Hitch in death’s big plan

Andrew Anthony

November 27, 2010

His spirit has not been diminished by the cancer diagnosis, and the chemical cocktail of treatment has not shaded the intellect or the writings of Christopher Hitchens, acclaimed author and polemicist.

I WASN’T sure what, or perhaps whom, to expect as the door opened at Christopher Hitchens’s top-floor apartment in downtown Washington. The last time I had interviewed the renowned polemicist, author, literary critic and new resident in the medical state he has called ‘‘Tumourtown’’ was in 2005. On that occasion, after a 5am finish to our extravagantly lubricated conversation, it was I who had felt the pressing need of hospital attention.

Since then there have been two dramatic changes in his circumstances. The first was the international success of his 2007 anti-theist tome God Is Not Great. After decades of acclaimed but essentially confined labour, Hitchens suddenly broke out to a mass audience, becoming arguably the global figurehead of the so-called New Atheists. Almost overnight he was upgraded from intellectual notoriety, as an outspoken supporter of the invasion of Iraq, to the business end of mainstream fame. In America, in particular, he has reached that rare position for a journalist of becoming a news story himself.

Unfortunately the news, which provided the second personal transformation, was that in June he was diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus, a malignancy whose survival ratings do not make soothing bedtime reading. As restraint is a quality for which neither Hitchens nor his critics are known, the ironies proved irresistible to many commentators. For the religiously zealous, the arch atheist suffering a mortal illness spoke of divine retribution — the unacknowledged irony being that belief in such a vindictive god served only to endorse Hitchens’s thesis.

For more secular moralists, a different kind of cosmic accountancy was at work. The celebrated drinker and smoker who once claimed that ‘‘booze and fags are happiness’’ had succumbed to a cancer most often associated with drinking and smoking. Having previously gone so far as to promote the benefits of teenage smoking, he offered a public recantation of sorts. ‘‘I might as well say to anyone watching,’’ he announced in a TV interview, ‘‘if you can hold it down on the smokes and the cocktails you may be well advised to do so.’’

Hitchens had already impregnated the story with pre-emptive meaning in his prologue to his recent memoir, Hitch-22, in which he meditated on the unpredictable incursion of death. One motivation to undertake the book, he confessed, was the need to do so before it was ‘‘too ‘late’’’. As he wrote those words, he had no knowledge of the tumour growing in his oesophagus, which has metastasised in his lymph nodes and lung. It was not until he was on a promotional tour for the book that he fell ill and was diagnosed.

The early post-chemo photographs and appearances were not encouraging. Without his trademark foppish fringe, he seemed to have undergone a Samsonian reduction. The few wisps of hair remaining mocked the mischievously boyish countenance that had duly withdrawn behind gloomy eyes. He looked old and battered. He looked like a 61-year-old man with stage-four cancer.

He had told me by email that he had good and bad days. As I’d pushed him for the interview, it was with a certain trepidation that I stood clutching an effete bottle of white wine — I assumed his usual tipple of whisky had been removed from the menu. At first, when he greeted me, I wasn’t entirely convinced it was one of his better days. Although he looked fitter and sharper than he had in those earlier images, the apartment was in darkness and he invited me in to watch the sunset. It all seemed rather forlorn.

If it triggered his cancer, burning the candle at both ends, as he recently remarked, also produced a ‘‘lovely light’’. The golden twilight over the American capital possessed its own illuminating charm, not least in the way that it seemed to recharge Hitchens. So it was that for a considerable part of the next 24 hours he held forth with unhesitating eloquence on a wealth of subjects, including the Iraq war and its likely aftermath, the global jihadist threat, his love of debate, romance, his illness and, of course, the persistently intrusive claims of religion.

When he initially became ill, Hitchens thought that he was suffering from exhaustion. He collapsed first on the New York leg of his tour, and had fluid drained from around his heart. Then an oncologist performed a biopsy. Hitchens went on to Florida, Chicago and Philadelphia, before collapsing again, this time at Boston airport. The surgeons took a lump of tumour for analysis and opened what’s known as a ‘‘window’’ in the pericardium to allow fluid drainage. Since then he has been undergoing chemotherapy at three-week intervals. The tumour has shrunk but not sufficiently for radiotherapy, and he was about to start a new course of a different cocktail of drugs.

‘‘The worst days,’’ he says, ‘‘are when you feel foggy in the head — chemobrain they call it. It’s awful because you feel boring. As well as bored. And stupid. And resigned. You don’t have any motive, which is bad. You don’t care what’s going to happen to you. That lasts sometimes two days.’’

BUT there are also some favourable signs. For instance, he hasn’t yet had any trouble swallowing, a problem frequently associated with oesophageal cancer. And his immune system remains strong: ‘‘I haven’t picked up a sneeze or anything like that.’’

Which is just as well, because Hitchens was never going to be a natural candidate for a prune juice and brown rice lifestyle. He was grateful for my white wine, but only because that’s what I drink and he was low on stocks. For himself he poured a generous measure of Johnnie Walker. None of his doctors, he says, has issued any kind of fatwa on booze, though you sense he probably hasn’t demanded a ruling.

