2011's latest victim is none other than Christopher Eric Hitchens, journalist, born 13 April 1949; died 15 December 2011
"Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centered and even solipsistic," Christopher Hitchens wrote in the Vanity Fair last year, and then in another piece this June, said, "My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends."
And one of those friends was the first to offer a tribute:
A swashbuckling opinionator, he loved few things better than a good argument — and he knew how to pick one. Once described by the New Yorker as "looking like someone who, with as much dignity as possible, has smoothed his hair and straightened his collar after knocking the helmet off a policeman," he tarred Bill Clinton as a rapist, Mother Teresa as a fraud and Henry Kissinger as a war criminal. He argued in Vanity Fair that women were less funny than men, which stoked the wrath of female comics. "I am programmed by the practice of a lifetime to take," he wrote, "a contrary position."
In his personal life he was no less the "rapscallion iconoclast," as historian Douglas Brinkley once described him.
Some of the early tributes:
"Right at the very end, when he was feeble, when his cancer overwhelmed him, he insisted on a desk by his window. There he was, a man with only a few days to live, turning out 3,000 words to meet a deadline."
-- Ian McEwan
'Goodbye, Christopher Hitchens. You were envied, feared, adored, reviled and loved. Never ignored. Never bested. A great and marvellous man'
-- Stephen Fry
'Christopher Hitchens, finest orator of our time, fellow horseman, valiant fighter against all tyrants including God'
-- Richard Dawkins
"Christopher Hitchens was everything a great essayist should be: infuriating, brilliant, highly provocative and yet intensely serious. I worked as an intern for him years ago. My job was to fact check his articles. Since he had a photographic memory and an encyclopaedic mind it was the easiest job I've ever done. He will be massively missed by everyone who values strong opinions and great writing."
-- Nick Clegg, British Deputy Prime Minister
"He was a cross between Voltaire and Orwell. He was there with Salman Rushdie when the horrible people were burning his books in Britain. He was there again and again and again. He was the greatest English journalist in America."
-- Denis MacShane, British Labour MP
Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, writes:
Christopher Hitchens was a wit, a charmer, and a troublemaker, and to those who knew him well, he was a gift from, dare I say it, God. He died today at the MD Anderson Cancer Center, in Houston, after a punishing battle with esophageal cancer, the same disease that killed his father.
He was a man of insatiable appetites—for cigarettes, for scotch, for company, for great writing, and, above all, for conversation. That he had an output to equal what he took in was the miracle in the man. You'd be hard-pressed to find a writer who could match the volume of exquisitely crafted columns, essays, articles, and books he produced over the past four decades. He wrote often—constantly, in fact, and right up to the end—and he wrote fast; frequently without the benefit of a second draft or even corrections...
Christopher was the beau ideal of the public intellectual. You felt as though he was writing to you and to you alone. And as a result many readers felt they knew him...
Christopher was brave not just in facing the illness that took him, but brave in words and thought. He did not mind landing outside the cozy cocoon of conventional liberal wisdom, his curious, pro-war stance before the invasion of Iraq being but one example. Friends distanced themselves from him during those unlit days. But he stuck to his guns...
And it was in Vanity Fair itself that he tried exorcising his ghosts in 2007 when dismayed to learn that a young man, persuaded to enlist by his pro-war articles, had been killed, he wrote in a gut-wrenching piece, A Death in the Family:
As one who used to advocate strongly for the liberation of Iraq (perhaps more strongly than I knew), I have grown coarsened and sickened by the degeneration of the struggle: by the sordid news of corruption and brutality ... and by the paltry politicians in Washington and Baghdad who squabble for precedence while lifeblood is spent and spilled by young people whose boots they are not fit to clean.
But, in 2008, to mark the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, Slate asked a number of writers who originally supported the war to answer the question, "Why did we get it wrong?", Hitch's article was titled: How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? with the sub-head: I didn't.
As he told Alexander Linklater of Prospect:
"Iraq was the property of a fascist and sadist who was butchering his people, squandering the resources of the country, preparing to hand over to his unbelievably nasty sons, who would probably have had an inter-dauphin fratricide of their own. And instead we have a humorous Kurdish socialist as the president of Iraq, and I'm supposed to apologise. Well, fuck that."
In the early part of his writing career, Hitchens's main way of being always right was to be very Left, but he has recently been casting off this identity, at least in its familiar forms. Now it appears that the infallible litmus test of whether one is on the right track is whether most people think the contrary. Comrade Hitchens may still be susceptible to the pull of fraternity when embodied by old buddies from the New Left Review, but his self-ascribed identity now is as a 'contrarian'. Being 'independent' (of parties, institutions, conventional wisdom, codes of politeness) is the thing. He describes himself in a recent essay as writing in opposition to 'the present complacently "liberal" consensus', when it's pretty clear that what really gets his goat is that it is a consensus and that it's complacent rather than just that it's liberal. In the same piece he introduces a sentence with the nicely self-ironic phrase 'without wishing to seem even-handed', but it's hard to think of anyone for whom this is less of a risk.
