It was by no means a disappointment. Sparrow was hosting a small lunch—“luncheon” might have been more the mot juste—and as he took my hand with both of his he summoned a butler named Lane to inquire what I might desire by way of a drink. I had never seen a butler before, and this one had the same name as Algy’s manservant in The Importance of Being Earnest. I had barely had time to adjust myself when lunch began and I was overwhelmed by the variety and deliciousness of the food and wine, and the splendor of the silver and glass. Sparrow exerted himself to live up to everything one had ever heard about him. He declared that homosexuality ought to be punishable—“gravely punishable,” as he put it with purring relish—even though he hoped to remain a member of a sophisticated minority that would be exempt from this very code. Since the law had only recently been changed, I recall myself guessing that there was an element of masochistic nostalgia in this. Sparrow had evidently done some hard thinking about buggery. He had contributed to the last great argument about literary censorship in England, arguing that in a very rugged passage of Lady Chatterley’s Lover D.H. Lawrence had plainly intended to suggest that the gamekeeper had sodomized his boss’s wife. (I must say that I agree with this analysis, though what struck me most about the novel when I last read it was the way in which gruff Nottinghamshire miners say “aks” for “ask,” in just the same manner that now marks off the speech of the black American ghetto. Some work here surely for a philologist, but not a project that would have especially amused Sparrow.)
Like Lord Marchmain in Brideshead, Sparrow was “everything that the Socialists would have me be.” His reactionary style was almost, if not in fact, a self-parody. He had engaged a photographer to walk around Oxford and take discreet photographs, not of the most beautiful and epicene young men, but of the most scrofulous and surly ones. This might have betrayed an interest in “rough trade” and was perhaps not unconnected to it, but when he showed me the resulting album (which contained snatched studies of quite a few of my more disaffected friends), he accompanied my turning of the pages with a reading of Walter Pater on the ephemerality and fragility of youth. I was by then a dinner guest, and even an after-dinner guest over the candles and decanters as they reflected each other in the high polish of the table. One evening I was placed next to that great Cornish queen A.L. Rowse, who had only recently unburdened himself of a new gay theory of the origin and dedication of Shakespeare’s Sonnets but mainly wanted to tell me what I already knew, that Hitchens was a Cornish name, and positively demanded to be told whether the Mrs. Hitchens who kept sending him such fervent and unwanted love letters was by any chance my mother. He was so lost in conceit that he did not, I remember thinking, completely trust my denial.
For all who try to lead a double life there will eventually be “a small but interesting revenge” as James Fenton later phrased it to me. Mine came when I was addressing a crowd of infuriated students from the steps of the Clarendon Building and denouncing some official infraction of our rights to free sex and free association and free speech. Over the heads of the audience, as I was hitting my peroration, I saw the silvered and saturnine features of “The Warden,” who must by then have been the most execrated figure on the Oxford Left. A twitch at the corner of his lip betrayed his design, which I detected almost at the same instant. Making a discreet but determined path through the astonished protestors, he arrived just as I was concluding and said: “My dear Christopher, I am so sorry to have missed most of your speech. I have no doubt it was admirable. But I do hope you haven’t forgotten that you promised to look in after dinner tonight.” It was a moment of cock-crow. I could have pretended not to understand, but I replied instead that I was looking forward to it and—as he glided away with a sleek air of “game, set, and match” clinging to him—faced the slightly baffled faces of my comrades. I could have taken refuge in some “know your enemy” formulation, but something in me said that this would be ignoble. I didn’t want a one-dimensional politicized life.
I sympathized, all the same, with those who were effectively forced to live one. Again to cite James Fenton, who first pointed it out to me, you were compelled to notice something different about the American students. As the rest of us poured out of “hall” after dinner and had a smoke and a drink in the quad, they tended to draw aside and form a huddle, as if hashing over some private matter or specific grief. We all knew what this was. Having been lucky enough to become Rhodes Scholars or in other ways be chosen as envoys of their country, they found themselves overseas at a time when the United States was conducting an imperialist war in Indochina and a holding action against the insistent demands of its own long-oppressed black minority at home. Those things would have been bad enough by themselves, but in addition it was entirely possible that these young Americans could be compelled to take part in a war they mostly regarded as criminal. Hence those tight little circles on the lawn as the Oxford dusk came on: Should they defy the draft and become outlaws, with the choice of prison or exile, or submit and become obedient and get on with their careers? It’s been often said since that it was only the military draft that stoked anti-war feeling among the relatively privileged American students, and that once the system of conscription was abolished, the feeling of outrage about Vietnam was diminished in proportion. I was there and I remember clearly, and I feel it a point of honor to give the lie to this sneer. The young Americans I knew were not afraid of being killed, or rather, they were very much more afraid that they would be forced to kill.*
I remember the address—46 Leckford Road—where many of them shared a house. Frank Aller, for example, a brilliant and conscience-ridden young man, eventually took his own life because he could not bear the conflict between his love of his country and his hatred of the war. Another young man lodging at the same address was Bill Clinton. I don’t recollect him so well though my friend and contemporary Martin Walker, later to be one of Clinton’s best biographers, swears that he remembers us being in the same room. The occasion was to become a famous one, since it was the very time when the habitual and professional liar Clinton later claimed that he “didn’t inhale.” There’s no mystery about this, any more than there ever was about his later falsifications. He has always been allergic to smoke and he preferred, like many another marijuana enthusiast, to take his dope in the form of large handfuls of cookies and brownies. Distributed around Oxford at the time were many young men—Strobe Talbott, Robert Reich, Ira Magaziner—who were later to become members of the Clinton administration. Of these, I remember Magaziner (later the man to ruin American health care on behalf of Hillary Clinton) the best. He had been something of a leader of the anti-war movement at Brown University in Rhode Island. I had written “RING IRA” on a pad by the telephone in a house I was then sharing, and when the police came calling on another matter to do with a public demonstration, they took a lot of persuading that this was not a sinister appointment with Irish Republicanism.
