{"id":7465,"date":"2011-12-16T09:56:47","date_gmt":"2011-12-16T13:56:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=7465"},"modified":"2011-12-16T10:02:54","modified_gmt":"2011-12-16T14:02:54","slug":"christopher-hitchens-1949-2011","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/christopher-hitchens-1949-2011\/","title":{"rendered":"Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>So Hitch shuffled off this mortal coil \u2014 & I half-expect a full report on his own death to appear in the next issue of Vanity Fair<\/em> under his by-line. I don’t wish him happy trails as, like him, I do not believe in an afterlife. This life is all there is & the only thing that will survive are memories in the heads & hearts of those who knew us, and beyond that maybe a few pages of writing \u2014 if we are lucky. The one book of his I didn’t read to the end was his numero uno US bestseller, God is Not Great<\/em>, for the simple reason that I agreed with him ab initio<\/em> as the non-existence of God \u2014 & the\u00a0concomitant\u00a0fact that religion is core to all totalitarianism, just as all\u00a0totalitarianisms\u00a0have religion at their core \u2014 has been self-evident for me since I was 14, the same year Hemingway, my last teenage idol, committed suicide (though that, in turn, had nothing to do with my realization that there was no God).<\/p>\n

I met Hitchens only a couple times in the late seventies when we were both writing for the New Statesman<\/em> \u2014 he for the front- & back-, me only for the back-pages (I wrote a short-lived “Letter from Paris” for the NS, while trying to\u00a0convince\u00a0them, with no succes, to let me review experimental \u00a0poets such as Allen Fisher or Jerry Rothenberg’s Technicians of the Sacred<\/em>) . I remember a couple of boozy lunches & it may have been he who told me the (tall?) story of the trenchcoat on the porte-manteau in the NS offices that had supposedly belonged to H.G. Wells. I do remember liking him, but not his friends. (In fact the only other person at the NS I had a real liking for was the 1979-1980 editor of the back-pages \u2014 the lit & art pages, that is \u2014 David Caute, a man whose book on Frantz Fanon I liked very much back then, having just returned from three years in Algeria.) The problem for me was that the\u00a0cultural\u00a0intellectuals \u2014 book critics, etc. \u2014\u00a0writing for those back pages could & would\u00a0interchangeably\u00a0write for the left-leaning New Statesman<\/em> or the rightwing Spectator, <\/em>with some strange sense that “culture” was somehow beyond & above politics, or something altogether other \u2014 so that one could in fact belong to the IS (International\u00a0Socialist, an intelligent Trotzkist mouvence<\/em> of those days) while in literary matters being completely out-of-date, anti-modernist, even reactionary (I remember a discussion with James\u00a0Fenton, another old Hitchens chum, a few years later at a festival in Toronto, with Fenton defending the oldest & stalest of British poetry against any & all US modernisms). \u00a0As my old friend &\u00a0teacher\u00a0Eric Mottram would say, they were “a sorry reactionary lot” in the main, a snotty OxCam elite with many of those around Hitch allied to the old Movement<\/em> as spearheaded by Amis p\u00e8re, <\/em>whose son Martin would be one of Hitchens closest life-long friends. Though Christopher Hitchens was of a different stripe, wider, more open, more\u00a0internationalist, more more.<\/p>\n

Which is also why I can understand the Hitch’s move to the United States in the next decade \u2014 a move I too had been contemplating\u00a0since\u00a0the end of the Labour government under Jim Callaghan (a period in English politics Hitchens had called “Weimar without the sex”) & accomplished a couple years after him. We only talked\u00a0once\u00a0more: over the phone when I called in on some Washington D.C. radioprogram he was on to discuss a detail of some political menu du jour<\/em> I have utterly forgotten \u2014 though I remember his sharp intelligence & humor on that occasion too. I kept however reading him, in the small to middling doses his journalism first in The Nation<\/em> & later in Vanity Fair<\/em> allowed one to, doses I in fact prefer to the big book collections. I did & do profoundly disagree with his\u00a0stance\u00a0on the Iraq war even if my loathing of Saddam’s regime was as profound as his. But no matter the disagreement on specific subjects, my esteem for his intelligence, his quick wits, his incredible range of information & the way he was able to mesh political analysis with\u00a0literary culture, and of course for the fabulous ease with which he wrote (the time it took me to pen these three paragraphs would have been enough for the Hitch to compose a full-length article for VF). The closest I come to circumscribing what I see him as is to call him a Voltairian moralist.\u00a0\u00a0And while Johnny Walker\u00a0Black\u00a0label isn’t a whisky I enjoy, I’ll raise a glass (or two) of Jameson’s to him at 5 p.m. tonight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So Hitch shuffled off this mortal coil \u2014 & I half-expect a full report on his own death to appear in the next issue of Vanity Fair under his by-line. I don’t wish him...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[76,1],"tags":[1118],"class_list":["post-7465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-obituaries","category-uncategorized","tag-christopher-hitchens"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7465"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7465\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7473,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7465\/revisions\/7473"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}