Moderation or Death

Letters

Vol. 20 No. 24 · 10 December 1998

From Roger Scruton

Christopher Hitchens, reviewing Michael Ignatieff’s study of Sir Isaiah Berlin (LRB, 26 November), claims that I accused Sir Isaiah of being soft on Communism. This is not true. In the piece to which Hitchens refers (the only article I have ever written about Berlin), I praised Berlin for his hostility to Communism. But I criticised him for being soft on Communists and their fellow-travellers. Like many liberals, Berlin pursued a policy of pas d’ennemi à gauche. The wisdom of this policy, in a man not naturally given to feats of courage, is amply displayed by Hitchens’s review: a collage of mischievous gossip, innuendo and self-righteous contempt, the only ground for which is the support Berlin offered to those who were prepared to defend liberal democracy against revolutionary Communism. Were history called on to judge, would Berlin’s name come higher or lower than that of Hitchens, I wonder, on the list of those who have sided with political crime?

Roger Scruton
Brinkworth, Wiltshire

From Stephen Vizinczey

I’ve taken a lot of flak over the years for criticising The Hedgehog and the Fox, in which Isaiah Berlin treats Tolstoy’s analysis of the way history works as something that had to do with Tolstoy’s psyche. Berlin’s failure to understand War and Peace, allowing himself to be distracted by Tolstoy’s religious mania (which is like rejecting the laws of gravity because Newton believed in alchemy), had everything to do with his faith in the Vietnam War. Though I was sufficiently anti-Communist to fight in the Hungarian Revolution and had an uncle beaten to death by the Communists during forced collectivisation in Hungary, I realised in 1966 that the Vietnam War could not possibly be won and should be abandoned, simply because I happened to reread War and Peace. The most profound wisdom about everything is in the great novelists and playwrights, but when people want to understand the world and the difference between the desirable and the possible they don’t turn to the greatest minds, which are available everywhere in paperback, they turn to supposed experts like Isaiah Berlin, Henry Kissinger and McGeorge Bundy, who with their limited intelligence and imagination and their unlimited vanity have done as much harm to Western civilisation as all its enemies put together.

Stephen Vizinczey
London SW5

Vol. 21 No. 1 · 7 January 1999

From Matthew Price

It seems that Christopher Hitchens (LRB, 26 November 1998), well travelled as he is, does not know the lie of the land when it comes to Brooklyn. He has the 'loony rebbe', Menachem Schneerson, living in Brooklyn Heights. This, by any standards, is a howler. The rebbe resided in Crown Heights.

Matthew Price
Brooklyn

Vol. 21 No. 2 · 21 January 1999

From Francis Wheen

Roger Scruton, a remote and ineffectual don, takes up his quavering, corroded pen (Letters, 10 December 1998): 'Were history called on to judge,' he asks, 'would [Isaiah] Berlin's name come higher or lower than that of [Christopher] Hitchens, I wonder, on the list of those who have sided with political crime?' Can Scruton cite a single political crime with which Hitchens has 'sided'? If not, would he care to apologise for this libel – and, in future, to consign his malodorous ruminations to their proper place in his Wiltshire cesspit?

Francis Wheen
Pleshey, Essex

Vol. 21 No. 4 · 18 February 1999

From Mark Lilly

Francis Wheen challenges Roger Scruton to 'cite a single political crime' with which Christopher Hitchens has sided (Letters, 21 January). Well, 'crime' is rather strong, but Hitchens is a self-confessed homophobe. When I was on the national executive of Liberty, then called NCCL, in the Eighties, I wrote to Hitchens about his homophobic sneerings in the New Statesman. His reply makes it clear that gay oppression is not to be seriously compared to other (then more fashionable) types of injustice. Specifically alluding to my complaint that he used terms of abuse in order to underline his contempt for gay people, he wrote: 'I think that people's sexual preferences are a legitimate subject for humour, dirty humour if at all possible. Obviously, one of the comic things about the Cambridge spy ring is that all or most of its members were/are queer … Faggotry, in my judgment, is as good a metaphor for that little world as any other.' When he appeared on Channel 4's Face the Press in October 1984, Hitchens's homophobic outbursts led Julian Barnes to say that 'you'd certainly need a lot of karma not to reach for your baseball bat' after hearing Hitchens's remarks.

