Hitchens’ new memoir Hitch-22 is a sprawling self-portrait of a name-dropper and a hanger-on.
Former communists make the best hawks and neoconservatives. Having put in time on the other side of the trenches gives their politics a weight that natural-born country-clubbers could only affect. The much-quoted Churchill maxim “If you’re not liberal when you’re young you have no heart, but if you’re not conservative when you’re old you have no brain” is true insomuch as that life is an embittering experience that deadens the heart—to fill the void we occupy ourselves with the abstract. One man who’s done a substantial amount of this has been Christopher Hitchens, the 61-year-old intellectual bulldog, who has told interviewers that he wrote his new memoir Hitch-22 to give “context in the battle of ideas.” The doorstopper-length memoir reads more like long years of waste byproduct that had been gunking up Hitchens’ pundit machinery—feelings, emotions, reverie, friendships. It does provide us with primary source material to ask interesting questions like: Why do people so often become more conservative as they get older? But only in between the agonizing, ego-bloated chapters where Hitchens talks at length about his famous friends like Ian McEwan and Edward Said. The book provides short glimpses of how Hitchens went from being one of the bright young pallbearers of the West (writing for socialist magazines and helping build up Cuba after the Revolution) to becoming one of the most mordant defenders of war and the status quo.
Hitchens’ disillusionment with the Left seems like it had been building up for a while: On assignment for a variety of magazines in Iraq before the First Gulf War, it seems as though he saw too much and couldn’t reconcile. His hate for the genocidal Saddam Hussein came to outweigh his hatred of American imperialism. Coming home to a provincial, feel-good Left absorbed with identity politics and tacitly defending Saddam’s innocence was enough to make Hitchens renege. As a child of the Second World War, Hitchens wanted his generation to have their own larger-than-life war against fascism. He found a watered-down version of this in the Gulf War, and subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
***
A communitarian in rural France once explained to me her belief that “politics should be a blood pact…an agreement that you cannot go back on.” While a society of morally hardened, ethically consistent individuals is a nice thought, it has proven to be an unlikely if not impossible reality. People change their minds. We have no problem acting against our own self-interest and perverting the things we claim to love and value most.
For all that Hitchens lionizes George Orwell and views himself (through some funhouse mirror) as his successor, the fact is that Orwell would never have wasted his time writing a book like Why Orwell Matters. A romp into the Hitchens oeuvre reveals not a major creative talent, but a scrappy linguistic boxer, primarily interested in the vainglory of winning arguments and debates. He does not give and give. Though he has persisted in a self-conscious attempt to cultivate a kind of rakish Orwell-ness about himself, he has failed to produce a lasting sociopolitical novel, or any novel at all. It’s as if the spirit that produces great journalist-novelists is some half-lifed isotope that grows weaker every year. Regardless, with sheer persistence, Hitchens has managed to carve out a niche for himself as the dilettantish pundit-hero of both the smarmy atheists and the war-hungry policy establishment. A fantastic verbal-sparrer with opinions on everything; a magazine-writer contrarian; and an excellent choice as a talking head on an evening cable news show.
***
Hitchens’ career, though ‘successful’, is a lived warning about the trappings of journalistic and literary hackdom. Getting assignments and editing for papers and magazines can feel prestigious and leads to Pulitzer Prizes, special envoys, speaking engagements, and elite press dinners, but despite these rewards, there are few things sadder than a professional opinion-monger. The pundit builds nothing, and contributes nothing but opinions. The best case scenario for the journalist is to end up like Michael Pollan, Upton Sinclair or Jeremy Scahill—a heat-seeker for injustice whose work does what its supposed to and results in palpable gains and reform. In the worst-case scenario, you become a Christopher Hitchens: a shiftless critic who has made a life out of tearing people down. He isn’t able to create, so he has created a life of destruction.
