Christopher Hitchens in conversation: The Only Subject is Love

this program is brought to you by Emory University so we're celebrating the opening of Salman Rushdie's archive this weekend it's a wonderful literary and political events and so many of us are aware it doesn't seem so very long ago that none of us were quite sure whether he or the archive would emerge into daylight and since for today the only subject is love I'd like to begin by talking a little bit about your friendship with him I've noticed in reading through some of your work both in print and on television that he appears in a great deal of it and I've also noticed the affection and respect with which you write and speak about him so can you tell me a little bit about how you met and a little bit about the course of your friendship yes I can lovingly ok well I I knew him in the way before I met him because every one of my age had read his magnificent novels about the simultaneous liberation of and amputation of his homeland that the price of its freedom was a wasn't was a mutilation a partition subject which interested me anyway but I'd never seen verbalized in or fictionalized in that way before and so we actually met in a place in London called Notting Hill now made famous by the revolting winsomeness of the huge yeah but actually better understood as that has the great HQ of the Caribbean population United Kingdom and there's an annual carnival where there's a steel band competition and various other less Hugh Grant like events Hey and at a rather funky do I met the future for Salman Rushdie looking less like a person liable to be knighted by Her Majesty the Queen than anyone I'd ever seen and we babbled on we had a slight disagreement even then about again about India partition he hadn't particularly like Paul Scott's novels or that even less I think had like the dramatization on Masterpiece Theatre and I thought they were better than that and we had a little disagreement there but but I I could tell that he was a real original and when I asked him I shouldn't take long over this by Austin later for a little blurb for a collection of essays which included the Paul Scott one which included a slight attack on him and the blurb said that with the exception of some unpardonable foolishness on pages 1 2 this is quite a good book and so forth and then we I guess we can't not do this so you might as well do it economically yeah anyone here who thinks what they were thinking on 9/11 should try and think what I was thinking on st. Valentine's Day 1989 in other words a confrontation between a direct one very violent one between everything I hate it because I think hate has to take part in this conversation versus everything I loved and if you want I'll tell you which the two things you must well under hate um boringness and its counterparts religious intolerance literal mindedness the view that you only need one book and not only that you can only read it one way the unbearable tedium of that backed up by ill-tempered in row over at Arianism the open offer of money in his own name by a theocratic fanatic for the just born murder of someone who was writing a novel in another country who wasn't even an Iranian citizen I mean that I thought okay in every generation there is a defined confrontation for those who favor free expression over those who don't and this is the one for our time by the way almost all the famous confrontations over this in history have been on the matter of blasphemy ever since the trial of Socrates or Galileo again go through it you'll find all these confrontations are to do with whether or not you can use Holy Writ for literary purposes so I feel a hand live this long not to know a confrontation when I saw and not only is this something that calls me every in any case but it involves defending someone who's become a friend and who is a literary genius so I thought of it in a way he couldn't have said this I thought of it as almost a great opportunity as almost as if I was lucky and a sentiment he couldn't very I forgot to say which bit so I love waiting kana well in Contra distinction to the literal mind does the Aztec face of the stupid certain person the person who person already has all the information they need um irony without which life is impossible irony irony is the Djinn in the Campari it's the it's the cream in the coffee it's not thinkable to do anything without it irony love of literature and language for its own sake explorations of same across frontiers and boundaries did right of the individual to conduct literary activities in his or her own way and for their own sake freedom of the press the First Amendment to the United States Constitution very important amendment rightly the first one other things like that were fighting for and were saying the command one's love as well as one's respect I'm struck by two things the first is the way you make the connection between freedom and mutilation in your earlier comments one of my most compelling memories of Salman was when he was under fatwa and Bard College where I used to teach invited him to be the graduation speaker and no one knew who the graduation speaker was going to be and it was a month of quiet and murmuring amongst all the undergraduates and there was lots of speculation and it was this