Reviews
Stylish and consequential. He spread word of some of the most terrible injustices of his day; was arrested by several authoritarian regimes for it; he wrote three original, important books (on Teresa, Kissinger and Orwell); he had a lot of fun. That's a good life. Why, then, are we so uneasy? Because of his changing his mind so forcefully about revolution? About America? Because his direct, tactless opposition to conservative Islam sounds vaguely similar to that of contemporary racists? Because he found Thatcher sexy? He raised my estimation of the British 'International Socialists' (i.e. Trots) of the 1960s by a giant interval: though nearly powerless and outnumbered on all sides, they really did resist both the US and Soviet empires and the humourlessness and cultishness of their peers, and post-modern, Foucaultian passivity, and really did manage to help in undramatic ways (fundraising, letter-writing, war tourism). Bravura. How did he get from there to chilling with Wolfowitz? Well, on some points Hitchens didn't change at all; the Left did: [In 1968] people began to intone the words “The Personal Is Political”. The instant that I first heard this deadly expression, I knew as one does from the utterance of any sinister bullshit that it was very bad news. From now on, it would be enough to a member of a sex or gender, or epidermal subdivision, or erotic “preference”, to qualify as a revolutionary. In order to begin a speech or ask a question from the floor, all that would be necessary by way of preface would be the words, “Speaking as a…” Then could follow any self-loving description. I will have to say this for the old “hard” Left: we earned our claim to speak and intervene by right of experience and sacrifice and work. It would never have done for any of us to stand up and say that our sex or sexuality or pigmentation of disability were qualifications in themselves. There are many ways of dating the moment where the Left lost or – I would prefer to say – discarded its moral advantage, but this was the first time I was to see the sell-out so cheaply. the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwah... was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression... To re-state the premise of the argument again: the theocratic head of a foreign despotism offers money in his own name in order to suborn the murder of a civilian citizen of another country, for the offense of writing a work of fiction. No more root-and-branch challenge to the values of the Enlightenment (on the bicentennial of the fall of the Bastille) or to the First Amendment to the Constitution, could be imagined. I had become accustomed to the pseudo-Left new style, whereby if your opponent thought he had identified your lowest possible motive, he was quite certain that he had isolated the only real one. This vulgar method, which is now the norm and the standard in much non-Left journalism as well, is designed to have the effect of making any noisy moron into a master analyst. Today I want to puke when I hear the word 'radical' applied so slothfully and stupidly to Islamist murderers; the most plainly reactionary people in the world. But never mind that. Lots of gossip, lots of travel writing, lots of quotation from the heart, lots of interesting digressions about the old New Left, nationalisms, Jewishness - have you ever heard of the Haskalah? - and two massive eulogies to his dear friends James Fenton and Martin Amis. Everything he said and did from the age of about 18 proceeded from a fully-developed worldview: sarcastic, elevated, British post-Marxist intellectuality. He becomes the Hitchens you know - the drawling, boozy pal of neocons, more Dawkins than Dawkins is ("Everything about Christianity is contained in the pathetic image of 'the flock'.") - late on in life and even later in the book, so even if you refuse to forgive him his shocking, but internally consistent transformations, it doesn't warp the weft. Beautiful despite crudeness; very modern in several clashing senses. In one sentence: The establishment's awful, until you get well in it.
A long, arduous, often rambling but nearly always interesting trip through the life and thoughts of a colorful and opinionated writer, Hitch-22 offers a unique look at events and people so varied that it’s worth the trip simply for the breadth of knowledge and experience contained within. One is struck again and again over the head by Hitchens’s extreme literary promiscuity and knowledge by way of his near constant onslaught of references, allusions and block quotes. The impression left is that it must be tiring to live inside such a brain, so entangled with the works of past literary genius and folly, not only because the memoirs themselves are quite tiring. Especially admired, though, is his ability to write simply enough, but without pretense and staleness. His prose is continually charming and pleasantly diverse. The narrative, if there is a consistent one, mirrors the volatility of his life. One gets the sense that Hitchens really isn’t trying to impart any large lesson or derive a set of morals from his life, but rather just to convey it as it came: confusion, violence and shifting ideologies throughout. There is no specific overarching benefit to be gained from reading Hitch-22, but it is a holistically rewarding book, even if barely so. I hesitate even to say that it is worth the tiresome effort required to finish it, but at the same time I don’t feel remorse for having done so. I think I may have learned a thing or two, and perhaps some seeds of wisdom have been sown through my vicarious experience of his life. Either way, the memoirs feel appropriate to the man, which I suppose is all that a man could ask for.
