Hitch 22: A Memoir [Hardcover]

While sending out review copies for my book about China, I warned readers they might find its content polemical, controversial, "politically incorrect," etc. Two reviewers replied `not to worry,' - they liked oppositionist perspectives and were admirers of Christopher Hitchens. I thought, `Christopher who?' Incredibly, I didn't know who Hitchens was (in 2011, no less), though I knew of his book God is Not Great, which didn't appeal to me because, pompously perhaps, I reckoned I didn't need to read an argument I already supported and a conclusion I had already arrived at. Like many, I familiarized myself with Mr. Hitchens through Youtube and found myself learning heaps about politics and history and more than I expected to about religion (I had never thought of religion as the original tyranny, for example). And then I chanced upon a copy of his memoir.

Hitch-22 is the best memoir I've ever read. Better than any biography, too. From a startling account about his mother's suicide to a Socratic declaration of how little he knows (the spur which kept him learning and reflecting on his positions and beliefs), Hitchens's crisp, articulate prose courses through 400 pages, drawing you in, propelling you on, causing you to reflect, and urging you to learn more about the many subjects, historical events, themes, and memes he scrutinizes and dissects. It also sends you to the dictionary, a healthy exercise, surely.

And it's not a conventional memoir. Apart from the section pertaining to his youth, there is little straightforward or chronological autobiography, and there is limited mention of things there should be: his wife and children, for instance. Instead, after describing his upbringing (vignettes of his loving but tormented mother Yvonne, awkward chats with his kindly but conservative father, "the Commander," and the bizarre rituals and norms of British public school), the volume morphs into a study of personalities, events, and subjects that shaped Hitchens's life and career as a journalist, writer, political commentator, radical, iconoclast, and public intellectual of the first order. So, in the beginning of the book, we get chapters like "Yvonne," "the Commander," and "Fragments from an Education," and in the middle and latter portions we get ones like "Salman," "Mesopotamia from Both Sides," and "Edward Said in Light and Shade (and Saul)." The final chapter, "Decline, Mutation, or Metamorphosis?" does not, as I thought it would, speak to the writer's battle with cancer (indeed, there is no mention of the disease that took his life just two years after this book was published), but instead to the volume's overarching theme, encapsulated within its apposite title.

Hitchens, you see, far from being an absolutist (one of the charges from his reactionary, absolutist detractors), has always been acutely aware of his myriad contradictions. Ever since he began his rabble-rousing at Oxford (by day; by night he socialized with profs and dons) he has been cognizant that he has kept two sets of books.

Like many intellectuals, Hitchens was drawn to the Left through Marxism (he was a committed member of the International Socialists), but unlike other big thinkers, he quickly saw the contradictions of Marxist ideology, the shortcomings and failures of communist states, and the fascist nature of anti-fascists. But Hitchens's outright rejection of the Left was the culmination of a process that occurred over decades. For anyone who has ever wondered or felt confused about just which notch on the political spectrum they occupy, Hitch-22 offers consolation. "Mutato nomine et de te fabula narrator," our Anglo-American narrator writes. "Change only the name and this story is about you."

Reading this book taught me too many things to list and whetted my appetite for more. Apart from Bill Clinton's Mayor Quimbyesque "I did not have sexual relations with that woman," (and Clinton, remember, was impeached for lying under oath) I wasn't aware of just what a lying sack of bovine fecal matter he was. I also did not fully comprehend the challenge to freedom of expression (and freedom in general) that Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa on Salman Rushdie represented. I did not really understand the severity of the situation in Iraq (or precisely how evil and fanatical Saddam Hussein and his sons were). But most of all, and although I've had my suspicions for a while and have been tiptoeing back to the centre of the political spectrum, I never completely realized precisely how brainless, extreme, and absurd the Left really can be. See members of this bleeding-heart's society demonstrating against armed intervention so that fascist states and military juntas can continue threatening their neighbours and torturing and murdering their citizens; see them advocate for freedom of expression while denouncing books and perspectives their perspective deems "offensive"; watch as people who call themselves liberal criticise all US foreign policy as crass and corrupt imperialism believing nothing the United States government does is motivated - not even in part - by morality; note the expression of satisfaction on Leftist faces when the planes hit the towers and thousands die. "Well, hey. America had it coming."

"If Hitchens didn't exist," Ian McEwan said, "we wouldn't be able to invent him." The cynic thinks this is overstatement: the endorsement of a friend in exchange for reciprocal endorsement. But the cynic who reads Christopher Hitchens should have their cynicism replaced by clarity, perhaps perspicacity. They should come to the understanding that McEwan's statement represents something approximating the truth.

