The posthumous intellectual reputation of Christopher
Hitchens still comes under regular assault: sometimes ‘more in sorrow
than anger’ blah blah, sometimes with the avowed intention of nailing some lasting badge of shame onto his collected writings. No-one can be surprised by this, since he was consistently repudiated
by aggrieved ex-co-thinkers of the left while he was alive – a little bit at
first because of his loathing for Clinton, then a lot on account of his advocacy
for the ousting of Saddam.
Unlike some admirers of Hitchens’ writing I don’t find any
of the attacks made on either side of his death to be outrageous, indecent etc.
Hitchens could certainly dish it out, and didn’t tarry much if the target of
his wrath was recently deceased or clearly en route to the terminus. He seemed to
feel these things needed saying regardless, and that it was ‘important to have
the right enemies’, which will tend to keep you speaking freely. (Also - does it need saying? - he wasn't right about every last thing, and not everything he wrote was end-to-end brilliant; and if you wrote as much as Hitchens did then there will, and must, be blood.)
Evidently his skin stayed thick and his wit keen during the cancer.
Recently I watched an interview he gave to Laurie Taylor for Sky Arts in 2011,
in which Taylor put the familiar question of whether Hitchens was bothered
about the kind of intellectual company he kept post-Iraq (also, unspoken but
clear, whether he missed the warm exchange of fraternal regards with Chomsky,
Tariq Ali et al.) ‘It takes a lot to make me cry’, Hitchens shot back,
confidently if a tad wearily, before Taylor could complete the thought.
A while back I was given and enjoyed reading Hitchens’
Mortality, the short book of thoughts and notes made as he neared the end. All
of it is expressed so candidly, searchingly, elegantly that I would hope to
read nothing else of cancer until the great history to come of how its cure was
found... (That said, I do wish I could take a razorblade and chop out Mortality’s
slack preface by Graydon Carter, who – perhaps imagining himself as generous as
was Time to Paul Claudel – describes Hitchens’ opinions on Iraq as ‘curious’,
twice in the space of a few pages.)
With Mortality I must also regretfully accept this is the final
Hitchens. I have come to terms, too, with a longstanding feeling that after
September 11 2001 it just wasn’t – couldn’t be – as much fun to read him as it
had been Before. (One more reason to wish Osama Bin Laden a hot place in a
dream Hades.) The retooling of Hitchens’ regular Slate column under the banner of 'Fighting Words' only confirmed that he now felt there was only one
political issue worth writing (and voting) on. It was needful, and he did it well,
though the fierceness of the disagreements on that single issue seemed
always to be lagging behind actual conditions ‘on the ground’. After 2001 Hitchens did begin to write
more about literature than before, which made for diversity, and was all highly erudite, but
not really the thing that had made him a must-read in the journals where I first
discovered his stuff...
That’s it, see. When I now sit and conjure up the pleasure
of reading Hitchens it’s all from the 1990s: his Nation 'Minority Reports' warning
and urging over Bosnia (‘for the last time...’), or even (lest we forget) welcoming a
Labour leader he first thought ‘unbearably Lite.’ Or his long LRB essays, bashing
Isaiah Berlin over Vietnam or hailing Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost.
His interviewing Mailer, for that matter, in the New Left Review, and stressing the
great man’s adherence to ‘an idea of the Left’ – an effort that now feels like less
of the absolute essence.
I suppose what I hate most is starting to sound the slightest bit like George
Galloway, who, in one of his attempts to debate Hitchens over Iraq, came out with
a notably pathetic sorrow-over-anger spiel lamenting whatever befell the Hitchens
he once loved - the guy who had such a store of snappy, quotable, unimprovably
moralistic one-liners about (mostly American) political creeps, phonies and psychopaths?
It’s a mawkish tendency in myself, I know. You have to wipe your
nose and move on (though not MoveOn.) There needs to be ‘a nuanced goodbye to all that.’
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