Christopher Hitchens, who has died aged 62, described himself as an “essayist and a contrarian” and, as a journalist, critic, war correspondent and bon vivant, enjoyed a 40-year career as one of the world’s most ubiquitous, prolific and provocative public intellectuals.
He began as a leading iconoclast of the Left and, during the 1970s, was a voluble member of a talented and raffish gang, with Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and James Fenton, which gave the New Statesman magazine its glittery literary edge. But he got tired of British politics and, in 1981, moved to America where, despite occasional disagreements with his erstwhile comrades (as when he took Britain’s side against the Argentine junta in the Falklands conflict), his repeated assaults on such hate figures as Ronald Reagan and Henry Kissinger continued to guarantee him a welcome in radical circles.
All this changed after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, an event he interpreted as a turning point in “a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate”. He became an outspoken opponent of “Islamofascism”, forging a breach with the Left which became a permanent rift after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. While his erstwhile colleagues were out on the streets proclaiming “Not in Our Name” (a slogan he found nauseating in its “unstinting self-regard”), Hitchens emerged as one of the fiercest cheerleaders for George W Bush’s strategy of “regime change”. To the inevitable accusations of betrayal (George Galloway described him as the “first ever metamorphosis of a butterfly back into a slug”), Hitchens responded with characteristic gusto: such attacks, he said, washed off him “like jizz off a porn star’s face”.
But, as Hitchens confessed in his memoir Hitch-22 (2010), there had always been a “Janus-faced” side to his personality. When he was a child, his mother told his father, during an argument over whether they could afford to send him to private school: “If there is going to be an upper class in this country, Christopher is going to be in it.”
At the time this was more her aspiration than his, yet Hitchens acknowledged that alongside the donkey-jacketed revolutionary “Chris”, veteran of the Aldermaston marches, there was the suave, good-looking and socially ambitious “Christopher” – “Hypocritchens”, as he was known at Balliol – who enjoyed the company of “confident young men who owned fast cars” and frequented the Union and the Gridiron Club.
The young man spraying pro-Vietcong slogans on car plant walls or marching the streets toting some insurgent flag, might, the same evening, be found at a Right-wing dining club happily gobbling up a pudding called “bombe Hanoi”. Friends later joked that the sentence least likely to emerge from Hitchens’s mouth was: “I don’t care how rich you are, I’m not coming to your party.”
Though he claimed to keep “two sets of books” when it came to political purpose and social ambition, his “Mr Both Ways” approach was as much intellectual as social. He claimed to be faithful to the values of “Left opposition” heroes, such as Rosa Luxembourg, Leon Trotsky and George Orwell, but was always too sceptical and independent-minded to fall for the tedious dogmas of mainstream Marxism – or any other “ism”.
He took pride in “asking annoying questions at every opportunity” and, as a journalist, made a point of going out to see things for himself, whether it was a war zone or a convention of Civil War re-enactors. Even at the height of student radicalism in 1968, he spotted, on a trip to Cuba, the oppressive side of the Castro revolution, acknowledging, when he found himself bombarded by showers of pebbles and the taunt “Sovietico” from the street urchins of Havana, that he had been granted a glimpse of “unscripted public opinion”.
The author or co-author of 17 books, as well as pamphlets and essays, Hitchens was a prolific columnist and, particularly in America, a formidable participant in public debates. He found it difficult to see a sacred cow without lobbing a hand grenade, and his more eminent targets included Mother Teresa (whom he portrayed as a fundamentalist Catholic bigot who gladhanded totalitarian regimes and was “a friend of poverty” rather than of the poor); Bill Clinton (the subject in 1999 of No-One Left to Lie to: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton); and God (the target in 2007 of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything).
Hitchens’s natural pugnacity seems to have earned him grudging admiration in some unlikely quarters. In his memoir he recalled an encounter with Mrs Thatcher (whom he found “surprisingly sexy”) not long after her election to the Tory leadership; their inevitable argument ended with the future Iron Lady ordering him to bend over so that she could spank him on the bottom with a rolled-up parliamentary order paper, afterwards mouthing the words: “Naughty boy!”
It was only later, he confessed, that he appreciated the glimpse of the “smack of firm government” which he had been afforded.
The elder of two sons (his younger brother is the journalist and author Peter Hitchens), Christopher Eric Hitchens was born on April 13 1949 in Portsmouth, where his father, a naval officer, was stationed, and was brought up as “a Navy brat” in Malta and Scotland.
