Times Literary Supplement  -  Geoffreey Wheatcroft

When Christopher Hitchens died in December 2011 it was literally front-page news, in the New York Times, and in the Guardian which, with a kind of media solipsism, devoted scores of column inches to him over many pages. Three days after the death of this journalist and pamphleteer, as Hitchens liked to call himself, that paper found considerably less space to mark the death of Václav Havel, a man who had changed the course of European history.

Dismaying as Hitchens’s death was, it wasn’t unexpected. In June 2010 he was beginning a publicity tour for his memoir Hitch-22 when he suddenly collapsed, and was found to be suffering from esophageal cancer. Despite the most advanced treatment, it proved incurable. Hitchens made his death a defiant public performance, drily reminding us that his cancer was now “inoperable, metastasized stage four – there is no stage five”, and adding that, to the victim’s inevitable question, “Why me?” “the cosmos shrugs and answers, ‘Why not?’” He was sixty-two.

Born to a dyspeptic, reactionary naval officer and a mother whose Jewish origins Hitchens only discovered after her tragic suicide, he was educated at a modest public school and Oxford University, where he delightedly embarked on a double life – radical agitation by day, sybaritic lotus-eating by night – which set the tone for the years to come. After Oxford he became a journalist, and few professional trajectories could be so simply summarized by a handful of names, the succession of journals he worked for: International Socialist, the Times Higher Education Supplement, New Statesman and then, when “the strong gravitational pull of the great American planet”, which he identified “with breadth of mind, with liberty, with opportunity”, drew him to New York, the Nation and Vanity Fair.

There was certainly opportunity for him. Within ten years of his arrival in America he had achieved a quite remarkable celebrity, as a polemicist, critic, television debater and (for want of any less irritating phrase) public intellectual, renowned for a verbal felicity and sophisticated brutality quite lacking in an American media oppressed by what the journalist Michael Kinsley has called its “suffocating gentility”.

By the time Hitchens’s atheistical polemic God Is Not Great was published in 2007, and then Hitch-22 three years later, his star was so high that both books would enter the New York Times bestseller list at Number One. Some of this story has been told here before, in a review of that memoir by Sudhir Hazareesingh (August 20, 2010) and by Michael Dirda, only days after Hitchens’s death, writing about Arguably (December 23 & 30, 2011), “an oversized, magnificent and sometimes exasperating” collection of reviews and essays by Hitchens, who had already published four previous collections. And Yet . . . is a tailpiece, another collection which shows him as ever – pugnacious, clever, fearless, bookish but brattish at once, always ready to tweak any nose or to strike any attitude, always wonderfully readable.

And yet . . . that short phrase seems almost more apposite than the publisher can have intended. To say that Hitchens divided opinion would be putting it mildly. He still does. In his later phase as an advocate of the Iraq war and a supporter of George W. Bush he incurred the obloquy, or sheer hatred, of a Left which had once cheered him, and led to a number of ruptured friendships, with Alexander Cockburn, Edward Said and Gore Vidal, who can be seen looking with disdain at his former “dauphin”, as Vidal had once ridiculously called Hitchens, in Nicholas Wrathall’s documentary Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia (2013).

Apart from the inevitable excruciating tribute to Hitchens from Tony Blair (“a complete one-off . . . an extraordinary, compelling, and colorful human being whom it was a privilege to know”), the Guardian issue marking his death included a loving threnody by Ian McEwan. But the paper also ran pieces by Simon Hoggart and Simon Jenkins, which began respectively, “To come to the point, Christopher Hitchens could be a monster”, and “Christopher Hitchens was a pain in the neck”. There is even an amusing, if unintentional and disguised, illustration of how he could arouse mixed feelings in the same person, on the front of the paperback of Hitch-22. Along with a couple of puffs from acolytes, we read Lynn Barber of the Sunday Times: “his wit, style and erudition are brilliantly deployed . . . sparkles with funny stories”, but we don’t see the next sentence of that review: “Why then did I find myself reading it with increasing distrust and eventually, I have to say, distaste?”

