Why I Lust After Conservative Women: A Lost Essay by Christopher Hitchens

The late writer on being spanked by Margaret Thatcher, David Frum on Proust, and MORE.

November 2022

I first met Christopher Hitchens in an overcrowded television greenroom on the night of the 1996 Presidential election. Hitchens had not yet attained the intellectual and literary status he would gain before his sadly premature death from throat cancer in 2011, at the age of only 62. Back then, he was more notorious than famous – notorious for his take-no-prisoners style of debate, as much as for a chain-smoking, hard-drinking way of life quite alien to the sober and punctual culture of Washington, DC.

I was then editing a magazine for a conservative D.C.-based women’s group. The publication’s very name dates it to the pre-Internet era: The Women’s Quarterly. 

Hitchens and I had been invited by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to provide commentary in between news reports on how badly President Bill Clintion was trouncing his Republican challenger, Bob Dole. My role was to provide the female angle. Hitchens would presumably comment on all other angles. 

I was not happy with the pairing. Hitchens’ sharp tongue had skewered many of the people in my social and intellectual circle, which was a lot more ideologically right-wing in those days than it is today. But any tension rapidly faded as it became clear that we shared exactly the same irritating predicament.

Hitchens and I arrived at the studio at the same time. We were greeted by a producer and pointed in the direction of a tiny, windowless green room not nearly big enough for the number of guests the CBC had summoned. The producer told us that we would appear at the top of every hour together for a couple of minutes. In between, we were welcome to refresh ourselves with coffee and soft drinks and to help ourselves to a sad platter of deflated fruit surrounded by rigid cheese cubes.

Checking my watch and seeing that our first spot was a good 55 minutes away, I said, “Well in that case I’m going for a drink.” The seductively low British voice at my side replied, “And I shall join you.”

A few minutes later, I found myself sitting on a bar stool alongside the dreaded Christopher Hitchens. We were in a Mexican restaurant across the street. I braced myself for a torrent of left-wing scolding. But of course that didn’t happen: Before we’d even ordered our first round of drinks, it became clear that the dreaded Christopher Hitchens was charming, erudite, hilarious, and fun. Our conversation rapidly wandered away from politics to British children’s books. We discovered that we both adored the Just William series by Richmal Crompton – and could both recite long passages by heart. 

When show time neared, we raced over to the studio and delivered our sound-bites. Then we returned to the bar to resume our real conversation. So it went deep into the following morning.

During our last spot, Christopher suddenly erupted into a coughing fit. I have no idea what precipitated it, but it was as if he’d just snorted a nose-full of hot chili peppers. As the Toronto-based anchor teed us up, Christopher sputtered and spasmed: “Now, joining us again” - hack hack hack- “the Nation’s Christopher Hitchens and” -  hack hack hack – “Danielle Crittenden, editor of …” hack hack hack. 

The light shone above the camera. I stared dumbly into it, as my fellow talking head seemed about to succumb like some doomed soprano in an opera. Like a pro, the host pretended nothing was happening and addressed all his remaining questions to me: “Danielle, how do you think American women will re-act to the re-election of Bill Clinton?”

We were done. As we left the studio and Hitchens re-composed himself, he managed to gasp, “So, shall we have one more?”

Postscript:

As soon I got home, I told my skeptical husband that he must immediately arrange to meet this amazing man Christopher Hitchens. I know he’s on the left but …!! “Yes, yes,” David said, as he directed my unsteady form to bed. In the sober light of morning, I remained insistent. So David made contact, and thus began a friendship that lasted until Christopher’s death. During that time, David and I grew close to Christopher’s wife Carol and their daughter Antonia, a contemporary of our own first daughter, Miranda. When I asked Christopher to contribute to The Women’s Quarterly, he agreed right away. Perhaps he was moved by the lordly fee I offered, all of $200. My idea was to cross the political divide by asking Hitchens and another friend, David Brooks, to debate, “Who is Sexier: Right or Left-Wing Women?” Brooks argued for the left; Hitchens revealed his attraction to women of the right, especially to the great British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. The essay was published in the Autumn, 1997, edition of The Women’s Quarterly. I reprint it here with permission from Christopher’s estate. I hope it might inspire more political cross-pollination, as it were, in this tense, divided time. ~ Danielle Crittenden

