Some notes left over from my brief review of Hitch-22:

Oscar Wilde’s fatal phrase: ‘the problem with socialism is that it wastes too many evenings on “meetings”.’ (149)

Expense accounts: he wrote a story which led to the imprisonment of a corrupt mayor. ‘I’ve passed your Dundee expenses (wrote the finance director) but I couldn’t help noticing that almost half the bills were for cocktails. I don’t think any newspaper is entitled to this kind of loyalty’ (151).

He had two wives, but except for the name of one of them we know nothing; nor about his children, except for a son he took to
Iraq, and a ‘delightful daughter’ he mentions in the acknowledgements who gave expert assistance to a ‘techno peasant’ (424). Sometimes his failures as a father ‘gives me inexpressible pain’ (399) – the only time he’s inexpressible about anything, I reckon!. We know more about his brother Peter – and their ideological differences (Peter is a committed Christian). Nor about his undergraduate studies at Oxford (but a lot about far-left political debates)

There’s a brilliant chapter on his friend Salman Rushdie and another on Iraq (Saddam Hussein was further down the track of creating WMDs than Hans Blix ever discovered.)

His ‘dear friends’ include(d) – for longer or shorter periods – Martin
Amis, W H Auden, Saul Bellow, Noam Chomsky, James Fenton, Norman Mailer,
Salman Rushdie, Susan Sontag, and Gore Vidal. He had a deteriorating
relationship with Palestinian academic Edward Said (‘I did not go to his
funeral, nor was I invited’).

The Kurdish city of Halabja had been hit by Iraqi chemical weapons in March of 1988, losing over 5000 of its citizens in just one afternoon (293)… Saddam Hussein had a whole Koran written in his own blood (297).

Quotes to give one pause, like: ‘I hate the idea that the dispossession of one people should be held hostage to the victimhood of another, as it is in the Middle East and as it was in eastern Europe (401).

Hitchens has the same problem with both heaven and hell… writes about the horrible ‘announcement that the party was continuing forever, and that I was forbidden to leave. Whether it was a hellishly bad party or a party that was perfectly heavenly in every respect, the moment that it became eternal and compulsory would be the precise moment that it began to pall’ (331) (which betrays his ignorance about eternal life beginning here and now, and then being beyond time (and moments)).

I like his quote from John Maynard Keynes: ‘When the facts change then my opinion changes; and you sir?’

****

Do I Contradict Myself?
By JENNIFER SENIOR
June 10, 2010

If anyone in this world is positioned to write a toothsome memoir, it’s Christopher Hitchens. He’s gone from international socialist to Iraq war enthusiast; he has a moving personal story and is a pasha of vice. His present solar system of intimates includes James Fenton and Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan; his past included Susan Sontag and Edward Said (both deceased) and Gore Vidal (still alive, but banished to a growing Kuiper belt of discards and debris). He’s gone to a New York brothel with Martin Amis and delivered bluejeans to Polish dissidents; he’s gotten smacked on the tush by Margaret Thatcher and beaten up by thugs in Beirut. He argues ruthlessly and writes like a drunken angel, making targets of subjects as various as Mother Teresa, Henry Kissinger, the Clintons and God. (In 2007, he published the best seller “God Is Not Great” — a title Rushdie ruefully deemed one word too long.)

The problem is that if you’re a public figure, especially a writer as extravagantly colorful and prolific as Hitchens (he’s written 11 books, 4 pamphlets and 4 collections of essays, and today appears regularly in Slate, The Atlantic Monthly and Vanity Fair), you may scarcely be aware of how much of your own store of tales has dribbled out over the years, like a sack of flour with a small hole in it. This makes the business of writing your memoir much harder. And it turns out that much of the autobiographical pith of “Hitch-22” has appeared elsewhere, most notably in Ian Parker’s excellent 2006 profile of Hitchens in The New Yorker, and it’s surprising how little to it that Hitchens now adds — how little, indeed, is in this book that’s generally considered the lymph and marrow of a traditional reminiscence. We hear almost nothing of Hitchens’s two marriages or three children, and he certainly never discusses falling in love. (Though he talks about his experiments on the Wilde side at university — as well as at boarding school, even if those were abruptly brought to an end by a snitch “with the unimprovable name of Peter Raper.”) We do hear about his social life and dearest friendships, and those portraits and set pieces are some of the most pleasurable in the book. This is a man who’s cut such a fat swath through the smart set that a dinner with William Styron essentially gets relegated to a footnote, as does the revelation that he learned the identity of Deep Throat long before the public did, by pestering Nora Ephron, Carl Bernstein’s ex-wife (in fact, you would not believe the number of delectable footnotes in this book; the devil, apparently, is in the asterisks).

