Friendship Doesn’t Get in the Way of a Feud, and Vice Versa

August is a fine month for literary quarrels.

Heat sharpens tempers; leisure whets the appetite for diversion; time hangs heavy on the Hamptons.

And what looks to be this season’s main event is definitely a heavyweight match: Its English-born antagonists--Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens--are not only transatlantically acclaimed writers but also close friends since their university days.

“I met Martin in 1973 at Oxford and soon realized I had met the friend of my life,” Hitchens, an author, essayist and political and literary columnist for Vanity Fair and the Nation, said this week. “I fell in love, really. But even in love there’s always a blemish. And, indeed, he had very ordinary political opinions, really wasn’t interested in politics at all, actually. I just thought, here’s something I know about, and he doesn’t.” Amis, of course, has gone on to become one of England’s leading novelists, a formidable literary essayist and the author of a memoir, “Experience.”

In fact, the occasion of their discord is Amis’ discovery of politics as expressed in his recently released book, “Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million” (Talk Miramax Books). It is a memoir in which Amis deploys recollections of his family and friends--particularly Hitchens--to argue that denial and a willful attachment to Marxism have led the vast majority of Western intellectuals to ignore Joseph Stalin’s crimes, the Great Terror and its 20 million victims. The book includes an “open letter” to Hitchens--who is made to stand as Exhibit A in the indictment--as well as Amis’ reflections on his children, his dead sister and his father, the late Kingsley Amis, the novelist, poet and critic, who died in 1995. The son now seems to confess that he failed to appreciate sufficiently the rectitude of his famous father’s own migration from orthodox Stalinism to right-wing anti-communism.

When, for example, Amis describes a public meeting in London at which Hitchens spoke, he is repulsed by the laughter with which the audience greets the speaker’s allusion to “old comrades” and writes: “What kind of laughter is it? It is, of course, the laughter of universal fondness for that old, old, idea about the perfect society. It is also the laughter of forgetting. It forgets the demonic energy unconsciously embedded in that hope. It forgets the Twenty Million.

“Everybody knows of Auschwitz and Belsen. Nobody knows of Vorkuta and Solovetski.

“Everybody knows of Himmler and Eichmann. Nobody knows of Yezhov and Dzerdshinsky.

“Everybody knows of the six million of the Holocaust. Nobody knows of the six million of the Terror-Famine.”

Hitchens is having very little of it. He has written a lengthy essay--”Lightness at Midnight: Satlinism Without Irony”--for the forthcoming Atlantic Monthly in which he dissects Amis’ book with a severity so thorough that it mocks the mere savagery of the usual unfavorable review.

After praising Amis as a writer who “has won and held the attention of an audience eager for [his] synthesis of astonishing wit and moral assiduity,” Hitchens carefully enumerates the handful of passages in which he finds virtue. Then: “Having called attention to the splendors of this little book, I am compelled to say where I think it fails. And by ‘compelled’ I suppose I must mean ‘obliged.’ ”

Among the observations that follow: “George Orwell once remarked that certain terrible things in Spain had really happened, and ‘they did not happen any the less because the Daily Telegraph has suddenly found out about them when it is five years too late.’ Martin Amis can be excused for coming across some of the above names and numbers rather late in life, but he cannot hope to get away with accusing others of keeping these facts and names from him, or from themselves.”

According to Hitchens, “With infinitely more distress, I have to add that Amis’ newly acquired zeal forbids him to see a joke even when [as Bertie Wooster puts it] it is handed to him on a skewer with bearnaise sauce.”

Amis, Hitchens writes, is guilty of “solipsism” and of “insulting” not only the memories of Stalinism’s many heroic left-wing opponents, but also history itself. “Hard work is involved in the study of history. Hard moral work, too. We don’t get much assistance in that task from mushy secondhand observations....”

The Atlantic’s literary editor, Ben Schwarz, who commissioned Hitchens’ essay, said that “when he sent me the draft of the piece, I was taken aback. I knew it would be a tough essay, but I was concerned immediately that Hitch had written some of it in the heat of the moment and would later think better of some of his remarks about Amis. Several times, I asked him to reconsider various words. He is a very careful writer. So, for example, while I think he is correct in choosing the word ‘solipsistic,’ I thought his closest friend might take offense at being described that way. I didn’t want to be the instrument of a breach between them.”

Schwarz need not have worried--and that is one of this literary quarrel’s singular aspects. While both Amis and Hitchens are unwavering in their differences over the points at issue, both profess themselves equally resolved not to let it damage their friendship. In part, this may have to do with the fact Amis shared early drafts of his memoir with Hitchens, who reciprocated by giving Amis copies of his review.