What interests me is left homophobia. It is one manifestation of 'gay exceptionalism', whereby people who are progressive in relation to other social issues, draw a line at homosexuality. Many of the canonical texts of feminism are blemished in this way. Homosexuality 'is spreading like a murky smog over the American scene', according to Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique. The hostility of Channel 4 producers to the gay community is well documented. Quite recently, a review in the Guardian of a collection of academic literary essays I edited appeared under the heading 'Fairy Stories'. Throughout Peter Preston's editorship of that paper, there was no coverage at all of lesbian issues, a ban on equal access for personal ads and a continuation of the paper's traditional support for supernaturalism. Alexander Chancellor is 'not sure', on 19 July 1997, whether equality for gay people is a good idea. As late as 1996, in his review of Kids, Derek Malcolm is dividing Aids sufferers into the 'innocent' (infection by non-sexual means) and 'guilty'. Throughout the Eighties, the Times Educational Supplement refused to cover the subject of homophobic bullying in schools, on the grounds that it was 'not on the agenda', though it is probably the main type of playground humiliation. The Observer carries a column by Richard Ingrams, who came third in a poll some years ago in Gay Times (after Norman Tebbit and Rabbi Jacobovits) as Homophobe of the Year. Had the same level of prejudice been directed against a racial minority, or the disabled, it would have been denounced with vigour and might well have led to criminal proceedings or civil litigation.

Mark Lilly
University of Tunis

Vol. 21 No. 5 · 4 March 1999

From Christopher Hitchens

It's not possible to please everyone, and it can be unwise even to try, but I found on reading Mark Lilly's letter (18 February) that I felt a sort of commitment to cheering him up. Anyone who has so resentfully treasured one of my frivolous notes from the dear dead days of twenty years ago, and who keeps it by him in a gazelle-infested exile at the University of Tunis, is entitled to such consolation as I can afford.

His case against me is one of latent and blatant homophobia, of the sort that if directed at another target might be 'denounced with vigour and might well have led to criminal proceedings or civil litigation'. By happy chance, I can refer him to a recent 'outing', conducted by Alexander Cockburn in the tabloid New York Press of the first week of February: 'Many's the time male friends have had to push Hitchens's mouth, fragrant with martinis, away, as, amid the welcomes and goodbyes, he seeks their cheek or lips.' Some good critics regard this as one of Cockburn's more polished pieces, especially dealing as it does with the absolute and inflexible requirement never to rat on an old pal. I offer it, though, as an example of a badge of supposed shame that one may wear with pride.

I was at first puzzled by Lilly's other faded but faithfully-preserved clipping, wherein he quotes Julian Barnes, then in his TV critic period, from October 1984. Apparently 'Hitchens's homophobic outbursts led Julian Barnes to say that "you'd certainly need a lot of karma not to reach for your baseball bat"' after my appearance on the tiny screen. A quick call to Julian and the fount of memory was unsealed. I had done a chat-show with Norman Mailer, after the incautious publication of his book Tough Guys Don't Dance. And I had ragged him a bit about his literary obsession with the occasions of sodomy, to say nothing of his then-interest in the karmic. 'I was,' recalled Barnes, 'sort of handing the baseball bat to Mailer.' This same notion had in fact occurred to Mailer himself. After the show, he berated me, and inscribed his copy of Tough Guys with an admonition to 'see what I say about you'. Nor had I long to wait. In a lengthy interview with the Face he attributed his bad notices to the fact that the London literary racket was run by a daisy-chain of queens, led by Martin Amis, Ian Hamilton and myself. (Amis and I composed, but did not eventually send, a letter to the Face protesting that this was very unfair to Ian Hamilton.)

Mailer and I have since made it up. So could one leave it like this? I would never persecute or deride Lilly, and he in return should drop his lugubrious demand that gay-teasers should be prosecuted. Also, he might bear in mind our relative advantages. He lives in Tunis. I live in sodding Washington DC. Was it so kind of him to rub this in? Need he have reminded me of the time when I could dash off a mocking letter to the likes of himself, and had not reached the state of decrepitude when only women would even consider going to bed with me?

