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Defending Hitchens

By Alan Jacobs • February 26, 2013, 9:36 AM

The one thing that can be said in praise of Richard Seymour’s UnHitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens, is that its subject would appreciate the effort. Indeed, I bet that Hitchens would be highly pleased that someone had expended so much time and energy to denounce him posthumously in the style that he had himself mastered, even if it took the author more than a year since Hitchens’s death to produce it. Concocted in the style of a 17th-century polemical pamphlet (a literary template favored by Hitchens), UnHitched purports to be an “extended political essay” that exposes its subject as, among other things, a “terrible liar,” “ouvrierist” (one of several words deployed by the overly earnest Seymour that will drive even more learned readers to the dictionary), a plagiarist, and, most unforgivable among Hitchens’s erstwhile friends and colleagues on the Anglo-American socialist left, “the George W. Bush administration’s amanuensis.” (Full disclosure: Hitchens was a friend, mentor, and neighbor of mine.)

Well, then, you shouldn’t be reviewing the book, should you? Or, if you want to do it on your own blog or something, that’s fine, but Newsweek shouldn’t be assigning this task to you.

Seriously, I stopped reading at that point. I have my suspicions about Seymour’s book, but I’d like to read an evaluation by someone who doesn’t have such an obvious dog in the fight.

Tagged Christopher Hitchens, James Kirchick.

26 Responses to Defending Hitchens

BenSix says:

February 26, 2013 at 10:25 am

Seymour has replied. He is of the British far left, and I suspect that I would disagree with his analyses of Hitchens’ religious and Marxist themes, but the petulant response to his criticisms of “the Hitch”‘s apparently indefensible post-9/11 writings on foreign policy has been entertaining. Some of his admirers are thrilled by his antitheistic works yet treat him with the reverence with which Christians treat their saints.

I am unsure if Kirchick should have been discluded on the basis of his relationship with Hitchens, though. One can surely be as prejudiced in one’s evaluation of the people one admires as well as one’s acquaintances. Some people are so ubiquitous and controversial that no one could have had an unbiased perspective on the matter and it is almost better that people admit to their prejudices.
Noah Millman says:

February 26, 2013 at 11:51 am

I think you’ve set a standard that is not only impossible, but undesirable.

One possible role for the critic is to be a kind of consumer guide – this book is “worth reading” and this one isn’t. Inasmuch as this is the critic’s primary role (and it doesn’t have to be), then it’s important for the critic to maintain a reputation for giving consistent and good advice. That doesn’t just mean not being biased towards, say, the work of friends, but not being biased towards his or her own taste, since readers’ taste might differ.

But that’s not the only possible role for the critic. Another possible role is to illuminate the work in question, to bring out aspects that might not be readily apparent. Yet another would be to do “cultural criticism” on it – to say not what it is but what it means that it is. For these kinds of criticism, it might be a positive advantage to know the author, or the subject, intimately.

In this case, we’re dealing with a polemic – and a polemic written against a professional polemicist. It would seem to be singularly appropriate to publish a polemic against such a book by yet another polemicist – just another round in the tennis game, as it were. Of course, that isn’t really a “review” nor is it “criticism” really – but so what?

Anyway, if I read Kirchick on Seymour on Hitchens, and Kirchick identified himself as Hitchens’s intellectual heir, and I found his defense of Hitchens unpersuasive, that would tell me a great deal about Hitchens and the worth of a book that savaged him. Similarly if I found his defense very persuasive. If, on the other hand, Kirchick was just some guy, who knew nothing in particular about Hitchens or the issues, all I would know is whether this polemic would appeal to somebody who isn’t invested in the questions or parties at hand. Which strikes me as, frankly, less-useful, since if I’m not much invested in the questions or parties at hand I’m probably not going to read the review in the first place, and certainly wouldn’t expect to want to read the book.
Hitchens Militarism says:

February 26, 2013 at 11:58 am

quote:

“in 2006, Hitchens’ wife, the American writer Carol Blue, told the New Yorker her husband was one of “those men who were never really in battle and wished they had been. There’s a whole tough-guy, ‘I am violent, I will use violence, I will take some of these people out before I die’ talk, which is key to his psychology – I don’t care what he says. I think it is partly to do with his upbringing.”