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Illustration by John Springs

I HAVE NEVER been one of those on the left whose chief delight lies in displays of the “unpredictable.” I like my knee to jerk, as I am fond of remarking, because it reassures me that my reflexes are in good order. (A failure to jerk, in other words, might represent a failure of nerve.) Every now and then, a bit of socialist fratricide breaks out and I like to be in the thick of it. But not for me the overstuffed, chat-show chair where a week’s reputation can be wrung from the “paradoxical” avowal that Charles Murray is onto something or that a “Star Wars” defense would deter Hamas or that “root causes” are a cop-out.

I did once, however, reap an enormous mailbag of the “Come off it; you must be kidding; get out of here” sort. This was when, in the New Statesman, I discoursed a bit on what was to me obvious, viz., the sexual magnetism of Margaret Hilda Roberts, the second Mrs. Denis Thatcher, and [later to become] a full-blown Baroness. The year was 1977 or so, and she was still a very provisional Leader of the Opposition. At the New Statesman, which was then the flagship journal of the British left, it was easy to share in the prevalent view, which was that the Tories had made a historic mistake.

By picking that “shrill, narrow, suburban housewife,” they had surrendered the all-important middle ground of politics and set themselves up for a thorough trouncing as “extremists” and “ideologues.” I had other reasons for thinking this opinion to be a mistake one, but this article is not about my foresight. It’s about my political libido.

You couldn’t beat the British Conservative party as a man’s club in those days (or indeed, alas, in these). And most of the senior leadership had not voted, on the first or second round, for the lady who deposed Edward Heath. So she was stuck, for a goodish bit of time, with a load of red-faced paunches who thought she was the spawn of hell. And loyalty being a premium virtue in that party, she had to affect to think of them as wise and experienced colleagues. Yet, at the party conference and in Shadow Cabinet meetings and in Parliament, she regularly reduced those chaps to mush.

It was at the annual conference that, as I stood in the body of the hall, it hit me. The feline smile, the composed but definite body language, the voice at once stern and cajoling…to say nothing of the Valkyrie helmet of blond locks! My god! She has them in her thrall! And she knows it! The minx knows it! It was for writing this that I got into the hot water of what nobody then called political correctness.

Mark the sequel. Not long afterwards, I was at a reception in the Rosebery Room of the House of Lords. She came. (I’ll try and keep this brief.) A mutual Tory friend offered to introduce us. I agreed with some alacrity. The subject of the moment was Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. I held one view on this. She held another. The introduction was effected. Did imagine it, or did she recognize the name of the scribe who had hymned her feminine allure? 

At once we were embroiled in an argument on the subject of racism and decolonization. I was (I only mention it) correct on my facts as well as my principles. She was lousy on both. But what a bonny fighter! She wouldn’t give an inch! I found myself conceding her a trivial point, and bowing as I did so. She smiled. 

“Bow lower,” she said. Suddenly robbed of volition, I complied.

“No – much lower.”

By now near to drowning in complicity and subjection, I obeyed. She withdrew from behind her back a rolled-up copy of the Parliamentary orders of the day, and gave me a sound smack before I could – how does one put this? – straighten up. I regained the perpendicular in some blushful confusion and difficulty, to see her swing away and look over her shoulder, the words “naughty boy” floating over me in my near trance-like state, as the journo witnesses closed in to say, “What was that all about?” I told them they would never understand, and – what do you know – they never did.

Once in office, she calmly and (if you will pardon the expression) dismembered all her male rivals, from Sur Geoffrey How to Nigel Lawson to Sir Ian Gilmour to Jim Prior, as well as a succession of Labour challengers. According to the biography of her loyal press officer, Sir Bernard Ingham, the first signal that someone was finished was the fluted question: “Shall we withdraw our love?” She also, incidentally, took my advice and reversed herself completely on Rhodesia. None of her triumphs astonished me.