Whatever his health regime, it doesn’t appear to have affected his work levels. The pugnacious weekly Slate column, the far-reaching literary essays for The Atlantic, and the Vanity Fair dispatches are all filed on time. And he continues to participate in public debates. Last month in New York he sliced through the Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan’s problematising evasions with stinging precision, and today (Melbourne time) he is to take on Tony Blair in Toronto. He disputes his industriousness on the grounds that he is not currently writing a book. ‘‘I spend a lot of time asleep or lying down.’’ Yet the spacious apartment he shares with his wife, the writer Carol Blue, and their 18-year-old daughter, Antonia, shows few signs of recuperative comforts, with its bare floorboards, sparse furniture and teetering stalagmites of books.

He has said before that his life is his writing, which includes priority over his family, but perhaps it would be more accurate to say that his life is an argument in which writing takes the lead role. It’s notable that there’s scarcely any mention of his wife or his children or former lovers in his memoir.
He stated in the book that this was out of respect for others’ privacy. If he had named one woman, he adds, he would have had to go into detail about them all. ‘‘Couldn’t do it selectively, it would lead to nothing but pain.’’

Still, the absence of women leaves the impression of a life consciously determined by the intellect, rather than haphazardly shaped by emotions. He shakes his head. ‘‘Even with all the advantages of retrospect, and a lot of witnesses dead and gone, you can’t make your life look as if you intended it or you were consistent. All you can show is how you dealt with various hands.’’

In America it has been suggested by some religious types that his condition could prompt a revision of his atheism. It’s not a hypothesis to which he grants much respect. ‘‘So now I know that there’s another life in my body that can’t outlive me but can kill me, it’s the perfect moment to gratefully acknowledge that I’m a product of a cosmic design? Who thinks up these arguments? Actually it’s an insulting question: ‘I hear you’re dying. Well, wouldn’t it be a good time to get rid of your beliefs?’

‘‘Try it on them and see how they would like it. ‘Christian, right? Cancer of the tits?’ ‘Well, yes, since you ask.’ ‘Well, can I suggest you now drop all that tripe?’’’

In Britain, I say, the notion that he will undergo some kind of deathbed conversion has minimal traction. What you find more often is the accusation that the New Atheism, as expounded by Hitchens and his fellow bestsellers, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett, is a ‘‘militant’’ or even ‘‘fundamentalist’’ attack on the numinous and the unknowable.

Hitchens once wrote a line that has almost gained the status of philosophical epigram or scientific dictum: ‘‘What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.’’ Although it echoes Wittgenstein’s famous injunction regarding the ineffable — ‘‘Whereof we cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’’ — Hitchens’s version is less a ‘‘no entry’’ sign than a civic reminder to place rubbish in the bin.

In fact, you could say that in God Is Not Great Hitchens ignored his own advice by conducting lengthy theological and historical research to assemble his case. His beef, in any event, is not really against faith itself, but against the way that all faiths are compelled to make irrational demands on believers and non-believers alike.

At heart he’s incurably in love with the dialectic. He cut his teeth on dialectical materialism as a teenage Trotskyist, and it was the analytical method that eventually put paid to any allegiance to the political madness. The past 40 years have amounted to a long and serpentine political journey. Along the way, he says, ‘‘I learnt that very often the most intolerant and narrow-minded people are the ones who congratulate themselves on their tolerance and open-mindedness. Amazing. My conservative friends look at me and say, ‘Welcome to the club. What took you so long?’’’

The hinge events were the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington. He had previously held positions that were unpopular on the left but his support for the toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan proved to be a step too far for his anti-imperialist comrades.

Hitchens genuinely believes radical or jihadist Islam to be an existential threat to civilisation. First because it is a pronounced enemy of free speech and social liberty and has succeeded in intimidating civilians across ‘‘an extraordinary number of countries in Europe’’ and the rest of the world. And second, he says, ‘‘because it has potential access to weapons of mass destruction’’. In the end, he argues, there are no pain-free options. You have to choose which future regret you’re going to have.

‘‘I was at a Hezbollah rally in Beirut about 2 years ago,’’ he says. ‘‘Very striking. Everyone should go. But of the many things that impressed me about it, having the mushroom cloud as the party flag in an election campaign was the main one. You wouldn’t want to look back and think, I wish I’d noticed that being run up. Now I can give you all the reasons that it’s bombast on their part. Still, I know which regret I’d rather have.’’

There appear to be two main criticisms of this stance. Either people think he’s a bonkers Islamophobe or they believe such antagonistic talk only serves to create the problem it seeks to prevent. Hitchens is contemptuous of the former, but scathing of the latter. He says those who tell him to tread more softly believe the price of not doing so is more violence. ‘‘Oh I see, so you’re always aware when you’re contesting the holders of this view of the threat that lies behind it?

Would you care for their opinions if it wasn’t for that? Or are you telling me you’d be reading their stuff just for the sheer pleasure of it? I don’t think so. If you say that this looks like war, you’re accused of liking it. Not true.’’

