The Last Days of Roger Federer by Geoff Dyer

Author:Geoff Dyer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

44.

I couldn’t finish Hitchens’s memoir Hitch-22 (the writing was bulging-over-the-waistband flabby, falling way below the exacting standards by which Amis judges anyone else’s prose), enjoyed his essays (with reservations),* and admire unreservedly the columns filed during his final illness (and collected in Mortality). I never met him but saw him speak, always impressively, on several occasions. Two things struck me about the late surge in his reputation, before the final super-surge of ‘the year of living dyingly.’ First, public-school confidence and voice, combined with the ability to lob in quotations from Macaulay, go an awful long way to persuade Americans that they’re in touch with some lost essence of England. Certainly it goes a lot further than a reciprocal arrangement—private school and quotations from Emerson—might grant an American in England. Second, Hitchens became quite famous for supporting the invasion of Iraq (not so clever) and still more infamous for being—wait for it—an atheist. How to react to this radical stance except with the single word of astonishment that the young Martin greeted the scene when Paul Theroux, in one of his books, has sex on a train? ‘Cor!’ Coming out, as it were, with God Is Not Great in AD 2007 was hardly the leap into the intellectual or ethical unknown that proclaiming the death of God had been for the madman in Nietzsche’s fable or that the life of ‘Shelley the atheist’ had been earlier in the nineteenth century. My dad, who never read a book in his life, was a vehement hater of Christianity for broadly the same reason that he was anti-royalist, or anti anything else for that matter: i.e., financial. For him the most powerfully symbolic moment in any church service was not the blood of my blood nonsense (my knowledge of what goes on in these places is a little vague) but the taking of the collection. On the few occasions we were obliged to be in a church he not only refused to contribute a face-saving penny; he didn’t even try to make it look as if he had. I asked him how it had taken hold, this trenchant opposition to the church, and he explained that when he was in the army he became friendly with a chap who was ‘anti-Christ.’ Let it be entered in the record then: Hitch and Mart have fun doing their priest-baiting, but my dad met the anti-Christ.

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