To come to my own point, my feelings about Hitchens were also a mixture, of admiration, affection, frustration and vexation, although that last had become something stronger by the time of his final incarnation as a tub-thumping neocon. I knew him for the best part of forty years, not as an intimate but as someone of whom I was incurably fond and whose company I always enjoyed. And of course I relished what he wrote, although my envy at his fluency and verve was checked by an apprehension that he was sometimes writing with an apparent command of the subject he didn’t actually possess.

More than once it was said that Hitchens wrote faster than most people read. The difficulty was when he began to write faster than he could think, although he could certainly think fast, or speak as if he did. “In debate”, said his friend Martin Amis, “I would back him against Cicero, against Demosthenes.” Never having debated with either, I can’t very easily compare, but he was formidable, perhaps deceptively so. Hitchens’s quicksilver tongue and courteously persistent manner could sometimes conceal a very flimsy case, as for example in his relentless insistence that the invasion of Iraq was legally justifiable. Hitchens wasn’t a lawyer, and his view was not shared by, inter alios, the late Lord Bingham, the former senior law lord, who was acclaimed at the time of his death as the greatest English judge of his generation. Tom Bingham marked his retirement by giving the Grotius lecture at Lincoln’s Inn, in which, with deep learning and forensic ferocity, he demolished any case for the legality of the war.

If international law wasn’t Hitchens’s strong suit, this book is a reminder that he was at his very best as a literary critic, splendid on Lermontov or Chesterton, Dickens or V. S. Naipaul. He brings out the levels of irony in A Hero of Our Time, the hero’s suicidal courage and cruelty, and the story’s erotic undertones. Then again, until rereading this piece, first published two years after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, I had forgotten the painful unconsciousness with which Hitchens could write: “The glorious Russian war to civilize the Muslim tribes is a squalid and brutal business on both sides”. Yes, indeed, like so many such wars!

Then again, Hitchens admires Chesterton, rightly so in many ways, but surely too much for what, quoting T. S. Eliot, he calls his “first-rate balladry”. Hitchens even praises “Lepanto” – “St Michael’s on his Mountain in the sea-roads of the north / (Don John of Austria is girt and going forth)” – which is GKC at his bombastic worst, in the long and deplorable line of bellicose English versifiers who had never heard the proverbial shot fired in anger. Although, come to think of it, that poem, celebrating a Christian victory over the Turks (at a time when “Turk” in, for example, the Prayer Book, meant a Muslim), might have had a new resonance in an age when Bush and Blair led their own crusade. And there is more unconscious irony in Hitchens’s phrase about Chesterton’s “half-developed insights” with their unintended effect of “straining and breaking the branch on which he leaned for effect”, something that may be detected often enough in Hitchens himself.

Behind his own paradox-mongering and phrase-making is the certainty that whenever Hitchens discussed or merely alluded to a book, you could be sure he had actually read it with close attention. He was marvelous on what George Orwell, after Chesterton, called “good bad books”, far from great literature but nevertheless readable and memorable. His very funny piece “Ian Fleming: Bottoms up” suggests that Hitchens had given all too much attention to the James Bond books in order to analyze Fleming’s interest in posteriors, in a learned display of schoolboy dirty-mindedness. He notes that Fleming expended much more energy describing flagellation than sex, and points out that the author had an early mentor whose name was Phyllis Bottome and a mistress called Monique Panchaud de Bottomes: “This might be coincidence (it could hardly be conspiracy)”.

Reading these various pieces, one begins to see an answer to the central question surrounding Hitchens: if he was so good, why was he so bad?; or at least, if he was so right, why was he so wrong? Another word too often used about him was “erudite”, but that really isn’t so. He was very well read, which is a different thing, but not deeply learned; he was a brilliant critic, but he was no historian. To the extent that he paid much attention to academic studies at Balliol, he read PPE; had he read History there he would have been taught by Maurice Keen and Richard Cobb, two great historians and teachers who might have provided some of the wider knowledge that he lacked.

