Hitch-22
Christopher Hitchens
424 pp. Twelve of Hatchette Book Group $14.99
Christopher Hitchens was never quiet for a long enough time to allow anyone to ask him any questions about himself. Readers never had a chance to inquire about how his ardent and militant atheism reflected his Jewish heritage. No one was afforded the opportune moment to probe the former anti-Vietnam crusader’s personal transformation into one of the greatest intellectual supporters of the Iraq War. There was never time to ask, because the self-described “contrarian” preempted every question with a thoroughly developed answer.
Unfortunately the prolifically vociferous Hitchens has now perished (certainly, as Hitchens would scoff, not “passed” into another realm). If his viewpoint is to be believed, Hitchens’ voice has been extinguished, never to reverberate excitable eardrums again. Thus, society is now presented with the first genuine opportunity to examine the life of the man who sought to make so much of it.
Some of what the world had always assumed was corroborated: Hitchens loved to drink and smoke, and he considered himself an Orwellian Leftist to his dying day. He abhorred Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton, and Mother Teresa. In fact, Hitch-22 tells the familiar reader scant new information about Hitchens himself, save for a two and a half page Vanity Fair-style “Marcel Proust Questionnaire.” Those looking for more insight into the personality of “Hitch” now know his favorite bird is the owl and his favorite flower is garlic. And even some of that personal reflection is not illuminating – no one needed to be told that Hitch overused the word “perhaps” or disliked stupidity.
Sadly, Hitchens rarely allowed himself to truly explore the depths of his wits. Instead, in the author’s memoir, readers are treated primarily to an extended tract on Hitch’s opinions of others, from his loving mother and her deranged second husband who arranged their double suicide to contemporaries such as Kingsley and Martin Amis. Several personas are granted entire chapters during which the reader may forget whether they are perusing an autobiography or a collection of author profiles. Even through his attempt at introspection, Hitchens could not help but opine and remark upon the careers of James Fenton, Salman Rushdie, and Edward Said.
None of this is meant to contend that Hitchens fails in the autobiographer’s duty to paint a self-portrait. After all, he does manage to cover a wide range of topics and never attempts the preaching that normally runs rampant in his works. (See god Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything). Actually, Hitchens barely touches on his role in the “War on Religion,” even though his zeal is at a level that even Rick Perry would have to admit diminishes that of President Obama.
Christopher Hitchens never tried to be a rabble-rouser. Despite the fact that the world will remember his antitheism, Hitchens never considered his self-governing philosophy as a crusade against God. Rather, he was a man of conviction. He describes how he disagreed with the intellectual merits of several Thatcherian policies, and “didn’t really like anything about her” except “the most important thing about her, which was that she was a ‘conviction politician.’” As a vehemently radical member of the Labour Party, he forced himself to admit “the rodent slowly stirring in [his] viscera: the uneasy but unbanishable feeling that on some essential matters she might be right.” Hitch stood for nothing but what he believed to be the truth, eventually forcing him to leave the party of his development and be shunned by many of his friends.
Hitch did not tell us everything about his inner soul (although the author would of course reject such a description), perhaps because he never stopped thinking about others long enough to ponder his own existence. After all, he did seem to have the uncanny ability to meet everyone there is to meet. More so than any journalist in the modern day, he drank with the best of them. Weeks after his death, publications still print varying personal obituaries, each explaining proudly, “How I knew Hitch.”
Christopher – never Chris, he assures – became something of a cult of personality among the Religious Right, where it became chic for each priest or minister to outdo the next in his defense of Hitch’s atheism. Although the religious critic never missed his monthly debates on the topic of God, he noted this hypocrisy by refusing to attend the national “Everybody Pray for Hitchens Day.” The autobiography provides a long history of Hitch’s rejection of hypocrisy. He saw Fidel Castro’s distortion of socialism in person and reviled the thought that supposed “humanitarians” on the Left could stand by and defend Saddam Hussein’s continued persecution of Iraqis.
In The Economist’s review of the tract, the newspaper sardonically hopes that “if Mr Hitchens can stay off the booze and do some serious thinking, his real autobiography, in 20 years’ time or so, should be a corker.” Ultimately, it did not matter whether or not Hitchens controlled his vices, as his long career as a smoker left him with unmanageable esophageal cancer. The world never got the “corker” it deserves and was left to read Hitch-22 as the author’s final contribution.
At least, after confirming the terminality of his disease, Hitchens provided his audience with an ominous preface that does better in introspection. In it, he notes how his pages are saturated with the theme of death as if he knew the end was near. Where he could not succeed in analyzing his life, Hitchens performed what he did best: analyzed written work. Christopher Hitchens begins this memoir by conflating death and writing. The author fought death all of his life, usually working toward the postponement of deaths of others. In this final case, Hitch was forced to accept he could not postpone that of himself.
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