***
Hatchet jobs and takedown review pieces are perversely satisfying for the frustrated writer. They allow him to see his name in print, accumulate social rewards, and sometimes even get paid; all while allowing time to further postpone the difficult work of building something. In February, Vanity Fair ran a web exclusive by Christopher Hitchens called “Vidal Loco” in which he attempted to call into question the judgment and patriotism of the great octogenarian American novelist Gore Vidal by calling him a “crackpot.” In this cheap bid for website hits, Hitchens argues that Vidal was once a noble “blue-blooded patrician” who is now “slumming it” with “Oliver Stone and Michael Moore” in the “intellectual gutter.” (Meanwhile, Hitchens continues to write pieces for Vanity Fair with titles like “Why Women Aren’t Funny.”) Adding insult to injury was the fact that many years previous Gore Vidal had named Hitchens his “delfino” or living successor. Hitchens argument is half-hearted, and there is the sense he wrote it for money: he uses that sad rhetorical device, long employed by the castrated Left, of trying to make himself look “reasonable” while bashing others with more radical ideas. Secondly, there is a credibility gap. Hitchens is a hack-for-hire who has been traitorous to his own politics. It is frankly amazing that he feels entitled to call a man who “holidayed with the Kennedys, cruised for men with Tennessee Williams, was urged to run for congress by Eleanor Roosevelt, co-wrote some of the most iconic Hollywood films, damned US foreign policy from within, sued Truman Capote, got fellated by Jack Kerouac, watched his cousin Al Gore get elected president and still lose the White House, and finally…championed Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh” a “crackpot.” What has Christopher Hitchens done? The fact is that Gore Vidal is free to do whatever he wants because he has done so much already. He is at liberty to call Timothy McVeigh “a noble boy” and spout his Delphic conclusions about how the American experiment is a “failure” and that it “will soon be ranked somewhere between Brazil and Argentina, where it belongs” because Vidal is America. Hitchens, by contrast, has produced little more than destructive bile to sit back on his haunches and be proud of.
***
Hitch-22 is a sprawling self-portrait of a name-dropper and a hanger-on. Whether he’s tracking down blind old Borges in Buenos Aires or getting drunk with little Martin Amis, throughout the book Hitch makes sure that you know who he’s friends with. In the book, as within social life, name-dropping has the reverse of its intended effect of building credibility for the namedropper—rather, it’s annoying, and you begin to resent his stupid babblings about the minutia experienced in the company of his generation’s titans in chapters with titles like “The Fenton Factor” (James Fenton), “Salman” (Salman Rushdie) and “Martin” (Martin Amis) and “Edward Said in Light and Shade.”
***
In our current literary epoch where everyone feels entitled to sell their boring life story or blog out for gushy self-memorialization, what kind of memoirs are actually worth reading? Obviously political memoirs have a certain value and help us to clarify the public record. Freedom fighters like Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, Emma Goldman and Leon Trotsky were far ahead of their time, and their memoirs show us what a full and meaningful life in the service of society (and not the ego) looks like. But do we really care to read a memoir by a moderate critic-essayist like Christopher Hitchens, who has walked a relatively well-worn track in life (Oxford—youthful radicalism—disillusionment—professional lecture circuit)? There is a creeping feeling in reading Hitch-22 that it wasn’t actually written for us, the generous book-purchasing public, but so he and his friends could experience the low-grade endorphin thrill of historical posterity—so that future historians would have something to work with as they wheedled Hitchens in the canon beside Amis, McEwan, and Said.
***
Fear and paranoia often settle on us like a curtain as we get older. Every car ride or turbulent flight necessitates swallowing a Xanax to quell the fear. Fathers lie awake in bed all night obsessing over the machinations of the Dow and the safety of their young daughters. Perhaps this fear comes from realizing that we’ve been so lucky to continue being alive when existence is such a tenous and shaky thing—everyone has a bullet with their name on it, and its only a matter of time. “Middle age” is like standing water, a breeding pit for mosquito-like fears, because the baggage that comes with acquiring so much (jobs, children, citizenship) is the fear of losing it. It is so lovingly embodied in that Tao Te Ching talisman, “That which fails, must first be strong.” September 11th was a jarring shock to the West—like an unexpected car crash or heart attack, it woke us up to the fragility of our experiment, and forever changed the political dynamic. Politics is not a teenage blood pact. Even former Weather Underground demolition-experts like Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorn finally settle down and became become philanthropists and distinguished members of the community. It’s OK to change and we are tempered by our experiences. Nonetheless, there is something cloying about Christopher Hitchens and his sorry, P.J. O’Rourke-style political devolution from British clandestine writer to American flagpin-wearing moderate pundit. In 2006, Hitchens’ wife Carol Blue told the New Yorker that he was one of “those men who were never really in battle and wished they had been.” It’s sad that he never enlisted, but rather sublimated a lifetime of war-desire into petty literary and intellectual disputes. This reviewer can’t help but wonder and challenge the old man: Hitchens does so well in rhetorical debate, but how would he do in a fistfight?
