In Front of His Nose

Christopher Hitchens has had an orchestra seat from which to view history and has captured a lot—but what has he missed?

Show me a journalist of Christopher Hitchens’s generation on either side of the Atlantic who has not sometimes read his writing with an envious “Wow,” and I’ll show you a journalistic dull dog who has no passion for complicated times, no taste for danger, no ardor for an unpopular cause, and, most important of the lot, no flair for the English language, potently, provocatively, and sometimes promiscuously deployed. I’ll show you, in short, someone whose journalism is to that of Hitchens almost what the phone directory is to the novels of Dickens.

The evasive word in that paragraph, of course, is “sometimes.” Hitchens is certainly a star writer. But he is not a star by whom others should set their own course. There are things about Hitchens that I have always envied and still do. They include his self-confidence, his bravery, his ability to talk as an equal to peasant and president alike, his sense of humor, his audacious phrasemaking, and, in an odd way, his capacity for implacable hatreds I can never share. But—and here’s the rub—there are also qualities that matter which Hitchens intermittently mislays. We all have these faults of one kind or another, but a list of these occasional gaps in Hitchens’s case might include necessary restraint and objectivity, a little conditionality atop the certainty, and perhaps that elusive acumen that Norman Mailer once called the essential journalistic quality of the modern era. Envy Hitch by all means, but don’t inhale.

All of these virtues and vices, as well as many others, are liberally displayed and generously mingled in Hitchens’s richly written and immensely readable memoir. Hitchens is most famous now as a polemicist—he is not a man to skewer a reputation with a single thrust when a dazzling display of extended rhetorical swordplay will do. But he is mostly a loyal and generous friend, and he is capable of more tolerance (with some choice exceptions, such as the journalist and Hillary Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal). Few words recur more often in this book than friend: “My old friend,” “our then-friend,” “my dear friend,” “my esteemed friend,” “my later friend,” “my Canadian friend,” “my one-day-to-be friend”—and in the case of the book’s dedicatee James Fenton, “my beloved friend.”

Yet this generous loyalty has its limits and conditions in both directions. Another word that recurs quite often in this book, even now, is “comrade,” and so it should, since Hitchens has always, until recently, been identifiably a man of the radical post-Communist left, and comrade has always been a vernacular Hitchens usage. But not all his comrades of yesteryear would use the word of Hitchens today, as he has moved improbably about the political spectrum. Nor would he use it of some of them, except perhaps sarcastically.

As so often in memoirs, the most eloquent pages are those about the writer’s childhood and upbringing. Here there is frequently something unexpected, urgent, and unique to say, qualities which rarely extend to the later and, on the face of it, more important chapters in which career milestones and meetings with the famous are detailed. Hitchens is no exception. His descriptions of, and his insights into, his parents’ very different personalities are among the most affecting things he has ever written. The characters come alive with a novelist’s eye for detail (although Hitchens’s younger brother Peter, a prominent British moral conservative commentator, is here a more shadowy figure, treated with some fraternal tact).

Hitchens’s father—prematurely retired and painfully reticent Royal Navy officer described here as “The Commander” whom Hitchens says is best summed up by “the flat statement that the war of 1939 to 1945 had been ‘the only time when I really felt I knew what I was doing’ ”—is hard to recognize in Christopher, his elder son. In the case of his mother Yvonne—outgoing, attractive, and optimistic—the inherited threads of Hitchens’s DNA are more apparent. Inevitably she was the boy’s favorite. And it is her big secrets—the decision to hide her Jewishness from her sons and, catastrophically, her suicide with her lover in an Athens hotel in 1973—that still preoccupy Hitchens in this account.

When he wrote the chapter that ends with his father’s death in 1987 and that contains a particularly evocative description of the strong silent relatives who attended the Commander’s funeral—“These distant kinsmen gave a hasty clasp of the hand and faded back into the chalky landscape. It was all stark enough to have pleased my father at his most downbeat”—did Hitchens have any premonition of the miserable symmetry that meant that he too would shortly be struck by the cancer of the esophagus that killed his father? Surely not, even though Hitchens has been a smoker and a legendary drinker for much of his life.

My own first impression of the 18-year-old Hitchens was of relief at meeting, amid the intimidating surrounds of Balliol College in the fall of 1967, someone both so sociable and so politically congenial. Fellow undergraduates, both studying Oxford’s famous philosophy, politics, and economics (PPE) course, we both, I am fairly certain, went into Balliol’s gothic dining hall that first evening wearing nuclear disarmament badges on our lapels—Christopher’s is visible in one of the early photographs in the memoir—and we may both have been wearing brown corduroy jackets of the kind that, in England at least in those days, marked one out as vaguely bohemian. Rebellious—or what?

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4

Post a Comment