Is there any truth in what his wife said? He pauses for a second. Then, unexpectedly: “Yeah. Yes. One of the things I’ve realised, writing the book, is that it has to be true.”

Hitchens militarism, Sullivan’s tesosterone addiction, recalls Matt Taibis comments on Brooks:

” a perfect example of the kind of spineless Beltway geek we always see beating the war drum at times like these. It’s because nebbishly [sic] little dorks like Brooks and Paul Wolfowitz and David Frum got their books dumped in high school that we end up dropping daisy cutters on Afghan sheep herds and shipping working class American kids halfway around the world to get their nuts blown off. That sounds like a simplistic explanation, but anyone who doesn’t have a keen ear for the pencil-pusher’s eternal quest for macho cred is going to have a hard time understanding Washington politics.”
Hunsdon says:

February 26, 2013 at 12:24 pm

Ah, James Kirchick, of the “Are you now or have you ever been” wing of respectable conservatism. That’s when I’d have stopped reading.
Paul Emmons says:

February 26, 2013 at 12:46 pm

This is complicated. We have Hitchens. Then we have Seymour, the un-Hitchens. Then we have Kirchick, the un-Seymour. Finally we have Alan Jacobs, the un-Kirchick. One sometimes forgets which direction in the hall of mirrors one is looking; but I gather that Jacobs dislikes Hitchens, although he doesn’t say why.

Apparently Hitchens sometimes drank to excess (cf. the story of his contre-temps with Fr. George Rutler) and a kind of frenzy sometimes invaded his generally reasonable discourse when pursuing Christian believers. My guess is that, under a confident and cultured veneer, he was not a happy man and may have been fighting/flirting with a demon or two. IMHO he should be appreciated for his virtues and more pitied than blamed for his faults.

A freedom-loving person has enough good reasons to oppose Islamists; and an atheist has more. If accused of being a liberal, I’m likely to plead guilty; but I’m not the kind who sees Islamism as anything but a threat to everything I hold dear as either liberal, conservative, or faithful. The invasion of Iraq was done under a dishonest pretext and seems to have been a mistake in various ways. I hope that we have learned some lessons from the experience. Yet it’s clear enough that Saddam was a perfidious tyrant (as Hitchen has shown from a video primary source of the scene in which he took power) whose toppling was in principle a worthy goal.
Alan Jacobs says:

February 26, 2013 at 1:15 pm

Noah, I take your point as relevant and helpful, but do please note that I didn’t ask for detachment or objectivity — just ” someone who doesn’t have such an obvious dog in the fight.” Important difference, I think.

Paul Emmons: Can you tell me what I wrote that leads you to “gather that Jacobs dislikes Hitchens”?
Michael Straight says:

February 26, 2013 at 1:58 pm

You can have a “How convincing is this book to someone whose mind isn’t already made up?” review or you can have a “How might Hitchens have responded to this book?” review, but probably not both in the same review.
Ted says:

February 26, 2013 at 2:11 pm

From what I can tell–and I can’t tell much from Kirchick’s piece–Seymour’s indictment comes to a very sharp point, and one heard often among my lefty friends, that H. was an opportunist, and especially that he saw his opening to do for nos jours what Orwell did for “democratic socialism” in the ’40s: turn on the “respectable” of his own movement as dishonest; but that what is genuine and inspiring in Orwell is cowardly, calculated and careerist in Hitchens. I’m not saying I buy it, but that’s what my friends–one in particular, a professional journalist–say. There may be an element of truth to it, the human heart being what it is. For anybody who remembers his line during Gulf War I, a far cleaner casus belli, if an inadequate one, Hitchens’s 2002 turnaround was remarkable, to say the least. (I saw him on “Crossfire” once in 1990, sneering about “plucky little Belgium”, too squiffed even to remember that it was “BRAVE little Belgium”.) Even from this distance it seems Seymour’s major beef is that Hitchens was a renegade, which H. cheerfully–and courageously–admitted, in fact in the epigraph to Seymour’s book. In that case Seymour’s pamphlet is leftist score-settling, then, and of limited interest.
vandelay says:

February 26, 2013 at 2:37 pm

I think that if you’re looking for a prominent American magazine writer who claims no association with Hitchens, exaggerated or not, you’ll be looking a long time. It seems they all had some story or another, all essentially the same, about how the “Hitch” was a great raconteur/drinker/conversationalist to share after his death. I always suspected that, if he were consulted about those tributes, Hitchens wouldn’t have remembered 90 per cent of them, which wouldn’t have been entirely due to his alcoholism.
BenSix says:

February 26, 2013 at 3:29 pm

It strikes me that “neighbour” would, if it was not accompanied with “friend”, “mentor” and the like, be a splendid bias to admit to in an essay. It would leave unanswered the question of whether you had enjoyed a friendly relationship with the person or whether they had allowed their hedges to intrude into your garden and prompted you to leave a tainted steak out for their pooch.
Richard W. Bray says:

February 26, 2013 at 3:39 pm

In 1976 Christopher Hitchens wrote a love letter to Saddam Hussein in the New Statesman. In fact, for most of his adult life Hitchens referred to himself as a Trotskyist.

My own working definition of a Trotskyist is someone who knows exactly who needs to be shot in order to create a perfect world and is willing to do the shooting himself. Of course, Hitchens never shot anyone.

And being a bibulous nicotine addict is hardly something to brag about:

http://laughterhopesockintheeye.wordpress.com/2012/07/07/the-hemingway-defense/
Paul Emmons says:

February 26, 2013 at 4:37 pm

>Paul Emmons: Can you tell me what I wrote that leads you to “gather that Jacobs dislikes Hitchens”?

Yes, the fact that you regard friendship with Hitchens as a disqualifier in anyone wanting to defend him.

It’s an ad hominem attack, at least when said friend has been upfront about it.
Alan Jacobs says:

February 26, 2013 at 5:00 pm

Ah, I see. Sorry for being unclear. I meant that as a general principle: if someone has written a strong attack on a writer, and I want to evaluate the legitimacy of that attack, I’m not going to turn to someone who was a friend of the attacked and considers him a mentor. I’d much rather read a review by a knowledgable person, even if that person has strong opinions, who is not involved in so personal a way.

Noah gives a good account of why someone might want to read something like Kirchick’s review, but I’m not one of them; and, aside from personal preference, I don’t think it’s ideal for a news magazine to assign a review to a person with so much skin in the game.

Of course, things can legitimately be done differently. For instance, in English newspapers obituaries are regularly written by close friends and even family members of the deceased, something rarely done over here. I’m just announcing my druthers.
Andre Kenji says:

February 26, 2013 at 5:50 pm

My time is too precious to read anything by James Kirchicken. And I think that Hitchens is overestimated.
Paul Emmons says:

February 26, 2013 at 6:43 pm

Thanks, Alan, for your patience. I apologize for jumping to that conclusion. I can see why someone would dislike such a multifaceted and complex man as Hitchens as well as why one would admire him. Ambivalence is probably the fairest assessment. Regarding his militant atheism, I think that his brother Peter made a good point in their debate (available on Youtube) when he said that Christopher was a “luxury atheist,” living safely in the shadow of the church whose civilizing influence, unthanked, still allowed him that luxury. He wouldn’t have enjoyed life among the “practical atheists” just a couple miles away, who might just as soon have mugged him as eat a hamburger.
William Dalton says:

February 26, 2013 at 11:02 pm

I would take the time to read a review of this book, by Hitchens’s brother, Peter. I have long admired his opinion columns, and I am confident that he would address the work of Christopher Hitchens and his critics both knowledgeably and as honestly as Chris himself would have professed himself capable.
Mightypeon says:

February 27, 2013 at 5:13 am

@Richard,
That is a somewhat interesting definition of Trotzkysm, I dont really agree, but Trotzkysm in an american context propably has quite different meanings from Trotzkysm in a East German or Soviet context.
We generally see Trotzky more in an Anti-Stalinist but still communist line, as in, champion of all communists who “disliked” Stalin very strongly (and usually for very good reasons), and were open to a “kinetic” resolution of the Stalin problem. That Stalin went completely axe(ice pick)-crazy on them kind of reinforces this point.
Mike w says:

February 27, 2013 at 8:45 am

Kirchick liked Hitchens only because Hitchens liked the slaughter of Muslims. Many so called conservative embraced this pile of manure for the same reason.

To think of the puffy, doughy, somewhat effeminate Hitchens as a tough guy who regretted never going into combat is quite funny.
Richard W. Bray says:

February 27, 2013 at 8:57 am

@Mightypeon

For many American T-shirt radicals, Che Guevarra plays the role of the “good” Marxist-Leninist. I remember seeing young people in Che shirts at an anti-war rally in 2002. They looked perplexed when I told them that Che loved war so much that he went to three different countries looking for people to shoot.
Mightypeon says:

February 27, 2013 at 10:10 am

@Richard,

well, I was born in Moscow, grew up in East Germany and my persepective is a bit different.

The bottom joke of course is that, practically speaking, Americans have more reasons to strongly miss the USSR than Russians etc. do, they just dont tend to know that.
It is unlikely that the banksters of today would attend their shenangians if the Soviet Union would still exist.

As long as far left nations actually were actually populist, they were fairly ok. Ideas like the “Vanguard party” etc. are of course elitist in nature, and the Bolshevik power grab from the Menscheviks and Social revolutionaries was explicitly anti populist. The outright massacre of the Makhnovists during the civil war was the final death knell for Soviet populism, a pity Makhno didnt manage to prevent his backstabbing by Stalin (and Trotzky, Trotzky and Lenin arent exactly innocent little daisies, they only appear relativly innocent compared to Stalin).
Jugoslavia was actually a fairly decent place to live in during the cold war, Chile propably would have been one too….
cka2nd says:

February 27, 2013 at 12:07 pm

Mightypeon says: “Ideas like the ‘Vanguard party’ etc. are of course elitist in nature, and the Bolshevik power grab from the Menscheviks and Social revolutionaries was explicitly anti populist.”

Given that the Mensheviks and Right Social Revolutionaries who supported the Provisional Government were following deeply anti-populist policies themselves – refusing to pull out of World War I or to support the seizure of the land from the aristocracy by the peasants – while the Bolsheviks sided with the populace on both issues, I’m not sure I can take the above seriously.

And a “Vanguard Party” is not necessarily elitist. It is supposed to be professional, not amateurish, and serious, not dilettantish. It’s also supposed to be revolutionary, not reformist or satisfied with parliamentarism.
Russell Seitz says:

February 27, 2013 at 2:50 pm

Just as the Trots found their nemesis in the Czech and Finnish Guards, the defunct Hitch is still being pestered by Albanian dwarves of all nations.

I hope he’s having a drink somewhere with John Belushi.
AC says:

February 27, 2013 at 3:05 pm

I’d just be happy if the far more conservative and sensible younger brother (and occasional contributor here, VERY occasional) of the late Mr. Hitchens received anywhere near as much press by the purported American conservative movement.
Lulu says:

February 28, 2013 at 6:42 am

Mr. Bray: Che died young (and looks good on a tee-shirt)–that may explain his popularity with “radical” American youth.
Goose Gander says:

February 28, 2013 at 5:56 pm

cka2nd, actually the Mensheviks split over WWI; most were opposed, but the so-called ‘Right Mensheviks’ did support the war.
MikeSchilling says:

March 8, 2013 at 3:35 pm

Ah, there’s the problem: Alan is confusing Newsweek wit a news magazine.