Gore Should Be So Lucky: Review of <i>Unacknowledged Legislation</i>

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Gore Should Be So Lucky: Review of <i>Unacknowledged Legislation</i>
URL:http://monkeyfist.com:8080/morgue/politics/christopher-hitchens/unacknowledged-review-irish-times
Subject: 
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"Gore Should Be So Lucky", The Irish Times

Review of Christopher Hitchens's _Unacknowledged Legislation:  Writers
in the Public Sphere_

by John Banville

One of the more dispiriting spectacles to which we are subjected in
this curiously weightless-seeming commencement de siècle is that of the
apostate left-wing radical taking revenge on his former self or selves.

Everywhere about us we see young wrinklies in their 50s who a mere
few decades ago were burning flags and burning bras but who now burn
nothing more than the occasional Montecristo in celebration of the
latest sewn-up software deal or stitched-up soft-hearted rival.

Almost as depressing as the trahison des clercs is the all too evident
relief with which so many of what by now we may call the old left - as
distinct from the old, old left of the Thirties and Forties - sink back
upon the deceptively comfy sofa of reaction.

How thrilling it must be to be able suddenly to express all those
dark thoughts kept bottled up for so long; how it must seem like a
second chance at being young and fearless and forthright. There is a
Punch cartoon that appeared at the time when the New Man was being
proclaimed, in which a nerdy type in a woolly jumper is standing with
clenched fists, telling himself over and over, "I must not think of
suspenders, I must not think of suspenders!" For the reformed and
re-styled old-leftist, an entire Ann Summers shop window may be summoned
up without a qualm of guilt or regret for the good old days on the
barricades.

Christopher Hitchens, known to his friends as The Hitch, and, come to
think of it, probably to his enemies also, has kept the socialist faith
with conviction, energy and high style. He is, as he tells us, "mainly
English", the son of a navy family based in Portsmouth, but he has lived
for a long time now in America, where he is, unlikely as it may sound,
Professor of Liberal Studies in the Graduate School at the New School,
New York.

He also writes for a broad spectrum of journals, ranging from the
somewhat louche and bumptiously masculinist Vanity Fair to the austerely
intellectual New York Review of Books. He is a fierce but never less
than elegant polemicist, who puts the question to himself, "Is nothing
sacred?" and answers, Of course not. His targets include the predictable
ones such as Ronald Reagan and Henry Kissinger, but also the two Toms -
Wolfe and Clancy - and, splendidly, Mother Teresa, dubbed by Hitchens as
"the Pope's National Security Adviser".

The essays in Unacknowledged Legislation were all, Hitchens tells us,
written in the last decade of the 20th century. He has taken his title,
he writes, from Shelley's "In Defence of Poetry" (sic, and tut tut), in
which the poet ringingly declared that "Poets are the unacknowledged
legislators of the world". It would be a brave man that would defend
such a claim in these prosaic times, but Hitchens is a brave man.

In a dust-jacket blurb, Gore Vidal says he has been asked if he
wishes to nominate a successor, "a dauphin or delfino", and names
Hitchens. It's a wise choice, no doubt, but is it appropriate? Hitchens
is far warmer, far more ruggedly alive, than the Doge of Ravello,
who, as he enters what he once wittily called the "springtime of his
senescence" - he was speaking of Ronald Reagan, the "acting President"
- has taken to repeating himself with wearying regularity, in many
forums, and often in exactly the same words, as if in his aristocratic
jadedness he believed that no one nowadays reads more than one newspaper
or journal or listens to more than one radio or television talk show.

No, the ancestor Hitchens most closely resembles is, of course, Orwell.
Indeed, in his foreword to this collection, Hitchens states his ambition
by quoting Orwell's desire to "make political writing into an art". His
chosen ground is sited at what Lionel Trilling identified as "the bloody
crossroads" where literature and politics intersect, a phrase annexed
for a book title, Hitchens recalls, by "the dire Norman Podhoretz
(who is to Trilling as a satyr is to Hyperion)", Podhoretz being a
particularly egregious example of those apostates referred to at the
opening of this review, once an old, old leftist and now one of the
rightest of the new right.

That crossroads is a dangerous one, as Hitchens well knows. One of the
first writers he quotes in his foreword is W.H. Auden, who famously
and flatly declared that "Poetry makes nothing happen". Hitchens
acknowledges the poet's "mild and sane claim", but sees it soundly
rebutted by the Great War poetry of Wilfred Owen. Against current
critical theory, most of which he finds "superficial and ephemeral and
sometimes sinister", not to mention "languid and onanistic", he believes
that literature and politics can mix without one or the other suffering
fatal dilution.

. . . [P]roperly understood and appreciated, literature need never
collide with, or recoil from, the agora. It need not be, as Stendhal has
it in Le Rouge et Le Noir, that "politics is a stone tied to the neck
of literature" and that politics in the novel is "a pistol shot in the
middle of a concert". [Stendhal obviously didn't know what was going to
happen to music] . . . [I]n the work of Tolstoy, Dickens, Nabokov, even
Proust, we find them occupied with the political condition as naturally
as if they were breathing.

Perhaps so: but it depends what you mean by politics. Sometimes, even
with a writer as subtle to nuance as Christopher Hitchens, it would seem
that there is nothing that is not politics, but if that is to be the
case, heaven help politicians, and heaven help poets even more.

Hitchens's subjects are an eclectic bunch of bedfellows: who would have
expected to encounter Kipling here, or Arthur Conan Doyle, or P.G.
Wodehouse, a particular Hitchens favourite, or, for that matter, Oscar
Wilde - two essays, and a third on the unspeakable "Bosie" - or Anthony
Powell, or Philip Larkin?

On the last-named, Hitchens is refreshingly fair and unblinkered. When
Andrew Motion's biography of Larkin appeared some years after the
poet's death, and, a few months afterwards, the Selected Letters were
published, revealing political and racial views strong enough to strip
the barnacles off Blighty's submerged bottom, all of liberal, literate
England went slightly barmy.

Even those commentators who managed to hang on to their sanity took
to harrumphing about the necessity to reassess the poems in the light
of this wholly unacceptable gibber gibber gibber (a favourite Larkin
ellipsis). Here is Hitchens, however, writing in 1993, in the very eye
of the storm:

The place [Larkin] occupies in popular affection - which he won for
himself long before the publication of his fouler private thoughts
- is the place that he earned, paradoxically, by an attention to
ordinariness, to quotidian suffering and to demotic humour. Decaying
communities, old people's homes, housing estates, clinics . . . he
mapped these much better than most social democrats, and he found words
for experience.

Irish readers will perhaps find a special interest in two essays here,
one from 1998 on the North and its sorrows, and the other on Conor
Cruise O'Brien, who also long ago situated himself at Trilling's bloody
crossroads.  Hitchens's essay, "The Cruiser", a review from the London
Review of Books in 1996 of O'Brien's sourly misanthropic On the Eve of
the Millennium: The Future of Democracy Through an Age of Unreason,
is an astonishing savaging - carried out more in sorrow than anger,
Hitchens says, though you could have fooled this reader - of the work
of a man whom Hitchens once greatly admired, and whom, indeed, he may
admire still, despite all. He closes with a "modest proposal": "The
Cruiser should be made to read this book, which would quite possibly be
for the first time. Then he should be asked to eat it."

Unacknowledged Legislation is a big, handsome book - lightly peppered
with editorial solecisms, however - containing some of the best, most
polished and wittiest writing you are likely to encounter this or any
other year.  Even if you disagree with the author's views, you will
surely delight in his expression of them. Gore Vidal should be so lucky
to have this boy for an heir.