Christopher Hitchens was, as Tom Piatak once wrote in our pages, “the purest neocon.” He was also, as George Scialabba has assayed, “an ornament of Anglo-American literary journalism.” I had read more polemic against Hitchens than of Hitchens himself until I picked up a copy of his Thomas Jefferson: Author of America and found myself compelled to recognize him as a writer first and ideologue a distant second — the only way any essayist of first rank should be evaluated. Read him, even if you shouldn’t believe him.
Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011
Posted in Books.
18 Responses to Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011
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Tony J says:
His descent into full-on neo-conservatism was a tragedy, but that man had a gift for conveying ideas about the human condition that made the world a better place.
RIP
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Ben, Okla. City says:
I disagreed with him on a lot of issues, but I respected him for his intellectual honesty and his ability to make his points. He died way too young.
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Cinjon says:
Articulate, clever, charming, a self-dealing drunk and turncoat. Diminished as Britain may be it never seems to run short of Kim Philbys.
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TomB says:
Cinjon wrote:
“Articulate, clever, charming, a self-dealing drunk and turncoat. Diminished as Britain may be it never seems to run short of Kim Philbys.”
Oh my God is this ever brilliant.
RIP Hitchens my ass.
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Hitchens is of a type in England which can be traced back to the pamphleteers of the English Revolution and their anti-Irish propaganda to Gordon Riots and then to Trevelyan and onward to the Left wing of the Labour Party. The anti-Catholic bigotry runs through this thread throughout history. He is neither unique nor particularly brilliant in this regard.
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John Drinkwater says:
I’m just glad I don’t have to read him anymore. His prose really deteriorated over the last few years. I used to like him back in the 90′s, but he became corrupted by power, fame, money and booze.
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The Beefeater says:
As an Englishman, it hurts me to see much validity in the comments, notably Cinjon’s, attributing Hitchens’s faults to his Britishness.
But I think they are specifically the faults of the type of Briton who fares better in the US than in his native land.
The young, pre-US Hitchens was not a major figure in London journalism. I recall him as a writer of quite sprightly left-wing boilerplate, but boilerplate none the less.
In America, which he took to and which took to him, he developed the prose style which leads Daniel McCarthy to acclaim him as ‘an essayist of first rank’.
To my British eyes and ears, that style was increasingly pompous, hectoring, overwrought and contaminated with risible archaisms. Sadly, however, many American intellectuals seem to have regarded this pinchbeck stuff as a late flowering of the Augustan Age of English letters.
That American fawning, plus the booze, impelled Hitchens to ingratiate himself more and more with his new compatriots, culminating in his conversion to neoconservatism.
Yes, he was a turncoat, but his new coat was an American one. -
ChiefEngineer says:
Like his bi-sexuality, he was on both sides of issues. Refreshing as a polemicist against appeasement, intellectual sloth, he was boorish and tiresome fulminating against The Divine or any supernatural power. His railings against Mother Teresa were exclusively filth, plain and simple. He was a man-largely due to his intellect and British fetish education-with enormous blind spots. In my opinion, he “zeroed out”, meaning for every good thing he wrote or spoke, there was cancelled and nullified by stupidity, blindness, and moral and personal failure.
Hitchen’s greatest liability was that he never worked a real job in his life. He didn’t wait tables while in college to pay for cigarettes, he didn’t do any manual labor, or spend significant time with ordinary people.
I worked as an engineer officer aboard merchant ships for over 30 years. In the Engine Room, you have an air conditioned space with a control center that has mimics of all the power plant functions. From there, you can control the plant, which is represented by lights, buttons and lines. But, it is not the actual plant, the physical, real, concrete. Thus, real knowledge on the operations is not equal to the abstract operation of the remote control and surrogate symbols.
The consummate engineer is mastery of both: the information management aspect of using symbols, and the nitty-gritty how things ACTUALLY work under the laws and limitations of the REAL (really) WORLD.
His lasting contributions to Humankind are over rated.
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Stephen says:
ChiefEngineer, I think you may have a real metaphor there. Hitchens could perform and amuse really well sometimes. However, he bought Marx and never took him back for a refund. Now I suppose one can, at a young age, be a Marxist and not suffer brain rot…but I doubt it. Believing in government as these people do is evidence of an extreme character flaw and yes, blind spots at least, if not blindness.
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ChiefEngineer wrote:
“His lasting contributions to Humankind are over rated.”
And that overstates it wildly I think.
Desperate to be interesting, in the end if remembered at all it will only be for the desperation.
