How to Get Psychoanalysed for Nothing - The Joy of Interviews

I can get myself analysed succinctly and free of charge almost any day of the week. Just ask a cyclist to stop riding his bike on a pedestrians-only path in Kensington Gardens, and you will be given a mordant and concentrated assessment of your failings. Another good way of doing this is to upbraid a driver for illegally using his or her mobile phone while at the wheel. But these encounters are necessarily brief and intense.

 

Thanks to my status as minor celebrity, I can now go one better. I can be interviewed. As some readers have noticed, I often do this in establishments where coffee is served, so inviting daft questions about the non-existent parallels between coffee and cannabis. By doing so, I lay my character open to all kinds of judgements and conclusions, either the interviewer’s or the reader’s.

I can also arrange to have my perfectly unexceptionable statements made to look daft, by the judicious insertion of exclamation marks (a guaranteed way of conveying to the reader that the speaker is mad).

I posted here, the other day, a selection of recent interviews of me, and I promised to give some response to Decca Aitkenhead’s account of a rather enjoyable encounter we had in, of all places, the Groucho Club. She chose it as a bit of a tease, as a place where I might not feel exactly at home. Well, of course not, but I can cope with worse than the Groucho, believe me.

I’ll do this in the context of the other interviews, but spend much less time on them. 

As it happened, the location didn’t matter. We were so absorbed in conversation ( I certainly was) that neither of us much cared where we were. The waiting staff had to be very pressing to get our attention. And it went on far longer than either of us had expected it to. I was quite late for the photo session afterwards. I think it’s fair to say we both enjoyed it. This is at least partly because (well, how can I put this?) I can’t help liking Ms Aitkenhead.

I first encountered her, bizarrely, at a conference (what can the theme have been?) organised by the outfit then known as LM, which I think was descended from some obscure Trotskyist heresy. We certainly weren’t members of this odd cultish group. But they’d invited us both to speak and I was struck by her bold frankness and force, and by her very strong personal presence. She’s also a very fine writer and interviewer, certainly among the very best interviewers around at the moment. For an example of her writing (recently pointed out to me by a friend), please read this powerfully moving account of her mother’s death, and of her childhood in general, here http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2005/oct/29/weekend7.weekend5

Be warned that there’s some bad language in it, but not gratuitous, and justified by the context.

She’s also, just as importantly, an ideological opponent. As the foregoing article makes clear, she comes from a tradition very different from mine and is on the other side in the Cultural Revolution. She wrote a much-praised book ten years ago (‘The Promised Land: Travels in Search of the Perfect E’ ) which could not be said to be an attack on the drug culture. And she interviewed my brother shortly before he fell ill. I suspect this got her into trouble with some on the Left, because the result (though perceptive, original and funny) wasn’t perhaps as adulatory as they would have liked. I had thought for some time that it would be amusing and instructive if she interviewed me too, and was pleased to hear from her that she wanted to talk to me about my new book.

I understood from the start that I was not going to persuade her that I was right, especially about drugs. What was important to me was that the interview would be intelligent. I would quite like it if at some stage the entire transcript of what must have been at least a two-hour conversation were to be published, but I don't think that's really practicable, interesting as it would be.

It’s my view that Decca, in reporting our various disagreements about drugs, was perhaps a little fairer to herself than she was to me. Readers of this blog, or of my book, will know that many of the points she flourishes triumphantly are ones I have in fact rebutted. Be assured that I rebutted them at the Groucho, too. It strikes me that she may not have devoted as much space as she might have done to my rebuttals. Why should she? It was her interview. I’m not going to go over all that again. She asked me at one point what I most feared she might write, at least I think that’s what she meant. I said I wasn’t afraid of anything she might say about me. I’d agreed to do the interview knowing she was free to do what she wanted. I thought and think that this is the only sensible view one can take. Later, if I wanted to, I might comment on it.

 

As for the point about addiction, readers here will be wearily familiar with it. It amused me that the electronic left-wing mob on Twitter thought that it was enough to repeat what I’d said, as if that proved I was too heretical to be taken seriously. Again, as readers here will know, the concept of ‘addiction’ is not a matter of objective science, but a moral attitude undermining any belief in human free will. To believe in it (or not to) is, much like believing in God (or not believing in Him), a chosen statement of opinion about the universe. Funny to think that modern atheists think they are being bold and dangerous when they attack religion. But if you want to experience a 21st century heresy hunt, it’s man-made global warming, addiction or egalitarianism you have to dissent from. These are the orthodoxies of our time.

