But Enough About You: Essays (30 page)

I got off lightly. When Martin Amis, his closest friend on earth, published a book in which he took Christopher to task for what he viewed as inappropriate laughter at the expense of Stalin’s victims, Christopher responded with a seven-thousand-word rebuttal in
The Atlantic
. But Christopher’s takedown of his chum must be viewed alongside thousands of warm and affectionate words he wrote about Martin, particularly in his memoir,
Hitch-22
, which was published with terrible irony almost simultaneously with the presentation of his mortal illness.

The jacket of his next book, a collection of breathtaking essays titled
Arguably
, contains some glowing words of praise, including my own asseveration that he is—was—“the greatest living essayist in the English language.” One or two reviewers called my effusion “forgivable exaggeration.” To them I say: Okay, name me a better one. I would alter only one word in that blurb now.

Over the course of his heroic eighteen-month battle with the cancer, I found myself rehearsing what I might say to an obituary writer, should one ring after the news of death. Something along the lines of: the air of Byron, the steel pen of Orwell, the wit of Wilde.

A bit forced, perhaps. Still. Christopher did not write poetry, but he could recite staves, cantos, yards of it. As for Byronic aura, there were the curly locks, the unbuttoned shirt revealing a wealth of pectoral hair, and the roguish, raffish
je ne sais quoi
good looks. (Somewhere in
Hitch-22
, he writes that he had now reached the age when “only women wanted to go to bed with me.”) Like Byron, Christopher put himself in harm’s way in “contested territory,” again and again. Here’s another bit from
Hitch-22
, a chilling moment when he found himself alone in a remote and very scary town in Afghanistan,

in a goons’ rodeo duel between two local homicidal potentates (the journalistic euphemism for this type is “warlord”;
the image of the goons’ rodeo I have annexed from Saul Bellow). On me was not enough money, not enough food, not enough documentation, not enough medication, not enough bottled water to withstand even a two-day siege. I did not have a cell phone. Nobody in the world, I abruptly realized, knew where I was. I knew nobody in the town and nobody in the town knew (perhaps a good thing) who I was, either. As all this started to register with me, the square began to fill with those least alluring of all types: strident but illiterate young men with religious headgear, high-velocity weapons and modern jeeps.

His journalism, in which he championed the victims of tyranny and stupidity and “Islamofascism,” takes its rightful place on the shelf along with that of his paradigm, Orwell.

As for the wit: one day we were talking about Stalin. I observed that Stalin, murderer of twenty, thirty—forty?—million had trained as a priest. Not skipping a beat, Christopher remarked, “Indeed, was he not among the more promising of the Tbilisi ordinands?”

I thought—as I did a thousand times over the course of our thirty-year-long tutorial—
Wow
.

A few days later at a dinner, Stalin came up. I said to my dinner partner, “Indeed, was he not among the more promising of the Tbilisi ordinands?”

The lady to whom I proferred this thieved aperçu stopped chewing her salmon, repeated the line I had casually tossed off, and said with frank admiration, “That’s brilliant.” Oh, was I tempted, but I couldn’t quite bear to continue the imposture, and told her that the author of this nacreous witticism was in fact none other than Christopher Hitchens. She laughed and said, “Well,
everything
he says is brilliant.”

Yes, it was. It was a feast of reason and a flow of soul.

Two fragments come to mind, the first from
Brideshead Revisited
, a book Christopher loved and which he could practically quote in its entirety. Anthony Blanche, the exotic, outrageous aesthete, has been sent down from Oxford. Charles Ryder, the book’s
narrator, laments: “Anthony Blanche had taken something away with him when he went; he had locked a door and hung the key on his chain; and all his friends, among whom he had been a stranger, needed him now.”

Christopher was never a “stranger to his friends”—
ça va sans dire
, as he would say. Among his prodigal talents, his greatest of all may have been the gift of friendship. Christopher’s inner circle, Martin, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, James Fenton, comprise more or less the greatest writers in the English language. That’s some posse. But in leaving them—and the rest of us—for “the undiscovered country” (he could recite more or less all of
Hamlet
, too), Christopher has taken something away with him, and his friends, in whose company I am grateful to have been, will need him now. We are now, finally, without a Hitch.