wonderful educational moment where the students had to figure out who needed to be so quiet and then they were all gathered in the graduation dinner and someone walked in quietly completely unobtrusively and the whole place lifted up and burst into applause and it was a really interesting moment for everybody because one of the things he mentioned when we hosted him he was still under fato was the price for the fatwa it was fear of course it was anxiety but it was more most importantly boredom that much of his time under fat what was boring well I mentioned it's not snotty little test I gave it I guess I could share it with the head son he did tell me once that he was not really afraid of the death squads right so much though they had killed her don't forget they'd killed one of his translators they very badly injured and mutilated another and shot another one a Norwegian with him I got three times with a high-velocity rifle in the back and left him in the snow thinking he was dead so it was no joke but he said he was more worried that the experience of having to be constantly on guard moved around just distracted replying to abusive nonsense written about him in particularly the English press Nelson wood would kill his abilities right yes he was afraid they'd murder that so that's why one of my favorite novels of his is is the Moors last time they'll Ultima sus Bureau tomorrow which as well as being a great tribute to the cultural synthesis between Islam in the West the took place in Andalusia quite a generous subject in the view of the cirques was also marvelously almost musically written and showed no they couldn't kill him as a writer either and I'm also struck them as it were if the expression may be allowed yes absolutely I'm also struck by what she said about irony I was in a conversation with a theologian once who in thinking about postmodern understandings of irony and so on said there very many things he might give us life hope for but irony was what one irony was not one of them and my response was probably the first thing I would give up my life for would be irony digit gets a bit literal yes indeed if they know part yes it good so I've mother sentiment yes absolutely so the other thing I've been looking at in terms of your writing is the unacknowledged legislation that wonderful collection of essays and you talk a little bit about this the line itself which of course is taken from Shelley and we wouldn't even know that if it were for Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley 18 years publishing it getting it in print after his death it seems to me that both you and someone share a certain conviction that the best writing as you put it moves around the furniture in one's mind and you talk about the war poems Wilfred Owen did this for you quite early on and made to question everything you thought about order and patriotism and tradition so like more like turning over all the cargo in your hold in your holding just moving the furniture right anyone can survivor furniture is when you feel the cargo shifting in your interior that you feel a boy that that was a real exposure to literature I understand so would you is there anyone I mean I know you've taught at the new school you've taught at Berkeley and you've worked with students and is there anyone writing today who you would suggest for young readers here who might have had the same effect on these readers as oh when did for you well I think that she read will do it and in particular they should read dulce de coeur amassed the poem that first arrested me which became the part of the basis for Benjamin Britten's will recommend there's no reason not to read that I mean the first world war was as remote to me as it probably is to anyone here when I read it and it will always be not something outside mind generation experience if you don't know what happened in the First World War you don't know why we are still in the crisis of civilization tuition land which is still going on and and the poetry of that war is the especially sensitive register of what a tragedy it was I can in fact recital chair decorum s but I don't if we have time the problem is that I still can't usually can't do it without becoming slightly moist which might be embarrassing all around this but it's absolutely everyone who all right I will do it I think you should um why not why not okay you have to picture that the trenches under way in the Western Front and a young lieutenant from the Midlands this is bent double like old beggars under sacks knock-kneed coughing like hags we cursed through sludge till on the haunting flares we turned our backs and towards our distant rest began to trudge men marched asleep many had lost their boots but limped on blood-shod all went lame all blind the drunk with fatigue deaf even to the hoots of tired outstripped five-nines that dropped gasps quick boys an ecstasy of fumbling fitting the clumsy helmets just in time but someone there was charging out and stumbling and floundering like a man in fire although I'm deep through the dark green panes and thin red line green light as under a green sea I watched him drowning in all my dreams before my helpless sight he plunges at me guttering choking drowning if in some smothering dreams you too could pace behind the wagon