Ian McEwan writes of his close friend's last weeks, and how his love of journalism and literature sustained
Christopher Hitchens with Ian McEwan (left) and Martin Amis in Uruguay, posing for a picture which appeared in his memoirs, Hitch 22. Photograph: PR
The place where Christopher Hitchens spent his last few weeks was hardly bookish, but he made it his own. Close to downtown Houston, Texas is the medical centre, a cluster of high-rises like La Défense of Paris, or the City of London, a financial district of a sort, where the common currency is illness. This complex is one of the world's great concentrations of medical expertise and technology. Its highest building, 40 or 50 storeys up, denies the possibility of a benevolent god – a neon sign proclaims from its roof a cancer hospital for children. This "clean-sliced cliff", as Larkin puts it in his poem about a tower-block hospital, was right across the way from Christopher's place – which was not quite as high, and adults only.
No man was ever as easy to visit in hospital. He didn't want flowers and grapes, he wanted conversation, and presence. All silences were useful. He liked to find you still there when he woke from his frequent morphine-induced dozes. He wasn't interested in being ill, the way most ill people are. He didn't want to talk about it.
When I arrived from the airport on my last visit, he saw sticking out of my luggage a small book. He held out his hand for it – Peter Ackroyd's London Under, a subterranean history of the city. Then we began a 10-minute celebration of its author. We had never spoken of him before, and Christopher seemed to have read everything. Only then did we say hello. He wanted the Ackroyd, he said, because it was small and didn't hurt his wrist to hold. But soon he was making pencilled notes in its margins. By that evening he'd finished it.
He could have written a review, but he was due to turn in a long piece on Chesterton. And so this was how it would go: talk about books and politics, then he dozed while I read or wrote, then more talk, then we both read. The intensive care unit room was crammed with flickering machines and sustaining tubes, but they seemed almost decorative. Books, journalism, the ideas behind both, conquered the sterile space, or warmed it, they raised it to the condition of a good university library. And they protected us from the bleak high-rise view through the plate glass windows, of that world, in Larkin's lines, whose loves and chances "are beyond the stretch/Of any hand from here!"
In the afternoon I was helping him out of bed, the idea being that he was to take a shuffle round the nurses' station to exercise his legs. As he leaned his trembling, diminished weight on me, I said, only because I knew he was thinking it, "Take my arm old toad …" He gave me that shifty sideways grin I remembered so well from healthy days. It was the smile of recognition, or one that anticipates in late afternoon an "evening of shame" – that is to say, pleasure, or, one of his favourite terms, "sodality".
That must be how I came to be reading The Whitsun Weddings aloud to him two hours later. Christopher asked me to set the poem in context for his son Alexander – a lovely presence in that room for weeks on end – and for his wife Carol Blue, a tigress for his medical cause. She had tangled so ferociously with some slow element of the hospital's bureaucracy that security guards had been called to throw her out the building. Fortunately, she charmed and disarmed them.
I set the poem up and read it, and when I reached that celebrated end, "A sense of falling, like an arrow shower/Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain," Christopher murmured from his bed, "That's so dark, so horribly dark." I disagreed, and not out of any wish to lighten his mood. Surely, the train journey comes to an end, the recently married couples are dispatched towards their separate fates. He wouldn't have it, and a week later, when I was back in London, we were still exchanging emails on the subject. One of his began: "Dearest Ian, Well, indeed – no rain, no gain – but it still depends on how much anthropomorphising Larkin is doing with his unconscious … I'd provisionally surmise that 'somewhere becoming rain' is unpromising."