**
See also The Rumpus Sex Book Throwdown.
46 responses
As a Hitchens admirer, I loved this piece, even though it does some of the very same things it accuses Hitchens of doing. But the writing is so strong and alive here, especially in moments that make broader generational and cultural observations, like this: “Fear and paranoia often settle on us like a curtain as we get older. Every car ride or turbulent flight necessitates swallowing a Xanax to quell the fear.” That sort of writing is inspiring, wherever you stand re: Hitchens.
My God, this is beautifully written and relentless. Great work.
I’ve been waiting for a piece like this for so long. Thanks.
I really liked this piece, except for one small phrase–“the smarmy atheists”–and I can forgive it that only because if there’s a word which best captures Hitchens’ argumentative style, it’s smarmy. Of all the current prominent atheists, Hitchens is the one most likely to make me cringe when he talks about religion. Even Bill Maher, with his shaky New-Age beliefs about medicine, is less grating on the subject.
But the problem is that smarmy isn’t used to describe Hitchens here–it’s used to describe atheists, and I think that’s an unnecessary shot at a group that, in my experience, looks at the current iteration of Hitchens as an unfortunate ally, not as a pundit-hero.
“Hatchet jobs and takedown review pieces are perversely satisfying for the frustrated writer.”
@Roy
That’s right. A guilty pleasure
that shouldn’t be often indulged. Like
expensive organic chocolate made from
smoked orange peels.
This was great. Reading Hitchens is a guilty pleasure of mine. After I read one of his pieces, I feel like I just did something not good for my health. And despite this review and my agreement with many of the points, I sort of want to read his memoir.
Hitchens has long been overrated as an intellectual. His posturing is boring, his positions – when assessed objectively with reason and logic – come up wanting time and again. When he was on the left, he was reactionary, and now that he is on the right and hawking war, his explanations are beyond shallow and myopic, they are (gasp) personal. Who gives a flying fig what he thinks. The man changes his views as steadily as the hairs fall from his fat head.
“He isn’t able to create, so he has created a life of destruction.”
These are the words I have been searching for to sum up why I just do not care for this man.
And his book cover reminds me of Charlie Brown, not that should be one more strike against him, just an observation.
‘Politics should be a blood pact’ isn’t a “nice thought”; it’s an absolutely ridiculous and dangerous one.
As a scientist in the medical sphere, can you imagine how quickly I’d disown a co-worker who pulled me aside and said ‘remember, our hypothesis was like a blood pact’?
A political view is different why? Little wonder you dismiss atheists as “smarmy” I guess.
Jessica,
Would you trust Joe Lieberman as your General Practitioner?
Or anyone who one day had a change of heart and turned in their former ‘comrades’?
Here’s what I think: you ‘grow up’ and question all your early, instinctual impressions about politics and the world, only to realize at a later date that your first conclusions were the most correct ones. Teenage Sex Energy 4ever: http://megawordsmagazine.com/teen-sex-energy-land-money-power/
The piece uses some of Hitchens’s own tactics against him, which smacks of the hypocritical, yet at times there is no choice to fight fire with fire.
Jessica, I think that because politics is basically a quest for power, and science is basically a quest for truth, they are actually significantly different from one another. It’d be nice if politics were more like science, but I don’t think that’s the world we live in. Just look at, oh, I don’t know, George W. Bush, maybe.
I give you credit for not succumbing to the tired “He’s nothing but an old drunk” attack, which is so often the case when people who don’t like what he’s become talk or write about him.
Regarding this article’s closing line, Hitchens makes clear in HITCH-22 that as a child, he turned to words in order to AVOID fistfights.
As for typifying atheists, the two most common adjectives for them are “smarmy” and “strident”…apparently, an earnest, reserved atheist has never existed.
