Goodbye, Comrade

The festivities continued when we found ourselves in Washington in the ?80s. Christopher came each year for Christmas lunch with his first wife, Eleni, and their two children. Henry Fairlie, the British writer who worked for the New Republic, was also a regular guest. As the beverages flowed, Henry, a generation older, would roll a political hand grenade down the table, aimed at Christopher. The explosive forces then released inevitably found their way into print, in some fashion or another. On one such occasion, when the topic was the Spanish Civil War, Christopher claimed Henry had written this or that unacceptable thing about the Republican side in front of witnesses, prompting my wife, Eleanor Randolph, who is Southern, to admonish Christopher, saying Christmas lunch was "off the record." The Fairlie-Hitchens confrontations, vicious though they were to behold, never lasted long, and at Henry's 60^th birthday, Christopher gave a stunning recitation of limericks that lasted 45 minutes. Eleanor immediately forgave him everything, well, almost everything. Goodbye, comrade, and thanks for those moments.

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=de0a5b22356e5bc60d5caacde9402509

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