The purpose of this somewhat sticky prologue is to introduce the more delicate question, Does the conservative woman possess a special attraction beyond her own wing, or faction? To stay with Thatcher for a moment – and I don’t want you to think I’m obsessed with her, or anything like that – an instant answer was first confected by her opponents. She had charisma and potency, agreed, but it wasn’t feminine. She was really a man. In the words of a gazillion tiresome jokes, she was the only one with balls. How people talked themselves into this I don’t know, but talk themselves into it they did. You can look it up.

Paradoxically – I knew I’d get here sooner or later – this mirrored or borrowed from traditional reactionary propaganda against radical women. Louise Michel, Rosa Luxembourg, and at least two of the Pankhursts, and many others were written off as mannish or thwarted or secretly Sapphist. And sexually “free” or emancipated types like Alexandra Kollontai and Emma Goldman were denounce as sluts. (Thatcher has at least been spared the last two of these imputations.) Rudyard Kipling’s “The Female of the Species,” probably among his top three poems in point of quotability, insinuated the same idea in the maddening form of a heavily sarcastic compliment, but struck close to the mark by suggesting that the latent superiority of women lay in their childbearing role. 

IF THEY CAN’T get you one way, as females down the ages have had cause to reflect, they’ll get you in another. The alternative role model of the “progressive” woman was that of the simpering, prissy type: too squeamish for war or capitalism, and inclined to be schoolmarm-like. (Some crossover, in the latter suggestion, with Sapphism. But only some.) To take a wearisome current example, see how the First Lady [Hillary Clinton] is variously described as a boss bitch and a bleeding heart. I’m coming back to her. Add to this constant suspicion – actually affirmed by some feminists – that men are intellectual and rational while women are emotional and nurturing, and you have the outline of the problem. What is a tough-minded, free-market, heterosexual woman to do, except be tough-minded, free-market, and heterosexual? Is there a style? Ought there even to be a style? If I were a conservative, I’m sure I would say not.

But here I must have done with the throat-clearing and foot-shuffling. The trifles that I composed in honor of Mrs. T. were as nothing, in terms of their outrage-the-comrades effect, to the roar of anger that greeted the avowals that Alexander Cockburn and I made about Jeane Kirkpatrick in the Nation. Never mind for now that I thought then, and think now, of Jeane as a death-squad groupie and a coiner of euphemisms for dictatorship. Never mind, either, that on the matter of the Falklands, she was Thatcher’s most sedulous foe. To watch her on television or in person was to see someone who enjoyed dialectic for its own sake, who strove to define the argument rather than squelch about in a pacifying “middle ground,” who had convictions rather than opinions but who also, and here I take the plunge, could be deliciously aware of her sex. She made Phyllis Schlafly look like a faggot. And she also showed the superiority of the pseudo-intellectual over the anti-intellectual. By this I mean, to phrase it simply, that you just can’t imagine Jeane Kirkpatrick commencing a sentence with the words, “As a woman, I feel …”

The cross-dressing appeal of conservative women for radical men is buried in there somewhere. Thanks to certain ephemeral “movement” ethics, a number of our guys had every chance to get a touch bored with people – of any sex and of none – who started with their identity and continued with their feelings. Don’t tell me who you are – I can see that. And don’t tell me how you feel – tell me how you think. We Marxists go by the content, not of your character, but of your cerebellum. And we don’t mind scar tissue if it’s been honorably incurred. 

That’s why so many of us wish we’d met Jessica Mitford when she was young. Not, I hasten to add, that we weren’t her pliant tools when she was in her seventies. She would tell broad jokes in male company, she quaffed, she smoked, she had faced down cops and bullies, she was screamingly witty, and she had done all her reading and homework. Dressy she wasn’t. But drop-dead elegant. And cross her – no thank you. Her claws would be across your face and back in her lap before you could notice it. The healing would come with the next limerick. Withal, a perfect mother, an ideal sister, an adored wife, and (not her fault) an exemplary widow. There was no feminine part she had not filled to perfection. If she and Ayn Rand had ever met, Nathaniel Branded would have needed Miss Rand’s dental records even sooner than he actually did.

