Hitchens, Amis, and Waugh, and the laws of natural selection

For a long time now, Christopher Hitchens has reminded me of Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis late in their careers, two other English masters of prose whose midlife devolutions into self-loathing and vile misanthropy gives off such a reek that, for me, it permeates back through time and pollutes their earliest and best work.

I can’t think about Amis’ Lucky Jim, a book that had me rolling on the floor with laughter when I read it the first time back in college, before I knew anything about Amis, and very much a young man’s book, without seeing in it signs of the sour and bloated old drunk jealously calling his own son a bastard and exchanging racist and misogynistic jokes with the equally sour and solipsistic poet Philip Larkin.

Larkin, however, was always sour and solipsistic, so his life story is spared the awful poingnancy of a self-perpretrated decline and fall.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad,
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had,
And add some extra, just for you...

Larkin also had a very clear idea of what he was and how he’d become himself.

And whenever I try to re-read the younger Waugh’s best books---A Handful of Dust, Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies---I keep stumbling across the little old toad of a domestic tyrant, self-satisfied, complacent, puffed up with a piety no one believed, least of all himself, snarling, malicious, cruel, and yet full of self-pity.

And I can’t even go near Black Mischief or Brideshead Revisited.

It’s hard to say with Amis and Waugh, and now Hitchens, whether the self-loathing and the misanthropy are cause and effect, or which is cause and which is effect, whether they’re two sides of the same coin, whether they’re contingent or serendipitous, unlucky accidents of temperament that were mutually reinforcing and sustaining.

However it worked, and however much it was fueled by booze, it turned the three of them into old creeps whose souls were moribund long before their bodies gave out.

Hitchens adds this.  He’s like a once-handsome playboy preening before a mirror, convinced he sees all his old beauty and charm, but aware of a derisive laughter coming from somewhere, possibly from inside his own head, that spins him around and has him screaming at invisible enemies, “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

A writer’s biography shouldn’t affect your appreciation for that writer’s work.

P.G. Wodehouse, who had his own biographical question marks, had it right:

My personal animosity against a writer never affects my opinion of what he writes.  Nobody could be more anxious than myself, for instance, that Alan Alexander Milne should trip over a loose bootlace and break his bloody neck, yet I re-read his early stuff at regular intervals with all the old enjoyment.

Waugh and Amis have an advantage over Hitchens.  They were novelists, and even at their worst they were able to imagine their way out of their own heads and lives far enough to produce novels that are compassionate, almost tender, and mostly devoid of the sourness that had infected their real selves.

Amis' The Russian Girl isn't anywheres near as funny as Lucky Jim, but it shows some of the same hopeful playfulness and self-reflective intelligence, and The Folks Who Live on the Hill is a forgiving portrait of the kind of regular human beings Amis had never particularly shown any affection for in even his earliest work.  Both books are more enjoyable, and more humane, than anything his son, the bastard, Martin, has written in a long time.

And Waugh's Sword of Honor Trilogy, while smudged with snobbery, reactionary politics, a nostalgia for an aristorcratic world that never was, and a very strange lack of interest in the actual war the characters are supposedly fighting, is a work worthy of a far more sympathetic spirit than Waugh showed any signs of possessing when he wrote it.

The novels stand apart from the lives.  Amis' and Waugh's biographies barely touch them.  It's only my own failure to achieve and maintain an imaginative distance that makes it hard for me to read those books without seeing the authors' ghosts.

They aren't their books.  Their books aren't their lives.

Hitchens is a journalist and an essayist, which means that his work, in a much more direct way, is his biography. 

In the last decade, through a combination of self-righteousness, rage, and a contrarianism that has become indistinguishable from willful stupidity has made himself both loathsome and ridiculous, so much so that it’s impossible to imagine that he was ever neither.

