Hitch

Amis, McEwan and Rushdie Properly Celebrate the Not-So-Proper Modern British Novel

On Monday, as corks were still popping across London in celebration of the new royal baby, a sellout crowd gathered at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan for a different celebration of Englishness. 

The occasion was a rare joint appearance by Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie, the literary equivalent of a concert by the Three Tenors — or perhaps a friendlier version of the Yalta conference, with three longtime allies jostling to carve up whatever territory might still be controlled by big-dude British literary novelists of a certain age.

...Those things, on Monday, included wry and often unprintable reminiscences about 1970s London literary life and the trio’s late and still-lamented friend Christopher Hitchens.

“I feel there should almost be an empty chair here,” Mr. Rushdie said, before going on to recall Mr. Hitchens’s fondness for word-substitution games. One of the more family-friendly ones: substitute “hysterical sex” for “love” in famous titles, as in “Hysterical Sex in the Time of Cholera.” 

...Another person asked about the legacy of Mr. Hitchens, who died of cancer in 2011. 

Mr. McEwan recalled helping Mr. Hitchens out of bed in his last days to finish a 3,000-word essay about G. K. Chesterton, with facts and quotations pulled largely from memory. 

The world will “never get that same combination of life and genes again,” Mr. McEwan said.