And this was a man in constant pain. Denied drinking or eating, he sucked on tiny ice chips. Where others might have beguiled themselves with thoughts of divine purpose (why me?) and dreams of an afterlife, Christopher had all of literature. Over the three days of my final visit I took a note of his subjects. Not long after he stole my Ackroyd, he was talking to me of a Slovakian novelist; whether Dreiser in his novels about finance was a guide to the current crisis; Chesterton's Catholicism; Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese, which I had brought for him on a previous visit; Mann's The Magic Mountain – he'd reread it for reflections on German imperial ambitions towards Turkey; and because we had started to talk about old times in Manhattan, he wanted to quote and celebrate James Fenton's A German Requiem: "How comforting it is, once or twice a year,/To get together and forget the old times."
McEwan's full tribute here.
No man was ever as easy to visit in hospital. He didn't want flowers and grapes, he wanted conversation, and presence. All silences were useful. He liked to find you still there when he woke from his frequent morphine-induced dozes. He wasn't interested in being ill, the way most ill people are. He didn't want to talk about it.
When I arrived from the airport on my last visit, he saw sticking out of my luggage a small book. He held out his hand for it – Peter Ackroyd's London Under, a subterranean history of the city. Then we began a 10-minute celebration of its author. We had never spoken of him before, and Christopher seemed to have read everything. Only then did we say hello. He wanted the Ackroyd, he said, because it was small and didn't hurt his wrist to hold. But soon he was making pencilled notes in its margins. By that evening he'd finished it.
He could have written a review, but he was due to turn in a long piece on Chesterton. And so this was how it would go: talk about books and politics, then he dozed while I read or wrote, then more talk, then we both read. The intensive care unit room was crammed with flickering machines and sustaining tubes, but they seemed almost decorative. Books, journalism, the ideas behind both, conquered the sterile space, or warmed it, they raised it to the condition of a good university library. And they protected us from the bleak high-rise view through the plate glass windows, of that world, in Larkin's lines, whose loves and chances "are beyond the stretch/Of any hand from here!"
In the afternoon I was helping him out of bed, the idea being that he was to take a shuffle round the nurses' station to exercise his legs. As he leaned his trembling, diminished weight on me, I said, only because I knew he was thinking it, "Take my arm old toad …" He gave me that shifty sideways grin I remembered so well from healthy days. It was the smile of recognition, or one that anticipates in late afternoon an "evening of shame" – that is to say, pleasure, or, one of his favourite terms, "sodality".
That must be how I came to be reading The Whitsun Weddings aloud to him two hours later. Christopher asked me to set the poem in context for his son Alexander – a lovely presence in that room for weeks on end – and for his wife Carol Blue, a tigress for his medical cause. She had tangled so ferociously with some slow element of the hospital's bureaucracy that security guards had been called to throw her out the building. Fortunately, she charmed and disarmed them.
I set the poem up and read it, and when I reached that celebrated end, "A sense of falling, like an arrow shower/Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain," Christopher murmured from his bed, "That's so dark, so horribly dark." I disagreed, and not out of any wish to lighten his mood. Surely, the train journey comes to an end, the recently married couples are dispatched towards their separate fates. He wouldn't have it, and a week later, when I was back in London, we were still exchanging emails on the subject. One of his began: "Dearest Ian, Well, indeed – no rain, no gain – but it still depends on how much anthropomorphising Larkin is doing with his unconscious … I'd provisionally surmise that 'somewhere becoming rain' is unpromising."
And this was a man in constant pain. Denied drinking or eating, he sucked on tiny ice chips. Where others might have beguiled themselves with thoughts of divine purpose (why me?) and dreams of an afterlife, Christopher had all of literature. Over the three days of my final visit I took a note of his subjects. Not long after he stole my Ackroyd, he was talking to me of a Slovakian novelist; whether Dreiser in his novels about finance was a guide to the current crisis; Chesterton's Catholicism; Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese, which I had brought for him on a previous visit; Mann's The Magic Mountain – he'd reread it for reflections on German imperial ambitions towards Turkey; and because we had started to talk about old times in Manhattan, he wanted to quote and celebrate James Fenton's A German Requiem: "How comforting it is, once or twice a year,/To get together and forget the old times."
McEwan's full tribute here.
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