Hitch 22: a book review

Hitch-22: a memoir. Christopher Hitchens. Twelve. 448 pages.ISBN: 0446540331

Christopher Hitchens hardly needs an introduction; as a journalist, polemicist and “contrarian”, he appears to be a one-man road show in rusting armour, travelling the world to tilt at whatever windmills of folly provoke his wrath. Late in this often engaging, sometimes instructive and occasionally self-regarding memoir, he compiles “hate” and “love” lists: in the hate column he puts “dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying and intimidation” while in the love column he has “literature, irony, humour, the individual, defence of free expression, friendship.” These lists sum up the passions and themes of this book.

Given the tensions and undercurrents of his childhood and youth, Hitchens, unlike many who embark on their autobiography, both understands and forgives his parents. His father was in the navy, a conventional, reserved man who once admitted that it was only during the War that he knew what he was supposed to be doing. His mother, Yvonne, was clearly the driving force of the family; from a poor Jewish background – which she managed to conceal from her two sons until well after her death – she was determined that they would become English gentlemen. Under the English class system this meant prep school, followed by public school: The Leys, Cambridge.

His mother’s later bizarre death in a suicide pact with her lover in an Athens hotel when he was in his early 20s haunts Hitchens still. She had been trying, and failing, to contact him; for this, he admits, there is no “closure”. He also confesses remorse at having been a highly neglectful father when his own children were young. Elsewhere he might tie himself up in elaborate explanations about his gradual move from a radical engagement with international socialism to support for American conservative policy after 9/11 – “I didn’t so much repudiate a former loyalty, as feel it falling away from me” - but here there is honesty without excuses.

An early and precocious reader, Hitchens captures well the effect of certain books on his growing awareness: Richard Llewellyn’s How Green was my Valley, Orwell, Wilfred Owen and Koestler among others. At The Leys he has a reputation as a “pseudo-intellectual” and a master tells him, to his great delight, that he is “in danger of ending up as a pamphleteer.” One might suggest, perhaps unkindly, that these two early characteristics remain with him still.

Yvonne instilled in her son that the “one unforgivable sin is to be boring”. In his memoir, Hitchens has not always remembered this; he includes long, detailed discussions of particular political experiences and ideological arguments, such as with Edward Said, which now seem dated and written to settle old conflicts, not so much in revenge but because he always has to have the last word. There is also an odd passage, put in for no good reason, about what, when and how he likes to drink, carefully explained and analysed but without any recognition that he might be more than a regular and heavy drinker.

What sparkles is his deft and accurate turn of phrase when pricking pretentiousness: “the bogus refulgences of Kahlil Gibran and the sickly tautologies of The Prophet”; freemasons, “the mafia of the mediocre”; JFK, “a high-risk narcissus”, Havana, “run by a wrinkled oligarchy of old Communist gargoyles”; Ceaucescu of Romania, “Caligula sculpted in concrete” and so on.

Hitchens is also honest about his “double life.” Beginning at Oxford, his conscience (though he would hardly call it this) troubles him about his privileged existence; thus his joining the International Socialists and his championing the proletariat wherever they seemed to be rising up against political injustice. At the same time exotic foreign travel, dining out with friends, meeting celebrities, good food and drink, becoming something of a media celebrity himself, also matter hugely.

Not for Hitchens the austere and dedicated life of a George Orwell, for instance. He quotes Wilde: the problem with socialism is that it “wastes too many evenings on ‘meetings’”. With a low boredom threshold, the minutiae of ordinary life is tedious; what Hitchens enjoys is spending long, boozy, smoke-filled occasions discussing moral certitudes – interspersed with ritual schoolboy scatology - among his circle of close friends. These include novelists Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, the poet James Fenton and Salman Rushdie; as a prisoner of censorship, Rushdie is a cause naturally close to the author’s heart. Such is his evident loyalty to his friends that one suspects, according to E.M. Forster’s dictum, that he would rather die for them than for his country.

Hitchens is a man who needs a moral cause. As Left-wing politics have gone sour on him he has taken up different cudgels, now declaiming that “the defence of science and reason is the great imperative of our time.” There is an irony here; for all his avowed hatred of bigotry and bullying, he comes across as blinkered and bigoted in his views about religion as his new friend, Richard Dawkins. Early on in his memoir he announces that “Everything about Christianity is contained in the pathetic image of ‘the flock’”. Later, he describes monotheistic religion “where love is compulsory and must be offered to a higher being whom one must necessarily also fear...This [is] moral blackmail...” He is delighted when another friend, the Somali writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali, tells him she has abandoned Islam for atheism and puts himself squarely in the “Athens” camp against “Rome” in the conflict between tolerance and fanaticism.

As has often been pointed out, there is no-one as intolerant as a liberal crusading against religious belief. The critic Cyril Connolly once wrote that “inside every fat man there is a thin man trying to get out.” I will not insult Hitchens by saying that behind his anti-religious rage there is a believer trying to emerge. But he is a bigger, more generous-hearted man than his prejudices and spleen suggest, as this provocative memoir bears witness.

Francis Phillips writes from Buckinghamshire UK and appears here through the courtesy of MercatorNet under a Creative Commons licence.