The last thing of his I was able to force my way through was a review in the Atlantic of some new biographies of John F. Kennedy.  (Unfortunately, it’s only available to subscribers.  Drop me a line if you’d like me to email you a copy.)  In it, Hitchens, pretending to despise Kennedy because of his timidity on Civil Rights, obsessed over Kennedy’s sex life with a borderline pornographic interest and with a degree of fabulism that made it clear he was projecting.  Here was a self-loathing, self-accused failure who had found a way to contemplate and condemn his own sins and perversities in the guise of holding up another, greater man’s vices and failures for public scorn.

The review is hysterical, and I don’t mean hysterical funny.  I mean hysterical as in Hitchens seems on the brink of an emotional meltdown.

This paragraph, though, from a piece Hitchens wrote for Slate, was the killer for me.  It’s ostensibly Hitchens on the death of Pope John Paul II.  What it’s really about is how Christopher Hitchens is a better and more morally courageous man than the late pope was.

Finally, if the pope is to have so much credit for the liberation of Eastern Europe, he ought to accept his responsibility for the enslavement of the Middle East. He not only opposed the removal of Saddam Hussein in 2003, but the use of force to get him out of Kuwait in 1991. I have never read any deployment of Augustinian argument, in the latter case, that would not qualify it as a just war. Moreover, the pope made a visit to Damascus not long ago, and sat quietly outside the Grand Mosque while the Assad regime greeted him as one who understood that Muslims and Catholics had a common enemy—in the Jews who had killed Christ. (That he may already have been senescent at this point is not an answer: It is a problem, though, for those who believe that he was Christ's vicar on earth.)

I don’t know what calculus you’d use to determine how many lives John Paul saved by opposing the Soviets and how many he caused to be lost by not championing the removal of Saddam by force or how it works out that the lives lost count more against him than the lives saved, but it’s an egregiously false and brazenly dishonest equation anyway.

Hitchens, in ignoring that what the Pope opposed in Iraq was more War, and an unjustified one started by a pair of egomaniacal bullies who happened to be the President and Vice-President of the United States, is essentially lying.

Add to this the fact that Hitchens wrote this on the occasion of John Paul’s death in 2005 when it was more than clear that our Iraq misadventure was failing and we were turning the country into a slaughterhouse and the evidence that Bush had lied us into the war in the first place was undeniable—when it was more than clear that the Pope had been right—and what you have here is another case of Hitchens being willfully and perversely stupid in the service of...what?

His own ego.

It’s another example of what’s become Hitchens’ defining trope.  He sets up impossibly high, and phony, standards of morality, intelligence, insight, or whatever, that only Christopher Hitchens is stern enough, disciplined enough, intelligent enough to meet (and which he only has to meet inside his own head) and uses them to show how stern, disciplined, intelligent, or whatever he is and how everybody else comes up short.

So when I saw that Hitchens had written an essay for Vanity Fair arguing that women are just not as funny as men, I gave it the skip.  I figured the measure for funny was going to be Hitchens’ own self-congratulatory wit, and that would be like all his other measuring tools, calibrated to show how nobody is as whatever as Christopher Hitchens.

I muttered a quick “Lily Tomlin,” and walked metaphorically away from the pompous old drunk at the bar, pausing at the door to think about tossing a “Tina Fey” over my shoulder, but deciding it wasn’t worth the bother and left the saloon without reading the essay or writing a post.

Then I was reading TAPPED yesterday and came across this post by Garance Franke-Ruta and found out that Hitchens wasn’t saying women weren’t as funny as men.  He was claiming that they weren’t evolutionarily predisposed to be funny.

There was no percentage in their being funny.  They attracted potential mates just be sitting still and giving off pherenomes.  But men had to work at attracting females and they found that being funny helped do the trick.

I can see it, because anthropologists have shown that bad puns and fart jokes were extremely useful on the mastodon hunts and it explains why women love the Three Stooges and how come back in the 1950s they mobbed Jerry Lewis while Dean Martin was left to stand by himself in the corner, lonesome and ignored.

I’ll get to my problems with all evolutionary psychology arguments later.  Franke-Ruta hit on the obvious objection to Hitchens’ argument.

If humor is an evolutionary strategy for human males to attract females, this makes human females the final arbiters of what’s funny.