I didn’t much like what little I knew of Clinton, and this may have had something to do with my suspicion that he, too, was trying to have things both ways. Someone was informing on the American anti-war students and reporting their activities to Mr. Cord Meyer and the CIA desk at the London embassy in Grosvenor Square (we knew this because the fools once approached the wrong guy as a recruit, and he blew the whistle), and I am not the only person who has sometimes suspected that it was Clinton who was the snitch. On another face-both-ways question, he and I both became peripherally involved (at different times, I hasten to add) with a pair of Leckford Road girls who, principally Sapphic in their interests, would arrange for sessions of group frolic. The men who flattered themselves that they were the desired objective would later discover that they were merely the goats tethered in the clearing, the better to magnetize more women into the trap. I have always thought that to be a deft and sinuous scheme and wish that I had understood its dynamics better at the time. But this is very much like the rest of life, where, as Kierkegaard so shrewdly observes, one is condem
ned to live it forward and review it backward. If you are going to sleep with Thatcher’s future ministers and toy with a future president’s lesbian girlfriend, in other words, you will not be able to savor it fully at the time and will have to content yourself with recollecting it in some kind of tranquility.
I tried at the time and have even attempted retrospectively to pretend that I enjoyed Oxford more than I did. For example, my tutor in formal logic was Dr. Anthony Kenny, who was then only beginning to raise the vast architecture of his now-magisterial History of Philosophy. Descending the staircase from his room after a tutorial, I remember thinking that I had finally lodged in my mind the principles of Cartesian reasoning. Kenny had been a Catholic priest in a tough parish in Liverpool before deciding that Thomas Aquinas’s proofs of god’s existence were unsatisfactory. He left the ministry and quite some time later got married, at which point the Catholic Church excommunicated him because he had violated his vows as a priest! Many people don’t understand that the term “lapsed Catholic” entails the sinister implication that only the Church can decide who leaves it and why, or when. (I had already come across some extreme Communist sects which would insist on expelling anyone who wished to resign.) Anyway, on the evening of my Cartesian tutorial I sat in my room listening to all the bells of Oxford chiming and tolling, and telling myself “Here you are, in a college that has been a great center of learning since the medieval schoolmen. Outside your window is the very place where Bishops Cranmer and Latimer and Ridley were burned at the stake for their principles. You can be the inheritor of all this, and more, and give yourself to the life of the mind.” Even as I tried to convince myself, I realized what I have often had to accept since, that if you have to try and persuade yourself of something, you are probably already very much inclined to doubt or distrust it.
Did I really think that my examinations in logic and philosophy didn’t matter much, because a revolution was in progress or at least in prospect? I did. Did I ignore my parents and my tutors when they said that my career prospects would suffer unless I applied myself more to my studies? Yes again, and not so much with careless abandon as with the thought that such counterinducements were somehow contemptible. Did I go to a vast demonstration in Grosvenor Square in London, outside the American embassy, which turned into a pitched battle between ourselves and the mounted police, and wonder in advance how many people might actually be killed in such a confrontation? Yes I did, and I can still recall the way in which my throat and heart seemed to swell as the police were temporarily driven back, and the advancing allies of the Vietnamese began to sing “We Shall Overcome.” I added to my police record for arrests, of all of which I am still reasonably proud. When a charge against me of “incitement to riot” was eventually dropped, I was slightly crestfallen because I had thought it a back-handed tribute to my abilities as an orator. I helped organize a sit-down outside an Oxford hairdressers’ shop that refused black female customers. While still on bail for this pending offense, I sat down again on the pitch at a cricket match involving a segregated South African team. In court, I failed to amuse the magistrate when I complained of the brutal behavior of the arresting police officer and gave the number that he had worn on his uniform. “How can you be so sure,” snapped the man on the judicial bench, “of that number?” “Merely because, Your Honor,” I responded sarcastically, “the figures 1389 are the same as the date of the great Peasants’ Revolt.” The resulting heavy fine reflected the court’s view of my impromptu contempt, as well as of my refusal to swear on the Bible when I took my oath. When found guilty, my comrades and I rose to our feet in the dock and sang “The Internationale,” fists raised in the approved and defiant manner.