that we flung him in and watch the white eyes writhing in his face his hanging face like a devil's sick of sin if you could hear at every jolt the Blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs obscene as cancer bitter as the cud of vile incurable sores on innocent tongues my friend you would not say with such high zest to children ardent for some desperate glory that old i vill J ed to Cora masked prepare Emery like oh so so when when someone says to me I should be reading I don't know it might be no offense to Jonathan Franzen how do you I think I think to myself I wonder if in a year anyone would be asking me that and by the way I haven't recently reread scenes from clerical life or Wilfred Owen and I might be doing better to stay with the gold standard well this is very much connected to my next area of thinking and that is you write in several places that the best writing is by nature political not because it is overtly politicized nor covertly politicized but because it's concerned with the honesty and integrity of public life and I was very moved by that and partly it's because you write that so often it is individual pens which create the moral space for a true argument and I'm not sure everyone here is read your work on Thomas Paine or Thomas Jefferson but it would be good to hear a little bit more about how those two figures in particular have created that moral space for a true argument well the real reason why I've realized I was becoming and had an effect become but wanted to become formally as well an American citizen it was a realization to the world had dawn on me is that as well as America being the great subject for a writer which is why I originally thought I wanted to move here it is also itself a work in progress and founded on certain documents and with certain flourishes of writing which are also amazingly subject to revision such as the US Constitution and so forth so that rather exciting to be able to take part in this process of composition shall I say and [Music] the two people who best express that were Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson Thomas Paine's pamphlets calling for an end to the British monarchy in North America are very beautifully written and make him in the eyes of many historians the moral author of the Declaration of Independence he was certainly at Jefferson's elbow so to speak was being written and the declaration itself is along with the think the King James Bible the only useful work ever done by a committee over literary critic that would unless unless unless there were four homers rights which were the jariya stood out I firmly believe there was only one Shakespeare I wouldn't trust anyone I didn't it's possible the Odyssey as multiple so that all of these ideas are taken from the very height of the European enlightenment it really is true you can Gatsby was right or Fitzgerald was right you meet a new country that finally stands equal to the human capacity for wonder and you can start again and you've been you're starting again with John Locke and Thomas Paine and David Hume and the first generation also we're printing presses make ideas of this kind possible for ordinary as we dare to call them ordinary people to read the self-educated artisan becomes a natural on the stage of history I'm also reminded of what you say about Jefferson in relationship to Orwell in your last or well is also one of your heroes and you write about a tunnels have heroes but I mean I don't know as close as possible yet and the fact that he's still understood intriguingly as a futuristic thinker even after 1984 is come and gone as a date and what's interesting in your recent essay about Orwell you argue that Orwell motivates us to keep the written and the spoken word together which i think is a beautiful an educator it's a beautiful sentiment thought never mind sentiment and you argue why that is the case is because they shouldn't be too far apart because in totalitarian regimes there's a tendency to create a spoken language in which certain thoughts such as thoughts about freedom are impossible to articulate in writing and vice versa right matatus Menendez and it seems also characteristic of Salman's work that there's this connection between the written and the spoken word very much part of the satirical critiques of religion in society that both of you have written you and critical essays him in fiction and this wonderful phrase that Jefferson in news speak yes Jefferson could not have written what he wrote doesn't if that's fantastic the beautiful question but very capacious and we'd have to try and remember all of it go no I tell you I'd have stood in reverse order slightly I know no I know what I'm going to say about Jefferson or well okay and pain but can concerning this question of writing as a form of conversational speech I say to my students look cheer up if you can talk you can write they do cheer up then I then I say to them they start to writing then I stage them okay which of your friends in this class do you really enjoy talking to hearing who speaks weld any of you I say at least if when you write something read it up read it out loud either back to yourself or maybe we get a trusted friend or lover to do it you'll be horrified but at least you can't put at least when