Furthermore, says Franke-Ruta, by Hitchens’ own logic he is an evolutionary failure:

If men are, as Hitchens asserts, funnier than women because masculine humor develops on account of sexual selection -- i.e. because women want them to be funny, just as peahens prefer their mates to have glorious decorative peacock tails -- then doesn't it follow that negative reactions to an article like Hitchens' is an example not of female humorlessness but of male failure in the psycho-sexual humor realm? If men are funny in order to seduce women, isn't an article that women find enormously irritating and off-putting the very definition of something humorless and lacking? After all, in Hitchens' own terms, we ladies are the ultimate judges here -- the "audience," he says, for the male performance -- since masculine humor's foundational purpose is to "make the lady laugh."

Continued.

Comments

[Mike Schilling]

I can't see that Waugh *devolved* into misanthropy -- even _Decline and Fall_ was misanthropic, and _A Handful of Dust_ far more so (unless you think its colossal misogyny leaves no room for misanthropy in general.) That's part of what gives them spice, like the cosmic pessimism at the heart of the Hitchhiker's Guide.

The books I can't go near are the Sword of Honour trilogy, which contends that Britain fought the Nazis only because the Reds duped them into it.

[grasshopper]

Amazing the lengths people go, trying to justify prejudice and what they imagine is *righteous* indignation. Several writers have presented such an ugly smug personality to the world that I can not see the beauty others find in their work.
Having only read "Brideshead Revisited" (Waugh) and a few books by Martin Amis, not his father, I can not respond to your argument with any authority. (Martin Amis has always seemed full of himself, but many writers tend toward that; his later books have not interested me as much as his very early ones.)And Hitchens has never caught my interest. Overall I heartily agree with you. But sometimes a piece writing far transcends the writer, which is mysterious.
When judging writers, though, I harbor much "sympathy for the devil." In my experience, writing is truly maddening and often dangerous.

[nothstine]

Alas for Hitchens. a lifelong contrarian gone to pot--a man who loves a good fight above all else and who, having exhausted all possible fist-fights with the right, and then with the left, is now riding out the sad remains of his career beating the crap out of himself.

As someone at TAPPED pointed out, it's not that hard to imagine the dark and filthy reasons he keeps writing stuff like this, but it's more difficult to understand why a place like Vanity Fair would give him a stage.

Looking forward to part two.

bn

[sonic]

Nice piece, I've taken the liberty of linking to it here.

http://christopherhitchenswatch.blogspot.com/2006/12/hitchens-amis-and-waugh-and-laws-of.html

[Kevin Wolf]

I used to enjoy Hitchens when he wrote for the Nation - before the sliding rightward, or downward perhaps, and his firing himself from the magazine because his colleagues didn't want to bomb the shit out of Iraq.

I quite admired his Mother Theresa book, which showed her for what she was - but it's too bad his skepticism about religious figures as political figures has turned into lazy comments such as the Pope pap above.

Hichens has simply lost it so I tend to avoid him now, while enjoying the occasional smackdown from the likes of Alexander Cockburn (of the Nation and CounterPunch).

[Claire]

Loved the post and am looking forward to part two.

[James Wolcott]

For diplomatic reasons, I must recuse myself from discussing that deposit of red kryptonite known as Christopher Hitchens, but I would urge the Lancer not to turn up his nose at Bridehead Revisited, which is beautifully written, funny, and boasting some of Waugh's best characters (Ryder's father, played to pickled perfection by Gielgud in the miniseries, and the aesthete-dandy Anthony Blanche, whose stuttering words of warning turn out to be prophetic). When I first read Brideshead, I brought to it a lot of antipathy left over from Edmund Wilson's famous pan of the novel (he considered it a tutti-frutti Catholic fairy tale), which I agreed with at the time. But BR is the only novel of Waugh's I can re-read and re-read without ever tiring of it because the mood and atmosphere deepen, the sense of mortality. (Whereas the comedy and social caricature of his most anarchic novels--Vile Bodies, say--turn brittle and remote with the passing years.)

