Published in The Monthly, September 2005
A couple of years ago at Britain’s premier literary festival, Hay-on-Wye, two star performers dominated the programme: ex-President Bill Clinton and journalist/author/commentator Christopher Hitchens. Clinton arrived in his Secret Service car, attended a few parties, hit a few golf balls, made a politically-stirring speech and departed to a boo or two for keeping a crowd of well-wishes waiting.
Hitchens arrived jet-lagged after a seven-hour plane trip from America and four-hour car journey from London, dishevelled and clearly under the spell of an indeterminate number of whiskies. To the barely-concealed alarm of the festival organisers, he went to the performers’ hospitality room and ordered more. It was going to be a long-night.
The next morning, I went to hear him talk about his hobby (obsession?), the works of P.G. Wodehouse, creator of Bertie Wooster and Jeeves. The venue was packed, a sell-out. “What are you lot doing here on a Sunday morning?” said Hitchens in mock reproach. “You should be in church.” He then went on without a note or a pause to hold us spellbound for an hour. He was witty, provocative, original, entertaining and informative. He got a standing ovation and easily ranked as the festivals’ most popular attraction.
Yet I doubt if there was a single member of that liberal, book-buying, Guardian-reading audience who did not know that this was the same Christopher Hitchens who had stunned the international Left by abandoning his socialist ideals, turning on his old comrades, and embracing George Bush, Washington’s neo-conservatives and the invasion of Iraq.
The shockwaves this caused is best expressed by writer Tariq Ali, a friend of Hitchens for more than 30 years. He says: “On 11th September 2001, a small group of terrorists crashed the planes they had hijacked into the twin towers of New York. Among the casualties, although unreported that week, was a middle-aged Nation columnist called Christopher Hitchens. He was never seen again. The vile replica currently on offer is a double.”
Another admirer, the Independent newspaper commentator Johan Hari – even now unable to give up totally on Hitchens – has puzzled over what happen to him. “He was sailing along the slow certain route from being the Left’s belligerent bad boy to being one of its most revered old men. And then a hijacked plane flew into the Pentagon – a building which stands just ten minutes from Hitchens’s home. . . within a year, Hitchens was damning his former comrades as ‘soft on Islamic fascism’, giving speeches at the Bush White House, and describing himself publicly as ‘a recovering ex-Trotskyite’.”
There are several questions we need to answer. Why the volte face and is it irreversible? And why does Hitchens’s current stance appear not to have seriously dented his public image? This is a good moment to do so because his latest collection of columns and essays, “Love, Poverty and War” (Atlantic Books, London) has just been published. Let’s begin with few biographical details and then see what clues there are in the essays.
Christopher Eric Hitchens was born on 13 April 1949 in Britain. His was a military family, which explains a lot. “I come from a longish line of military and naval types on my father’s side and was brought up on and around bases and within earshot of tales of stoicism and even courage. I was very glad that during the long peace that followed the ‘boom’ of my babyhood, to be the first Hitchens for a few generations who did not even have to contemplate donning a uniform.”
At Oxford University he became a Trotskyist and wrote for the magazine “International Socialism” – “Neither Washington nor Moscow but International Socialism.” He left Oxford with a third class degree and went to work for the Left-wing “New Statesman” magazine in the 1970s where he became friends with writers like Martin Aims and Ian McEwan. He built a reputation as an aggressive left-winger, homing in on targets like the Vietnam war, Henry Kissinger and the Catholic Church.
He moved to the United States in the 1980s to test himself in what he saw as the premier league. There he found American attitudes to social intercourse very liberating. He could not only put English politeness, modesty, reticence, good form and understatement behind him but make a career from doing so. He expanded his targets to include Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and American policy in Latin America. He opposed the first Gulf War, arguing that Saddam Hussein was the victim of an American conspiracy and had been lured into the war by President Bush.
The first hint of his changing views probably came with the fatwa on his friend Salman Rushdie over his anti-mullah novel “Satanic Verses”. He accused Islam of theocratic fascism and the international, multicultural left of being soft on Muslim extremists. He hardened his stance after 9/11, supporting US military action in Afghanistan and becoming increasingly alienated from his left-wing colleagues on The Nation.
He resigned from the magazine in 2002 after a highly-charged exchange of letters with its most prominent left-wing contributor and anti-war leader Noam Chomsky. Hitchens said he could no longer contribute to the magazine because he believed that its editors, its readers, and writers such as Chomsky considered the American Attorney General John Ashcroft to be a bigger threat than Osama bin Laden.
It is now not easy to pin a political label on Hitchens. He has said he no longer feels part of the Left and does not object to being described as a “former” Trotskyist, with the emphasis on “former”. He admits he still admires Trotsky and that his political and historical view of the world has been influenced by Marxist thought.
He supported Bush during the presidential election, but not enthusiastically, and had a supporting word for Kerry saying it was “Indecent” for Republicans to equate Kerry with capitulation. “There’s no one to whom he can surrender, is there?” Then last year he confessed to British columnist Johan Hari, that it is not Bush he admires but “pure” neo-Conservatives like Paul Wolfowitz which to my mind puts Hitchens a long way to the Right and with little chance of any change.
