My Intellectual Heroes, Part 2

Christopher Hitchens

What have you read that made you think, “My God, I never considered it that way!” and now you can’t imagine a world where you didn’t know that? This series is about people who are, collectively, my North Star. I can only dream of one of them up there in Author Heaven, reading something I wrote and saying, “Well, that doesn’t stink.”

This week it’s Christopher Hitchens. I had a signed copy of God is Not Great, which I treasured and now I can’t find it. Oh well. Maybe it’ll turn up.

Hitchens seems to have been as much of a born genius with words as Mozart was with music. In his autobiography, Hitch-22, he says of his babyhood:

For example, noticing that I had skipped the baby-talk stage and gone straight to speaking in complete sentences (even if sometimes derivative ones such as, according to family legend, "Let's all go and have a drink at the club").

This preternatural talent lasted his whole life. Graydon Carter, at the time editor of The New York Observer for which Hitchens wrote, said:

I can recall a lunch in 1991, when I was editing The New York Observer, and he and Aimée Bell, his longtime editor, and I got together for a quick bite at a restaurant on Madison, no longer there. Christopher’s copy was due early that afternoon. Pre-lunch canisters of scotch were followed by a couple of glasses of wine during the meal and a similar quantity of post-meal cognac. That was just his intake. After stumbling back to the office, we set him up at a rickety table and with an old Olivetti, and in a symphony of clacking he produced a 1,000-word column of near perfection in under half an hour.

But there are other great writers and not all are my heroes (even if I do admire them). Is there something unique about Hitchens’ brand of writing and speaking, or is it merely that he’s the best? Well, he was. He made “Hitchslap” a generic term for a putdown so devastating that there’s no recovery from it.

Here he is delivering one on the subject of the Danish newspaper cartoons, which inspired a worldwide controversy on the legality of mocking Islam:

As with Roger Ebert, Hitchens being my hero is not because I always agree with him (I don’t on Henry Kissinger, for instance). He’s my hero because of the quality of his thought, and its consistency. He started out as a Trotsky-ist, and ended up defending the Iraq war and speaking out against radical Islam. He didn’t leave progressivism; progressivism left him.

Here is a tiny sample of the issues he was involved with. First, a part that you’ve probably never heard of, unless you’ve read his memoir.

Yvonne

You probably know Hitchens through his brilliant attacks on organized religion, the Clintons, Mother Theresa, Saddam Hussein, and all the other villains who aroused his scorn. You probably haven’t heard about his mother.

I don’t think that every writer’s private life needs to be explained. People who plumb the depths of Jane Austen’s life to “explain” Sense and Sensibility are wasting their time and their Ph.D. advisor’s. Nonetheless, there’s a chapter in Hitch-22 on the death of his mother that might explain his fierce devotion to his craft, and maybe his utter indifference to what people thought of him. I think it also speaks to the depth of his character.

Hitchens’ mother was named Yvonne, and he discovered after he was already grown that she was Jewish. She’d kept that from him and from everyone, since there was a lingering anti-semitism in England (and as we’re finding out, there still is, all over Europe). She sacrificed her whole life, enduring a loveless marriage full of boredom, to give Christopher and his brother Peter a chance to reach the upper crust of British society. He went to “public school” (which really means “private school”) and then to Oxford. How proud she must have been of him.