you've written something you can't put the word like in every five minutes I do so there are some mistakes you can't make that way just as there are some mistakes you can only make in in writing so I say note which of you can really talk but they can't they cannot so I cast them down all over again whenever I've really broken them to my will but then I can start teaching them to write but you're speaking about with someone is it he stated me once and Thanksgiving was when he was still on the run and we were trying to get him in to see Bill Clinton which we did that succeeded it that Kocher critical planning the farewell I had leisure time with him because the unfortunate our apartment had been missiles armed camp for a while and I was writing a piece of Vanity Fair on black and white every now and then we do a black and white yes and we were commemorating Truman Capote's famous black and white wall and they said to me hitch you're supposed to over write about anything can you just do three thousand words on black and white and I said I'm sure I can but I didn't know if I was going to do it I said someone why I've got you before dinner do you mind just free associating for a bit no black and white he eyes slightly good yeah and for the next half-hour he it wasn't free association to it was it was an extrordinary well-organized well thought out unprompted spate of stuff I didn't know before this that shajahan designer of the Taj Mahal had wanted a black copy in black marble on the other side of a reflecting pool at Agra brilliant idea once you've got it you can't lose it I didn't know about Edward my bridge is multiple black and white exposures of horses galloping and amazing work he did It was as if I was listening song composing music I can't rival that but I I know that there must be a connection between his the literary ability in his verges conversationalist and the speaker and I think that I sometimes think he's he's not even writing it down he's almost transmitting it now with all well that's not true it was rather gruff in conversation and actually rather rather anglo-saxon on the page I mean it's one of the reasons it indoors is it's quite simple but on him and the revolution in revolution I've made another discovery sense who here can tell me who rather I should say who can't tell me what is the opening line of 1984 since there are no hands I assume that means everyone can oh you say you can't well the hell with you that the opening line of 1984 is the following it was a bright cold day in April and all the clocks were striking thirteen you know you're off to the races April 13th is Jefferson's birthday it's also mine by the way well though Jefferson was born before the old calendar changed so he had two birthdays he's actually born on the 2nd of April had to switch it to 30 often wonder what the astrologers did whenever yes I'm sure they managed to work it out John Adams said of the 13 colonies the great problem to carrying the revolution will be to get all the clocks to stall 13 blocks to strike at the same time so I think I may be on to something here anyway at the end of the novel there's a dictionary of Newspeak which shows the attempt essentially to purge the idea of freedom from the language so that he couldn't there's no word doesn't know I don't know word there's no there's no syntax of Liberty in which you could talk to grind it out grind all the Milton or Shelley everything out of English and in the in the dictionary the world gives an instance of a sentence that could not be translated into new speak and guess what sentences says we hold these truths to be self-evident that by the way was put in by Franken interesting yes it in Franklin crucially firmed up Jefferson on this one Jefferson said we hold these truths to be only some of its Frank friends so the judges in self-evident will go well they thought yes writing by committee in them yeah that's why it's what committee writing is better than you think I think also what you're reminding me I was something very important that I know has come up in your recent writing and that is the question of self censorship and the effect of a kind of Newspeak idea I'm writing a book now on scholars of religion who well intended though they maybe have profoundly insulted the communities about which they're writing you would like many of them and one of the things that's so interesting about each of them is their narratives after this happens to them is there was a question of self-censorship that immediately comes in and I think therefore thinking about the relationship between the written the spoken word again it's ways in which we imagine ourselves speaking something and yet we dare not write it that's what happens in South Sider ship with so many writers look it's not unlike what I said earlier about all the classic test cases in history of free expression are to do with profanity or blasphemy if you prefer South Korea's Galileo Galileo agreed to shut up or at least did not say that his theory had any theological implications the same Cardinal Cardinal Bellarmine was the man who burned to Julianna Brunner by the way conduct that Inquisition Spinoza after being excommunicated by the synagogue and Amsterdam changed his name a bit didn't put his name on anything he wrote put a rose a