Hitch never pulled his punches
Charles Glass 3:29pm
One night in pre-gentrified Notting Hill, circa 1979 or 1980, Christopher Hitchens was
walking home from dinner at our house when he saw a man beating up a woman. Never one to back away from battle, physical or verbal, Christopher took a swing at the woman's attacker. He was pleased
to have spared her further savagery from the brute, until the woman told him to mind his own business and offered succour to her boyfriend. I think Christopher ended up with a black eye, but I
forget which of the pair administered it.
The neighbourhood lost a vital element when he moved to New York (and later Washington) not long afterwards. He'd have hated the new Notting Hill anyway, and London wasn't big enough to contain his wit, his ambition and his interest in the great globe. As an anti-imperialist, he had to be at the centre of the real empire. From Washington, he savaged it and wrote a book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, that should stand as an indictment for Kissinger's crimes against humanity. Later, to the disappointment of many of his friends (including myself), he saw the virtues of imperial expeditions to Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet I won't be unfair to him. He saw in the Taliban and Saddam Hussein the oppressiveness that he had always railed against, and he must have believed the empire had somehow changed sufficiently since the Vietnam War to do some good. He might have felt the same about Britain intervening on the side of the Republic to defeat Franco in Spain, when he would undoubtedly have taken up arms against the military rebels of 1936.
Christopher never resisted attacking his chosen enemies, but he would assail friends as well. As Christopher Buckley recalls on the New Yorker website, in a touching reminiscence of their friendship, he unleashed several thousand words in the Atlantic against his closest friend, Martin Amis, on the subject of Stalin. He also criticised another friend Edward Said, who was himself dying of leukaemia at the time, in the same magazine. It was the only time Christopher and I had a falling out. I thought it was bad form, but he reminded me that Edward was too honest a man to expect a free ride because he was ill. (I see that Edward's daughter, the actress Najla Said, forgave Christopher and now laments his passing.) Yet most of Christopher's friendships survived, including the one with me. It did not matter that he hated my Catholicism and I was indifferent to his atheism. Each of us believed the other was wrong about the American invasion of Iraq and said so. Life would be duller than it is if friends agreed on everything.
I shall miss long, boozy lunches and dinners that began in 1977 with James Fenton at the Gay Hussar and continued to my last visit to Washington almost two years ago. He never bored. He had charm and wit and knowledge. Who would not hang onto such a friend, right or wrong?
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Frank P
December 16th, 2011 4:14pm Report this commentAnother Hitchens manqué trying to scoop some vicarious literacy out of the cadaver. Respect his atheism Charlie, he's gone! It doesn't matter any more, by his own tenets. Nor do the 'long boozy dinners' which we didn't attend.
Those interested in his mercurial philosophy will cannibalise his printer's ink remains and YT videos from the Intertubes for a few years before even those footprints inevitably join him in the oblivion he augured for himself, while the Glasses and the Murrays strive to fill the wee vacuum left by his sad departure. Shame he had such a messy exit, poor bastard. Cigareets 'n' whusky and wild wily wordsmithin'....
Austin Barry
December 16th, 2011 4:16pm Report this commentApart from admiring his massive and protean intellect, I respect Hitchens for seriously considering with his chum Dawkins, having the frightful Nazi Pope, Joe “Benedict” Ratzinger, arrested for being complicit in the Vatican’s evil cover-up of child rape and molestation – which clerical dissembling continues unabated.
Tom White
December 16th, 2011 4:34pm Report this commentFrank P: that's a sour comment to make this afternoon. Memories are important to atheists too, and that they ultimately don't last either is completely irrelevant. I'm happy to learn about the boozy lunches. Maybe I'll have one in Hitch's memory!
Frank P
December 16th, 2011 4:51pm Report this commentSorry about this, but, in search of balance:
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/science-%26-technology/hitchens-cancer-not-intelligently-designed-201112164685/
There is a serious message beneath the baleful banter. No doubt the bared teeth of fear and the twisted sneer of cynicism are first cousins. But pissing on a grave before the occupant moves in is - well - insensitive!
Andy Carpark
December 16th, 2011 4:54pm Report this commentFrank P 4:14 pm. Hats off.
Frank P
December 16th, 2011 5:18pm Report this commentTom White
I think part of my 'sour' came from reading his prolific works; he was a rich source, (sauce, even) of sour.
Actually, the New Yorker piece by Buckley is a worthy obit. Thanks for the link, Mr Glass.
Andy CP. As Tom Jones would say, "You can keep your hat on"! Not if it's not a brown one, though. :-)
HackneyJon
December 16th, 2011 5:18pm Report this commentContrarian and wind up merchant though he undoubtedly was, Hitchens was genuinely fearless at times - his taking on of the entire orthodox left over Iraq, which brought him abuse and levels of condemnation reserved only for an apostate, and his debunking of the rigid and orthodox ultra-traditionalist catholicism of Mother Theresa (who for some obscure reason was deified by many) are two prime examples. He'll be sorely missed.
David Lindsay
December 16th, 2011 6:43pm Report this commentSeveral years ago, I told Peter Hitchens to his face that he had really become a sort of Old Labour. He did not deny it, he has since moved even further in that direction, and he has more or less said so in print. He sees the Labour Party of Ed Miliband and Maurice Glasman as potentially the vehicle for patriotism and social conservatism, if it can only rid itself once and for all of the Blairite poison that is now the only thing remaining in the Conservative Party. He is right.
Whereas Christopher Hitchens, as he told Anne McElvoy in the interview replayed in part on today's World At One, stopped being a Socialist but never stopped being a Marxist. He continued to hold that "the materialist conception of history is valid". He merely changed the ending so that victory belonged to the bourgeoisie, and thus to the most bourgeois of countries, to which, thus conceived, he duly transferred his allegiance, like the Canadian David Frum and the Australian Danielle Pletka, not to say Rupert Murdoch.
Their wildly ahistorical version of the American Republic simply took over where the Soviet Union had left off, spreading the dictatorship of victorious class throughout the world, including by force of arms, while the vanguard elites in other countries owed allegiance to Washington, as once to Moscow, rather than to their own respective countries. But Hitchens, among others, was really a Trotskyist, so the entryism and the permanent revolution also remained.
Peter Hitchens's column, which reaches an otherwise untouched section of opinion and which contributes very considerably to the Mail on Sunday's market lead, probably cost the Conservative Party a hung Parliament in 2005, and as certainly as we can ever know cost that party an overall majority in 2010. What did Christopher Hitchens ever do that had anything remotely approaching that sort of influence?
CS
December 18th, 2011 4:35pm Report this commentDavid, your conclusion is worthless if it rests on your having to invent evidence. Just because you read the babblings from Hitchens' Jnr's padded cell doesn't mean that he determines election results. It doesn't even mean that he "probably" does.
Yes, there may be an electorally significant number of people who believe that things were better in the 1950s. Pandering to their idiocies every week may make you an influential writer among that school of thought but hardly a writer to be respected.
A bonkers imam who called for sharia law in the UK might draw a lot of support, that doesn't make his influence anything to admire.
If there genuinely are enough people in the country whose votes are swayed by reading Hitchens Jnr, that merely shows how widespread the lack of education is in the UK. The man simply cannot construct a rational argument these days and his explanation for many of his various idiotic ideas often boils down to "because, that's why".
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