It is clear from the various essays in the book that Hitchens chooses his subjects very carefully. They need to fit specific criteria. There would be no sense in writing a brilliant attack on a non-entity. Who would read it? Equally, there would be no sense in demolishing the reputation of someone who had already lost it; Lord Archer, for instance. Next, gentle criticism will not suffice. The attack must be so wounding that it will outrage many readers.
Here’s a contemporary example: Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a US serviceman who was killed in Iraq. Mrs Sheehan camped outside President Bush’s Texas ranch in protest against the war and says she will stay there until the President agrees to meet her. Her protest attracted the support of many other bereaved mothers. Hitchens response was to accuse Mrs. Sheehan of “spouting piffle” and lambaste her protest as “dreary sentimental nonsense”.
Amazingly, he is sometimes surprised and sensitive if his target hits back. When the rebel Labour MP, George Galloway, who had openly supported Saddam Hussein, went to Washington and wiped the floor with a Senate Committee trying to link him with the “oil for food” scandal, Hitchens turned up outside the hearing to put some awkward questions to Galloway. Galloway used Hitchens-style tactics to deflect them, abusing Hitchens as a “drink-sodden former Trotskyist popinjay”. Hitchens later complained in a newspaper column that Galloway had been “unfair”.
But he is not easily intimidated. He lives on the top floor of one of Washington’s tallest buildings. He describes in the book how in the autumn of 1993, the State Department’s Office of Counterterrorism urgently advised him to change this address “because of credible threats received after my wife and daughter and I had sheltered Salman Rushdie as a guest and had arranged for him to be received at the cowering Clinton White House.
“I thought, then as now, that the government was doing no more than covering its own behind by giving half-alarmist and half-reassuring advice. In other words, I have a quarrel with theocratic fascism even when the administration does not, and I hope at least some of my friendly correspondents are prepared to say the same.”
On another occasion, he went to introduce his documentary film on Mother Teresa, which his producer had, over Hitchens’s objections, called “Hell’s Angel”. “I was picketed furiously by a group called the New York Lambs of Christ, a distinctly sheep-like organisation.” The police told him he would require a full security escort because some dangerous criminal elements had been spotted in the crowd. “I didn’t believe that the Lambs would resort to bloodshed and declined the protection.”
But as he pushed his way towards the hall, he was accosted by a gang of bearded, leather-jacketed roughnecks. “I approached them and asked them what they wanted. With some awkwardness, they handed me a notarised ‘cease and desist’ order.” It was from the local chapter of the Hell’s Angles claiming that Hitchens had violated their trademark.
He is prepared to debate with anyone. He debated with Michael Moore at the Telluride Film Festival over Moore’s film ” Fahrenheit 9/11″, and then followed it up by giving him a good kicking in Slate in June, 2004, included in this book. “Moore is a silly and shady man who does not recognise courage of any sort even when he sees it because he cannot summon it in himself. To him, easy applause in front of credulous audiences is everything.” And then he offered Moore another debate. “Any time, Michael my boy. Let’s redo Telluride. Any show. Any place. Any platform. Let’s see what you’re made of.”
The title of the book, presumably Hitchens’s idea, comes from an old saying that has it, “Life is incomplete unless love, poverty and war have been experienced.” Hitchens runs through these three states in his introduction to the book. I wonder if he realises how much of himself he reveals in doing so.
On war, he writes, “My father’s lightly-armed cruiser HMS Jamaica delivered the coup de grace to quite a serious Nazi battleship named the Scharnhorst in December 1943, a much better and riskier day’s work than I have ever done, or will ever do.” Yet, now in his mid-fifties and with no compelling professional need to do so, he visits conflict zones from the Lebanon to Afghanistan and Iraq.
On love he is very brief, despite having children by more than one woman. “[W]hen I read Bertrand Russell on this matter as an adolescent and understood him to write with perfect gravity that a moment of such emotion was worth the whole of the rest of life, I devoutly hoped that this would be true in my own case. And so it has proved and so to the extent that I can regard the death I otherwise rather resent as laughable and impotent. . . My three children are all beautiful, intelligent and humorous, (I shall say nothing about their mothers except this: to have been lucky with women is to have been lucky tout court.)”
In his section on poverty Hitchens agrees he makes a very comfortable living from what he does. But I suspect that if his editors stopped paying him tomorrow he would continue to do it anyway. What can we make of all this – the writing, the lecturing, the debates, the intemperate attacks on anyone he disagrees with and the political transformation from darling of the Left to patriotic hero of the American Right?
The essays in this book vouch for Hitchens’s erudition, range of interests and writing skills. This explains the many admirers he has for the body of his work. But what is it? Is it nothing more than old-fashioned, “in your face” journalism pushed up-market, “trash the celebrity”, but with an intellectual slant?
Little old ladies ask him in bookshops is there not anything or anyone he likes? He gives an answer of sorts in his introduction. After listing all the things in his life he has reason to be grateful for, he writes: “I wake up every day to a sensation of pervading disgust and annoyance. I probably ought to carry around some kind of thermometer or other instrument to keep checking that I am not falling prey to premature curmudgeonhood.” Christopher, may already be too late.