I echo Brian’s comments — the criticism and the praise.
Too bad about ol’ Hitchens. In Slate, once, he made the argument that even if Iraq didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, the war was justified because at least now we KNOW Iraq doesn’t have them. How embarrassing to see someone with Hitchens’s intelligence advancing an argument unworthy of a high-school debater. (Off-topic: how infuriating is it to read the claims — made most recently in the UK by David Milliband — that we “went to war in Iraq in the wrong way.” A bit like “raping in the wrong way.”)
One thing Hitch seems to have in common with George Bush and, e.g., David Brooks, is a horror of admitting that he was ever wrong about anything important. As irritating as Andrew Sullivan can be, I do admire his willingness to make a sincere apology for the various things (there are many) that history has proven him wrong about.
Thanks for his great piece on Hitchens and his career. Between this and the Guardian Digested Read I know I’d be bored and annoyed by “Hitch-22.”
I do find Hitchens a trustworthy voice, when taken with a grain of salt.
I remember during the 2008 Democratic nomination race he wrote a scorcher about Hillary Clinton. Evisceration, insult, attack, demean.
But the entire focus of his vitriol was that after Edmund Hillary died, Clinton apparently said she was named after him, even though his name wasn’t famous until years after her birth.
Sure, it’s a fib. But would any mature mind grant it 500 words of self-righteous outrage?
While I agree with the basic sentiment about the drift of Hitchens’ politics over the past 15 years, I think the piece itself reads, at best, like a poor imitation of Hitchens, lacking in the verve and linguistic dexterity that makes Hitchens so irresistibly readable even when he’s being infuriatingly perverse. Hitchens is less an ideologue than a provocateur. Compared to a typical conservative columnist–say, George Will or David Brooks–Hitchens reads like Oscar Wilde crossed with Emile Zola. And compared to a neo-con “intellectual” like Paul Berman, Hitchens might as well be Dwight MacDonald.
I also think that the stirring defense of Gore Vidal is more than he deserves. Vidal is a complicated character and, like Hitchens, a sometimes entertaining provoateur. But he has always had a deeply anti-democratic streak and more than occasionally sounds absolutely daft. And please spare me any defense of Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorn on the grounds that they became “philanthropists.” The Weather Underground did more lasting damage to the American left than Hitchens could do in several lifetimes. I’ll take name-dropping over bomb-throwing any day.
I’m stumped. Why would anyone care how Christopher Hitchens, or any writer for that matter, does in a fist fight?
Because just like the writing it would be a cheap big for website hits. For me Hitchens is hit or miss, but I have to say that when he hits (love his VF piece on civil disobedience) he’s far better than the other VF blowhard James Wolcott. That would be a fair fight, no? Wolcott vs. Hitchens. They wouldn’t use fists–they’d just throw their big ole books at each other.
@Alvin
Because it’s one thing to feel strong enough about something to publicly debate a topic in a venue that naturally increases both participants credibility, regardless of the outcome of the battle of wits. It’s another, much more intense thing, to be willing to put your body on the line for it.
@Bill
Perhaps you misread what I wrote. I was not condoning bomb-throwing, but making the point that even the most intense the political feeling (the Weather Underground’s ‘bring the war home’) is eventually faded and tempered by time. People mellow out as they get older, as was the case with Bernadine Dorn and Bill Ayers.
“This reviewer can’t help but wonder and challenge the old man: Hitchens does so well in rhetorical debate, but how would he do in a fistfight?”
Very cheap ad hominem tactic on your part. A fistfight vs who? You? Are you on steroids? Has Emanuel Steward trained you as a professional boxer at Kronk Gym in Detroit? Do you want to beat up every “old man” with whom you are in ideological disagreement?
Speaks well of you, Benito Mussolini.
It’s strange that after criticizing Hitchens for name-dropping, you laud Gore Vidal by… name-dropping. Why don’t you dwell further on all the patrician connections that resulted in Vidal writing such timeless masterpieces as… name one. I can’t.
Your apparent conviction that few learn anything as they go through life, have children, etc — well, how very “Logan’s Run” of you. Yeah, when I seek wisdom I go to a sophomore every time. Better than all that nuance and shit. When you’re a sophomore with a strong opinion about all the injustice in the world, when you’re really indignant — that’s such a glorious moment, isn’t it? You know everything you’ll ever need to know. Enough to pull the trigger anyway.
