Amis on Hitchens: ‘He’s one of the most terrifying rhetoricians the world has seen’
Martin Amis hails the peerless intelligence and rhetorical ingenuity of his exceptional friend, Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens, left, on holiday with Martin Amis in Cape Cod, 1985.
Spontaneous eloquence seems to me a miracle,” confessed Vladimir Nabokov in 1962. He took up the point more personally in his foreword to Strong Opinions (1973): “I have never delivered to my audience one scrap of information not prepared in typescript beforehand … My hemmings and hawings over the telephone cause long-distance callers to switch from their native English to pathetic French.
“At parties, if I attempt to entertain people with a good story, I have to go back to every other sentence for oral erasures and inserts … nobody should ask me to submit to an interview … It has been tried at least twice in the old days, and once a recording machine was present, and when the tape was rerun and I had finished laughing, I knew that never in my life would I repeat that sort of performance.”
We sympathise. And most literary types, probably, would hope for inclusion somewhere or other on Nabokov’s sliding scale: “I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.”
Mr Hitchens isn’t like that.