All was in furtherance of a conversation that, Hitchens says, began two years ago in--of all places--San Marino.

“There was a conference on humor in the postwar English novel held on the occasion of the Huntington Library’s acquisition of Kingsley Amis’ papers,” Hitchens recalled. “Martin and I were there and Martin gave a reading and, then, announced that his future project would be this. It made the audience slightly wince. To be frank, listening to him announce his intentions was like watching an inebriated person crossing a 12-lane highway. Martin is as deft and gifted as anyone I know, and without that gift he wouldn’t have made it to the divider. It is a fairly heroic exaggeration to make the vast majority of Western intellectuals complicit in Stalin’s murders. It’s not true, even of the left.

“I took him aside afterward and tried to tell him that the playback he got from the rather good audience at the Huntington was: ‘Who do you think you are and who do you think you’re talking to? And to whom do you think any of this is a fresh moral dilemma?’

“Unfortunately,” Hitchens said, “Martin didn’t find the modesty or the proportion to take on either question seriously. When I saw the manuscript a year ago, I thought, ‘Oh, dear.’ We had quite a lot of conversation. I said, ‘Look, I don’t want to say anything about myself, though I do not recall things between us the way you do, but don’t do this to yourself or to your family.

“I told him everything that I’ve said in the review--and more,” Hitchens said. “I told him the book he’d written was sentimental and trivial and uncomprehending to the point of being misleading.”

For his part, Amis, who received the review’s final copy only Wednesday, says: “While I disagree strongly with some of things Christopher has written, I defend with my life his right to say them. I am not discomposed. I will argue through some of the points with him, but I’ll need to read it through again before we do that.

“Christopher,” Amis said, “objects, in part, to the entire premise of the book, but it is my personal response to these questions and events and is not meant to be panoptic. I have found my own way through it. I’m sorry he does not like the personal stuff--objects to it, really--but it’s a memoir not historiography. It is written from my peculiar slant and is not meant to be definitive.”

Still, Hitchens insisted, “Martin fails heavily” and “has written a book barely redeemed by its prose.”

“In effect, he calls me a Holocaust denier, which more than slightly pisses me off. I was fighting against the Communist Party and its thugs when I was 18 years old. I forgive Martin only because, until two years ago, he wouldn’t have known the difference between Bakunin and Bukharin. I wouldn’t take my oath that he even now knows the difference,” Hitchens said.

“Our differences over these questions,” Amis said, “are not a personal thing. As much as possible I think they should be argued on the merits and are detachable from my personal slant. Insofar as Christopher’s review goes, I thought it could have done with more of a personal slant from his own point of view. I would like to have had more of a sense of his personal history and of his period of Trotskyist romanticism. It’s something he ought to do at some point.”

Schwarz and the Atlantic have offered to sponsor further public debates between the two writers. Amis says he will decline.

“It would be a rash man, indeed, who went to the podium with him,” Amis said of his friend. “I would rather our conversation go on in private than from the podium....” In any event, Amis said, “There is no question of a rupture between us nor of any fluctuation in our friendship. With this book, I ventured rather far into his territory, and I expected him to have much to say in rebuttal. From my reading of what he has said, there is no malice in his response and, indeed, there was none on my part.”

On this, Hitchens agrees. “There is no question of a breach in our friendship,” he said. “It would take a lot more than this from my side. I think I’ve been slightly abused, but not betrayed. Martin would have to do something very sordid for me to break our friendship off. I suppose that if I’m one person involved with Marxism who he has known well, that’s simply a mark of his laziness.”

One can almost hear the connoisseurs of controversy sighing in collective disappointment.

Work in Progress

Michael Henry Heim, professor of Slavic languages and literature at UCLA, is one of America’s most distinguished literary translators. His most recent projects include “My Century” by Gunter Grass and the forthcoming “Diary of Kornei Chukovsky: 1901-1969”:

“At this moment I’m working on something I promised to finish by the 31st of July, but I haven’t quite gotten there. It is a new translation of Chekhov’s four essential plays, which are in chronological order: ‘The Seagull,’ ‘Uncle Vanya,’ ‘The Three Sisters’ and ‘The Cherry Orchard.’ I’ve actually been working on it for more than 25 years. The first one I did was “The Three Sisters,” for the Mark Taper Forum, in 1975. The other translations were commissioned by American and Canadian regional theaters over the years. In each case I worked with the actors, and now I’m making the final revisions, annotating the plays and writing the introduction.

“The introduction, in fact, is what has held me up. I’m trying to show the interplay between the universal and the specific in the plays. In other words, what makes the plays interesting and valid for audiences today and what was specifically Russian, and now is only of historical interest. I expect to finish within the next few days.”