I mention the late and beloved “Decca” because I realize that I’ve given a hostage to fortune. The thrill of cruelty isn’t absolutely indispensable to one’s make-up or vulnerability, whatever you may have read about the education of the English male. When I first met Laura Ingraham, she was brought by Dinesh S’Souza as his luncheon guest – in the White House mess, as it happens, on the only occasions I dined or expect to dine there – and she rather offset his Thomist subtly and discretion by thundering on about her adventures in El Salvador and inquiring boldly about one’s marital status. OK, I remember thinking, I get the point. You can be female and feminine and assertive, and, so to speak, right-wing. (Good grief, how many times does that of all points need hammering home?)

Hillary Clinton began life as a “Goldwater Girl,” distributing those cute little AuH20 stickers around her bourgeois neighborhood in Illinois and generally being the perfect white-toothed, hair-banded little brat of the 1964 GOP rally. I can’t help feeling she’d have been better off staying right there, and would probably have made a happier marriage and met a nicer class of people. Thanks partly to her, though, the whole idea of the political woman has become indissolubly linked to the preach, to the righteous, the health-conscious, and the wholesomely interfering. 

If conservative women want to elicit low, helpless growls from our side or any other, and this is only an suggestion for heaven’s sake, they must cease to wave their babies about, cease to speak about gender gaps, cease to be “inclusive,” and instead flaunt what makes them different – their attachment to ideas. I still have the reading lists that Decca sent me. Which Tory minx, of her prey, will be able to say the same?

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Cartoon by Charles Jaffé

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Speaking of Christopher Hitchens, I once asked him why certain classics my husband was obsessed with had no appeal to me. I’d forced my way through Moby Dick (David’s all-time favorite book), gave up after a chapter or so on Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim (“Maybe the funniest book ever written”), and struggled with Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past after the first volume, Swann’s Way (also a top favorite of David’s, who has powered through the full 1.5 million words multiple times, including in the original French text).

Christopher considered my question for a moment, and then said, “Bit of a chap thing, I suppose.”

Such a characterization would be viewed as sexist now (as it was then) but I didn’t take it that way. It made perfect, intuitive sense. “Try Anthony Powell,” he once recommended, pronouncing Powell as “Pole,” correctly as it turned out. “Although you may find him a bit of a chap thing.”

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the first translated publication of Swann’s Way by C.K. Scott Moncrieff in 1922 (and also the centenary of Proust’s death, at age 51). So in the spirit of chap things, I asked David to chapsplain why he loves Proust so much — and why we should, too. ~DC

DURING THE PEACE negotiations after the First World War, a great diplomat met a great writer at a party.

The writer asked the diplomat to describe what the conference was like.

The diplomat answered with the kind of punditry we see on Sunday morning shows: who was taking what position on what issue.

No, no, said the writer. What is it like? You walk from the street up the stairs; you clasp the door handle into the room — what do you see? What do you hear? What do you smell?

The diplomat started seeing — and he started talking. He talked about the fake smiles on the faces of the diplomats, the feel of the carpets under the feet, the sound of tea being brewed in the next room. Every few minutes, the writer would interrupt him. “No, you are going too fast! Precisez-vous, mon cher monsieur, precisez-vous.”

The writer was Marcel Proust. I read him first at age 18, at regular intervals all my life along, and I will return to him again and again before I leave this earth. As with the diplomat, so also for me, it was Proust who taught how to see, and thus how to think, and thereby how to write.

Because of the vast length of his multi-part novel, and the sinuosity of some of his sentences, Proust has a reputation as a difficult writer. The reputation for difficulty is worsened because some of the most tangled of those sentences are found in the short opening section, The Overture, which is where most readers give up on Proust. If they persist, however, they will encounter one of the most acute observers of humanity who ever lived - and one of the funniest commentators on humanity.

