I first met Christopher Hitchens at the Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival in Wales in 2005. Well, technically we didn’t meet. I saw him standing outside a pub in a cream linen suit with a drink in one hand and cigarette in the other, and I remarked rather over-excitedly to my friend, “There’s the Hitch!”
The following year I returned to Hay with my first collection of poems and found myself seated between Hitchens and Seamus Heaney at a dinner for Al Gore. It was one of the most surreal experiences of my life. On one hand—a man you felt like standing up and clapping for every time he spoke; on the other—a man you’d need to run from if you got into a political debate. I remember little about the evening except there were spectacular fireworks. Al Gore gave a speech, and was funnier than expected. Heaney was predictably lovely, and Hitchens remarked on how white my teeth were. Hitchens also, after discovering a gap in my education with regards to Kingsley Amis, suggested I read That Uncertain Feeling, on account of my Welsh heritage. “The old boy truly liked Wales,” he said.
Hitchens and I stayed in touch—exchanging e-mails and colliding at literary festivals and friends’ homes that always involved food, plenty of drink and dirty limericks. In Cartagena, we went emerald shopping (he bought, I looked), and when his book God is Not Great, was published, I had the privilege of hearing him at his inspiring and eviscerating best (at Hay again). The last time I saw Hitchens was at the New York Pen World Voices Festival in May 2010, two months before he was diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus. He looked pale, unwell, but on stage, in conversation with his friend Salman Rushdie, his oratory skills were intact.
Christopher Hitchens died on December 15, 2011, in Houston, after an 18-month battle with cancer. During his illness he continued to write prolifically about politics and literature, but also about his own mortality. Some of these essays are the finest contemplations on death I’ve ever read—unsentimental, visionary, horrific and humorous simultaneously. In Unspoken Truths, published in Vanity Fair, he described how the attack of cancer on his vocal cords was comparable to an act of impotence, an amputation of his personality, because for most of his life, he was defined by his voice.
“My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly,” he wrote, “has been the presence of my friends. I can’t eat or drink for pleasure anymore, so when they offer to come it’s only for the blessed chance to talk. Some of these comrades can easily fill a hall with paying customers avid to hear them: they are talkers with whom it’s a privilege just to keep up. Now at least I can do the listening for free. Can they come and see me? Yes, but only in a way... What do I hope for? If not a cure, then a remission. And what do I want back? In the most beautiful apposition of two of the simplest words in our language: the freedom of speech.”
I thought it fitting, for my last column of the year, to salute a friend and fellow-writer, Christopher Hitchens—a great voice who has left us.
The writer is a poet, novelist and dancer
