Hitch-22

If I’d known how interesting Christopher Hitchens’ memoir Hitch-22 was going to be, I would have lined up an assignment to write a full-length review before it appeared. For blogging purposes, there is so much here that it’s hard to know where to begin.

I had read some of Hitchens’ columns in The Nation before he broke with the magazine, and his support for the Iraq war made me regard him as one of those liberals who lose their grip on reality for no apparent reason. Still, to see him speak on TV, or especially in debate, was to be impressed with his focus, erudition, and combativeness. Having read his book, I can see that the erudition was honed by an Oxford education and the combativeness by a youth spent as a Trotskyist rabblerouser.

A long time ago I overheard someone ask a young activist what party he belonged to, and he replied, “I’m a member of the American Civil Liberties Union.” It hadn’t quite sunk into my brain before that “left” and “right” are not the only ways to organize one’s political life. Hitchens’ political instincts, like those of that activist, have more to do with human rights than party platforms. Whether or not you agree with him that it was our job to overthrow Saddam Hussein, this belief is consistent with his previous positions, and based on extensive experience as a reporter around the world. (Photos show him not only in Iraq but in Kurdistan, Cyprus, Argentina, Zimbabwe, Malaysia, Uganda, Venezuela, Romania, Nicaragua, Uruguay, and the Western Sahara.)

Hitchens says he discovered only while on the tour for this book that he had esophageal cancer, the ailment that killed his father. But reading “Prologue with Premonitions,” which introduces this book, it’s hard to imagine that he didn’t have a strong sense that something wasn’t right. It begins as Hitchens picks up a copy of the National Portrait Gallery’s magazine Face to Face and sees a 1979 photo of himself with Martin Amis, captioned “the late Christopher Hitchens.” He moves on to thoughts of T.S. Eliot, Julian Barnes’ book Nothing to Be Frightened Of, and to this thought:

When I first formed the idea of writing some memoirs, I had the customary reservations about the whole conception being perhaps “too soon.” Nothing dissolves this fusion of false modesty and natural reticence more swiftly than the blunt realization that the project could become, at any moment, ruled out of the question as having been undertaken too “late.”

Well, Hitch-22 wasn’t conceived or written too late, because—well, here it is. I hope that the author, too, will be around for many more years to goad, infuriate, and stimulate his readers and listeners.