On Hitch...

RUSHDIE: Well, he went on working up until almost the last minute. I remember when Hitch-22 was published [in May 2010]. He had an event at the 92nd Street Y, and they asked me to be the moderator. He was at his most brilliantly Hitch-like, entertaining this packed room. Afterwards, we had dinner at a little restaurant across the street. It turned out that earlier that morning he had been given the news of the extent of the cancer, and had essentially been given a death sentence. I thought, “What an extraordinary thing to be able to do, to receive that information and then come out in front of 1,000 people and perform.” It spoke to his willpower and maybe his willingness to believe that he would beat it in the end.

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RUSHDIE: If Christopher were still around, what would he make of the world today? There’s this double crisis we’re in at the moment; on the one hand this pandemic, on the other hand this very urgent reexamination of race relations in the country, and all of that happening underneath the umbrella of Trump. You and I both signed this Harper’s letter [“A Letter on Justice and Open Debate” calling for an end to cancel culture, published July 7, 2020]. Somebody asked me the other day, “If Christopher were around, do you think he would have been canceled because of all his outrageous remarks?”

AMIS: Like his essay, “Why Women Aren’t Funny.” Wrong!

RUSHDIE: Wrong, yes, wrong! But one of the things one should be allowed to be is wrong.

AMIS: Contrarian was almost Christopher’s middle name. And he did show his contrarian spirit on quite important things like the Iraq War and the voting for Bush/Cheney in 2004. I don’t know for sure how he would have reacted to Trump in 2016.

RUSHDIE: Well, he would have had a problem because he hated the Clintons so much that for him to support Hillary might have actually been impossible.

AMIS: That’s a good point. I reread just the other day his last attack on Hillary Clinton. He zeroes in on the fact that she lied about her name. She said, “I was named after Sir Edmund Hillary.” And Christopher gleefully points out that Sir Edmund hadn’t yet climbed Mount Everest by the time Hillary Clinton was born and this lie alone should have disqualified her.

RUSHDIE: We have somebody who’s a more outrageous liar in charge of things right now.

AMIS: Remember how indignantly he pointed out that Reagan told a lie every day? Trump tells one every 10 minutes.

RUSHDIE: Now it’s 100 lies a day.

AMIS: But Trump is the nemesis of all sorts of ways of thinking. He’s anti-expertise, anti-allegiance, and

RUSHDIE: Anti-journalism. And that’s who Christopher was, apart from anything else. He was a journalist.

AMIS: You know, I always thought Trump was a one-term president if that—with or without COVID. Americans have a certain appetite for crassness and chaos, but that appetite is soon sated. And he’s clearly unreformable. Lying his head off, as a strategy, clearly wasn’t going to work as a response to a pandemic, but he tried it anyway.

RUSHDIE: No, his only method is to double down.

AMIS: To never change his thoughts.

RUSHDIE: There’s that line in [George Bernard Shaw’s] Arms and the Man where the soldier says, “Never explain, never apologize.” That seems to be his motto.

- Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie on Cancel Culture and The Hitch