 

Now, to the interview itself. I never actually said the thing about Millwall. It’s not that I particularly object to the sentiment, though it’s unoriginal. I just didn’t use the word, or make the comparison, and I noticed that (though Decca doesn't attribute it to me) some readers thought I had. The point I made about enjoying being written about was just (as I thought then and think now) a necessary piece of honesty. Should I pretend that I disliked being written about, or didn’t care? Absurd. Of course I like it. I said something a little more complicated than what’s quoted, and I’ll try to recapture it. I recalled that when I had first come to London as a child I had been thrilled by its atmosphere, by the excitement of a capital city and the feeling that this was the centre of things. (This is a sensation I still get very strongly especially in autumn, when I walk anywhere near Whitehall , though the buildings are no longer the sombre black they were when I first glimpsed them). I had ever since wanted to be part of that, to be part of the capital as one of the people who was involved in the arguments which decided what happened. I also said that I had been thrilled above all things to discover that it was possible to argue with opponents without disliking them. I suppose it might have been ‘guileless’, though it was certainly calculated. I’d consciously decided to be as open as possible about any subject she cared to raise (including several she never did raise) as I thought that was part of the bargain.

I don’t think what I said about the exhilaration of London was even in response to a question. I just thought, let’s start as we mean to go on, and truthfully admit that I’m pleased to be doing what I’m doing, and getting the attention I get. Why pretend otherwise? It was also worth pointing out (though she didn’t spot that) that I had this impulse from a very early age. I mention this because one or two people have been especially puzzled by that passage.

 

I don’t think I actually said that the Edwardian era was a golden age either (I don’t believe in golden ages at all), just the moment from which our decline began, and the point at which the Christian remoralisation of the country went into reverse (well, August 1914 was that point, actually. I know perfectly well about Edwardian slums and snobbery as what reader of Somerset Maugham and H.G.Wells could not?) and I seem to recall mentioning Zweig’s ‘The World of Yesterday’, and his view – which carries some weight since he was there - that the pre-1914 age had been stifling. I imagine it was, though it seems to me to have been a worthwhile price to pay for its great security, gentleness and hope.

 

And I also think I said that we might have saved civilisation if, at Christmas 1914, the soldiers’ truce at the front had become general, and the armies of both sides had just got up , dumped their weapons and walked home in their millions. It’s a favourite fantasy of mine. When she tried to make an issue out of coffee, a tedious diversion also used by the man from the Evening Standard a few weeks before, I asked her ( as I’d asked him) if she was perhaps a Mormon. This seemed to go straight past her. But I think they are the only people who truly regard coffee as some sort of dangerous drug.

 

As for jumping naked into an English river, I’d (almost)swear that I said ‘in midwinter’ ( as many people are quite capable of swimming naked in English rivers, after drinking coffee if not because of drinking coffee, during the warmer months) . Where I’d really part from her is when she says ‘time and again, Hitchens cites their (schizophrenia and psychosis) grave risk as the reason why cannabis should be illegal.' I don’t think I do, in fact, do this. I refer to mental illness, but I hesitate to use these specific categories and classifications, as I explain in the book, since they lack objective definitions.

Where others use them and I quote them, I leave things as they are. But my doubts remain, and are clearly expressed in the book. I believe, for instance, that it is evident that Henry Cockburn was in some way mentally ill after he smoked cannabis as a schoolboy. But I would hesitate to give a name to his illness, though I might quote what the doctors have called it, as that is what they said. This doesn't bind me to their precise diagnosis.

These are two different points - whether the person is objectively ill (Yes), and what, if anything, you can call his illness (I personally don't know).

 

Then there’s a bit of simple naughtiness with figures. Decca writes : ‘Hitchens maintains that it's practically impossible to get locked up for possession, and that even dealers are unlucky to wind up in jail. That might come as a surprise to 16% of the prison population. Between 1998 and 2006, the number of people sent to prison for drug offences increased by 91%, whereas the increase for other offenders was just 53%.’ These figures don’t in fact contradict my point. How many of these went to prison for simple possession of drugs, without intent to supply? Very few, and I would guess none for simple possession of cannabis. How many people actually go to jail for dealing? The number doesn’t vary much, year by year, as my book shows. Yet there’s a huge and active drug market, in my view growing all the time. The criminal justice system is going through the motions.