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Kim Margosein says:
It seems that those who try to say something nice about him continue to use the words “contrarian” and “raconteur” . I am not an articulate man, so my understanding of these terms is:
Contrarian- a troll with a publisher.
Raconteur- a windbag who picks up the check.
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John Knox says:
Hitchens despised Christians- both Catholic and Evangelical. Yet this souse never complained when both joined the United States Army to fight his endless wars against Islam.
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After, ummm … expressing my mild dislike of Christopher Hitchens I suppose it’s only good form to mention that his brother Peter seems a wonderful guy, and just the sort of writer TAC readers would love. (Indeed it would be neat to see the TAC give him some space once in awhile.)
Or to put it another way, anyone who calls the EU a “giant vampire squid” and says that the Tories are pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes the same way Bush pretended to be a conservative gets my affection.
Peter writes for the Daily Mail in the U.K., a tabloid worth watching in its own right. (If you don’t mind its silly interest in celebrity anatomies.)
The paper’s web address and then its derivative site where Peter’s columns can be tracked are as follows:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/index.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/columnist-224/Peter-Hitchens.html
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Jim Dooley says:
At the Daily Mail also, two other columnists very much worth reading: Mary Ellen Synon with particular reference to the Eurozone mess and Thomas Fleming of Chronicles.
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R. J. Stove says:
Tom B writes of Peter Hitchens: “it would be neat to see the TAC give him some space once in awhile.”
But TAC already does (and quite right too)! See umpteen TAC back-issues.
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It is one measure of the effect of Christopher Hitchens upon those of us among his veteran readers – in my case, for fully thirty of my fifty years – for whom the act of writing is commanded not far behind that of breathing that we find ourselves tempted to write of that effect at ten times the length that might distill it most wisely in its compacted essence – both in guilty compensation for our own failures to match the Stakhanovite prodigality of output that was among his prime hallmarks, and in self-indulgent mimicry of those Falstaff appetites – for food, drink, books, argument, and tennis-match badinage, not necessarily in that order – to which that record of production seemed to have been bonded as if chemically. The man was truly a force of nature – as his astonishing ability, world without end, to both turn in copy ahead of every deadline, and/or perform with unfailing lucidity in the television studio the morning after every three-bottle evening will alone attest – and a throwback, in many ways, to the romantic French tradition, descended from Voltaire and the Encyclopedists and other C18 lumières, through Zola and then Malraux and Camus, of infamy-crushing attacks on the immemorial cruelties of throne-and-altar obscurantism, pen-as-sword j’accusations of the abuse of power at the highest levels, and the muscular, typewritten displacements of martial combat of the early-c20 “action intellectual” in the 1930s Orwell mode – and, suggested by the latter, first among equals among his encyclopedic inspirations, of an age in which just under half the square-footage of late-Victorian maps were colored red after the planting of the imperial Union Jack, which nimbus in Hitchens’s self-assigned brief, after the fires of avowed empire had long since cooled to ash survived in the virtual United Nations of his passport stamps and a stickered suitcase specially fitted, at least pre-9/11, for bottle and shot glasses.
All this is not to suggest, though, that his writing was one long scattering of occasional pieces, destined to yellow with each new morning’s headlines – his signature gift for friendship, at its core in his case with a brains trust composed of such literary Englishmen as Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan and James Fenton, and the omnivorous humanist breadth of his learning, saw to it that he would come more and more to inhabit the rare domain of the journeyman journo-as- artist, in a lineage that extended from Swift and Hazlitt through Gissing’s New Grub Street, through H.L. Mencken, George Orwell, Cyril Connolly, V.S. Pritchett, Dwight Macdonald, and on to the postwar belletrist Fleet Street of Anthonys Powell and Burgess, Robert Conquest, Kingsley Amis, Henry Fairlie, Philip Larkin, D.J. Enright, Frederic Raphael, Clive James and Ferdinand Mount.