And hey, yeah, you’re right. Cuba has been a fucking worker’s paradise. Sure it has been. Che Guevara never machine-gunned any gays and Fidel never put any of his buddies from the Sierra Maestre up against the wall. Worker’s paradise, man.
Hey Aaron, flex those biceps in front of the mirror. Here’s a tip: don’t worry about feeling any pain whe you get hit in the face. You’ll just be aware of the impact. The pain comes later on.
@TWG
Glad my review could spark a passionate post from you in the comments section.
But, whoa, hold it–you’re putting words into my mouth. There was nothing in this piece about Cuba being a ‘worker’s paradise’ (it’s not), or Fidel Castro, or Italian fascism. Or state communism of any kind being preferable to a free society.
Thank you for this authentic depiction of the mean spirited, self agrandizing, Hitchens. You sum him up succintly in saying; “He isn’t able to create, so he has created a life of destruction.”
I used to read him regularly when he wrote for The Nation (but I always preferred Alexander Cockburn), I read his book on the Clintons (No one left to Lie to) and listened to many of his interviews. He started to remind me of William F. Buckley Jr. Someone who is basically in love with hearing himself talk. I was disappointed to see him go after Mother Theresa, it seemed like a bullyish thing to do.
I didn’t care so much that he changed his mind, moving from left to right (would that it had been right to left!), but I agree with you that people grow and rethink things. This is the important thing, to be thoughtful and respectful of other people’s process while standing up for what you believe in. I think this is what you meant by your reference to the ‘fistfight’. Could he really stand up, personally that is, for what he believes in? I doubt it.
i think hitchens wrote the article. same style, same nonsense, same self-importance.
I really liked this piece. I’ve never thought much of Hitchens, and I love reviews that just confirm what I already believe. My comment is to my fellow commenters who’ve taken issues with the reviewer’s seeming criticism of atheists. I don’t think that when he says “smarmy atheists” he’s referring to all atheists as smarmy. I think he’s referring to a particular hitchensesque subset of atheists – the smarmy ones. So I don’t think that criticism is fair.
I doubt Mr. Hitchens would say he himself matters. Rather it is the ideas he presents, which matter. If you find his analysis of your strange conceits disturbing, why not turn your cheek, and try on some self-honesty for a change rather than the perpetual denialism the religious seem to cower into in the face of challenge.
It’s quite a bad habit of the right and the religious, to feel that you can ignore the man, or destroy the person, and still done with the idea they bring forth into the public forum.
It seems like Hitchens wrote this review. He no cause to champion? He merely destroys? Hitchens as an essayist and journalist does have a cause; tearing down God.
Figures, my comment doesn’t get posted. did even use a swear word or anything.
@gc
But god is already dead.
Killed over a hundred years ago (with spirit)
by a generous-hearted, horse-lover named Friedrich
Nietzsche. A great man.
Maybe Hitchens should watch more zombie movies–you can’t
kill what is already undead
A swan’s attempt to bite.
Christopher Hitchens is a Socialist, but I love him anyway!
He and Tom Varney come from across the pond with great ideas and different views of democracy.
Any time Christopher is interviewed I watch. He has, of late, become increasingly impatient with interviewers, but his opinion is always worth the wait (i.e. Fox Early News…about two weeks ago) I fear the impatience of old age is encroaching!
We miss the infusion of Vidal and Buckley, but content ourselves with Hitchens.
It would seem that Chris has mellowed politically since his early days with Vanity Fair. Fascinating and thought provoking…maybe he has seen the light!!!
