Hitch 22- A Memoir by Christopher Hitchens
When one thinks of public intellectuals in India, the insufferably usual suspects come to mind and unless you totally agree with them you don’t want read them because (a) they’re not as widely read as they pretend to be; (b) they have no sense of humour; and (c) language for them is a cumbersome tool rather than a fluid passion. There are few Indians who you stop and read or who you don’t mind watching on TV, and none of them compares to Christopher Hitchens, the 1960s British Trotskyite who travelled a long way to (a) supporting the 2003 Iraq war and (b) lately taking on creationists by articulating a hard atheism (his recent book God is not great had one too many words in the title, according to his friend Salman Rushdie). Along the way he has befriended an enviable heap of cultural icons and has crossed swords with another. The Hitch, as he’s referred to by pal Martin Amis, has taken Plato’s Socratic advice of the life unexamined not worth living, and has written a memoir. Though Hitchens is clearly an exhibitionist public intellectual you don’t mind, since what he writes sparkles, gorgeously.
“If you are going to sleep with Thatcher’s future ministers and toy with a future president’s lesbian girlfriend… you will not be able to savor it fully at the time and will have to content yourself with recollecting it in some kind of tranquility.” Fortunately, Hitchens allows us to fully savour the orgies organised by Rhodes Scholar Bill Clinton’s Sapphic girlfriend; he does so by his sheer command of the language. How did he become the Hitch, besides the usual public schooling and Oxford and then a glorious magazine career at the New Statesman? Oh, by building up the muscle, as he puts it. Often at a weekly lunch, on Fleet Street.
Who were at these lunches, begun by Martin Amis? “Reliable founding attendees included the Australian poets Clive James and Peter Porter, Craig Raine (T S Eliot’s successor as poetry editor at Faber and Faber), the Observer’s literary editor Terry Kilmartin (the re-translator of Scott Moncrieff’s version of Marcel Proust, and the only man alive trusted by Gore Vidal to edit his copy without further permission), the cartoonist and rake and dandy Mark Boxer, whose illustrations then graced all the best bookcovers as well as the Times’s op-ed page… The critic Russell Davies, the then-rising novelists Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes, James Fenton and Robert Conquest when they were in England, Kingsley when he wasn’t otherwise engaged with yet more lavish and extensive lunches, and your humble servant”. Almost like the legendary Bloomsbury group, a comparison of which you can be sure all the participants were hyper-aware.
They built muscle through word games. Like taking the names of books and turning the word ‘House’ into the word ‘Sock’: ‘Bleak Sock’, ‘Heartbreak Sock’, ‘The Fall of the Sock of Usher’, ‘The Sock of Atreus’, ‘The Sock of the Seven Gables’. Or substituting ‘cunt’ for ‘man’: ‘A Cunt for All Seasons’, and ‘Batcunt’. Or substituting ‘prong’ for ‘man’: ‘Our Prong in Havana’. Or substituting ‘dick’ for ‘heart’: ‘Dick of Darkness’. Or even more vulgar substitutions. Well, you get the idea.
On Clive James: “His authority with the hyperbolic metaphor is, I think, unchallenged. Arnold Schwarzenegger in Pumping Iron resembled a ‘brown condom stuffed with walnuts.’ Of an encounter with some bore with famous halitosis Clive once announced ‘by this time his breath was undoing my tie’. I well remember the day when he delivered his review of Leonid Brezhnev’s memoirs to the New Statesman and Martin read its opening paragraphs out loud: “here is a book so dull that a whirling dervish could read himself to sleep with it… If it were to be read in the open air, birds would fall stunned from the sky.”
When Rushdie joins the group, he impresses them by giving Robert Ludlum-style titles to Shakespeare plays: ‘The Elsinore Vacillation’. Fluke? Not exactly. Challenged to do the same for Macbeth, he produced ‘The Dunsinane
Reforestation’ with hardly a flourish and barely a beat. After this it was plain sailing through ‘The Kerchief Implication’, ‘The Rialto Sanction’, and one about Caliban and Prospero that I once knew but now can never remember.” While in hiding from the fatwa over The Satanic Verses, “Salman began to evolve and improvise a new word game, this time of book titles that had almost but not quite made it to acceptance by publishers: ‘The Big Gatsby’, ‘A Farewell to Weapons’, ‘For Whom the Bell Rings’, ‘Good Expectations’, ‘Mr Zhivago’, ‘Two Days in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch’ …”
Hitchens, of course, isn’t just some clever wordsmith: he has earned his spurs as a public intellectual by having extensively travelled the globe to the less fortunate places, be they junta-ruled Greece (where his mother and her lover committed suicide while he was still an Oxford undergraduate), Cuba, Poland when Solidarnosc, was just a seedling, Czechoslovakia when its revolution was put down by Moscow, junta-ruled Portugal, Iraq, junta-ruled Argentina and even Bosnia. Though Hitchens is the man credited with the post-9/11 term ‘Islamophobia’, his visits to Kurdistan and Sarajevo was against any ethnic cleansing of Muslims. No wonder it rankles Hitchens that the execrable Tom Wolfe is said to have lampooned him in The Bonfire of Vanities by modelling the drunken British journalist in New York, Peter Fallow, after him.
So suffice it say that the memoir is heady stuff. Well, until about page 280. That’s when Hitchens begins to explain his positions on Iraq and God, which elicit reader-fatigue. He then reflects on the fact that many a thinker has changed ideological positions over a lifetime, and his isn’t actually a change because, whether as an International Socialist or as a Neocon, his has always been a position against tyranny (Saddam’s or the Vatican’s). The fact of his change is contrasted with the souring of his friendship with Edward Said, the famous Palestinian author of Orientalism; Said, in Hitchens’s view, became too trapped in one position and too proud to modify it, even as he was dying.
I don’t grudge Hitchens’s change of views. He’s now 60 and apparently battling throat cancer (of which not a word in this memoir). His is not just a frank appraisal of a life well-examined and worthily-inhabited; it is also an absolute pleasure. Like the monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, it will kick you up a level on the evolutionary ladder.
— editorchief@expressbuzz.com