But Enough About You: Essays (43 page)

A tin bread box. The letter to Hawthorne about having written a wicked book ends on a note of mystical triumph. Melville tells his friend that he has cracked at least one major piece of the eternal puzzle. “I feel,” he writes, “that the Godhead is broken like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces.” All of Melville’s ontology is contained in that single sentence. W. H. Auden quotes it toward the end of his haunting poem “Herman Melville.”

Not long ago, I found myself in the room where he wrote most
of
Moby-Dick
, a small corner north-facing study on the second floor of Arrowhead, his farmhouse near Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

“If they but knew it,” Ishmael tells us at the end of the novel’s first paragraph, “almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.” For anyone who cherishes very nearly the same feelings for
Moby-Dick
, standing in that room will induce a pilgrim sensation. The kindly, informative docent goes on with his narrative, pointing out this and that detail, but his words fade as the reverential hush descends on you. A quiet but overwhelming feeling rises as you think of all those whom Melville conjured into immortality in this shabby little space: Ahab, Ishmael, Queequeg, Starbuck, Father Mapple, Elijah, Pip, all them.

You can see the whale through the window over the desk, looking out toward Mount Greylock, with its distinct whalelike hump. The windowpanes have that distorted quality of antique glass, which makes you wonder: Are these the same panes through which Melville stared when he looked up from his epic labor on his wicked book? I don’t know, but I’ll assert here that they are, if only so that, having failed to say anything original, I can at least claim to have been wrong about
Moby-Dick
in a new way.

—Afterword to the Signet Classics edition, 2013

I
. When the U.S. Senate outlawed flogging in the U.S. Navy, the author of
White Jacket
could take some credit for the reform, having brought it vividly to the public attention, along with Richard Henry Dana’s
Two Years Before the Mast
, published in 1840.

II
. Bentley rewrote passages that he thought might offend British sensibilities; moved the introductory “Extracts” to the end; and, most ruinously, eliminated the all-important epilogue, leaving British readers to wonder how in hell Ishmael could be narrating the story if he went down with the
Pequod
. Into the bargain, the spines of the three volumes of
The Whale
were embossed with drawings of a right whale, rather than a sperm whale. All in all, a disaster. Melville published the book first in Britain in order to protect his copyright, which rights barely existed in the United States then.

III
. By way of a very weird QED, after I wrote the paragraph above, I turned to the
Times
crossword for my daily humiliation and there was the clue: “Grand, un-godly, godlike man” of fiction. Four letters.

Christopher Hitchens began his memoir,
Hitch-22
, on a note of grim amusement at finding himself described in a British National Portrait Gallery publication as “the late Christopher Hitchens.” He wrote, “So there it is in cold print, the plain unadorned phrase that will one day become unarguably true.”

On June 8, 2010, several days after the memoir was published, he awoke in his New York hotel room “feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse. The whole cave of my chest and thorax seemed to have been hollowed out and then refilled with slow-drying cement.” And so commenced an eighteen-month odyssey through “the land of malady,” culminating in his death from esophageal cancer last December, when the plain unadorned phrase that had prompted him to contemplate his own mortality became, unarguably, true. He was sixty-two.

Mortality
is a slender volume—or, to use the
mot
that he loved to deploy,
feuilleton
—consisting of the seven dispatches he sent in to
Vanity Fair
magazine from “Tumorville.” The first seven chapters are, like virtually everything he wrote over his long, distinguished career, diamond-hard, and brilliant. An eighth and final chapter consists, as the publisher’s note informs us, of unfinished “fragmentary jottings” that he wrote in his terminal days in the critical-care unit of the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. They’re vivid, heart-wrenching and haunting—messages in a bottle tossed from the deck of a sinking ship as its captain, reeling in agony and fighting through the fog of morphine, struggles to keep his engines going:

My two assets my pen and my voice—and it had to be the esophagus. All along, while burning the candle at both ends, I’d been “straying into the arena of the unwell” and now “a vulgar little tumor” was evident. This alien can’t want anything;
if it kills me it dies but it seems very single-minded and set in its purpose. No real irony here, though. Must take absolute care not to be self-pitying or self-centered.

The alien was burrowing into me even as I wrote the jaunty words about my own prematurely announced death.

If I convert it’s because it’s better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.

Ordinary expressions like “expiration date” . . . will I outlive my Amex? My driver’s license? People say—I’m in town on Friday: will you be around?
WHAT A QUESTION
!

Fans of the movie
Withnail and I
will recognize “arena of the unwell” and “vulgar little tumor.” Readers of his 2007 atheist classic,
God Is Not Great
, will get the frisky “convert” bit; more than a few of the pages in
Mortality
are devoted—as it were—to a final, defiant and well-reasoned defense of his non-God-fearingness.

As for the “jaunty words,” those are of course from Chapter 1 of the memoir whose promotional tour was so dramatically interrupted by the tap-tap-tap of the Reaper. Self-pity? Those of his friends (I was one) who witnessed his pluck and steel throughout his ghastly ordeal will attest that he never succumbed to any of that.

“To the dumb question ‘Why me?,’ ” he writes, “the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?” He was valiant to the end, a paragon of British phlegm. He became an American citizen in 2007, but the background music was always
H.M.S. Pinafore
: “He remains an Englishman.”

Mortality
comes with a fine foreword by his longtime
Vanity Fair
editor and friend Graydon Carter, who writes of Christopher’s “saucy fearlessness,” “great turbine of a mind,” and “his sociable but unpredictable brand of anarchy that seriously touched kids in their 20s and early 30s in much the same way that Hunter S. Thompson had a generation before. . . . He did not mind landing outside the cozy cocoon of conventional liberal wisdom.”