Helen Thomas is gone, thank God. Her bigotry has no place in today’s world. If I were a betting man I would bet that the last question of the future press conferences would go to “The Chicago Sun Times”
What a second-rate junk review. From the first sentence Smith shows he has little grasp of what he’s talking about or taking on. Hitchens was never a Communist, let alone a reformed one. (See Hitch-22 or nearly any of his column’s from 1969-1989.) And labeling Hitchens a “mordant defender of the status quo” is utterly ridiculous. Even among his numerous detractors, such a statement is simply false: What was support for the liberation of Iraq but a challenge to the fascistic status quo of Saddam Hussein? Hitchens has consistently repudiated the suggestion that he is Orwell’s successor. (See any interview about “Why Orwell Matters.”) And if Smith had done any research, understood, or simply had read a sampling of Hitchens’ extraordinary output, the lousy arguments–like the mention of Vidal–would never have been made. (Scratch that, they couldn’t have been made with such glib bravado.) Throughout Hitchens’ career he has consistently quoted from and paid tribute to the fiery old novelist, repeatedly directing readers to pearls like “Lincoln.”
A few notes on style since a number of these mistaken posters were impressed with this writing: Life is only as “tenuous” as we make it, however “shaky” (good grief!) it may be. And attempts at literariness (“…settle on us like a curtain…”) demonstrate what any reader suspects by the column’s end, authorial jealousy.
Take on someone you understand a bit more about next time, Comrade. Or at least use such hostile blaze for a nobler purpose.
Sounds like someone is jealous. Do a ‘google’ on Chirtopher Hitchens and you
get about a million hits. Funny thing is this article is true and so are all the comments. Ole Hitch stired the pot and souped us all.
Get well and do it some more.
JMHO
Wow – how badly has the author missed the mark with this piece. Along with many of the commenters here, I dare say.
It’s bold to suggest Hitchens does not matter; not just because it’s patently false – book sales continue to ring with reassuring regularity worldwide – but it’s the thrust of his ideas which continue to conquer his critics and inspire others to snap out of the gripping malaise of tyrannical faith.
Smarmy? Intellectual? Who cares? Truth is what we’re after: no matter who says it, no matter what its form. Only children, or the intellectually stunted, could miss how dramatically Hitchens has shifted the landscape in which we consider the pitfalls and perils of faith in our society. We will never be the same.
Hitchens on the 63 London bus
NB Martin Amis author, Christopher Hitchens, journalist
Two people sit on the bus, discussing Shakespeare
Another: “Your Uncle Vanya was superbâ€
Our driver, a classics scholar with film star looks
Speaks Greek to his friend. He’s never forgiven him
For those comments, in the London Review of Books
The sky’s a gigantic, suppurating bruise
There’s Peckham Rye common, where Blake saw his angels
Puddles, with tower blocks in them, slide by us
Queen’s Road, where the palm trees of Peckham parade
Listlessly. But who is this getting on the bus?
It’s only Hitchens and Amis – Starsky and Hutch!
Hitch’s last book is on everybody’s mind
The atheist tract set Lewisham alight –
God is Not Great: The Case Against Religion
Everyone has an opinion all right!
A stranger joins them. Looks like a varsity man
His Oxford scarf is an exclamation mark
He and Hitch are friends, they met at Balliol
Precocious union debates were their platforms –
Rowing on the Cherwell at dawn, the May ball
We have entered that liminal zone, the Old Kent
The least favoured spot on the Monopoly board
Every pub claims to be Henry Cooper’s gym
You can still smell the Brylcreem and aftershave
“Splash it on all overâ€, they used to call him
Here, thin yellow men regret the smoking ban
Punch drunk, their fingers twitch for untipped Rothmans
Collecting beer glasses in their frosted-glass lairs
They are Charlie Chaplins, without his millions
Violence and hope flavour the atmosphere
We slither past Tesco’s; to its rear the Shard
A slim, grey needle, pierces the sombre sky
“A point well made,†says Hitchens, of his new mate
“Martin?†The upper-deck debate’s in full swing
What would Amis pere have thought? Martin hesitates
“I’m sorry I don’t agree,†he announces
He will overcome this upstart; mess him up
Like an unleashed Staff, he goes on the attack
“I see that you haven’t read Christopher’s book
If you had done so, you would understand that …â€
As we pass through the Elephant, the boys
Go at it, hammer and tongs, giving it some
At Blackfriars, the brown river staggers by
Does God exist? At least they have entertained us
The 63 bus is themed by their colloquy
[ The idea that Hitch hasn’t built anything or created anything is unsustainable, and expressed in a resentful, boring tone. Just setting the record straight on Orwell and Thomas Payne is a major achievement, not to mention his attacks on overrated cultural symbols like mother theresa, Kissinger or the Clintons. Hitch sometimes comes across as angry or unhappy, but watching him engaged in conversation is enough to dispel that.