Subrosa symbol with the cow a caution mater on it he couldn't he wouldn't stop but he had to write obscurely Antonio Gramsci in the quad Ernie the prison notebooks Italy he managed to write under Mussolini in prison but he had to write off in a very organized form so as not to reveal the full implications of what he meant by his project so it goes now these people were threatened with torture and death and worse or both or in different order wonderful salad of opportunities that could be offered to you by the clerics in those days Yale University Press is threatened with no such thing but it doesn't have the nerve to publish a book on the Danish cartoons that has the cartoons reprinted in the world and not only that it doesn't understand the basic muscle and sinew of the English language was in saying that we are going to take out cartoons now from the book it said because we're convinced that if we did not we would be instigating violence now it's a pity that Yale University Press doesn't know that meaning of the simpler instigate which means you go out and sponsor it and try and make it happen you try to incite it they promote themselves from the passive to the active whereas in fact they couldn't be more passive and more supine so that was pretty easy without a shot being fired but not a shot being fired a shot being threatened the campus of Nathan Hale is running up the right right flank we surrender you didn't ask us to but in case you do we already have yeah this is very common now across publishing across the movies it's absolute all across my professional journalism right there's everyone's in full retreat so though someone survived brilliantly and his work did anyone trying to be him now wouldn't get a publisher this is something there's an Indian activist and writer for a show tomorrow who speaks very eloquently what does that actually translate the mighty human a great person that's what Porter's altima means the Indian names was worth unpacking that's right we were talking about this at lunch about translating Indian name he talked about that every author reserves the right to blaspheme which i think is a wonderful way to put it and he also speaks about the fact that he learned this from negotiating with with a cowardly publisher yes and most of the authors that I work with also talk and speak very very clearly about whether they trust the publisher or not so it's a very profound question Theodor Adorno in his minimum moralia his book of epigrams says he's reflecting on the Hays office which the younger ones if you won't remember but used to be the office of religious vigilance and civic censorship in Hollywood it was the one that said you couldn't have black and white characters in the same bed which you couldn't have mainly female characters and they said sure twin beds even if you showed a married person's home all this stuff and was a very oppressive Hays office code for many decades and Adorno said his reflection was it would be possible to make an aesthetically an artistically satisfying film there was in complete conformity with all the rules of the Hays office as long as the wars know Hays office so if you keep telling yourself of course free to say anything I like but I better avoid the blasphemy business don't think that it won't bleed back into everything that you're writing and offering to publishers don't think that you aren't doing the censors work for him well I mean I don't have a day to live under the instructions of some bullet or rabbi Hill priest I'm not going to and I've been inspired to say that by people much braver than myself and things at least you can say no I don't owe them a thing and I refuse to act as if I do they and refused to let them talk to me as if I owe it and one more thing we too have unalterable convictions we too have principles were willing to fight for die for kill for if you like if you insist don't mistake our pluralism and our tolerance and our multicopters and don't mistake that for weakness we have convictions too and principles and we can be offended well we can be offended we have so much more to talk about and I'm just see that we have to wrap up but I wanted to ask you honey good mug I'm sure we just got started I'm sorry I apologize I'm working with our publishers over there well tell them they didn't understand foreplay I think you just did um something about you makes me this way all right my final question is actually quite a serious one look at that colors um your your use of the term your book and religion you use a wonderful word which we religionists use all the time or criticizes of religion and that is the word numinous and throughout that book I was first motivated to read it partly because it seems to me to be written as much as a moral argument and it needs to be read as part of a larger work so often now I think that that work has become metonymic for all your work and I think that's terribly unfair because you have such a broader output than that but I also was struck by the way in which it was really morally grounded and you sort of placed yourself within a long tradition of moral critiques of religion and in the same way you also use words like marvelous and mystery and numinous in that book Joseph Conrad's quote and one of the chapters the