But we learn little about the friendships of Hitchens’s that soured as he began his political metamorphoses, and we hear practically nothing about his fondness for drink, though he does treat us to a brief audit of his intake (at least one bottle of wine and two slugs of “Mr. Walker’s amber restorative” per day). I understand that Hitchens is probably bored with people’s obsession with his boozing, but this is his memoir, and apart from his swift and spirited dispatches, he’s best known for his swift dispatch of spirits. Aren’t we entitled, in the name of science, to know how he does it, if the question of why is too dull and unprofitable to explore?

None of this means that “Hitch-22” isn’t marvelous in its own way. But it’s probably a misnomer to call it a memoir, and easier to enjoy if one thinks of it as a collection of essays instead. Our protagonist is a bit of a disembodied brain, highly capable of poignancy but not exactly introspection or, as is welcome in memoirs, overwhelming indiscretion. (Would it be primitive to say that he seems so English in this way, though he’s become an American citizen?) When he shares a tender memory, his preference is to quickly convert it into a larger political observation; for him, politics remains the most crucial sphere of moral and intellectual life. At the beginning, for instance, he draws a compact, empathetic picture of his mother, who struggled to make a glamorous life for herself in the British naval towns where his father was based, and who would one day run off to Athens with a lover and take her life in a suicide pact. (I was particularly moved by his story about her one attempt to take a solo road trip, only to return the next day with her neck in a brace, “having been painfully rear-ended by some idiot before she had even properly embarked on the treat that was rightfully hers.”) Yet only a few pages later, when he recounts his efforts to arrange her burial in Greece, he freely acknowledges his trip was as political as it was personal. He recognizes that the coroner in his mother’s case was a famous villain in the military junta’s machine; he makes reporting side-trips to talk to student protesters; at the cemetery where he lays his mother to rest, he stops to pile carnations on the grave of George Seferis, the poet and national hero.

Something similar happens when Hitchens discusses his Jewish heritage, which he discovered only in 1987. (This, too, his mother kept a secret, in addition to her terrible pain.) He starts with an affecting visit to his maternal grandmother, to whom he “somewhat awkwardly uttered the salute ‘Shalom!’ ” as he took his leave; but soon enough he uses his genealogical exploration to make the more brutal, unsentimental point that “a great number of Stalin’s enforcers and henchmen in Eastern Europe were Jews.”

Even when he was a young man, Hitchens’s bête noire was Stalin. Born in 1949, the author came of age during that heady moment of “revolution within the revolution,” that time when Trotskyism had captured the imaginations of an international class of students, intellectuals and organizers. He was a natural soixante-huitard, a Labour Party member and anti-Vietnam War demonstrator in advance of 1968 itself, and one can feel his enthusiasm for that era still. “If you have never yourself had the experience of feeling that you are yoked to the great steam engine of his­tory,” he says, “then allow me to inform you that the conviction is a very intoxicating one.”

As soon as we leave Oxford, however, and follow him on his tour through the revolutionist’s Fodor’s (he goes to Havana and Prague, Poland and Portugal), we begin to hear about the ways that international socialism isn’t quite delivering on its promise, either from his young perspective or from the perspective of disillusioned comrades he meets along the way. We also follow Hitchens to the Iraq of 1976, which he now more or less admits to have gotten wrong — “I should have registered the way that people almost automatically flinched at the mention of the name Sad dam Hussein” — and we follow him back there after Desert Storm, when he very much wished to get it right. And there’s a whole chapter about Salman Rushdie, whose involuntary fugitive status occasions a moment in 1989 when the personal and the political truly do inter twine, with Hitchens looking aghast at those on the left who, under the guise of multi cultural sensitivity, were unwilling to condemn the ayatollah’s fatwa.

By the time 9/11 comes along, we are hardly surprised to hear the author describe its barbarism as “fascism with an Islamic face” — a phrase he coined back then that has since evolved into the blunter, catchall term “Islamo fascism.” Little by little, he has been setting us up for his divorce from the left, and his surrender to the conviction that “the only historical revolution with any verve left in it, or any example to offer others, was the American one.” Some will find his version of events sympathetic; others will find it a cliché, the inevitable rightward drift of an old Trotskyist; and still others will violently quarrel with his tangents and disquisitions, as Hitchens so often makes one do (he may be smarter than most of us, but when he’s hellbent on making a point, he’ll haul out straw men one would just as soon leave to the cows). Personally, I didn’t lose all patience with him until the end, when he claims that although he wanted the “moral arithmetic” to add up so that he could remain on “the ‘left’ side of the column,” he couldn’t when it came to Bosnia: “I was brought to the abrupt admission that, if the majority of my former friends got their way about non intervention, there would be another genocide on European soil.” Perhaps this was true of the intellectual left, but it was Bill Clinton, a center-left president Hitchens detested for his opportunism and slipperiness, who finally ordered the troops in, and he did so over a squall of conservative objection, with 29 Republican senators voting against the intervention, versus only one Democrat. (How’s that arithmetic?)