The other bit is from Housman, from a poem Christopher and I would recite back and forth at each other across the table at Café Milano. I hesitate to quote it here. I see him wincing at my deplorable propensity for “crowd-pleasing.” But I’m going to quote it anyway, doubting as I do that he would chafe at such consolation as I can manage over the loss of my beloved athlete, who died so young.

Smart lad to slip betimes away

From fields where glory does not stay,

And early though the laurel grows

It withers quicker than the rose.

—
The New Yorker
, December 2011

I
. The phrase was actually coined by Alexander Pope.

People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.

—ATTRIBUTED TO A BOOK REVIEW WRITTEN BY ABRAHAM LINCOLN

As Philip Larkin so indelibly put it,

Sexual intercourse began

In nineteen sixty-three

(Which was rather late for me)
—

Between the end of the Chatterley ban

And the Beatles’ first LP.

But things didn’t really get going until 1972, when Dr. Alex Comfort published his groundbreaking and indeed earth-moving
Joy of Sex
. Since then it has sold in all its various editions eight million copies. If you were born after 1972, you may owe your very existence to Comfort. Now, on the occasion of the book’s thirtieth anniversary, it has been revised and reissued by Comfort’s son, Nicholas, and lavishly—lasciviously—reillustrated.

A lot has happened sexwise since 1972:
Roe v. Wade
; the herpes epidemic; AIDS; Attorney General Edwin Meese’s doomed Commission on Pornography; ubiquitous breast implants; the rise and fall of
Penthouse
magazine; X-rated videos; triple-X-rated videos; Larry Flynt; the
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit issue industry; Victoria’s Secret; cyberporn;
Boogie Nights
; RU-486; Wilt Chamberlain’s 20,000th conquest; Courtney Love and her band, Hole; the Wonderbra; Monica and Bill; Ellen DeGeneres and Anne Heche; Viagra;
Maxim
; Manolo Blahnik; the Anna Nicole Smith television show. It would appear that more people are having sex than ever before.

Whether “joy” has increased apace amid all this furious exertion is debatable, but anyone seeking either initiation or a refresher course on
ars amatoria
could do worse than to peruse these mauve, titillating
pages. There are some delicious giggles to be had along the way. If these are not necessarily intentional, they are no less enjoyable.

The young man featured in the illustrations in the 1972 ur-text has evolved. He is no longer hirsute and missing only a peace symbol, looking as if his day job were playing bongos with the Lovin’ Spoonful. His partner in bliss is a comely raven-haired lady who just can’t seem to stop smiling, and little wonder, though she’s surely going to have a crick in her neck after all this.

In this 2002 edition, the emphasis on hair is—I’ll just quote Comfort, whose name remains on this book’s title page despite his son’s revisions: “Many women shave their armpit hair, conditioned as they are by the idea that hairlessness is sexy. Opinions are divided on this one—fashion dictates armpits should be bare, but in my opinion shaving is simply ignorant vandalism.” This aperçu will surely stimulate lively dinner party conversation in the months ahead.

Comfort gets quite passionate on the general subject of the armpit. Under the heading “Armpit” we find: “Classical site for kisses. Should on no account be shaved (see
Cassolette
). Can be used instead of the palm to silence your partner at climax.” I know you’re in a hurry to find out about
cassolette
, but please first note that “if you use your palm, rub it over your own and your partner’s armpit area first.” At points as these, the text seems to intersect with the script of the movie
A Fish Called Wanda
, in which Otto, the mad ex-C.I.A. assassin played to hambone perfection by Kevin Kline, takes a deep snort of his own armpits before leaping onto Jamie Lee Curtis.

Cassolette
is—well, it’s right there on page 33 and I think I’ll just let you look it up. The book teems with French words, and why not, French being the lingua franca of love. Until now I had thought
cassolette
involved rabbit and white beans. Some of the terms are quite recherché, but I yearn to conjugate them, conjugally. There is, for instance,
pattes d’araignée
, literally “spider’s legs,” and it does sound like fun. On page 101: “The round-and-round and cinder-sifting motions of the woman’s hips—what the French call the Lyon mail-coach (
la diligence de Lyon
)—come easily with practice if you’ve got the right personality.” The word
postillionage
was also new to this reviewer, and you’re going to have to look that one up for yourselves,
too. The section on
la petite mort
—“the little death”—is an alarming prospect and basis for an entire Woody Allen movie. And the word for one particular position is
négresse
. No comment.