My father was a very good man and a worthy and honest and hard-working one, but he bored her, as did much of the remainder of her life. "The one unforgivable sin," she used to say, "is to be boring." What she wanted was the metropolis, with cocktail parties and theater trips and smart friends and witty conversation, such as she had once had as a young thing in prewar Liverpool, where she'd lived near Penny Lane and briefly known people like the madly gay Frank Hauser, later director of the Oxford Playhouse, and been introduced by a boyfriend to the work of the handsome Ulster poet Louis MacNeice, contemporary of Auden and author of Autumn Journal and (her favorite) The Earth Compels. What she got instead was provincial life in a succession of small English towns and villages, first as a Navy wife and then as the wife of a man who, "let go" by the Navy after a lifetime of service, worked for the rest of his days in bit-part jobs as an accountant or "bursar." It is a terrible thing to feel sorry for one's mother or indeed father. And it's an additionally awful thing to feel this and to know the impotence of the adolescent to do anything at all about it. Worse still, perhaps, is the selfish consolation that it isn't really one's job to rear one's parents. Anyway, I knew that Yvonne felt that life was passing her by, and I knew that the money that could have given her the occasional glamorous holiday or trip to town was instead being spent (at her own insistence) on school fees for me and my brother, Peter (who had arrived during our time in Malta), so I resolved at least to work extremely hard and be worthy of the sacrifice.

For this next part, contrast Hitchens with modern “confessional” writers whose first concern is that you understand their “journey.” He didn’t think his journey was the main thing you should care about; he wanted to be known for his ideas and his writing and speaking. As he is.

Nonetheless, at the end of his life he gave us this book, and you should contrast his understated words with what most writers would slobber onto the page.

(Background: His mother had left his father and moved in with another man, a former preacher. Christopher had met the man and “approved” of him, more or less.)

What it is to be twenty-four, and fairly new to London, and cutting your first little swath through town. I'd had a few Fleet Street and television jobs and gigs, and had just been hired by one of the best-known literary-political weeklies in the English-speaking world, and was lying in bed one morning with a wonderful new girlfriend when the telephone rang to disclose, as I lifted the receiver, the voice of an old girlfriend. Bizarrely, or so it seemed to my pampered and disordered senses, she asked me the very same question that my father had recently asked. Did I know where my mother was? I have never quite known how to ask forgiveness, but now I wish I had been able to repress the irritable thought that I was getting just a bit too grown-up for this line of inquiry.

Melissa in any case was as brisk and tender as I would have wanted to be if our situations had been reversed. Had I listened to that morning's BBC news? No. Well, there was a short report about a woman with my surname having been found murdered in Athens. I felt everything in me somehow flying out between my toes. What? Perhaps no need to panic, said Melissa sweetly. Had I seen that morning's London Times? No. Well, there was another brief print report about the same event. But listen, would there have been a man involved? Would this woman called Hitchens (not that common a name, I dully thought) have been traveling with anybody? Yes, I said, and gave the probable or presumable name. "Oh dear, then I'm very sorry but it probably is your mum."

He flew to Athens, of course. They had just had a military coup and that figures into the story: he had to deal with people whom he despised, or who had reason to fear the new dictatorship. At any rate:

I was going through all of these motions while I awaited a bureaucratic verdict of which I was already fairly sure. My mother had not been murdered. She had, with her lover, contracted a pact of suicide. She took an overdose of sleeping pills, perhaps washed down with a mouthful or two of alcohol, while he whose need to die must have been very great took an overdose with booze also and, to make assurance doubly sure, slashed himself in a hot bath. I shall never be sure what depth of misery had made this outcome seem to her the sole recourse: on the hotel's switchboard record were several attempted calls to my number in London which the operator had failed to connect. Who knows what might have changed if Yvonne could have heard my voice even in her extremity? I might have said something to cheer or even tease her: something to set against her despair and perhaps give her a momentary purchase against the death wish.

A second-to-last piece of wretchedness almost completes this episode. Whenever I hear the dull word "closure," I am made to realize that I, at least, will never achieve it. This is because the Athens police made me look at a photograph of Yvonne as she had been discovered. I will tell you nothing about this except that the scene was decent and peaceful but that she was of the bed and on the floor, and that the bedside telephone had been dislodged from its cradle. It's impossible to "read" this bit of forensics with certainty, but I shall always have to wonder if she had briefly regained consciousness, or perhaps even belatedly regretted her choice, and tried at the very last to stay alive.

