Christopher Hitchens in Conversation with Salman Rushdie at the 92nd Street Y

a few years ago to see Headly was one of the old editors at Esquire in the 1960s he said why don't you send Christopher a mission to discover the limits of self-improvement and so over two or three columns Christopher we sent him to professional haberdashers and professional dentists and he had manicures and professional haircuts and he came to the office we were having a little meeting and he said well what's next and I said why I'm just there's one more thing I think you should do and I and I said it involves waxing and he said he said what do you mean waxing I said well I sort of tried to explain to him what it was and I said there's a procedure that I just heard about but I think you should try it and it's called the the back the sack and the crack is where the colors slightly drained from his face as he used to try to contemplate what there's actually mangas I don't have figured it out in a while before but he looked up and he said in for a penny in for a pound and he did it but again so I I have the great honor to introduce two incredible gentlemen Christopher Hitchens and Salman Rushdie as I say men who need no introduction I think one of the things that is very affecting in the book at the beginning is your is your accounts of your parents both the commander's you call him your father who you present as a somewhat you know it's a kind of stoic but not fantastically emotionally articulate person and and your mother who hoped for more and was you know had a kind of gaiety that she perhaps was not satisfied by him and then this tragic yes fate that befell her I don't know whether you want to talk about the the book is to a large extent about my my personality has a divide itself not just in the political and ideological but in every respect and it begins by having Russell radically discrepant parents my father who was 12 years older than my mother had given his entire life to the Royal Navy and been a very disciplined and very Hardy warrior in it and at the end of the war had been rather let go father maybe they downsized and so dumped him on the beach and he never forgot it never got over it and I was brought up guessing a formulation which I've only put into words in this butchers a family of people who were Tories but with nothing to be Tory about their loyalties to the establishment of the crown the Empire and the Admiralty and so on had been set at a very low price and he never quite recovered from this and he was from a very do a Baptist Calvinist background in Portsmouth dockyards I remember when I was young once I lost a rage he liked to have breakfast to learn in the morning he was an early riser mess around in the kitchen in solitude baked eggs I remember he night and strontium and I thought I'm not an early riser at all but I thought nice to go down and have breakfast with the old man one of these days so one morning I put on my jammies sorted down the stairs into the kitchen morning and daddy he looked up at me said bloody hell it'll be family prayers next I thought okay you don't have to tell me twice and I'd like breakfast anyway so while this was happening Yvonne would have been upstairs with her makeup and trying to put on a fashionable look for the day she's very beautiful she was a milliner she wanted to make a success of a dress shop you never managed it alas but and she wanted a life that where we went to the theater and sharp cocktail parties and things of this kind and there was no money for this sort of thing and he bored her so I could tell that this was a very radically oppositional family to be from and well she left him waiting too long as respectful women did in those days especially in the English lower middle class waiting too long waiting til my brother and I were off the scene took up with the man who wasn't boring who was witty and playful and literate it was unfrocked orb and I was a spoiled unfrocked Priestess of the Church of England and a recent convert the toilsome jab rings of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi yes his sail was so raised as to be ballooned by any wind of that came by so but was the for all his outward charmant so and he was a I think the word we would now use would be bipolar he he was manic depressive Wendy suicidal he talked her into a suicide pact in Athens when I was 23 and I had to go to Athens it having been reported as a murder so I went my mother's room in this hotel was it was when I saw the crime scene and there were tanks in the street outside there was a revolution and counter-revolution going on increases the hunter was beginning to fall apart it was firing wildly into the crowd and it's a very melodramatic week for me I hope I could convey some that another almost the really heartbreaking thing in that moment is discovering in the records of the hotel that there had been five attempt by her to telephone you yes she was making he was very confused very keen on me keen enough to keep her Jewishness from me because she didn't want me to suffer she and her mother had from the sort of low-level discrimination you can't have in England you catch it on the edge of a remark as held Abram says in the entire eights of fire so we never had the discussion I'll never know why she did I think she wanted me to pass and to become an English gentleman so you'd be the judge of how well that worked out but that know she had desperately tried to ring me and I was young in London in those days I just started working at the new States and I just moved to the capital I wasn't home that much and I never got the false and we know answering machines or voicemails and those and cell phones in those days so you hear a lot of babble somehow under knew about closure for example in therapy and the healing of the wounds well this all this is meaningless stimulus meaning is for a particular reason I can't get closure now as I'm sure and I never will I know if she'd heard my voice it would it would have steadied her rally to I know it would have done and she didn't so I had some wounds I think should stay fresh yes you don't want them to be healed particularly do you have an opinion it says here of the new Arizona immigration law when I was a green card holder which I was for 25 years almost of my life before I became an American citizen very movingly described in the book available to find bookstores everywhere I was told that it was a federal law that I never left the house without having my green card on me and I never did I always counted it and I say in the book though because which I wrote before I was in it that if I was regularly stopped and asked for it all the time my attitude United States would not be the same though I think it's a perfectly defensible law I was only ever asked before by immigration officers but then I don't look conspicuously Guatemala well we well we see in the paper today that there's an enormous exodus of Hispanic people from Arizona yeah because they feel threatened so clearly somebody feels it was slightly crying before what I do think I said I don't think the toy it's been a federal law for a long long time you if you are not in this country as a citizen you must be able to show that you are here legally mmm and I went through a lot of trouble to as they say work hard and play by the rules and I resent people who don't and I also I'm not completely won over by the idea that a monopoly on our demographic change is held by Mexico and its neighbors I mean every available spot for immigration in a lot of states now has taken up as monopolized by them I would like to see a lot more Bosnians coming to United States lot more people from South Africa lot of people from Ireland and Indonesia it seems to me that there's something not necessarily adorable so well that's too bad what you're gonna get is an angler Hispanic America and you have no say in that so I can perfectly see that there's more than one argument involved all right well to end on a light note what is the one person in history that you would most like to have it says here coffee with and what we could on playing your games substitute the word sex for coffee in world history in world history at any time in any place coffee or sex I don't think Dorothea I don't think Dorothy are ever found out really what it was all about did she she's still doing begging this one so our Thea mmm I think Dorothea really you need to say why yeah because she was also yearning and pining and she found the male sex a disappointment hmm I would like to rescue her was it I saw is it true I read it in the paper an interview with Reuters in which you were asked what was your greatest regret and you said more people should have gone to bed with me if that is true could you specify rich people no it was more I was arguing for quantity not quantity would you're a theorist quality yeah well Christopher will be signing books afterwards that if you want to give him your phone number as it as he says he's dot he's not interested in the quality it's just it's just a pop so anyway Christopher Hitchens thank you very much you

Channel: 92nd Street Y

Views: 163,325

Rating: 4.7856421 out of 5

Keywords: Christopher Hitchens, Salman Rushdie, 92Y, Hitch 22, Graydon Carter

Id: vmP7QHhhBoc

Length: 11min 6sec (666 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 10 2010