You give a superficial account of Hitch-22, and offer irrelevant opinions on the descriptions of his friends (and former friends). Why doesn’t he write novels? he explains that very clearly in his memoirs, stating that being exposed to his literary betters convinced him that he was an essayist and a critic, and not a storyteller and a poet. And if we’re talking about “creation”, then i’d say that his book-length essays and the first two chapters of Hitch-22 (where he gives breathtaking accounts of the lives and deaths of his parents), are good examples of litarary creation. As for betrayal of convictions, his deferences with the left, his change of views on isues as the situations change can hardly being considered a deffection. You sound as if ideological kinship was more important than priciples. Gore Vidal and Edward Said, for instance, are not described with vitriol or dishonesty in his memoirs, in spite of their feuds with CH, yet you take issue with his VF piece as if it didn’t illustrate his attitude towards Vidal and their history as frinds and now rivals.
I’m upset about the general content of the article, the cheap shots at the man, the incomplete descriptions of his work, the stupid and self serving quote-mining from your fans in the forum. You don’t have to like the man, but an attack on his life and work shuld take into consideration HIS LIFE and HIS WORK, and not half-baked opinions about selected parts of it. As for the Hitch’s life being boring or easy, his adventures as a leftist, his travels, his postions and their defence, even at the face of controversy and backlash are not the ones taken by someone who is lazy or complacient. Take his defense of palestinians, or Kurds, or Salman Rushdie, and dare attack his principles and conviction without looking foolish or resentful. ]
Pace the nasty commenters, I really enjoyed reading this review. It is now routine that both Hitchens and his posse are notoriously thin-skinned, no matter how often they throw darts at others. “Contrarian” for them means aligning with their prejudices — anything else shows “shallowness” and lack of “consideration of HIS LIFE and HIS WORK” (that is, yelling).
I think it is pretty widely accepted that Hitchens is at his best as a late-night cable news equivalent of a professional wrestler: great for the vituperative character slams (“contemptible” turns out to be one of the highest counts on a Lexis Nexus search) and street-brawler facial expressions. He has Google-like recall of data but lacks the wisdom to organize it well, so it is dumped in total and the volume overwhelms where the logic is not compelling.
Even his “God” book, the product of a lifetime, he says, only resurrects ancient arguments against religion, re-states them less fully or accurately than originally formulated, but spews them with enough venom and spice to make them sell well at airport bookstands; serious philosophers and theologians didn’t take much notice so his debates ended up being with other traveling elixir showmen that we had already seen on their own book tours in other towns in the South.
Hitchens is a sideshow at the carny: someone adept at something amazing: fire-spewer, insult-monger, sword-thrower. He won’t matter for long — like Mencken, he will be read for fun because of his language and for picking fights with icons, not because of his thinking. He won’t endure as an influencer of public opinion because his thought is not deep, only his prejudices are. He is, in fact, defined most clearly even now by what he finds “contemptible:” Kissinger, his erstwhile Left colleagues, Mother Theresa, religion. Can anyone who knows well his biases spell out his arguments on any of these topics and use more than 2 or 3 minutes in doing so? No. Did he make a dent in what history will record of any of these people? No — he was a magazine writer who got rich throwing rocks at them. He might be a footnote, but no one will be wrestling with his “insights” on these or the myriad other prejudices he found he could make a career — and reputation — of displaying.
“He isn’t able to create, so he has created a life of destruction”.
Well, the fact remains that destruction is an accepted and necessary part of life; one must have demolition experts on-call to demolish old buildings and make way for the new, oncologists to destroy tumors that would otherwise grow and ravage, and, thankfully, we have C. Hitchens to tour the bible-belt and take the war of ideas directly to where unfettered ideological destruction is most in need.
And for those who might think he’s incapable of speaking without ego, or, without poignancy, I direct you to this, specifically his closing run starting at 4.24: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUSxMCtWLII
Another Hitchens admirer here. You had some good points and I liked the article for that. I am currently in the process of reading the memoir and I sensed something that materialized only once I saw your formulation of it, namely that Hitchens was a constipated creator, way too serious about what the public mistook was his true calling towards the end there, and that he regretted never actually having been in a war per-se. Though the last point is hardly valid as critique from us, since Hitchens took to the streets of the worst places and acted the journalist and activist he saw himself as.