All of this can be illustrated by a fine essay reprinted here on Paul Scott – fine, that is, when Hitchens sticks to the Raj Quartet as fiction. Having offered some extremely persuasive literary criticism, Hitchens then invokes Scott, or rather one of his cast, by way of political-historical argument: “The creation of Pakistan is our crowning failure”, says Lady Ethel Manners. “The only justification for two hundred years of power was unification.” This is cited by Hitchens as though the musings of a fictional character were a clinching point in an acutely controversial historical question. He likes Lady Ethel’s line because it fits one of his own pet themes, or idées fixes: retreating imperial powers partitioned the countries they were leaving out of malice aforethought. The first examples usually adduced are Ireland and India (Palestine is another case, but more problematic). Whatever the examples, the thesis is completely groundless. Apart from the fact that the one thing Ireland (the island) and India (the old Raj) had in common was that they had never been political entities except under English or British rule, contemporary documentary evidence demonstrates unambiguously that the British governments of the day did not want to partition either.

There are other hints of the path Hitchens would take. In one short, sharp jab at Hillary Clinton, he reminds us of her inability to tell the plain truth when there is any alternative, as exampled by her demonstrably false claim that “I remember landing under sniper fire” at Tuzla in 1996. But he then compares this with his own experience of flying into Sarajevo in 1992 and, almost yearningly, recalls running to the terminal as “a mortar shell fell as near to me as I ever want any mortar shell to fall”. This almost sounds as though Hitchens were a war correspondent, which he never was. Maybe nearer the mark is York Harding, the character in The Quiet American described by the excellent Andrew J. Bacevich as “a sort of proto-Thomas Friedman who parachutes into various trouble spots and then in best-selling books serves up glib recipes for advancing the cause of liberty”. Or a proto-Hitchens?

Sad to say, Hitchens suffered acutely from that nostalgie de la guerre which afflicted so many of our generation born in the years after 1945, who’d heard all about fighting and dying, but had never experienced it. He once wrote very perceptively about Brideshead Revisited, and the memory of the First World War which overshadows Evelyn Waugh’s novel. War overshadowed Hitchens himself, the son of a man who had taken part in the sinking of the Scharnhorst in December 1943: “a more solid day’s work than any I have ever done”, as Hitchens revealingly said. Some delayed response may explain the way in which he became one of those cooing Vietnam doves of the 1960s who turned into such squawking hawks in the 1990s and beyond.

In his sabre-rattling speech on Syria in the House of Commons in December 2015, Hilary Benn followed in Hitchens’s footsteps by invoking the International Brigades (apparently forgetting that they were volunteers, like ISIS), a sentimental invocation which is an unfailing danger signal. As Hitchens’s friend Ian Buruma said, he was “always looking for the defining moment – as it were, our Spanish Civil War, where you put yourself on the right side, and stand up to the enemy”. Or as Carol Blue, Hitchens’s wife, still more shrewdly observed, he was one of “those men who were never really in battle and wished they had been”.

At last Hitchens did find himself in a battle, even if “fighting cancer” was the kind of phrase he scorned, and his sardonic courage in that final year was more than usually admirable. With the American Presidential primaries once again in full swing, I smile and salute his memory reading “The Case Against Hillary Clinton”, reprinted in And Yet . . .: “Indifferent to truth, willing to use police-state tactics and vulgar libels against inconvenient witnesses, hopeless on health care, and flippant and fast and loose with national security: the case against Hillary Clinton for president is open-and-shut”. Yes, that’s the true voice of Christopher Hitchens – and how we could use it still.

On Christopher Hitchens . . .

He saw death lurking tediously in the hallway

On Christopher Hitchens . . .

Mourning Christopher Hitchens

National Post  -  David Frum

British-born journalist and atheist intellectual Christopher Hitchens, who made the United States his home and backed the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, died on Thursday at the age of 62.

Hitchens died in Houston of pneumonia, a complication of cancer of the esophagus, Vanity Fair magazine said.

“Christopher Hitchens – the incomparable critic, masterful rhetorician, fiery wit, and fearless bon vivant – died today at the age of 62,” Vanity Fair said.