Here, even though I know it is almost certainly useless, and that I will be accused of confirming the charge, or of moaning about how I am treated, I might as well take the chance to deal with the section which runs: ‘ It was Hitchens's defining misfortune, almost 61 years ago, to be born the younger brother of the more famous writer Christopher. "When you're a small child, and you have a brother, you want to catch up with them. I just wanted to be as big as, be as strong as, all the things a younger brother feels." Hitchens owed his first job – in 1973, on the Socialist Worker – to Christopher's connections, and was a loyal young apprentice to his brother's revolutionary leftwing politics. But he could never compete with his mercurial sibling's legendary charisma, leaving a rightward march back towards their parents' parochial, blimpish politics as the only available alternative. In 1977, he joined the Daily Express, where he toiled away as a worthy if unglamorous reporter until Richard Desmond's arrival propelled him – a conscientious objector to pornography – into the arms of the Mail on Sunday and a weekly column where he could be as unlike his brother as humanly possible. If Christopher was louche, hedonistic and iconoclastic, Hitchens would be fastidious, puritanical and Christian.’

 

It was certainly not a 'misfortune' to have such a brother. Who knows how things would have been had I been an only child, or had a big sister, or been the elder sibling? But that's the point. Nobody knows. I benefited from his life. I like to think he benefited from mine too. I know more about this, of necessity, than any interviewer.

 

The words about childhood were actually said wistfully during a discussion about Christopher’s death, and the fact that I am about to be 61 and will soon be older than my brother was when he died. I said, which I think is true of many younger siblings, that when I was small, I wanted to catch up with my older brother’s birthdays, and perhaps imagined that if I tried hard enough I could. Now that, assuming I didn’t die myself , I was about to do so, it was a melancholy reflection, that a foolish childish wish was coming true in a way I’d never imagined it would when I’d made it.

 

I also said, truthfully,  that of course as a younger brother I wanted to be as big and strong as my elder sibling. I think this is normal, even when relations are good between brother and brother. He certainly wasn’t more famous in those days. I’ll say here something which I have long hesitated to say, but which might as well be openly stated sooner or later, so how about now?

It always seemed to me that it was Christopher who had the problem with me, rather than the other way round. I won’t go into the petty details of our childhood, but if anyone wanted to Freudianise it, they would probably be drawn by the evidence to the old belief that the first child resents the arrival of the second child. I thought it quite natural for brothers to love each other, and was puzzled when it was clear that in my case this feeling wasn’t returned. I thought it was something odd about my own family for many years, until, in my twenties, I realised that ‘sibling rivalry’ was a normal feature of many families. So that’s what it was. I think it’s simply misleading to place this next to a discussion of my adult career. And let’s go through some of this. I’m not dealing with every error in the account, because some are too trivial to matter or impossible, at this distance, to demolish reliably.

But first I would say that my politics are not in fact those of my parents, but my own, reached through my own experiences. Are they blimpish or parochial? I suspect Decca has no idea what I think about most subjects, and might be surprised (for instance) by my views on railway nationalisation, Suez, political correctness or Bomber Harris. I don't have her down as a regular reader of my column, let alone of my blog. She called  me 'devout',  for heaven's sake.

These things never came up, so I don’t know what she thinks I think. As for parochial, I’ve spent much of the last twenty years travelling abroad, and learning from it. And I’m quite happy to be described as unglamorous, and as toiling, and as being a reporter, but I don’t know, was it all as dim as Decca seems to suggest? Tearing around Eastern Europe witnessing the frantic collapse of Communism, followed by opening the Daily Express’s first Moscow Bureau for 20 years, being in Moscow for the 1991 putsch, knocking about the world for a year (Somalia, Israel, South Africa, Australia, China) before setting up another bureau in Washington, were quite enviable reporting jobs, and not everyone managed to do them. I had a reasonable time as a columnist, and as an unglamorous toiling assistant editor (urged by several colleagues to apply for the editorship of that paper at one stage) on the old Daily Express, as well.

Well, how could Decca know any of this (unless she’d asked, that is)? The really odd thing is that we did actually discuss the path I’d taken to my current minor eminence, Much of it took the form of controversies where I'd become the story.

There was the row about the Jennifer’s Ear episode in 1992, which got written about quite a lot, my pursuit of Gerry Adams round the USA in 1994 (which won me mentions in some of the big American papers, quite a lot of North American TV appearances, and a recommendation from Mr Adams that I be decommissioned) and then the other row about witnessing Nicholas Ingram’s execution in 1995, and then the other row, in 1996, about investigating Cherie Blair’s parliamentary campaign which got me a half-page denunciation in Decca’s own paper, and attacks in several others too. Not to mention my little difficulty with Mr Blair during the 1997 election, when he refused to take a question from me, and then eventually cracked.