He has said he experienced ‘‘a feeling of exhilaration’’ while watching the World Trade Centre collapse on September 11. ‘‘Here we are then,’’ he later recalled thinking, ‘‘in a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate. Fine. We will win and they will lose.’’

He says the exhilaration was born of a sudden sense of clarity. ‘‘What I felt is that we’d been suffering from all this for some time. And yet people’s main interest seemed to be in ignoring it or denying it, or if they were politicians or soldiers, running away from it: abandoning Somalia, leaving Afghanistan to rot, trying to subsume Islamism into multiculturalism. I thought: until yesterday, they knew they were at war, and we didn’t. And now we do.’’

The divorce from the left was made absolute by the war in Iraq. The problem with Hitchens’s inductive reasoning about Iraq is that it did not and could not take into account future outcomes — namely the relative likelihood of death and destruction. In the light of what unfolded in the wake of the occupation, these were the matters that I wanted to put to him the following day.

First, though, there was dinner. We walked to a restaurant where Hitchens knows the barman and the barman knows what Hitchens drinks, and I asked Hitchens if his cancer diagnosis had altered his political outlook. He looked mystified; I explained that he used to say that he woke up angry, full of disgust at the world. Was it still possible to feel so strongly about external enemies when the internal one had taken such malevolent root in his body?

‘‘It’s the sort of alternative that doesn’t present itself to you,’’ he says. ‘‘You don’t think, ‘Why do I care when I could be thinking about my daunting nemesis?’’’

The banality of cancer seems to irk him almost as much as its lethality. Lacking any dialectical substance, it affords few opportunities to escape platitude or avoid cliche. It’s a big subject, but it’s essentially small talk, and Hitchens’s style requires the elevated registers of the epic and the ironic. Anything less is like asking a high-wire artist to perform his act at ground level.

WE REPAIR back to the apartment for a nightcap or two, and I fear it is I, the ostensibly well one, who crashes first. The following morning Hitchens rises late, as is his routine nowadays, and after working for an hour or two, reconvenes our discussion over lunch. We sit in the dining room with the window open on a distinctly chilly autumn afternoon. He’s wearing just a thin shirt, while I shiver in a thick pullover. Not for the first time, I feel a twinge of pity for that tumour. Does it realise what it’s up against?

A few days before we met, Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s former deputy, was sentenced to death in Iraq for suppressing Shiite religious parties during the Baath rule. This surely wasn’t the bright future for Iraq that the trenchant secularist and opponent of capital punishment had in mind back in 2003. He agrees that it’s depressing news. Nor is he confident that things won’t deteriorate after the coalition has departed.

‘‘The best one can do is say that we’ve given the Iraqis the chance to produce a constitution, independent courts and a free press. They can keep it if they want, but the parties of God may veto that. Unless we’re directly requested by a functioning government backed by a functioning parliamentary vote to stay on, we have to leave it to them now.’’

So if the parties of God gain control, Iran’s influence increases and human rights further decline, will it still all have been worth the loss of life? ‘‘Oh yes, I definitely think so,’’ he replies without vacillation, ‘‘and not just for the humanitarian reasons. There are all kinds of reasons that don’t get discussed and are harder to quantify.’’

He points out something he says opponents of the war always fail to mention: the success of an autonomous Kurdistan. But he also says that the discovery of oil around Baghdad has transformed the material basis for political control. ‘‘There’s a petrochemical reason for federalism now. If the oil laws were enforced properly by province, it could be as rich as Kuwait. The Saudis and the Iranians don’t want a revived Iraqi oil industry because it will undercut them. You could have a modern Middle Eastern country or a parties-of-God failed state.’’

The point, I say, is that you cannot make countries take the right path.

‘‘No, again, since one is always going to regret something, you have to decide in advance what it will be. OK, I’m glad we’re not having an inquest now, as we would be, into why we allowed a Rwanda or a Congo to develop on the Gulf, an imploding Iraq right in front of our eyes, a vortex of violence and meltdown, a whole society beggared and fractured and traumatised, waiting to fall to pieces.’’

The problem with this picture, of course, is that many people believe that it exactly describes what has taken place since the invasion. Hitchens maintains that the situation is better than it would otherwise have been, and to the extent that it’s worse, the responsibility lies with al-Qaeda.

‘‘Trying to destroy the Christian community, strategy of tension, trying to start a civil war,’’ he says, listing al-Qaeda’s nihilistic program, ‘‘and people act as if those casualties should be on my conscience. I won’t have that. For one thing, it absolves those who have done it of their guilt.’’

He leaves the room briefly to deal with a domestic issue and I take the opportunity to close the window. When he returns, he opens it with a knowing smile. ‘‘I’ll bring you an overcoat,’’ he says.
We continue talking for another couple of hours. In the end, it’s only my need to catch a plane that brings the discussion to a close. With Hitchens, though, the argument will continue, first with himself and then, if needs be, with the world. His intemperate style is not to everyone’s taste, but as he has often remarked, you can’t produce light without heat. To those of us who admire his clarity of thought, if not always his conclusions, it is indeed a lovely light. And I’m pleased to say that on a cold November day in Tumourtown, it showed little sign of fading.

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