Way back in 2006, Ian Parker tried to examine how a former socialist became the Iraq war's fiercest defender in a memorable New Yorker profile: He Knew He Was Right:
Hitchens writes on politics and literature; and in both lines of work he tends to start from textual readings of a subtle and suspicious-minded kind. When he is not writing, he talks in the same measured, ironic voice as his prose, with the same fluency and intellectual momentum, as if he were troubled by the thought that he might never find another audience. Hitchens likes to have his say: he takes his arguments to the cable-news channels, to West Point cadets, to panel discussions in windowless hotel conference rooms. He stays at public meetings until the crowd—dehydrated and faint—has no more questions to ask, and then he gives out his e-mail address. He is a fine, funny orator, with the mock-heroic manner of an English barrister sure of his ground ("by all means," "if you will"), using derision, a grand diction, and looping subclauses that always carry him back to the main path. He also has the politician's trick of eliding the last word of one sentence to the first of the next, while stressing both words, in order to close a gate against interruption. In more private settings, the rhetoric is the same—except that there are filthy jokes drawn out to twenty minutes, and longer quotations from his vast stock of remembered English poetry. He seems to be perpetually auditioning for the role of best man. Ian McEwan, the novelist, recently said of Hitchens, "It all seems instantly, neurologically available: everything he's ever read, everyone he's ever met, every story he's ever heard."
But perhaps we should hear it in first person about the two events that helped change the former socialist's thinking:
I should say briefly that on that day [9/11] I shared the general register of feeling, from disgust to rage, but was also aware of something that would not quite disclose itself. It only became fully evident quite late that evening. And to my surprise (and pleasure), it was exhilaration. I am not particularly a war lover, and on the occasions when I have seen warfare as a traveling writer, I have tended to shudder. But here was a direct, unmistakable confrontation between everything I loved and everything I hated. On one side, the ethics of the multicultural, the secular, the skeptical, and the cosmopolitan. (Those are the ones I love, by the way.) On the other, the arid monochrome of dull and vicious theocratic fascism. I am prepared for this war to go on for a very long time. I will never become tired of waging it, because it is a fight over essentials. And because it is so interesting.
I had felt this way once before, on Valentine's Day 1989, when the Ayatollah Khomeini offered a bounty in his own name for the murder of a fiction writer then living in Western Europe. On that occasion, the response had not been so unanimous. The first President George Bush, when asked for a comment on the Khomeini fatwah against Salman Rushdie, had replied that as far as he could see, no American interests were involved.
But there were times, as Mukul Kesavan points out,
And of course there was drinking and friends. Christopher Buckley recalls in the New Yorker:
One of our lunches, at Café Milano, the Rick's Café of Washington, began at 1 P.M., and ended at 11:30 P.M. At about nine o'clock (though my memory is somewhat hazy), he said, "Should we order more food?" I somehow crawled home, where I remained under medical supervision for several weeks, packed in ice with a morphine drip. Christopher probably went home that night and wrote a biography of Orwell. His stamina was as epic as his erudition and wit...
Christopher was never a "stranger to his friends"—ça va sans dire, as he would say. Among his prodigal talents, perhaps his greatest was his gift of friendship. Christopher's inner circle, Martin, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, James Fenton, Julian Barnes, comprise more or less the greatest writers in the English language. That's some posse.
Here he talks to Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg on his cancer last August:
"How am I? I'm dying. Everybody is, but...the process has accelerated on me. So I'm looking for ways to try to die more like you.
"...there are bad days and then there are worse days, and I'm never quite sure whether the exhaustion comes from the treatment or from the tumor itself."
"I'm a realist, I'm objective, It's not a good cancer to get. The statistics are very depressing. Mine isn't just in my esophagus, either. It's gone to my lymph nodes. I would be a very lucky person to live another five years."
Soon after the news of his cancer was made public, Andrew Anthony noted in theGuardian:
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."
The same profile also noted:
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 have had to go into detail about them all. "Couldn't do it selectively, it would lead to nothing but pain."
At dinner, Steve Wasserman, Hitchens's agent, toasted him, using the quote "I know I shall have grown old when I no longer wake up angry."
"I wake up angry every day," Hitchens said.
"But he also wakes up smiling, like a little dolphin," his wife, Carol Blue, chimed in.