At the risk of stating the obvious or sounding hagiographic, what a pity Christopher Hitchens is no longer with us. He did what the media routinely fails to do. Not only did he use reason and logic to point the way toward what to think, but how to think. He got us to question what we knew or thought we knew. And now that he's gone, who's going to replace him? I reckon someone of Hitchen's intellect and drive comes along once every twenty or thirty years, maybe longer. There was Socrates.... There was Orwell.... There is Chomsky. The feeling I got while reading Hitchens's commentary was something approaching awe, and I felt foolish - nay, ignorant - for not having known who he was. Without question, I will read his book, Arguably (reviewed opposite my own in the San Francisco Book Review). I'm sure the pages will practically turn by themselves. Will I agree with everything Hitchens says? Of course not, and I doubt he would have wanted it any other way.

Six stars.

Troy Parfitt is the author of Why China Will Never Rule the World.

I chose this book as my holiday read. And what a good choice it was too. Hitchens is a man who usually polarizes people into one of two camps - you either love him or hate him. I try not to engage in such ideological flag waving, suffice to say, I would consider myself to be one of those who he seems to have left on 'the left' ....so to speak. His memoir takes us through his early years, with chapters devoted to his father and mother ( who i hadn't realised met with such a grizzly end). He treats us to his stint at Oxford, his experiences of the sixties, there are chapters devoted to other great loves in his life such as James Fenton, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and needless to say Edward Said.
Hitch elucidates upon how he first had misgivings about his ultra-socialist leanings, and he provides us with insight as to his dismay at the tendency of some 'comrades' to ignore the rather brutal underpinnings of the spread of the socialist revolution, and how the obvious warts were seen as beauty spots by 'the party faithful'. He has a chapter on his burgeoning love affair with all things American, which is a little rose tinted it has to be said. He seems to refuse point blank to consider that any behaviour of the USA might, in part, explain the attacks of 9/11, which for a man who easy fillets others for such naivety, is quite surprising. His chapter on Edward Said angered me a little, as the late great professor is no longer with us to defend himself to the charges Hitch lays at his door. But it is his memoir, so his rules. His attempt to defend his seeming volte face to the right, reads like the worlds longest excuse. He portrays it as if he was able to find that which Hans Blix wasn't and he refers to being a conscious part of history making as quite an 'intoxicating feeling'. Perhaps it is this which helps explain his apparent abandonment of his earlier principles. It seems to me that Hitch views himself in the same mold as George Orwell (who gets many a mention), as a chronicler of great and interesting times and an iconclast to long held fallacies in our world. The difference being that in Orwell's time, western civilization really was facing an existential crisis. It is this missing component in Hitch's world which explains his apparent desire to ratchet up the hyperbole of the 'threat of Islam' and odious regimes to the east of us, the need for 'civilized' nations to go about spreading civilized notions of 'democracy' and 'freedom'....all at the business of a gun of course.
Toward the end Hitch treats us to a detailed account of his awakening to his Jewish ancestry and how he never viewed zionism as a solution to 'the jewish question'. We see how he traced the footsteps of his jewish ancestors in Eastern Europe, which is tragic to read.
He has an unattractive tendency to ad hominen against those he dislikes, such as Clinton et al, the book would have been so much better if he had reined that in. All in all, I would recommend this book to his fans and opponents alike (of which I count myself as both). He had led a life the quarter of which would make most of us proud to recount, and no matter what his old friend Martin Amis might say, he has a great command of the language, all resulting in this wonderful book. To the man himself I forward him my best wishes and hope that he beats the big C, because like him or loathe him, Im sure we all hope theres a few glasses left in the old boy yet !

My copy arrived on that same day that the news of his latest battle with malevolent authority was revealed, he will face it, I know, with the same courage he has always exhibited, at the risk of sounding quasi-religious it goes without saying that I wish him well, for purely selfish reasons, his writing warms my heart and brings some order to my cluttered mind.
The book itself is neither really a complete memoir or a political tome, it is however beautifully composed, as you'd expect from the finest living polemic wordsmith in the English speaking world, by his standard it's almost light-hearted in places, there are many wonderful passages of kindness, friendship and affection. His comes across as fiercely loyal to his old friends, not to say very proud of them. Evidently, he still retains that naughtiness beloved of men behind closed doors amongst chums, you can almost hear him tell the bawdiest yarn, for the sole purpose of making you pistol your drink through your nostrils. It is, as if he were over a very fine summers day, recalling the moments in his life, that he thinks we might want him to recall, on his terms though, he has, in a life that has attracted as much scorn as veneration, somehow, managed to keep his personal life beyond prying eyes.
Very wisely, he steers clear of any revelation regarding his marriage(s) or says much about his children, this is such a welcome change from books of this nature, some people will of course jump on this as weakness, or what clever folks like to term a lacuna, but I think not. One of the many grand aspects of any Hitchens book or indeed essay, is the likelihood of his readers picking up on other authors that he quotes so readily, that perhaps one has not read much, if at all, in a few beautiful lines in context, he sells the concept of other books well worth reading. Mr Hitchens, like all great writers, Mr Hitchens is clearly a great reader too.