As for the Sword of Honour trilogy, it has a literary cult following that I've never understood, finding its hero the most appalling priggish shit. The three military volumes of Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time are also the weakest of the twelve. Go fig.

[Mike Schilling]

As for the Sword of Honour trilogy, it has a literary cult following that I've never understood, finding its hero the most appalling priggish shit.

To be fair to Waugh, I think he knew that. The scene where Guy Crouchback tries to seduce his ex-wife (because the Church still recognizes the marriage, so from his and their point of view it's licit marital sex) is painfully funny for just that reason.

[Campaspe]

When you read about Waugh, did you read about the bananas? for me it summed up everything about the man. Son Auberon Waugh told a story about his family, during the stringent rationing after WW II, actually managing to get some bananas. Evelyn ate every last one of these precious items in front of his distressed and yearning children, who hadn't seen fresh fruit in weeks. Yeah, he was a thoroughly detestable person. But I agree with Mr. Wolcott, Brideshead Revisited is well worth your time, with more jokes at the expense of Catholicism than you might imagine. (I remember one character at the end of the novel, in discussing the last rites, blithely says she'd been told if the priest got there while the body was still warm, absolution still counted.)

[M.A. Peel]

I don't memorize poetry or lines from novels easily, and I have always admired those who can. The one exception for me is a line from BR that seared into my brain on the first reading: "I could tell him, too, that to know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom." Waugh--much more pleasant to muse upon then CH.

[The Heretik]

Um, Larkin? Well it's true he said a poem was best experienced on the page and not necessarily in voice. But of his pages, while some were bitter (or some might say pointed), some were also choice.

Dublinesque

Down stucco sidestreets,
Where light is pewter
And afternoon mist
Brings lights on in shops
Above race-guides and rosaries,
A funeral passes.

The hearse is ahead,
But after there follows
A troop of streetwalkers
In wide flowered hats,
Leg-of-mutton sleeves,
And ankle-length dresses.

There is an air of great friendliness,
As if they were honouring
One they were fond of;
Some caper a few steps,
Skirts held skilfully
(Someone claps time),

And of great sadness also.
As they wend away
A voice is heard singing
Of Kitty, or Katy,
As if the name meant once
All love, all beauty.

Where light is pewter, some good may yet exist, even as old images grow moist and fade into that mist.

[Lesley]

Alcoholics bask in self-pity and self-centeredness, never realizing what crushing bores they are.

[Jim Tourtelott]

One curious note in the hit piece on JP II is Hitchens's upbraiding of the Pope for opposing the first Gulf War, a conflict Hitchens himself loudly and publicly opposed. While now he tells us it was in Augustinian terms a just war, that was certainly not the position he took, for example, in his famous television squabble with Charlton Heston.

One of Hitchens's specialties, years ago, was the evisceration of elderly gents, radical in their youth, who spent their mature years spouting what he once called "John Bull-shit." He was always particularly good at sticking it to Paul Johnson. I wonder if he has ever called Johnson to apologize.

[Nanuk of the North]

Say what you like about Hitchens (please, say it!) but he sure is fun to hate.

[Matthew]

Surely Hitchens opposed the 1991 Gulf War?

[Hob]

Amis's late novel, The Old Devils, is well worth reading - not exactly *non*-misanthropic, but a lot more humane than what led up to it, and pretty funny too.

[Pasquino]

I adore the great English monsters. They are so much funnier and fiercer than our own. And they don't march around the world mucking things up. Why we don't have satirists to match is beyond me. (I do try.)

[william]

There is something parasitic about those English public shcool ponces whose only skill in life is what they learned in prep school. They learned an ascerbic turn of phrase which we are invited to accept as wit. They learned to juggle verbal inanity as if it constitutes something real in the world. They learned to fall back on the comfort of their class certainties like self satisfied infants in a foetal comfort zone.
They should get off their fat arses and try working for a living; for a month or two at least.
I can't despise them more than I do....I've tried.