The other foreign terms here serve to validate French’s claim to be
the
proper vocabulary of love. Take
saxonus
, a word for—never you mind. German may be the language of philosophy, but it is not the vernacular of the pillow. Shall we do the
coitus saxonus
, Liebchen?

Were you aware of
srpski jeb
? That is, we are told, “Serbian intercourse” or “mock rape.” Not tonight, Slobodan, I have a headache. Or
hrvatski jeb
? Croatian intercourse, “reputed by local wiseacres to be ‘exhausting.’ ” I’ll bet, what with all those NATO jets whooshing by overhead.

The Chinese have, as does their cuisine, delicious names for such positions as Wailing Monkey Clasping a Tree and Wild Geese Flying on Their Backs. I’ll have both, please, and the hot-and-sour soup. But there are English terms here, too, such as Viennese Oyster, defined as “a woman who can cross her feet behind her head, lying on her back, of course.” (Love the “of course.”) And it is nice to hear a few good words on behalf of the old missionary position: “Name given by amused Polynesians, who preferred squatting intercourse, to the European matrimonial. Libel on one of the most rewarding sex positions.”

Italian terms pop up here and there, but in the end it’s basically a
Larousse Érotique
. There’s
flanquette
,
cuissade
,
croupade
,
ligottage
,
poire
—not your grandfather’s pear, either—and you’ll very definitely want to know the meaning of
pompoir
, “the most sought-after feminine sexual response of all.” The nineteenth-century explorer Richard Burton, the Ernest Shackleton of sex, wrote that if a woman can perform this technique, ‘‘her husband will then value her above all women, nor would he exchange her for the most beautiful queen in the Three Worlds.” Or as
Cosmopolitan
magazine would put it: ONE SEX TRICK THAT
WORKS
!

There are pages and pages of cautionary notes about AIDS. (Casual sex was
sooo
’70s.) Some critics have taken Comfort to task for urging complete abstinence in the matter of using an orifice not specifically designed by nature for purposes to which it is sometimes put in, say, English public schools. Also, he notes that spermicide
can sometimes increase the chance of transmitting HIV. There’s a useful-sounding section on something called “hair-trigger trouble,” otherwise known as premature ejaculation, that income stream of a thousand sex clinics. And gentlemen are enjoined from blowing air into a certain part of madam, since this can be extremely injurious, to say nothing of embarrassing to explain at four a.m. in the emergency room. Meanwhile, Spanish fly can be as poisonous “as mustard gas.”

This is a manual, as it were, and manuals must employ the language of precision. Occasionally, however, you wonder if you’ve wandered into a game of Twister refereed by Casanova and the entire Académie Française, with video conferencing by the Marquis de Sade. If you thought the section on “frontal” would be fairly straightforward, parse this: “To unscramble a complicated posture for purposes of classification, turn the partners round mentally and see if they can finish up face-to-face in a matrimonial without crossing legs. If so, it’s frontal. If not, and they finish face-to-face astride one leg, it’s a
flanquette
; square from behind (
croupade
); or from behind, astride a leg (
cuissade
). It’s as simple as that.” What could be simpler? Honey, what are you doing on the floor?

Dr. Comfort died in 2000, having done more than most for the general pursuit of happiness. He was not a proselytizer, like those tiresome Esalen types who were always urging us to do it in the road. The phrase “free love” is mercifully absent. On the other hand, he didn’t see anything wrong with voyeurism or group sex. In fact, he quite enjoyed both, and the evidence suggests that he did enough research for a second Ph.D. But he doesn’t make you feel like a dweeb (or dweebette) if your idea of fun doesn’t include
croupade
and
flanquette
with the entire neighborhood block association. On the whole, the tone is warm, learned, and friendly, as if Marcus Welby, M.D., had disappeared to California for a few months and come back with a great big grin on his face and some nifty new ideas on stress reduction. The occasional refusal to admit irony—as when he advises wearing a hard hat during motorcycle sex—will cause guffaws, but that only shows, once again, the impotence of being earnest.