You do not, on pain not of forgetting the point of reading so much as that of being human, read such writers in order to copper-plate your pre-existing political commitments, those get-over-yourself-already-you’re-not-that-great extensions of your own righteous ego, but above all, and in an age both of specialist tunnel-vision and of set-piece partisan polarities grown drearier by the day, to continue after the false badge of your cap and gown your general education and gather leads for further reading, to argue with both yourself and with a worthy adversary who honors your intelligence as he instructs you, to feel your verbal senses buoyed and borne aloft by the charm of a muscular and nimble prose poetry, all of it fortified by a cultural range of reference, across majestic vistas of memorized English poetry not least, all of it at total, instant fingertip recall. You are tempted as you assay the sheer omnivore range of Hitchens’s output to discern an amplitude more c19 in its Victorian libido for bookish arcana, imperial geographic reach (with white ash-flecked blazer updating the khaki and pith helmet), and, not least, its imperious confidence in judgment – before you are tempted in your atavist calibrations to turn the clock back more than two centuries further still, to that A-to-Zed colossus among Renaissance omnium gatherums, The Anatomy of Melancholy of Robert Burton.
All of this is barely to touch what will have proved your, and everyone else’s with a pulse for politics, serial head-bumpings with the kaleidoscope shape-shiftings of Hitchens’s programmatic commitments these thirty years of his stateside presence, from the still-wet Oxford Trotskyism (Popular) fronting his 1981 arrival at The Nation, through his wishboning assaults on both Reaganism and fellow-traveling post-Solidarity Manhattanite Stalinists (the influence of the Robert Conquest/Encounter strain in UK literary anti-Communism would continue to ripen), to humanitarian, anti-Milosevic “liberal hawkishness” over Bosnia and anti-Clinton broadsides over Lewinsky (No One Left to Lie To), through his signature 2002 break, amicable in the main as these things go, with his Nation “comrades” over both Iraq specifically, and over the deeper split between the postcolonial/antimperialist/Chomskyite left and its antitotalitarian, liberal-hawk sometime brethren in general. His modulation in default venue from the left-orthodox Nation to the “neoliberal” orbit of Slate, The Atlantic and Vanity Fair – though only by an indirection of the most oblique unto the Israel-hawkish Peretz-era New Republic – all of the latter less reflexively hostile to the overseas projection of American hard power, and much less inclined to ascribe murderous Islamist terrorism to imperial-Amerikan “blowback”, than the former.
Whether such polemical culture clashes with Hitchens will for you have taken on a primary and peremptory import or one more secondary and, if not forgiving, at least mitigating, will depend, I suspect, upon whether or not you find yourself, in assaying him and not just him alone, among what blogger “Michael Blowhard” has memorably called the PPPs – Primarily Political Persons, those susceptible to reducing their primary engagements with the larger culture to Identikit templates derived from long-running arguments, frequently calcified in reciprocal complacence, over the size and scope of the national government in its divers assignments foreign and domestic. Others among us are no more inclined to apply a strict vinegar-and-water sectarian test to a writer of the Hitchens amplitude, assuming their art wills out, than we do to Swift or Burke or Hazlitt, but to those in our day insensible to their own scattershot category errors, I have little more to say, and thank the atheist Hitchens’s small-g “god” for that modest reprieve, in a world where life is short and totalitarian artlessness, is, world without end, far too long as it is.
To such greater dispositions of the one sort, I leave on this occasion all such lesser dispositions of the other, and in their place close with a few passages freshly inspired in recall in the wake of Christopher Hitchens – to adapt Orwell on Gandhi, below, “that one even thinks of” invoking such sovereign parallels “indicates his stature”, if not quite on such a primary level, though there is no dishonor whatever in landing along the ambassadorial register – who, confident though he at all times was in his many-sided polemical bravura, would have been among the first, I suspect, to disclaim on his behalf all forms of posthumous excess in the way of sentimentalism, arm-linked acclamations unto beatitude, claims of permanent, primary literary stature, and, not least, bibliographical desiderata more explicitly Hitchensian than, flourished unto perennially-expanding bedsit standby by his own syllabussing and polysyllabic hand, Dickensian, Orwellian, Wodehoused, Huxleyan, Waughfaring, Pained or Jeffersonian:
Peter Stothard, editor, The Times Literary Supplement (2003-); editor, The Times (1992-2002), reviewing Hitchens’s 2010 memoir Hitch-22:
“Hitchens [c. 1970] ‘realized that my new chum [the precociously polymathic critic George Steiner] had suggested to me a possible relationship, which was that of politics to literature but this time beginning at the literary end and not at the ideological one.’ It was a relationship that has lasted a lifetime, bringing a powerful purpose to literary criticism on George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh and a rare literary vigor to his political attacks, whatever their target.”
