Ford now admits she wrongly accused the novelist on that [smoking] count. Instead, she agrees, it was Hitchens who "fugged up the room so densely with your 'one cigarette' that I had to open the window". Hitchens owned up to that in his own contribution, in another letter the Guardian.
But she does hit out at Amis and Hitchens for their failure to give support to her when she was widowed, shortly after the sickbed visit in question in 1988. She told the Guardian yesterday that she had received "not a letter, not a thing" from either of them. "Other people helped, but Martin and Christopher – not at all.....
Still, other parts of the letter have a conciliatory tone. Descending to the vernacular, Ford addresses Hitchens and Amis as "Dear chaps".
Hitchens did not hold back in his contribution to the fray. In his letter he called Ford's criticisms "spiteful and false".
Ford has refrained from retaliating in similar terms. She told the Guardian she did not feel bullied by Amis's and Hitchens' co-ordinated counteroffensive: "I don't mind that, because that's what they do." She even said that she feels "a tiny bit sorry for Martin.
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
”