A great comic incident in the novel occurs within the family of the Prince and Princess of Guermantes (not to be confused with their more intelligent cousins, the Duke and Duchess of Guermantes). During the Dreyfus Affair, the Prince gradually becomes convinced of the innocence of the accused Jewish artillery captain. This conviction causes him much trouble, especially because he knows how much it will pain his wife, a devout Catholic and ardent monarchist. Nevertheless, the truth is the truth. Every day, he would send in secret his valet to buy a copy of the pro-Dreyfus newspaper, which he would read alone in his study. Returning from the newsstand one day, the valet accidentally crashes into the Princess’s maid. The maid was carrying a package, which she drops to reveal … that she has been secretly buying the same newspaper for the Princess.

Yet lurking behind and above Proust's many light moments are passages of depth and power as great as anything in literature. The mighty theme of the novel is the power of art and memory to transcend the inevitable changes of time. Those changes are not all for the worse, Proust is no nostalgic. At one point in the novel, the narrator asks a famous artist about a discreditable episode in the artist’s past. The artist neither confirms nor denies the episode. Instead he answers (I’ll abridge the answer a little):

There is no man however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man—so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise—unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded. … We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.

My first edition of Proust was a gift to me from a family friend who had taken his own strange and sad journey through the wilderness. The friend has gone now, but the journey continues. A glorious centenary to the first volume of Proust’s masterwork! 

You can purchase the Modern Library’s version of Swann’s Way, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, here.

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DESPITE A FIERCELY abusive campaign by transactivists against her, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling simply refuses to disappear. Her advocacy on behalf of women and women's rights has never ceased to be anything but courageous and principled.

Her Twitter feed relentlessly documents the atrocities being committed against women around the world, from Iran to Afghanistan. And among the atrocities in our own muggle world, Rowling condemns allowing male predators into women's prisons and shelters simply because they declare themselves to be "trans women." Rowling has also taken stands against doctors performing sex change operations and prescribing "puberty blockers" on teenagers and children, well before they are mature enough to understand the long-term consequences of such interventions.

But above all, Rowling was one of the first and most prominent women to warn against the potential erasure of women's rights, women's organizations, women's health initiatives, women's spaces, and women's safety, when a society ceases to recognize female biological differences.

For taking these stances, and gracefully refusing to be cowed by threats of cancellation and worse, Rowling has found herself targeted even by the cast members who starred in the movie versions of her books, including Daniel Radcliffe, who played Harry.

Recently, however, another cast member — Ralph Fiennes — defended Rowling in an interview with the New York Times. He called the verbal abuse against her “disgusting,” and noted, “J.K. Rowling has written these great books about empowerment, about young children finding themselves as human beings. It’s about how you become a better, stronger, more morally centered human being.”

Fiennes added: “I mean, I can understand a viewpoint that might be angry at what she says about women. But it’s not some obscene, über-right-wing fascist. It’s just a woman saying, ‘I’m a woman and I feel I’m a woman and I want to be able to say that I’m a woman.’ And I understand where she’s coming from. Even though I’m not a woman.”

Fiennes refreshing statements might be surprising from the actor who plays Lord Voldemort, but hey, maybe there’s a good side to everyone.

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We received some fun comments on Danielle’s essay about working as a lowly au pair for a grand Parisian family when she was 18 years old. Among them, former New York Times reporter Nina Bernstein wrote:

This delightful piece brought back memories of the chambre de bonne I lived in one summer on the Avenue de La Grande Armée, while an unpaid intern at L’Express. Still haunted by the communal squat-over-hole toilet at the end of the hall. But no fire escape or ironing!

Danielle replies:

The chambre de bonne is a tiny room atop an apartment building allotted to servants. Mine had a sink, but Nina is absolutely correct in her memory of the squat-over toilet. It was so disgusting that I became adept at using my sink for, um, number one emergencies. For the other I always hoped it could be timed during working hours in the apartment. It’s amusing to me — as I’m sure it would be to Nina — that these little chambres are now being advertised as vacation stays on AirBnB. They seem spruced up from days of old but if you plan to rent one, definitely ask about the toilet situation!

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