world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is marvels and mysteries acting upon our emotions and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it almost justifies the conception of life as an enchanted state but no I am too conscious of the marvelous to ever be fascinated by the supernatural and then later with Ian McEwan was one of my favorite writers as well he says in McEwan can elucidate the numinous without conceding anything to the supernatural so beautifully phrased and I'm wondering if you could speak as final note about what you mean by the numinous and how you think riders like McEwan do it so well Keats wrote a poem attacking excuse me but John Keats wrote a poem attacking Isaac Newton for his gravitational theory because he said it had unwoven the rainbow he'd taken the magic out of the rainbow now in fact another reason to agree with Byron by the Lakers and the the general saltiness of the Romantic movement we are a Newton Newton have any idea of the beauty and variety of the spectrum and the various ways in which it can be replicated none so far from unweaving the rainbow it makes the rainbow absolutely real to everybody but when I say real of course I seem like a materialist what I mean to say is that there's no question that in Asian humans is a need for one might as well say the transcendent as the numinous or perhaps the adventuresome Li the ecstatic and that the Verdi didn't believe in God he could write a very beautiful Requiem indeed and no one would know the difference we don't know that the devotional painters really believe we only know what would have happened to them if they'd said they didn't believe so this recourse to poetry literature music above things that can't be quantified but or essential is the counterpart I think to the preferring of philosophy and literature over holy texts and over incantation reciting a poem which I did just manage to do without getting to throw tea is not at all the same as going to a ceremony several times a week or day and chanting the same incantation all the time in case if you didn't keep chanting it like the the children shouting that they believe in fairies otherwise Tinkerbell will die that if you if you stop in canting it you might stop believing it this is a pathetic way to live you have all these opportunities for mental and aesthetic adventure and you would exchange that for faith and for one book read in one way I don't think so if you take a page of Stephen Hawking on time it's more beautiful than many a stained-glass window I would think the Darwin on beetles alone you did the buttocks as he says there is grandeur in this view of life the amazing struggle the amazing continuous life force that's involved and the irony giving one's life up yes yeah I mean as my great friend Lawrence Krauss says great fantastic physicists probably the next noblest in physics given a brilliant talk on the answer to the simple-minded question why is there something not nothing he said everything comes from nothing the quantum gives you something out of nothing all the time there's a whole universe nothing but take part he said everyone everyone sitting here is made out of Stardust isn't that magic enough for you every element of which you're composed is story never mind Jesus of Nazareth stars had to die so you could sit here isn't that a bit more awe-inspiring than the burning bush and that knows what I say so which is the witches of peasants to gape at so I would say that saman is one of the great examples of how music poetry literature conversation at finally and the thing that makes it all possible which is a certain amount of fortitude moral and civic who would exchange that for a text at which you're only allowed to gaze in reverence we were just talking at lunch and I'll and hear about the fortitude that it takes to create and display an archive and confront one's own history and congratulations to emery for that and let's hear that absolutely welcome and the connection between an archive and love I think is a wonderful one to think about and I'm reminded of Paula couey's novel the archivist where one could say that the main characters archival work is motivated by a kind of love of the records and her human love her relationship is in turn inspired by kind of archival mystery of who the author is of a particular poetic text and I love this novel for that very reason and so I want to thank you for making the connection for us between the human archive and moral critique and love that you've done in your work and because today the only subject is love I want to thank you for your friendship to Salman Rushdie whom quite sure could not have emerged into daylight archive intact without his friends thank you oh love you too the preceding program is copyrighted by Emory University

Channel: Emory University

Views: 247,643

Rating: 4.8505917 out of 5

Keywords: Emory Libraries, Emory Library, emory, university, college, symposium, hitchens, christopher hitchens, salman, rushdie, laurie patton, blasphemous, fatwa, fatwah, self, censorship, writing, writer, journalism, free speech, freedom, of, expression, Orwell, Jefferson, author, god, religion, zealot, Dulce et Decorum Est, Wilfred Owen

Id: ABsd5WssVS0

Length: 36min 29sec (2189 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 04 2010