Like a lot of people who were teenagers in the noughties, I grew up as a big fan of Christopher Hitchens. Like a lot of people who were teenagers in the noughties, I have since realised that I should have been more critical.
With the vague patricidal impulse of a writer reassessing their influences, I’ve written before about Hitchens’s disastrous pro-war obsession, and about the coarseness of his antitheism. I’ve kvetched, in a forthcoming book, about his careless approach to facts, and about his popularisation of the pointlessly belligerent oral debate.
Yes, it isn’t difficult to have harsh words for a man who waved the banners of Leon Trotsky and George W. Bush.
But as we approach the fifteenth anniversary of Christopher Hitchens’s death, I thought it was time to say some nicer things. There are reasons so many of us loved his writing, after all. To only focus on the flaws of one’s teenage heroes amounts to a sad attempt to disown one’s younger self.
Besides, Hitchens’s legacy needs a coat of paint. True, the man himself did a lot to undermine his reputation. But some of his supposed fans keep making him look worse. If they aren’t making awful AI videos out of what he might have thought of contemporary politics, they are insisting that his heirs are people like the camp sociopath Milo Yiannopolous or the oafish sexist Andrew Wilson. I am very cautious about predicting what dead people would think if they had not died, but I feel confident that if Hitchens had had to share an evening with these gentlemen, it would have driven him to even greater extremes of drink.
A lot of other people just don’t know Christopher Hitchens except as a kind of a cultural echo. He is a relic of a less online age.
To some extent, this is natural. Very few journalists are remembered years after their deaths. But I don’t think Hitchens should be forgotten.
One praiseful thing to say about Christopher Hitchens is that he was a brilliant writer. In an age of AI-generated prose, and prose that might as well have been AI-generated, it is worth revisiting his work for prose that seethes with human insight and energy. It is full of arresting phrases — I can rarely feel embarrassed without recalling a throwaway line where he risked “immersing [himself] in a bog of embarrassment” — and, of course, deliciously florid insults. Even when you disagreed with Hitchens, his use of language could pull you up short. I’m not sure that Heaven can actually be conceptualised as a “celestial North Korea” but it’s a thought-provoking image.
Secondly, it is worth reading an author who loved to read. Even in his later years, when his excuses for American failure in the Middle East grew more strained than a middle-aged pub crawler’s waistband, his literary essays were sparkling. In an age where most of us — myself included — don’t read half as much as we would if we weren’t hooked to our screens, it’s inspiring to read someone who loved books — and loved them on their own terms — as much as Hitchens did. Seek out Unacknowledged Legislation and the “love” section of Love, Poverty and War.
Thirdly, Hitchens had a life. While he was far more of a commentator than he was a journalist, you could find him writing from anywhere from Cuba to North Korea. Me, I’d rarely leave Upper Silesia if I had the choice, but I appreciate his bold curiosity. While many of us spend most of our working life online, meanwhile — to some extent unavoidably — Hitchens drifted between bars and battlefields. The world has changed and journalism had to change as well. But I’m sure our writing, and our memories, would be richer if we varied our experiences.
Finally, I want to write in praise of Hitchensian condemnation. To be clear, one could also write in opposition to Hitchensian condemnation. His “moral clarity”, as it was sometimes called, too often misrepresented complex matters. He could also be downright boorish. “If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox” is a funny line, but I do think it is not the kind of thing that one should say about a dead human being while their body is still warm.
Yet there is a place for moral dudgeon. The older I get, the more complex moral issues seem to be. (Not to mention epistemological questions.) But I sometimes think my prose gets too painfully tentative. When I write about factory farming, for example, which I believe entails the systematic torture of sentient beings on trivial grounds, I still sometimes write with all the powerful conviction of a part-time waiter trying to convince tourists to come inside a vegetarian restaurant. I’m not sure I’m convincing anyone to skip their sausage sandwich.
A well-timed Hitchensian outburst, on the other hand, could have a great deal of spiritual vitality. His denunciation of Shirley Williams’s handwringing concerns about Salman Rushdie being knighted, for example — “I think that’s a contemptible statement and I think everyone who applauded should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves” — was the argumentative equivalent of a bomb going off, with the appropriate destructive effects.
It’s just a shame that he could so misuse his talents. But I don’t think I have put my own lesser rhetorical abilities to such effective use that I can be his reputational graverobber. He wrote prose that is worth reading more than a decade after his death, and few writers can have such claims made for them.
“camp sociopath” were my two favourite words in a column chock full of contenders.