Walter Lippmann on another force of literary nature, H.L. Mencken, in 1926, suggested that Mencken’s weaknesses, all told, were the forgivably – and much smaller – obverse price we pay, as with Hitchens’s excesses, for what we get in the way of a contagious élan vital, of a fire that warms as it burns:
“For this reason the Mencken manner can be parodied, but the effect is ludicrous when it is imitated. The same prejudices and the same tricks of phrase employed by others are usually cheap and often nasty. I never feel that in Mr. Mencken himself even when he calls quite harmless people cockroaches and lice. I do not care greatly for phrases like that. They seem to me like spitting on the carpet to emphasize an argument. They are signs that Mr. Mencken writes too much and has occasionally to reach for the effect without working for it. I think he is sometimes lazy, and when he is lazy he is often unfair, not in the grand manner but in the small manner. And yet his wounds are clean wounds and they do not fester. I know, because I have fragments of his shellfire in my own skin. The man is admirable. He writes terribly unjust tirades, and yet I know of nobody who writes for his living who will stay up so late or get up so early to untangle an injustice. He often violates not merely good taste according to the genteel tradition, but that superior kind of good taste according to which a man refuses to hurt those who cannot defend themselves.
“Nevertheless I feel certain that insofar as he has influenced the tone of public controversy he has elevated it. The Mencken attack is always a frontal attack. It is always explicit. The charge is all there. He does not leave the worst unsaid. He says it. And when you have encountered him, you do not have to wonder whether you are going to be stabbed in the back when you start to leave and are thinking of something else.
I have not written this as a eulogy, but as an explanation which to me at least answers the question why Henry L. Mencken is as popular as he is in a country in which he professes to dislike most of the population. I lay it to the subtle but none the less sure sense of those who read him that here is nothing sinister that smells of decay, but that on the contrary this Holy Terror from Baltimore is splendidly and exultantly and contagiously alive. He calls you a swine, and an imbecile, and he increases your will to live.”Essayist John Jay Chapman (1862-1933), to the Class of 1900, Hobart College:
“When I was asked to make this address I wondered what I had to say to you boys who are graduating. And I think I have one thing to say. If you wish to be useful, never take a course that will silence you. Refuse to learn anything that implies collusion, whether it be a clerkship or a curacy, a legal fee or a post in a university. Retain the power of speech no matter what other power you may lose. If you can take this course, and in so far as you take it, you will bless this country. In so far as you depart from this course you become dampers, mutes, and hooded executioners.
“As a practical matter a mere failure to speak out upon occasions where no opinion is asked or expected of you, and when the utterance of uncalled-for suspicion is odious, will often hold you to a concurrence in palpable iniquity. Try to raise a voice that will be heard from here to Albany and watch what comes forward to shut off the sound. It is not a German sergeant, nor a Russian officer of the precinct. It is a note from a friend of your father’s offering you a place in his office. This is your warning from the secret police. Why, if any of you young gentleman have a mind to make himself heard a mile off, you must make a bonfire of your reputations and a close enemy of most men who would wish you well.
“I have seen ten years of young men who rush out into the world with their messages, and when they find how deaf the world is, they think they must save their strength and wait. They believe that after a while they will be able to get up on some little eminence from which they can make themselves heard. ‘In a few years,’ reasons one of them, ‘I shall have gained a standing, and then I will use my powers for good.’ Next year comes and with it a strange discovery. The man has lost his horizon of thought. His ambition has evaporated; he has nothing to say. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don’t be gagged. The time of trial is always. Now is the appointed time.”
From Alvin “Future Shock” Toffler’s 1964 interview with the creator of the old man in that book by Nabokov for Playboy, included in the latter’s (Nabokov’s, not Playboy‘s) Strong Opinions:
“…since my youth– 1 was 19 when I left Russia– my political creed has remained as bleak and changeless as an old gray rock. It is classical to the point of triteness. Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of art. The social or economic structure of the ideal state is of little concern to me. My desires are modest. Portraits of the head of the government should not exceed a postage stamp in size. No torture and no executions.”
Finally, George Orwell, in the closing words of his essay, a master-class of its chaff-winnowing kind, on Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, in Partisan Review in 1949, a year after the death of the latter and a year before the death of the former:
“One may feel, as I do, a sort of aesthetic distaste for Gandhi, one may reject the claims of sainthood made on his behalf (he never made any such claim himself, by the way), one may also reject sainthood as an ideal and therefore feel that Gandhi’s basic aims were anti-human and reactionary: but regarded simply as a politician, and compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind!”
Never mind his atheism – he was a liberal, but the phony conservatives at NRO and the American Spectator embraced him for his support for the insane Iraq war. Those same conservatives support Joe Lieberman for the same reason.