Christopher Hitchens
Washington DC

Vol. 21 No. 6 · 18 March 1999

From Tony Oujangwe

The issue of journalists' homophobia raised by Mark Lilly (Letters, 18 February) ties in closely with Valentine Cunningham's British Writers of the Thirties (1988). LRB contributors seem to assume that queer-bashing has disappeared from literary criticism: a glance at Cunningham's book will disabuse them. Auden and Isherwood's love affair is 'perverse'; Cunningham does not wish to 'deplore homosexual writing in all its manifestations' but 'one must declare a worry … that the going homosexuality was not just a symptom of the youthies' current immaturity but a factor that helped stabilise that immaturity, helped keep the youthies juvenile.' Homosexuality 'helped entrench some immaturely lopsided views'. The 'youthies' are 'bourgeois buggers'. Auden's marriage to Erika Mann (so that she could leave Nazi Germany with a proper passport) is 'typical of the Old Boys' relish for the practical joke'.

Jeffrey Meyers takes a different tack, claiming, in Homosexuality and Literature, 1890-1930 and elsewhere, that angst-ridden, closeted writers produced works far superior to those of modern 'liberated' gay writers. Thus he says of Thom Gunn's sexually explicit poems that they 'are not nearly as good as his early work, written when he was in the closet'. The Meyers-Cunningham binary is a literary equivalent of the saloon-bar ideas – sometimes held by one person at the same moment – that gay people are inherently secretive and that we flaunt our sexuality.

A second type of homophobia is just to pretend that there aren't any homosexuals, or any gay-specific approaches to literature. Terry Eagleton can write a supposedly comprehensive survey of modern criticism (Literary Theory: An Introduction, 1983) and not mention gay studies at all. Then, when he updates it 13 years later, he can still avoid mentioning it.

Tony Oujangwe
Paris

Vol. 21 No. 7 · 1 April 1999

From Abla Mouhawi

Mark Lilly (Letters, 18 February) refers to the Guardian's 'support for supernaturalism'. More needs to be said here. Institutionalised homophobia is given a spurious respectability by the pronouncements on sexual matters of bishops, rabbis and mullahs. British intellectuals, afraid of being accused of 'religious intolerance', have rarely embraced the robust anti-clericalism of their European counterparts, so that religious leaders are usually treated courteously, however outrageous their pronouncements. After Cardinal Basil Hume had published a document moderating the anathematising stance of British Catholicism towards gays (broadly, loving friendship is now okay, but sex is still taboo), the Guardian's leader argued that the Cardinal could not be expected to embrace equality tout court, because that 'would have been to make a nonsense of centuries of teaching'. This preposterous reasoning was not invoked when the same paper urged the Anglican Church to accept women priests. Any radical reform is going to 'make a nonsense' of the arrangements it replaces.

Abla Mouhawi
Bromley, Kent

Vol. 21 No. 9 · 29 April 1999

From Andrew Conway

The comments of Mark Lilly and Abla Mouhawi on the Guardian's 'support for supernaturalism' (Letters, 18 February and 1 April) conceal a far more complex state of affairs. On religion, as on other issues, the Guardian is sharply divided. It inherits a distinguished Christian Socialist tradition, and still appeals to a sizeable liberal Christian constituency; on the other hand, it has to make its way in an increasingly competitive market, and its coverage of moral and religious issues sits oddly alongside its new emphasis on lifestyle and entertainment.

The dilemma is nicely caught in a recent article by Madeleine Bunting reflecting, in the Church Times of 12 March, on her three-year stint as the Guardian's religious affairs correspondent. 'A churchgoer on the Guardian,' she writes, 'is a rare species. The centre-left media is of a pretty uniform mind when it comes to faith: it's a pile of tosh.' Take the issue for 2 February: Simon Hoggart says that 'all religion is bonkers and irrational.' Steve Bell lampoons Roman Catholic beliefs as 'mumbo-jumbo'. Joan Smith celebrates the fact that more and more married couples, 'freed from the constraints of religion', are discovering the delights of sexual infidelity. As Bunting says, 'what a secular newspaper wants to publish about religion is largely what is ridiculous, freakish, scandalous or unjust.'

Andrew Conway
Durham