February
- March, 1999 I HAVE a huge backlog of
paperwork to deal with before I can leave London,
in a few hours' time. I work all night. Jessica shows up sleepily
around 7:15 a.m., expressing bafflement that I have
got up so early. Her Mama explains that I am
leaving for America in a few minutes' time. "Is it
Thursday, then?" asks Jessica. It is, and already
she is spelling out her list of desiderata, most of
which involve Barbies. Benté asks my phone
number in Key West; I say don't know it yet, and
I'll let her have the number as soon as I get in;
but she is to give it to nobody else -- security, I
add, at which paranoia she scoffs out loud. I
explain that I want to be unrecognised, and write
in peace. I stay awake until the Virgin-Atlantic 747 is
aloft, then drop off into several long and
unsatisfying sleeps; my head snaps forward, I slump
into the seat, I miss the meals, I wake, I read a
book -- I have started Hannah Arendt's
Eichmann in Jerusalem
-- then fall asleep again. I work for
three hours on the Website until the computer's
battery gives out. Once or twice I go to the rear
and look down through almost solid banks of white
snow clouds onto the southern tip of Greenland,
then Gander as we fly high overhead. Land at Miami at 3:15 p.m. How gorgeous the
hot-wet-flannel that hits you in the face as you
step out of the plane. Hertz refuses to rent a car
to me, so in the sweltering heat I walk round to
the Avis lot and rent a car there, five dollars
cheaper in fact. A car which in England would be
nearly luxury in size, rents here for $26 a day. I
finally set out down the turnpike at 5:30 p.m.; I
call at Office Max to stock up with paper and
envelopes: a packet of 500 regular white envelopes
costs $3.39. A loss-leader? The stationery
equivalent of the girl in fishnet stockings at the
door of the near-beer joint? How cheaply the
Americans live. They surely don't realise how
fortunate they are. I head off southward down US.1
to a month of total anonymity. IT IS still light at seven p.m.; in England it
is dark at four. I arrive at the Rusty Anchor at
9:10 p.m., and have a quick bite of fish and chips.
Smiles all round. Here everybody knows me, but
nobody knows my name. Then on to Old Town Key West;
from a lock-box outside the long-closed estate
agent, I pick up the keys of the tiny cottage I
have rented for the month -- it is smaller than the
brick slave-quarters I saw years ago at the
plantation outside Charleston, South Carolina,
where they filmed Gone with
the Wind (Goebbels' favourite Hollywood
movie). Aaargh: none of the keys fits the
door. Thwarted, and numbed by exhaustion, I settle
down in the car's front seat instead, and fall fast
asleep. FRIDAY: Awake at 7 a.m. The car's
interior windows are steamed up. I drive to the
Croissant Shop for a snack. How nice to be just one
of the town's thousands of nameless visitors. A
comforting, velvety famelessness. At eight a.m.,
Roger at the estate agency sheepishly admits that
he mixed up the keys. I carry the heavy trunks of
equipment into the cottage, and start setting up my
office to write. I phone Benté; she says
that the bank reports no money has yet arrived from
the investors, and Cattlin is going off at midday
today and at midday on Monday. He will cover the
gap up to 2 or 3,000 he says. This could get very
awkward indeed. I RESCUE my bicycle from under the tree where I
chained it in August; it is beginning to rust, and
I take it to a bike shop for minor repairs. At the
printers' shop I arrange to print the next Focal
Point publications. Several times I stop at the
barbers', anxious to get my regular $8 haircut.
Each time the sign on his locked door has advanced
an hour: back at 2:30 becomes back at 3:30 and so
on. At five p.m. he is at last in. "How much?" he
asks, and I say, "All of it, right down to the
bone. I don't want anybody recognising me down
here." I go on-line. There are 42 e-mails to deal with.
At 8 pm. at last I cycle over to El Siboney Cuban
Restaurant for a snack. I have never been to this
one before. As I pay my bill, the middle-aged waitress, with
whom I have chatted in flawless accent-free Spanish
all evening, or so I thought, sidles up to me:
"Excuse me señor, but aren't you an English
writer? Is your name Irving?" I assume that
somebody is putting me on, but no. She continues,
"I was in Spain some years ago, and I read a book
with your picture in the cover. La Guerra de
Hitler," she confirms. I escape as fast as I
decently can. Later, I return -- I have left my
gafas on the table -- and slip a two-dollar
propina into her hand. The game is up: she
knows my name, and I can't have people putting it
around that David Irving, this gringo with the
crew-cut, doesn't know how to tip handsomely. 