The truth is, by Hitchens’s standards, his examination of how he and the left parted company is surprisingly un strident and nonpolemical. It is, in fact, almost melancholic. He’s not claiming with his typical adamantine force that the balance sheets work out. And perhaps the strongest theme in “Hitch-22” is just this — that sometimes the balance sheets are an unholy mess. From the time he was young, Hitchens says, he’s tried to keep dueling notions in intellectual and emotional equipoise. His need to manage contradictions came early, with an exotic spirit for a mother and an embittered Tory for a dad. By the time he got to Oxford, he was quite accustomed to “keeping two sets of books,” passing out leaflets at car plants by day and racing off in fancier dress to the Gridiron Club by night. When he began his work at The New Statesman, he realized that “journalism was the ideal profession for someone like myself who was drawn to the Janus-faced mode of life,” in that one had to seduce both sides to hear the whole story.

So yes, Christopher Hitchens may long to be a cogent man of reason, and he can certainly be a pitiless adversary. But he knows there are two sides to any decent match, and it’s touching, in “Hitch-22,” to see how often he’ll race to the other side of the court to return his own serve. Which may explain why, though he tries to be difficult, he’s so hard to dislike.

Jennifer Senior is a contributing editor at New York magazine.

****

“This lacerating howling moment” makes your hair stand on end. Hitchens will go on to say of prep school that “it was probably good for me to be deprived of my adoring mother”. She had taught him to read, not taken a liking to any of his girlfriends and been determined that he would do well in life. “If there is going to be an upper-class in this country,” she had declared in a row with his severe ex-naval father “then Christopher is going to be in it.” “My poor Yvonne” he calls her; even “Mummy”. This is the only woman he refers to with tenderness in the book

It is the Hitch taking us into his personal life. But not for long. Even as he arrives in Greece the rule of its military junta was being challenged and soon his notebooks filled up with first-hand accounts of torture victims and defiant students, accounts he will relay back to the paper for which he writes in London.

Hitchens enjoys deserved renown as an outstanding commentator, debater and wit. This engaging memoir takes us along the rollercoaster ride of his opinions and career. He has never lacked commitment, but that commitment has ranged wider than most, from the extreme Left — years with the International Socialists — to the extreme Right, as a proud defender of George W. Bush’s Iraq war. Most recently he has found new convictions as a proclaimed atheist and enemy of what he terms “fascism with an Islamic face”.

As becomes a polemicist, his opinions are fuelled more by his heart than his head, and it is the triumph of this book to make clear how much passion dominates his attitudes. It is passion that triggers the contempt and derision that he feels towards those who disagree with him. His early and surprising claim that Richard Llewellyn’s novel How Green was My Valley was “the single book that most altered my life” suggests its story of the South Wales mining community was what first opened his heart to the case for Marxism.

Speaking of his anger at America’s Vietnam war he even grows aggressive towards the reader … “you should f***ing well have been there and felt it for yourself”. Where exactly? Hitchens was still at boarding school — The Perse, in Cambridge — taking time off at Easter to join the Aldermaston marches. And when he speaks much later of the September 11 atrocity, it is with seething, explosive rage: “Before the close of that day, I had sworn a sort of oath to remain coldly furious until these hateful forces had been brought to a most strict and merciless account.” Coldly furious he remains.

But there is far more in this engaging book than fury. Hitchens is a vain man but he has much to be vain about: intelligence, wit, style, charm, a prodigious memory and a fluency in debate that brings packed houses to wherever he expounds his views. He declares his favourite word in the English language to be “library” and he has indeed read and remembers a very great deal. Auden, Dawkins, Clare, Orwell and Joyce are cited on the first two pages. Yet this is not a bookish life: Hitchens has been out and about wherever the action is: Prague, Poland, Sarajevo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, sometimes arrested, often duffed up. This is no coward’s tale.

