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Tuesday 22 May 2012

Christopher Hitchens 1949-2011

It was only yesterday that I remembered I should read Christopher Hitchens' latest article for Vanity Fair: a touching, mordantly funny, survey of life, Nietzsche, Sidney Hook and death. Though one knew the occasion would not be long delayed, it remains wincingly sad that it must be one of the last things the great fighter ever wrote before his death. As he put it:

Before I was diagnosed with esophageal cancer a year and a half ago, I rather jauntily told the readers of my memoirs that when faced with extinction I wanted to be fully conscious and awake, in order to “do” death in the active and not the passive sense. And I do, still, try to nurture that little flame of curiosity and defiance: willing to play out the string to the end and wishing to be spared nothing that properly belongs to a life span. However, one thing that grave illness does is to make you examine familiar principles and seemingly reliable sayings. And there’s one that I find I am not saying with quite the same conviction as I once used to: In particular, I have slightly stopped issuing the announcement that “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”

Time is always called, however. And yet the suddenness of this news is still a sad, sad business. One had, again, thought the day might yet be delayed. Evidently not.

There are thousands of people who knew Christopher better than I did and it would be presumptious and a little unseemly to pretend or suggest I knew him or spent more time with him than was the case. The proper tributes are from those, such as Christopher Buckley and Andrew Sullivan who really knew him well. Though I'd like to call it friendship, we were really only a little more than acquaintances for a while, exchanging the occasional email and encountering one another from time to time in Washington. But, whether over lunch (which, as I recall, tended to last until the staff began setting up for the evening service) or drinks - Johnny Walker Black, usually - back at his place on Connecticut Avenue no-one ever forgot or regretted, I think, the time they spent with the Hitch. It was always such fun.

And amidst all the merited praise for Christopher's fighting and writing qualities, the kindness and generosity he showed to younger writers should not be forgotten. He was a great one for encouraging, was Christopher. Like many others, I owe him more than I ever let him know. This too, now that it's too damn late, is a regret.

He had a pretty good list of enemies - God, Kissinger, Mother Theresa, Bill Clinton, Princess Diana, Saddam Hussein and many more - but that always struck me as being tangential to the real business. He hated fakery and he hated authority and that was what mattered most and animated the best - and there was a lot of this - parts of his journalism.

I dare say there are some people, especially the young, who associate him principally with his advocacy for the Iraq War. Doubtless there remain some on the left who cannot forgive him this. Whatever happened to Christopher Hitchens? was, remember, a tediously common question back in 2002 and 2003. Bugger all, was the obvious answer. Christopher remained Christopher and he appreciated, I think, all the ironies that his support for George W Bush demanded and illuminated in hefty, equal measures.  He'd only returned to the political fray because of 9/11. Before then he'd grown bored of politics and had hoped to direct a greater portion of his artillery to literary criticism. Events demanded otherwise, however.

A foolish consistency is a terrible error and no-one, perhaps not even those dolts who hated him, could accuse Christopher of that. But though he was often a contrarian he was rarely a contrarian for the sake of being a contrarian. There was a point to it all and it was not a pose struck for the sake of, well, just striking a pose. That said, his poses were also an aesthetic matter: Hitch had style and he knew it and traded on it and that was all just fine. You could love it but you also, if you were being honest with yourself, envied it and, in sourer moments, almost resented it because you knew you could never match it. That was your problem, not Christopher's. Buck up, laddie.

His death - I think he'd mock anyone who calls it his "passing" - leaves a great hole that won't be filled for some time. I've no idea, right now, who can claim to be the best essayist still writing in English but I've a pretty solid hunch that they're not as good as the man from whom they've inherited that title.

A sad business, to be sure, but there is the work to return to and much more besides. Christopher wrote his own monument and, though his death is properly a terrible business, the work remains and will do so for a long time yet. That and the memories of the man are more than most of us deserve or are granted.

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