Christopher Hitchens.

• Author: Abramsky, Sasha
• Position: Columnist - Interview

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for The Nation and Vanity Fair and a freelance contributor to numerous other publications in both Britain and the United States. He is the author of a dozen books, covering issues as diverse as Britain's plundering of the Parthenon, the conflicts in the Middle East, Anglo-American relations, and the unsaintly qualities of Mother Teresa.

An Englishman by birth and upbringing, Hitchens came to America in the early 1980s, living first in New York City and then in Washington, D.C. In 1994, I was Hitchens's intern at The Nation. I discovered that we both went to the same college at Oxford--Balliol--and studied the same course: Politics, Philosophy, and Economics. Now, aged forty-seven, Hitchens lives with his wife, Carol Blue, and their three-year-old daughter, Antonia, in a spacious apartment in the Adams-Morgan district of Washington, D.C.

I talked with Hitchens in his apartment. He was chain-smoking cigarettes, and we both drank generous glasses of whiskey. As with so many British journalists, Hitchens is a heavy drinker and smoker, a bon vivant with a quick tongue and an often deadly pen. At one point in the interview, "You Say You Want a Revolution" by the Beatles came on. Hitchens said: "I hate this song, it's one of the few I really hate. This was the one praised by Mayor Daley as a healthy alternative to the Rolling Stones." After four hours of talking, the bottle was empty, and, as I left, Hitchens was getting ready for a late night of work.

Q: I remember reading that you grew up a navy brat.

HItchens: Well, I was born in 1949, in Portsmouth. It's a navy town, where all my father's ancestors seemed to come from. My father was a lifetime naval officer. The first memory I have is of Malta, which was still a British colony, technically, where my brother was born. I was brought up in a very naval, military, and conservative background. My father and his friends had very typical opinions of the British middle class-lower-middle class actually--after the war. My father broke into the middle class by joining the navy. I was the first member of my family ever to go to private school or even to university. So, the armed forces had been upward mobility for him.

After the war, the general feeling was that Britain had been cheated out of its Empire. A sort of politics of resentment. It would be very common to hear people say, round about the cocktail hour, "Well, I thought we won the war," with rather heavy sarcasm, as the news came in that yet again Britain had had to back down over Suez, or bases in Cyprus, or whatever it might be. It was a very resentful feeling that all that Churchillian rhetoric hadn't really amounted to very much in the long run. It had a powerful effect on me.

Q: What were your formative political impressions?

Hitchens: I was precocious enough to watch the news and read the papers, and I can remember October 1956, the simultaneous crisis in Hungary and Suez, very well. And getting a sense that the world was dangerous, a sense that the game was up, that The Empire was over.

I didn't form any political opinions of my own until I was a little bit older. I remember the first time I ever made a public speech, I would have been eleven or twelve. My prep school had a debate on the question of whether or not the Commonwealth Immigration Bill, which the Tories had just proposed to restrict West-Indian immigration, was justified or not. I spoke against the bill. I think I did it because nobody else would. And then, I remember deciding quite early on, having read a book by Arthur Koestler on hanging, that I was on principle opposed to capital punishment.

In 1964, when Wilson ran for Labour in October, we had a mock election in the high school. I decided I wanted the Labour Party to win, and again it wasn't very difficult to become nominated for the candidacy--because there wasn't much rivalry. We came third.

Q: Do you remember how many votes you got?

Hitchens: No! But I remember there was a very good communist candidate who took away a lot of my constituency.

Q: Why didn't you run as a communist then?

Hitchens: Because I was never, ever tempted by it. Maybe it was just an accident of where I was born and when. But the communists never appealed to me. And I was to a certain extent inoculated against it. I read Darkness at Noon before I read The Communist Manifesto.

No the leftward move for me was the very rapid experience of disillusionment with the Wilson government of 1964, with the collapse of that government into the most dismal kinds of conservative orthodoxy. There was the seaman's strike of 1966 and devaluation and the sell-out of Rhodesia--a lot of stuff.

But obviously the central, defining, overarching, whatever word you want for this sort of thing, was Vietnam. The first time I went on a CND [Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament] march--Easter march as it used to be called--was in 1966, and what drew me to it principally was that CND was the main national movement making a stink about the war in Vietnam.

Q: And this is before you went to Oxford?

Hitchens: Before I went to Oxford, which I did in late 1967.

Q: How did the Oxford culture, the college system, the tutorials, the drinking, how did all of that help mold your character?

Hitchens: I don't think very much. I knew from some time before, having been at this rather well-placed school at Cambridge, and having done a bit of English history and economics, I knew that what I wanted to do was to read PPE [Politics, Philosophy, and Economics--a course many future journalists, diplomats, and politicians take at Oxford] at Balliol. I knew that when I was fifteen. Not only that, but I got to do it, too.

And my very first experience was one of extreme disappointment. The standard, the intellectual atmosphere, was not as rarefied as everyone had led me to believe it would be. I just didn't go to classes or lectures at all.

Q: What were your politics like then?

Hitchens: Before I went up to Oxford, I had basically been kicked out of the Labour Party-roughly the time I did go up to Oxford...