I admire Hitchens very much. He had a creative vocabulary and is very inspiring to read, even if some of his opinions are bollocks.
Refreshing!
This is a badly needed opinion piece to balance the incredibly puffed up and fortunate career of Hitchens. I have been ploughing through this book because I live in an area where it is hard to get English books, and on the PROSE alone, not the politics, it is full of murky, muddy, ill-shaped sentences.
It is not jealousy that causes Internet blog writers to write critically about Hitchens.
His early life contains an unbearable tragedy, the suicide/murder of his mother and the man she ran off with. He was also an incredibly physically good looking young man, and so was his best friend Martin Amis. He writes of his famous friends in a sort of brown-nosing way, showing some insecurity, and the way the mother died must have impacted him concerning irrational guilt.
Sorry, but self-named socialist journalists flying around all the hot spots of the world getting well paid, staying in nice hotels, do not strike me as courageous. His courage was in the area of dealing with the childhood problems. His charisma opened doors quickly in America.
I did like the work on Kissinger, and learned a lot from that book.
The Mother Teresa writing is just an easy potshot, of course, Roman Catholic nuns are conservative, big deal. She was an ACTION person who went out and improved life for people ill and dying on the streets of India.
He had a golden world of career opportunities, and he drank himself to death, opportunities that will be forever closed to many younger writers, due to the economic disasters now unfolding.
To be fair, we can say he is quite overrated as a writer.
The hints that he himself makes about gay or not gay are not particularly honest, as inconsistent as his politics. He loves America blindly, yet says nothing good about even one federal leader.
His socialism like those in his media circles never questions the paying rate for his own vicious phrases, like junk food for our minds, pepping us up yet never sustaining nutritional needs, the money paid to him while others more talented can’t get past the front door.
It surely could not be that he mutated from a youthful “socialist” into a patriotic Iraq war-supporter? This is an old old story.
I would just say that the critique against Hitchens that he failed to write a novel is kind of terrible. Hitchens got more done in terms of social justice than any novelist, and it strikes me as deeply weird to value art over the down and dirty business of trying to make the world a better place.
I am atheist only because that’s what most people would label me. I care not what anyone believes, nor ever have, and I don’t much care for the “talking heads” that degrade anyone for personal beliefs.
I found a lot of truth in this article, some disturbing suppositions and some valid arguments. I feel the worse thing about Hitch is true for anyone who tout opinions as tangible truths (whether their underlying premises may be valid): to make wild generalizations of people-at-large is never wise. He and his comrades often make this mistake about the religious, or anyone else who may disagree with them. People are people, we can not be pigeonholed and judged. Some conclusions may be drawn from differing premises, some may be drawn from invalid premises, but to prove a sound argument is an entirely different venture. This is where a lot of professional commentators fail.
The comment about the fistfight seems odd, though the general point is hard to deny. Apart from making an entertaining read Hitchens failed very often at making convincing arguments. The bulk of his support simply seems to come from people who wanted to display their anger at religion and the religious rather than actually trying to put forth a convincing argument. No wonder “contemptible” was his most commonly used word.
As a long-time reader, supporter, and admirer of Hitch, I must say that it was nice to have my biases challenged and seen through a different lens. Rather than completely changing my mind about Christopher Hitchens or, God forbid, turn me into a defensive apologist, this article made me realize that the author’s strikes against him were in fact, a big part of his attractiveness.
He did not face discrimination, persecution, or the loss of civil rights, but had the spirit of a fighter; as a result, he went out seeking to crush those who opposed him with his mastery of the English language and seemingly-endless supply of historical knowledge, global facts, and witty anecdotes. He was always ready for a challenge, but also loved satisfying his own senses, either through sex or substances and was a modern-day embodiment of the Renaissance Man.
For these reasons, though arguably frivolous and superficial at times, there is an element of envy and attraction in all of us to live a life as rich and unique as that of Christopher Hitchens.
Click here to subscribe today and leave your comment.