… said UD as she returned to her rented beach chair yesterday afternoon. She’d been away from it for two hours, first cooling down in her building’s nearby pool, then having lunch with her sister, and she’d worried that someone might have snatched the chair.
Or, far worse, someone might have lifted the big black hardback she’d set on its seat: Hitch-22, the memoirs of Christopher Hitchens.
But no, everything was here, including the book, its yellow spine blazing away in the sunlight as a high tide nipped its heels.
Having carried a headful of Hitchens to lunch, she’d burbled to her sister (who would have preferred to discuss Morrissey) about his virtues… “Dismal. Why don’t Americans much use that word? Hitchens uses it all the time, and it’s a great word… Recondite. An absurd word! I don’t use it because it sounds pretentious. But he uses it and it’s fine… Grog-blossom!
I once had a drink with an Express veteran, his face richly veined and seamed with grog-blossom…
Phrases too: One cannot be just a little bit heretical… And endless hilarious invective which always feels accurate — unlike Gore Vidal’s, which is also hilarious but feels vindictive…”
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I didn’t go into the deeper affinities I feel reading a man who adores Auden and Larkin (“I think that if I take, say, my two favorite English poets,” he said in an interview a couple of days ago, “the ones I most often recur to, are Philip Larkin and W.H. Auden. Both of them have a great understanding of tragedy, and a keen feeling of, you know, in some ways, the absurdity of the human condition. But it’s also from the absurdity that they draw things that are quite mordantly funny as well. I don’t think it’s possible to have a sense of tragedy without having a sense of humor.”) and quotes Cesare Pavese…
Actually there’s a striking and immediate affinity there, because my first week on the beach I’d reread A. Alvarez’s book about suicide, The Savage God… Beach reading à la UD… and Hitchens not only begins his narrative talking about that book (his mother killed herself); he even pulls some of its quotations from Pavese (“No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.”). If you’ve read my latest Inside Higher Ed post about burqas, you know that I begin with a Pavese quotation pulled from last Saturday’s Alvarez reading. (“Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in the world.”)
UD and Christopher Hitchens: Two literary-minded children of suicides.
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To be sure there are more obvious things to interest me in Hitch-22 — people we know in common, like Peter Galbraith, praised on page 300; a love of obscene limericks; a love of Dylan and Peter Paul and Mary and the Mamas and the Papas; Jewishness; a slightly louche interest in the outer edges (“I think I wish I had not been introduced so early to the connection between obscure sexual excitement and the infliction – or the reception -of pain.”) — but what rivets UD is this odd life-and-literature affinity.
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Well, let’s bring it all together. It’s far from my favorite Larkin poem (I think the last line is weak), but anyway.
To the Sea
To step over the low wall that divides
Road from concrete walk above the shore
Brings sharply back something known long before —
The miniature gaiety of seasides.
Everything crowds under the low horizon:
Steep beach, blue water, towels, red bathing caps,
The small hushed waves’ repeated fresh collapse
Up the warm yellow sand, and further off
A white steamer stuck in the afternoon —
Still going on, all of it, still going on!
To lie, eat, sleep in hearing of the surf
(Ears to transistors, that sound tame enough
Under the sky), or gently up and down
Lead the uncertain children, frilled in white
And grasping at enormous air, or wheel
The rigid old along for them to feel
A final summer, plainly still occurs
As half an annual pleasure, half a rite,
As when, happy at being on my own,
I searched the sand for Famous Cricketers,
Or, farther back, my parents, listeners
To the same seaside quack, first became known.
Strange to it now, I watch the cloudless scene:
The same clear water over smoothed pebbles,
The distant bathers’ weak protesting trebles
Down at its edge, and then the cheap cigars,
The chocolate-papers, tea-leaves, and, between
The rocks, the rusting soup-tins, till the first
Few families start the trek back to the cars.
The white steamer has gone. Like breathed-on glass
The sunlight has turned milky. If the worst
Of flawless weather is our falling short,
It may be that through habit these do best,
Coming to the water clumsily undressed
Yearly; teaching their children by a sort
Of clowning; helping the old, too, as they ought.