A friend of theirs once took Christopher Hitchens and his wife Carol Blue to dinner at Palm Beach’s Everglades Club, notorious for its exclusion of Jews.

“You will behave, won’t you?” Carol anxiously asked Christopher on the way into the club. No dice. When the headwaiter approached, Christopher demanded: “Do you have a kosher menu?”

Christopher was never a man to back away from a confrontation on behalf of what he considered basic decency. Yet it would be wrong to remember only the confrontational side. Christopher was also a man of exquisite sensitivity and courtesy, dispensed without regard to age or station.

On one of the last occasions I saw him, my wife and I came to drop some food–lamb tagine – to sustain a family with more on its mind than cooking. Christopher, though weary and sick, insisted on painfully lifting himself from his chair to perform the rites of hospitality. He might have cancer, but we were still guests – and as guests, we must have champagne.

I once had the honor of sharing a debating platform with Christopher, on the same side thank God. It was like going into battle alongside the U.S. Marine Corps. The audience was overwhelmingly hostile. The longer Christopher talked, the more subdued they became.

As the event broke up, a crowd of questioners formed around him. I created a diversion thinking it would help him escape for some needed rest. But Christopher declined the offer. He stood with them, as tired as I was, but ready to adjourn to a nearby bar and converse with total strangers till the bars closed.

Hitchens was not one of those romantics who fetishized “dialogue.” Far from suffering fools gladly, he delighted in making fools suffer. When he heard that another friend, a professor, had a habit of seducing female students in his writing seminars, he shook his head pityingly. “It’s not worth it. Afterward, you have to read their short stories.”

He delighted in writing himself, of course, and in all that surrounded writing. I had the dazzling experience one night of listening to Christopher and Salman Rushdie replay a favorite game, wrecking book titles by changing a single word.

I wish I could remember them all, not only because they were so funny, but because I still wince at the scolding Christopher gave me when he overheard me relating the anecdote from memory and mangling his alternative to “The Great Gatsby” as “The Good Gatsby” rather than “The Big Gatsby.”

He especially liked gallows humor. When the nurses asked him, in that insinuatingly cheerful way they have, how he was feeling, he’d answer, “I seem to have a little touch of cancer.” If he was late to emerge from his living room to see you because of the exhaustion and nausea of chemotherapy, he’d excuse himself with, “I’m sorry to keep you waiting. I was brushing my hair”– of which of course there were only a few wisps left.

I never expected to become friends with him.

It was my wife Danielle who sparked the relationship. She and Christopher were booked as guest commentators on the same TV network – CBC I think – on election night 1996, shortly after we’d moved to Washington. The format had them talking for 10 minutes at the top of every hour, then adjourning for 50 minutes of newscast.

At the end of the first 10 minutes, my wife decided she did not want to spend most of the rest of the evening in the nasty green room provided. “I’m getting a drink,” Danielle announced. Christopher never had to hear that invitation twice, certainly not from a very beautiful woman. Over the next four hours, they moved back and forth between the studio and a nearby bar, talking for 10 minutes per hour and drinking for 50. When Danielle lurched home that evening, she raved about this brilliant and charming writer I had to, had to meet.

I vetoed the idea. I knew Christopher’s writing and had encountered him a few times in the 1980s. He was an impressive person, no question about that, but I objected to his ad hominem attacks on people I greatly admired. Then a few weeks later, I had my own face-to-face encounter with him. We were guests together on C-Span’s morning program, which convened at 7 AM. He rolled in looking absolutely like hell. Of the dead, nothing should be said but good, but … wow. Christopher’s eyes were bloodshot, his clothes were crumpled, his face was ghastly. And then he started to talk. And then he made me laugh and laugh and laugh.

The show ended at 8 AM. Even for Christopher, that was not drinking time. We adjourned to the nearby Phoenix Park hotel for a coffee, and two more hours of talk. When I did finally get home I had to admit to my wife, “OK, you were right.”