"Love, besos, hugs," Wasserman said.
"Abrazos," Hitchens replied.
"Cheers to you," Rushdie said. "May your shadow never grow less."
"Not 'May the fleas of a thousand camels infest your armpits'?"
The night was winding down. Soon, only Hitchens, Blue, and Rushdie were left, drinking coffee.
"I've got to go, my dear," Hitchens said, finally, to Rushdie. "I'll be boring if I don't. I'm one bushed Hitch." Hitchens and Blue made their way outside. Rushdie got into a cab.
"A bit of air?" Blue asked.
"Yes, a bit of air." Hitchens disappeared down the sidewalk, still carrying his china coffee cup.
John le Carré's conduct in your pages is like nothing so much as that of a man who, having relieved himself in his own hat, makes haste to clamp the brimming chapeau on his head.
And here he is discussing his book God Is Not Great with Jon Stewart in 2007, where, inter alia, he casually notes: "The more secular a society is, the more amusing it is, and the better the food. And the more to drink":
It was in this book where he wrote:
"My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilization, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can't prove it, but you can't disprove it either."
"[Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction."
On Mother Teresa, also read, Mommie Dearest, when the pope decided to beatify her in 2003:
...[she] was a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud, and a church that officially protects those who violate the innocent has given us another clear sign of where it truly stands on moral and ethical questions."
Further reading and some quotes:
On George W Bush
"[George W. Bush] is lucky to be governor of Texas. He is unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things."
On Giving Obama Nobel Peace Prize:
"... like giving someone an Oscar in the hope that it would encourage them to make a decent motion picture."
Post 9/11
Stranger in a Strange Land documents "the dismay of an honorable man of the left" in the Atlantic in December 2011:
Kipling is back in fashion these days, because of the North-West Frontier, so when I ask myself the question, I also allow myself this couplet from If, in which we are asked, "If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken, / Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools..."
"'Bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age' was quite a favorite headline for some wobbly liberals. The slogan does all the work. But an instant's thought shows that Afghanistan is being, if anything, bombed OUT of the Stone Age."
"Henry Kissinger should have the door shut in his face by every decent person and should be shamed, ostracized and excluded. No more dinners in his honour; no more respectful audiences for his absurdly overpriced public appearances; no more smirking photographs with hostesses and celebrities; no more soliciting of his worthless opinions by sycophantic editors and producers."
On Michael Moore:
"If Michael Moore had had his way, Slobodan Milosevic would still be the big man in a starved and tyrannical Serbia. Bosnia and Kosovo would have been cleansed and annexed. If Michael Moore had been listened to, Afghanistan would still be under Taliban rule, and Kuwait would have remained part of Iraq. And Iraq itself would still be the personal property of a psychopathic crime family, bargaining covertly with the slave state of North Korea for WMD. You might hope that a retrospective awareness of this kind would induce a little modesty. To the contrary, it is employed to pump air into one of the great sagging blimps of our sorry, mediocre, celeb-rotten culture. Rock the vote, indeed."
"Germinal seeds have surely been sown. But the shudder of conception is some considerable way off from the drama of birth, and this wouldn't be the first revolution in history to be partially aborted."
"Every day, the New York Times carries a motto in a box on its front page. 'All the News That's Fit to Print,' it says. It's been saying it for decades, day in and day out. I imagine most readers of the canonical sheet have long ceased to notice this bannered and flaunted symbol of its mental furniture. I myself check every day to make sure that the bright, smug, pompous, idiotic claim is still there. Then I check to make sure that it still irritates me. If I can still exclaim, under my breath, why do they insult me and what do they take me for and what the hell is it supposed to mean unless it's as obviously complacent and conceited and censorious as it seems to be, then at least I know I still have a pulse. You may wish to choose a more rigorous mental workout but I credit this daily infusion of annoyance with extending my lifespan."
In my limited exposure to the larger world, the people I like in the sphere of public speaking, it is Christopher, next to Osho. I know it is not the same league, but my desire for the blunt and politically incorrect seems to guide this choice. These folk comfortably venture into the area exclusively available for comedian like George Carlin, without really being a comedian. I must say Outlook do carry that quality in bits.
It is a tragedy that Outlook has to present him with "Indian Connection" in this blog, I don't know, may be for approval.
I can't even write RIP to you Christopher; because I know; and more me you know; you are resting, but you are dead.
It's a loss for certain. A very sane voice on the left of the political spectrum. He could see the dangers of Islamism for the world, and he was aware of the shenanigans of Pakistan. Also quite sympathetic to the idea of India, and India's troubles with Islamic terror. RIP.
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