It all began traditionally enough: lower-middle-class parents scrimped and saved to send him first to a brutal prep school, then public school. Hitchens remains sensitive about not having money and perpetually grateful that sacrifices had to be made. It sets him at odds with those who treat their education as an entitlement. But he was clever, won prizes and made his way. At each of his schools he attracted male attention: “Blue-eyed boy, small for his age, with rather feminine eye lashes.” The charms still held sway when he got to Balliol College, Oxford, where he dallied with two who would become ministers in Margaret Thatcher’s Cabinet. “For this reason I can’t really give any more names.” Pity about that.

At Oxford he began to live parallel lives; recruited to the International Socialists he would spend time leafleting at factory gates, selling the Socialist Worker outside car plants, then spend the evening consorting with the likes of Maurice Bowra, Isaiah Berlin and John Sparrow, with calls on Christopher Hill and Noam Chomsky along the way. Donkey jacket by day, dinner jacket for Union debates — and an expedition to Cuba in the vacation.

He moved silkily between both: arguing with the Trots and drinking fine wine with the Gridiron Club. He is unapologetic for any ambiguity, and it prefigures his ability to be at ease in any company.

A housemaster had suggested he was “in some danger of ending up as a pamphleteer” and he happily takes the hint. Moving to London in the 1970s he joined a circle of writers/journalists/columnists who constructed a career from reviewing, writing books, reporting from around the world and fetching up in town at legendary Friday lunches. Here moved the luminaries of literary London: the novelists Julian Barnes, Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, the critic Clive James, the historian Robert Conquest and the poet James Fenton. Later Salman Rushdie was of the crew. It was relentlessly male company, sharing a boyish pleasure in word games, jokes, teases and plenty of drink.

These were friendships that mattered and still do. Fenton, Amis and Rushdie each get a chapter to themselves. Hitchens writes of these attachments with almost girlish devotion. Indeed he writes of his love for Martin Amis as “the most heterosexual relationship one young man can have with another”, adding for emphasis “he was more blond than Jagger … but his sensuous lower lip was crucial”. They would visit a brothel together as research for Amis’s novel Money. We learn, almost by accident, that Hitchens is married and has three children.

In the 1980s he moved to America, first New York then Washington, where he still lives, writing regularly for The Nation and now Vanity Fair. On earlier visits the country’s energy and opportunities had delighted him. He began to appreciate the Jeffersonian settlement. What he calls “his gradual enlightenment” as to the American ways with freedom and tolerance was realised when the American Civil Liberties Union actually opposed the banning of a Nazi Party parade. He liked the women there, too: the “English rose” left the initiative to the male. “American girls, I was to find, were more . . . forward.”

Throughout the Eighties he wrote vociferously against the Reagan regime, and then extended his loathing to Bill Clinton. In 1999 his old loyalty to friends deserted him when he betrayed a White House staffer, Sidney Blumenthal, who had unwisely gossiped about Monica Lewinsky. Hitchens omits to tell this story but the incident lost him many admirers. He quarrelled with others, too: Edward Said, another of those who has a chapter to himself, did not remain a friend.

September 11 clinched things: Hitchens decided to come off the fence. Michael Chertoff, Secretary of Homeland Security, nudged along the papers that made him an American citizen and the ceremony took place at the Jefferson Memorial on his 58th birthday. “A whole new terrain of struggle had just opened up in front of me … I took it upon myself to defend my adopted country from insult and calumny.” But there was already another identity: in 1987 he had learnt that his mother had been Jewish. Always thorough in following up a lead, he went in search of his ancestry and found someone who had been a communist in 1930s Palestine and survived Auschwitz, only to become a colonel in postwar communist Poland. He had tracked down the origins his mother had kept hidden. In sum, he is now an American Jewish intellectual.

At the end Hitchens debates the contradictions of his absolute certainties — on religion, on the war against what he was the first to term Islamo-fascism — and the duty he feels to engage in intelligent self-doubt. It is his Catch-22. He dismisses various attempts to define him: “gadfly”, “maverick”, too trivial; “contrarian”, irritating; “oppositionist”, barely acceptable. His final insight is that because he loves an argument he will often protract one simply for its own sake rather than concede even a small point. Within this book we learn why: it displays the best of his persuasive skills, the sharpness of his dismissive put-downs and something else too: self-knowledge.

Hitch 22: A Memoir by Christopher Hitchens (Atlantic, £20; Buy this book; 352pp)

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/
non-fiction/article7131889.ece

****

Also essential reading: the Wikipedia articles on Christopher Hitchens and his brother Peter Hitchens

Rowland Croucher
July 2010