Danielle mobilized Christopher to write for a magazine she then edited, the Women’s Quarterly. For the very uncharacteristic fee of $200, he and David Brooks divided a page to settle the question, who were sexier: left-wing women or right-wing women? Christopher championed right-wing women, and told the story of the erotic thrill he had experienced when Margaret Thatcher had slapped him on the bottom with a rolled-up newspaper.

For such a pugilistic intellect, Christopher Hitchens could be surprisingly sensitive and deferential. I well remember my anxiety before the first time he joined a party with my in-laws. My father-in-law is perhaps the only person I know who has visited even more countries than Christopher, but politically … uh oh. Peter Worthington is not one to mince his words about anything, least of all his view that British colonialism did the people on the receiving end much more good than harm. But when Christopher heard that Peter had been with Hitchens’ beloved Indian Army on the eve of the 1962 Himalayan war with China, politics flew out the window, as the great journalist in him extracted every anecdotal detail.

Not every evening went so well. In the aftershock of 9/11 and Hitchens’ great political rotation, I made the mistake of organizing a dinner to try to reconcile him to the Middle East expert, Daniel Pipes. That time, Christopher arrived spoiling for a fight. The evening ended with Christopher storming out of the house.

Carol struggled to follow him, but he moved so fast that he had vanished around the corner of a neighboring street before Carol reached the sidewalk. She realized she couldn’t get home on her own because Christopher had departed with the keys to their car in his pocket. Nor could she re-enter the house, without an awkward explanation to all the other dumbfounded guests. Andrew Sullivan played Sir Galahad and returned Carol home. The Hitchens’ car remained parked on our curb till late the next morning.

At most parties, though, he was wit in a white suit. He’d enter the house and push past the offer of what he called the worst phrase in the English language: “White or Red?” He’d walk into the kitchen, to the small pantry where we keep our own stock of liquor, and help himself to a slug of Johnnie Walker Black, which I learned to think of as the whisky you drink when you’re drinking more than one. Soda, no ice. In recent years, and contrary to reports, the pours got smaller and the spacing between them grew wider. Was his body rebelling? Or did the mind need less artificial impetus as it raced faster and faster down the current toward the waterfall at the end?

In recent years, as I’ve undergone a political rotation of my own, I’ve thought more and more about the example Christopher set. Interviewed in about 2003 by C-Span’s Brian Lamb, Christopher gave this answer to a question about his former belief in socialism: “I miss it the way an amputated man misses an arm.” It’s a bewildering experience to move away from prior certitudes. The most usual response is to careen to exactly opposite certitudes – to clutch at some prosthetic substitute for the vanished limb. Christopher refused this ready aid.

Perhaps his formal moment of departure from the political left came when he was summoned to answer for his deviations before the editors of The Nation in 2002. He rode the train up from Washington, sat at the long conference room table to await the interrogation – and lit up a cigarette in defiance of all no-smoking ordinances. What was there to be said after that?

If Christopher quit the left, however, he never joined the right. Like his great hero George Orwell, he was a man whose most creative period of life was a period of constantly falling between two stools: his new hatred for George Galloway never dimmed his old animosity toward Henry Kissinger. He was for the Iraq war without ever much trusting or liking the leaders who led that war.

The stock phrase of the 2000s on the right was “moral clarity.” If moral clarity means hating cruelty and oppression, then Christopher Hitchens was above all things a man of moral clarity. But he was also a man of moral complexity, who would not submit to Lenin’s demand that who says A must say B. Christopher was never more himself than when – after saying A – he adamantly refused to say B.

By the end, the one-time Trotskyist doctrinaire allowed no furnishings inside his mind except those that he had deliberately chosen and then shaped to his own use.

One sometimes hears of people who try to model their writing or their persona on Christopher Hitchens’ example. The results are usually absurd and sometimes perverse. Christopher did not offer a model of what to think. He offered a model of how to think – and how to live. Fully. Fearlessly. Joyously. And then, alas too soon, of how to die: without bluster but without flinching, boldly writing until the fingers moved no more.

On Christopher Hitchens . . .

My battles with Christopher Hitchens