There is more about the awfulness of this episode, and then he closes with this:

Yvonne, then, was the exotic and the sunlit when I could easily have had a boyhood of stern and dutiful English gray. She was the cream in the coffee, the gin in the Campari, the offer of wine or champagne instead of beer, the laugh in the face of bores and purse-mouths and skinflints, the insurance against bigots and prudes. Her defeat and despair were also mine for a long time, but I have reason to know that she wanted me to withstand the woe, and when I once heard myself telling someone that she had allowed me "a second identity" I quickly checked myself and thought, no, perhaps with luck she had represented my first and truest one.

Mother Theresa

When I mentioned “his utter indifference to what people thought of him” you might have thought I was exaggerating. No, he really was willing to say whatever was true for him and not back down when the blowback came. And wow, did it ever on Mother Theresa.

Mother Theresa is, literally, a saint (she was canonized). Naturally, Hitchens wanted to look behind the legend and see what she actually did: not giving medical treatment, even pain relievers to her suffering patients, and opposing contraception and abortion, to name a few. Also cozying up to dictators.

His recollections about the debut of this film make me laugh out loud.

Coarse personal remarks can be read about me in print. Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd, the former editor of Burke's guide to the wellborn, has this to say in his television column: "One had only to look at Christopher Hitchens's ineffably smug, conceited face as he preened himself before the cameras to see what motivated this 'Balliol Bolshevik'; narcissistic vanity and the longing to be thought clever, smart and notorious. The hair was carefully arranged in a cute quiff, the open-necked shirting unbuttoned to allow us a peep of hirsute chest; but some kind friend should tip our Chris the wink that he is just a teensy-weensy bit too fleshy about the chops for all those sexy close-ups—which also reveal a gap in the front teeth, the trademark of a cad."

He's fighting it, but I think he wants me.

Henry Kissinger

He wrote a whole book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, which I haven’t read. His thesis was that Kissinger should be tried in a court of international law for war crimes. It’s not my purpose here to argue about that.

There’s a lot of video on this. Here’s one example.

In terms of writing, there’s the book. He’s also wrote this Article which ends

After I published my book calling for his indictment, many of Kissinger’s apologists said that, rough though his methods might have been, they were at least directed at defeating Communism. I never quite saw how the genocide in East Timor, say, had any effect in eroding the Berlin Wall. But I also pointed out that Kissinger did many favors for the heirs of Stalin and Mao: telling President Gerald Ford not to invite Alexander Solzhenitsyn to the White House, for example, and making lavish excuses for the massacre in Tiananmen Square. He is that rare and foul beast, a man whose record shows sympathy for communism and fascism. It comes from a natural hatred of the democratic process, which he has done so much to subvert and undermine at home and abroad, and an instinctive affection for totalitarians of all stripes. True, full membership in this bestiary probably necessitates that you say something at least vicariously approving about the Final Solution. What’s striking about the Nixon tapes is that they show Kissinger managing this ugly feat without anyone even asking him. May my seasonal call be heeded: Let this character at last be treated like the reeking piece of ordure that he is.

“Reeking piece of ordure” : that’s good.

Atheism and Religion

I was at this talk and had him sign my copy of his book afterwards. I told him I’d particularly enjoyed the section on Mormonism, and he said, “Oh, dear, I hope you weren’t brought up with that!” (No, I wasn’t)

What other public intellectual would debate Al Sharpton about God is Not Great?

The Catholic Church

Ow. That’s gotta leave a mark.

Conclusion

What makes Hitchens a hero of mine is, first and foremost, that he’s always worth reading or watching, no matter what he’s talking about. He’s entertaining, no matter how much you’ve seen and read him, and that’s no small accomplishment.

More than that is his lifelong commitment to the truth and to human values. He may not think that god is great, but he does think than mankind can be pretty great, and he hates the people who keep us from it.

Next week is Daniel Kahneman.