I didn’t have the money to pay the fine, but I had been told that there was every chance that John Lennon would shell out for all of us. I later vastly preferred Mick Jagger’s “Street Fighting Man,” which had been written for my then-friend Tariq Ali, to the Beatles’ more conciliatory “You Say You Want a Revolution,” but in those days I would also have agreed with one of Lenin’s favorite statements (borrowed as I now know from the satirical Juvenal) that pecunia non olet or “money has no smell.” Anyway I left the court in a hurry because on the following day I was due to board a charter flight that would take me across the Atlantic for the first time in my life and land me in revolutionary Cuba.
Havana versus Prague
Within the Revolution, everything. Outside the Revolution, nothing.
—Fidel Castro
Ex ecclesia, nulla salus. [Outside the church, no salvation.]
—Thomas Aquinas
At the risk of seeming ridiculous, the true revolutionary is moved by true feelings of love.
—Ernesto “Che” Guevara
Socialism with a human face.
—Alexander Dubek
THE EXPEDITION TO CUBA was the toughest exercise in double-accounting that I had so far undertaken. It was only a few months since Guevara had met his pathetic yet stirring demise in the highlands of Bolivia, and the Cuban government had announced that any young leftist who wanted to break the embargo and could get to the island would be a guest in a special camp for “internationalists.” This, with its chance to mingle with revolutionaries from all over the globe, was an unmissable invitation. But it was also an opportunity to see whether Cuba’s claim to be an alternative “model” to Soviet state–socialism possessed any staying-power. It’s difficult to remember today, when Havana itself is run by a wrinkled oligarchy of old Communist gargoyles, but in the 1960s there was a dramatic contrast between the waxworks in the Kremlin and the young, informal, spontaneous, and even somewhat sexy leadership in Havana. Not that we of the International Socialists, who sent our own team of polemicists and dialecticians to the camp, were much impressed by beard-sporting histrionic types, either. It was revolution within the revolution again.
Since I couldn’t pay that fine, how had I paid for the flight? Easy. I had just been awarded a Kitchener Scholarship, named for the man whose face adorned the World War One poster admonishing all young Britons to remember that “Your Country Needs YOU!” Available only to the sons of naval and military officers who were obliged to lead low-budget lives at university, this award required an interview with some red-faced old buffers who wanted mainly to reassure themselves about one’s general soundness. I had a decent shave and put on a tie and played along. When asked what I did for extracurricular activity, I cited the Oxford Union. “Didn’t Her Majesty The Queen,” one of the whiskery veterans inquired, “just recently attend a debate there?” This was too good to miss: she had in fact shown up and I had been technically a member of the committee that ran the debate. Modestly, I made the most of this fact and knew in that moment that the scholarship named for the red-coated imperial hero of Khartoum would be mine and would help finance a socialist incendiary. (I think I may also have justified my duplicity by recalling the shameful way in which the Navy had treated my father over his pension. Yes, that’s right—they owe us. What great self-persuaders we all are.)
At Gatwick Airport I recognized quite a few of the brothers and sisters who turned up to board the scruffy Czechoslovak charter aircraft that was to take us to Havana, and I submitted sullenly to the business of being pulled to one side while plainclothes British policemen rudely grabbed my passport and wrote down all my details in a ledger before letting me proceed. (Who cares? I thought angrily. Their rule won’t last much longer.)
“The belly of the beast” was the expression commonly used for the United States in those days, and there seemed something gratifying in the way that our plane made only a brief touchdown in Newfoundland before embarking upon the second leg and setting course for Havana while avoiding the taint of Yanqui airspace. Arrival at the José Martí Airport, with its blinding sunshine and crushing humidity, was an excitement all of its own. We were greeted by smiling and good-looking young comrades who offered a tray of daiquiri rum cocktails: this first impression was as unlike the Berlin Wall vers
ion of official Communism as one could wish. But there came at once a slight moment of awkwardness. After handing over my passport, I waited awhile and, having by now heard a couple of rousing speeches of welcome, asked for it back. The hospitable internationalist grin on the face of the Cuban host contracted perhaps a millimeter or so. “We look after it for you.” “You do? For how long?” “Until you leave our country.” I felt an immediate sense of unease but decided to get over it.
I might perhaps have succeeded in getting over it, were it not for a couple of later developments. The scheme was for our planeload of mainly British internationalists to board the waiting buses that would take us to the Campamento Cinco de Mayo, a newly built work-camp in the hilly, verdant province of Pinar del Rio. Here we would join our French, German, Italian, African, and other compañeros, and have dialogues with them in the evening while helping to plant much-needed coffee seedlings during the day. In this fashion, we would build links between different insurgencies at the grass-roots level while—at the seedling level—helping to rid Cuba of its notorious colonial dependency on the single crop (the infamous “monoculture”) of sugar.* What could be more agreeable?