 

These were simple outgrowths of my own activity and (I happily confess it) ambition as a national newspaper journalist. I wasn't sorry to be getting the attention  ( see above).

I’m really not sure how she concludes that these things were done in competition with my brother, at that stage ‘toiling’ for an American glamour magazine (glamorous, eh?), Vanity Fair, and for various minuscule left-wing publications in the USA, and unknown in this country outside a fairly tight circle of left-wingers, and the readers of small circulation weekly reviews. Christopher’s later enormous rock star fame had not by then arrived. The Mother Theresa book attracted quite a lot of attention, but not the ballistic attention that would come later.

 

In fact his first real brush with full-scale front-page notoriety came in 1999 with his famous affidavit concerning Sidney Blumenthal’s role in the Clinton-Lewinsky affair. Next came his great switcheroo, after September 11th 2001, to support for American military adventures abroad, which I challenged him over, leading to our famous row, which would hardly have been interesting if I’d just come from nowhere. And finally (and in my opinion crucially) his book, TV appearances and permanent lecture tour attacking God which (as I discovered in Grand Rapids) had touched a vast and passionate audience such as I never expect to command.

The truth is that we had very different, parallel careers, in different parts of the same trade, both of which matured at roughly the same time. Though there was an early, comical episode when we both arrived independently at the Daily Express in the same week, he a club-class Editor’s appointment, I a glamour-free toiler from the provinces in a horrible suit, who’d only recently finished an indentured apprenticeship. I’m still not sure which of us was more surprised, either by the coincidence or the fact that it was the Daily Express.

 

Much later, there was a period when I think quite a lot of people in Britain had heard of me, and had not heard of him. And at the same time, quite a lot of people in Britain had heard of him, and not of me. His fame in the USA , where I barely exist, is a different thing altogether. But during most of that time we lived entirely separate lives. Even when we were both living in London we would rarely meet. My milieu was, at that time, the Industrial Correspondents, a small, boozy club of (in many cases very talented) troublemakers who regarded themselves as Fleet Street’s shock troops and who lived an intense life on the edges of the endless industrial conflicts of the time. All of us had served our apprenticeships in the feral trade of daily newspaper reporting, and each of us was a troublemaker in his own right. That’s why we chose to report trouble. Out of this school came people as diverse as Paul Routledge, Alastair Stuart, John Lloyd, Trevor Kavanagh, Don Macintyre, Julia Somerville, Geoffrey Goodman, Nick Timmins and Richard Littlejohn. We were very busy and we spent most of our waking hours in each other’s company, or with union contacts.

 

I don’t think sibling rivalry took up much of my time, and it was also about then that I began to develop a proper interest in Eastern Europe and the Communist world, beginning with a private journey to Prague in 1978, and continuing with an assignment (begged for) to Poland during the Solidarity strikes of 1980. These were the foundations of my career, such as it is. And then I was a fairly active member of my local Labour Party, though not a very welcome one (Described in ‘The Rage Against God’). I have absolutely no idea what my brother’s political activities were by then, and can’t even remember if he’d left for the USA. His world wasn’t mine. Mine wasn’t his. I was struck, when his FBI records were put on line a few months ago, by the fact that at least one of his London addresses was completely unfamiliar to me.

 

I went to his wedding, in Cyprus. He came to mine in London. Once or twice we met on visits to our father in Oxford. I remember him, on one such occasion, chiding me for wearing a Remembrance Poppy. It amused me that 25 years later he made a great business about wearing a (Canadian) Remembrance Poppy in Washington DC, and offered to get me one. My first child was born, then his was. There was the now infamous moment where, on a rare if not unique visit to my house in Oxford, he said he didn’t care if the Red Army watered its horses in Hendon, a memory he later found unwelcome. I visited him during a Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Washington, and stayed at his tiny house on Capitol Hill. It was then that I told him what he would never have found out himself, that our mother was partly Jewish, a piece of information which he always told me had changed his life. I've often been struck by the fact that he never came to visit me when I lived in Moscow, though he would have been welcome.

Now, all this was available to Decca if she’d asked. As was the account of his determination to escape the suburbs which I gave to Tom Cook, who was not , I think, so constrained by a fixed picture of me. Maybe we could do it again some time. I’m sure it will be therapeutic.