AM PERPLEXED by the latest
news
stories concerning my
friend Christopher Hitchens, and even
more so by the inexorable way that they have
dragged my name in, just as in the bombing of the
Alfred P Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City.
Hitchens has made himself unpopular with, ahem,
certain circles in New York City and Washington, by
revealing that his erstwhile friend Sydney
Blumenthal perjured himself in testimony to the
Kenneth Starr investigation. That is a serious
charge, and the only thing which will save B.'s
butt is if Hitchens can first be smeared into
oblivion.
No easy task, because he is a highly capable
writer, with a record of writing fine columns for
Vanity Fair and other newspapers including the
Evening
Standard in London. He is also a brave and
independent minded man: like myself, Hitchens
cannot be bought and cannot be bought off. When I met him in Washington DC -- he attended a
little dinner at the Cosmos Club two years ago, at
which I spoke on Real History -- he struck me as
having a sharp brain, in danger of becoming
befuddled by alcohol, tho' not for many years to
come. I learned that he and Steve Wasserman
(now literary editor of the Los Angeles Times) had
between them persuaded The Random House to display
an immediate interest in taking over my biography
Goebbels.
Mastermind of the Third Reich, after it was
stabbed in the back by the craven directors of St
Martin's Press at the orders of the Anti-Defamation
League (who had never even seen the book). Hitchens published an angry piece about the
scandal in Vanity
Fair in June 1996. (He also lauded my book
Nuremberg,
the Last Battle for The Literary Review). For a
month, Wasserman pushed the Goebbels book at The
Random House, overcoming obstacle after obstacle,
until he was "outed" by the New York Post and had
to abandon the task. Over lunch in New York, he
spoke to me in glowing terms of the fight that had
also been put up by Edward Jay Epstein --
who now turns out to be Christopher Hitchens'
nemesis. Epstein had kept a diary about a dinner
party in 1995 at which Hitchens expressed
well-informed scepticism about aspects of the
Holocaust. It just goes to show, you can't be too careful
about what friends you pick, and what you say in
their presence. As for Hitchens's views on the
Holocaust: he struck me as being level headed,
sceptical, curious to learn more, and open minded.
In short, just what a journalist in the free world
should be. I have put this on my Website this
morning, I thought you would be amused...
HAVE JUST received an e-mail
from a Mr Harry Abrams, somewhere on the
Pacific coast to judge by his address. I should be quite proud, because it is the first
piece of offensive mail I have received in the
fourteen months that I have been on-line: I have
received ten or twenty thousand messages since I
set up, and this is the first piece of hate-mail.
He writes: "You are a jerk, a conniver, a blackguard and an
evil fool. You will lose all in court." Out of the blue -- and possibly quite true.
Those are the words that this total stranger, Mr
Abrams, commends to me. I confess that I am at a
loss. I reply courteously, "I am afraid you have
the advantage of me, as I don't think I know you?
Perhaps you have mixed up your addresses?" I use simple words, because Mr Abrams appears to
have little command of the English language: jerk,
conniver, blackguard, evil fool? What would have
been wrong with: poltroon, snake-tongue of a
thousand forks, heap of mummified horse manure? Never mind: By his choice of language he has
greatly hurt my feelings, and as the day wears on I
wonder if there is some way that I can turn these
hurt feelings into money. Around two thousand Canadian dollars should
suffice to soothe me and restore my soiled
reputation in the eyes of my community. After all,
we now know
that Britain's M.I.5 and Scotland Yard, not to
mention the Community Security Trust of the
Board of Deputies
of British Jews, are all monitoring the e-mails of
violent and extreme right-wingers like myself, and
Mr Abrams has clearly defamed me in the eyes of
these monitors at least. Is there some kind of Commission I can turn to
for relief? The problem is that here in England,
all of these commissions have their hands full
investigating wrongs done to people of a different
skin colour than mine, a factor which appears far
more important to them than it is to me. So the mystery persists. Who is my Pacific Coast
well-wisher? He clearly has tenderer feelings
toward the defamatory
Professor Deborah Lipstadt than toward me. Perhaps she should contact him, and I offer her,
through this diary, his Internet address (I am
afraid he did not vouchsafe to me his postal
address). It is: [email protected]
Harry Abrams of Victoria,
BC, runs an advertising agency in elevators
(telephone 604 386-6246) and has a webpage at
http://www.pacificcoast.net/~j3765/
• Article
by Abrams defending his viewpoint.
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