Christopher’s wife, Carol Blue, contributes a—I’ve already used up my “heart-wrenching” quota—deeply moving afterword, in which she recalls the “eight-hour dinners” they hosted at their apartment in Washington, when after consuming enough booze to render the entire population of the nation’s capital insensible, Christopher would rise and deliver flawless twenty-minute recitals of poetry, polemics, and jokes, capping it off saying, “How good it is to be us.” The truth of that declaration was evident to all who had the good fortune to be present at those dazzling recreations. Bliss it was in those wee hours to be alive and in his company, though the next mornings were usually less blissful.

“For me,” he writes in
Mortality
, “to remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off: the ones that made the sacrifice of the following day a trivial one.” In support of this, he adduces several staves of William Cory’s translation of the poem by Callimachus about his beloved friend Heraclitus:

They told me, Heraclitus; they told me you were dead.

They brought me bitter news to hear, and bitter tears to shed.

I wept when I remembered how often you and I

Had tired the sun with talking, and sent him down the sky.

He was a man of abundant gifts, Christopher: erudition, wit, argument, prose style, to say nothing of a titanium constitution that, until it betrayed him in the end, allowed him to write word-perfect essays while the rest of us were groaning from epic hangovers and reaching for the ibuprofen. But his greatest gift of all may have been the gift of friendship. At his memorial service in New York City, thirty-one people, virtually all of them boldface names, rose to speak in his memory. One selection was from the introduction Christopher wrote for the paperback reissue of
Hitch-22
while gravely ill:

Another element of my memoir—the stupendous importance of love, friendship and solidarity—has been made immensely more vivid to me by recent experience. I can’t hope to convey the full effect of the embraces and avowals, but
I can perhaps offer a crumb of counsel. If there is anybody known to you who might benefit from a letter or a visit, do not
on any account
postpone the writing or the making of it. The difference made will almost certainly be more than you have calculated.

One of the “fragmentary jottings” in the last chapter of
Mortality
is a brushstroke on Philip Larkin’s chilling death poem “Aubade”:

“Larkin good on fear in ‘Aubade,’ with implied reproof to Hume and Lucretius for their stoicism. Fair enough in one way: atheists ought not to be offering consolation either.”

For a fuller version of that terminal
pensée
, turn to his essay on Larkin in his collection
Arguably
: “Without that synthesis of gloom and angst we could never have had his ‘Aubade,’ a waking meditation on extinction that unstrenuously contrives a tense, brilliant counterpoise between the stoic philosophy of Lucretius and David Hume, and his own frank terror of oblivion.” The essay ends with two lines from another Larkin poem that could serve as Christopher’s own epitaph:

Our almost-instinct almost true:

What will survive of us is love.

What discrepant parts were in him: the fierce tongue, the tender heart.

There is no “frank terror of oblivion” in
Mortality
, but there is keen and great regret at having to leave the party early. But even as he stared into the abyss, his mordant wit did not desert him:

The novelty of a diagnosis of malignant cancer has a tendency to wear off. The thing begins to pall, even to become banal. One can become quite used to the specter of the eternal Footman, like some lethal old bore lurking in the hallway at the end of the evening, hoping for the chance to have a word. And I don’t so much object to his holding my coat in that marked manner, as if mutely reminding me that it’s time to be on my way. No, it’s the snickering that gets me down.

In his first collection of essays,
Prepared for the Worst
(1988), he quoted Nadine Gordimer to the effect that “a serious person should try to write posthumously. By that I took her to mean that one should compose as if the usual constraints—of fashion, commerce, self-censorship, public and perhaps especially intellectual opinion—did not operate.”

He refers back to that in
Arguably
, the introduction to which he wrote in June 2011, deep in the heart of Tumorville. He was still going at it
mano a mano
with the Footman, but by then he was at least realistic about the odds and knew that the words he was writing might very well be published posthumously. As it turned out, he lived just long enough to see
Arguably
hailed for what it is—inarguably, stunning. What a coda. What a life.

He noted there that some of the essays had been written in “the full consciousness that they might be my very last. Sobering in one way and exhilarating in another, this practice can obviously never become perfected.”

Being in Christopher’s company was rarely sobering but always exhilarating. It is, however, sobering and grief-inducing to read this brave and harrowing account of his “year of living dyingly” in the grip of the alien that succeeded where none of his debate opponents had in bringing him down.

In her afterword, Carol relates an anecdote about their daughter, then two years old, one day coming across a dead bumblebee on the ground. She frantically begged her parents to “make it start.” On reaching the end of her father’s valedictory
feuilleton
, the reader is likely to be acutely conscious of Antonia’s terrible feeling of loss.

—
The New York Times
, August 2012

How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?

—DE GAULLE

When you are in love, you go to Paris, and then you are really in love.

I am trying not to write like Hemingway, but this is not an easy thing to do, because I have spent the last four days in Paris with Peaches reading
A Moveable Feast
aloud to her in cafés and in the hotel room where Oscar Wilde died. It is a very fine book, which Papa wrote forty years after he lived in the Paris of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Ford and James Joyce. It was published after he died and created a sensation not just because it was so good but because of the scene where Scott confides to Hemingway that he is worried about the size of his manhood. The restaurant where this alarming scene took place was Michaud’s, at the corner of the rue Jacob and the rue des Saints-Pères. As for Peaches, this is not her real name but it seems a good name for her since she is from the American South and is very wild. Zelda would also be a good name for her, except that was the name of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife and she was crazy technically, the kind where they come and take you away. Peaches is not crazy in that way but she is from the South and is exuberant in the way Southerners have of never wanting the day to end.