‘Christopher Hitchens in conversation with Stephen Fry’ this wasn’t — Hitchens had been struck down with pneumonia. No matter, ‘Stephen Fry and friends on the life, loves and hates of Christopher Hitchens’ at the South Bank didn’t disappoint.
Sean Penn was the first to offer his memories, fittingly complete with cigarette – an irony it was unclear whether he appreciated or not. Penn praised Hitchens’ rallying against the “ultimate childishness of Henry Kissinger” reading an excerpt from The Trials of Henry Kissinger, which satellite failure cut short.
Fry then welcomed Richard Dawkins onstage — the only participant who wasn’t communicating via satellite. Asked about the topic of offensiveness, he bemoaned that “we’re expected to be respectful… whether respect is deserved or not… and I don’t see any reason to do that if *off-ence* is deserved.”
Christopher Buckley then amused all with an anecdote about how Hitchens was forced to share the same church as Kissinger at Buckley’s father’s funeral. He escaped for a cigarette at the first opportunity, so as not to be seen as being “among” Kissinger and his ilk.
Ian McEwan, who was watching the event with Hitchens and wife, was then in contact, via the latter’s email address. Hitchens’s “Rolls Royce” of a mind was “purring slowly”, he insisted, in spite of his illness.
Fry then introduced the “greatest (living) English poet”, James Fenton, asking him if the circle of friends he and Hitch moved with heightened their collective “genius”. Fenton pondered that “Martin (Amis, made everyone) more talented” before closing with a reading of his own poem, ‘The Skip’.
Lewis H. Lapham, former editor of Harper’s magazine, remarked that Christopher was the “…only journalist in Washington that would actually bite the hand that fed him” and that one could “rely on (him) to tell the truth as he saw it”.
Salman Rushdie described the word games that he and Christopher used to play. One such game, “titles that didn’t quite make it”, featured suggestions like “For whom the Bell Rings”, “To Kill a Hummingbird” and “The Catcher in the Wheat”.
He also described the “obscene” fun Amis and Hitchens had exchanging the word ‘love’, with ‘hysterical sex’. The results? “All you need is hysterical sex” and “hysterical sex is a many splendored thing” among others.
Finally, Amis himself commented on the “unconsummated gay marriage” he and Hitchens share, adding that “Christopher, certainly some time ago, would have consummated it very happily”.
Fry concluded proceedings by relaying the scrutiny that Bertrand Russell was subjected to when he refused to sympathise with the British soldiers who were being killed in World War One. His response? That, in sending the soldiers out to kill, a far greater evil was being perpetrated. Fry defied anyone to say, on the back of that, that one cannot be moral without being religious. Despite the valedictory tone of the evening, you suspect that the Rolls Royce purred loud at that final note.
Picture credit Max Taylor.
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