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In this excerpt from Hitch 22: A Memoir, Hitchens recalls that first meeting with Amis. Cue violins.

Lovers often invest their first meetings with retrospective significance, as if to try to conjure the elements of the numinous out of the stubborn witness of the everyday. I can remember it all very well: Ackroyd doing his best to be a good host (it’s a fearsome responsibility to promise two acquaintances that they will be sure to get along well with each other) and Martin rather languid and understated. He did not, for example, even pretend to remember when I said we had met before with our other mutual friend, James Fenton. (It is characteristic of Martin to have pointed out that Dickens’s title Our Mutual Friend contains, or is, a solecism. One can have common friends but not mutual ones.) A verse letter to Martin from Australian poet Clive James, published in Encounter at about this period, described his “stubby, Jaggerish appearance,” and I remember this because of how very exact it seemed. He was more blond than Jagger and indeed rather shorter, but his sensuous lower lip was a crucial feature, and there was no doubt that you would always know when he had come into the room.

His office performed, Ackroyd withdrew, and the remaining pair of us later played some desultory pinball in another bar. He asked me which novelists I enjoyed, and I first mentioned Graham Greene: this answer palpably did not excite him with its adventurousness. In answer to my reciprocal question he said he thought that one had to look for something between the twin peaks of Dickens and Nabokov, and it came back to me that Fenton had said to me how almost frighteningly “assured” all Martin’s literary essays were turning out to be. I don’t recollect how the evening ended.

Read Martin, Maggie, and Me in Vanity Fair.