His father was a kindly, decent but emotionally inhibited man whose world view epitomised an old-fashioned English conservatism and whose way of showing affection to his son, while he was at prep school, was to send him complicated naval knots tied out of pipe-cleaners, which, of course, Christopher never mastered. (Later, Hitchens was much affected by the discovery that his father was secretly giving his friends Christmas gift subscriptions to his “pinko” magazine, the New Statesman).
His mother, Yvonne, a glamorous but tragic figure whose carefully concealed Jewish ancestry Christopher would discover only when he was in his 40s, eventually left her husband for an unfrocked vicar, with whom she became a devotee of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (“the sinister windbag who had brought enlightenment to the Beatles in the summer of love”), and with whom she died in a suicide pact in an Athens hotel when Christopher was 24.
Hitchens’s account of this “lacerating howling moment” in his life and his journey to a junta-governed Greece to identify Yvonne’s body is one of the most powerfully moving passages in his memoir, the tragedy compounded by the revelation that, in the hours before she died, she had tried to phone him repeatedly but had failed to get through. Characteristically, though, he still found the time to file a piece for the New Statesman on the political situation in Greece.
At the Leys School in Cambridge, Christopher discovered a passion for literature, dabbled in homosexuality and was introduced to the pleasures of Marxism by the headmaster who, in a vain attempt to inoculate him against such a heresy, presented him with a copy of the Communist Manifesto.
He developed all three interests at Balliol College, Oxford, where he went up ostensibly to read PPE, but devoted more energy to sit-in and picket line duties (as well as joining the Labour Party, he became a member of the Trotskyist International Socialists) and to cultivating friendships among a camp and reactionary circle of students and academics.
These included John Sparrow, Warden of All Souls and a hate-figure for the Left, who once mischievously ambushed Hitchens in full rant at some student demo to remind him they had a date for dinner. Hitchens’s claim, in his memoirs, that, while at Oxford, he had bedded two future government ministers under Margaret Thatcher would set off an – ultimately futile – orgy of press speculation which did little to damage sales of the book.
After graduating with an inevitable Third, Hitchens launched his career in journalism as “social science correspondent” at the Times, a “Gogol-like ghost job which I held for six months before its editor said something to me that made it impossible for me to go on working for him”. (In a footnote, Hitchens noted that the exact words were: “You’re fired.”)
In the 1970s, as well as working as a freelance, he took various “mainstream” jobs, from being a researcher for the Insight team at the Sunday Times to working as a foreign correspondent for the Daily Express, before joining the New Statesman as a staff writer and editor under Anthony Howard. At the same time he became a regular at the famous Bloomsbury “Friday lunches” at which such luminaries as Clive James, Peter Porter, the Amises (père et fils), Craig Raine and others would swap jokes and gossip.
As the decade wore on and Old Labour tottered towards the political graveyard (“Weimar without the sex”, as Hitchens described the Callaghan government), Hitchens became increasingly disillusioned with the British Left and confessed to harbouring an “odi et amo” complex about Mrs Thatcher, whom he felt was “right on essential matters”. By the 1979 election (in which, for the first time, he did not vote Labour) he was starting to feel “the strong gravitational pull of the great American planet”.
Hitchens’s decision to settle in the United States was a turning point in his life, both personally and politically. As a columnist for The Nation, he continued to fulminate against familiar targets – American imperialism, military fascism, religious fundamentalism – but his rightward political odyssey rolled inexorably on, driven by a disgust with the empty pieties of the Left and an appreciation of the dynamism of the American political tradition.
Gradually he expanded his columns to the pages of mainstream publications such as The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Harper’s Magazine, Newsday and, appropriately, Dissent. He also lectured and accepted visiting professorships at the Universities of Pittsburgh and California and the New York School for Social Research.
Hitchens’s ideological shift was driven also by a concern at the growing threat of Islamic extremism to Western freedoms. He was appalled by the “tepid reaction” of the European Left following Ayatollah Khomeini’s issue of a fatwa against his friend Salman Rushdie, and also by the events of September 11 2001 which, in his view, opened up a “whole new terrain of struggle”. In 2007 he took the oath of American citizenship at a ceremony at the Jefferson Memorial presided over by George W Bush’s Secretary of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff.
Hitchens opened his memoir Hitch-22 with a story about a false rumour of his own mortality. A catalogue for an exhibition of photographs at the National Portrait Gallery had mistakenly described him as “the late” Christopher Hitchens, a mistake he used as a peg to muse on the subject of mortality (it was not so much the mourners at the funeral that came to mind, he wrote, but the “steady thunk of emails into my in-box on the day of my demise”). But as he toured to promote the book, he was diagnosed with oesophagal cancer and forced to cancel the remainder of his engagements.
Read more at
The Telegraph
