What can Christopher Hitchens, camp English gentleman-essayist and DC curiosity, do for you? Write a memoir, that’s what! Your Wonkette book reviewer admires Hitchens’ writing up to A Certain Point, but didn’t he become a bit dull over the last decade, when he became the Man With One Idea? First he was obsessed with Iraq, and wrote almost exclusively about that, making the same war-fap catcalls over and over. Then he became obsessed with famous Third World dictator “God,” which brought him such riches that he’s now obliged to talk about this notorious tyrant all the damn time.
The fact that he’s wrong about Iraq and right about clerical horror is less important than the fact that he’s been suppressing the dandyish eclecticism that made him interesting. That is why it’s refreshing to report that Hitch-22 is — despite the embarrassing title that no publisher should have allowed — thoroughly entertaining beach/oilscape reading.
Early in these wistful reminiscences, Hitch writes:
I was one of those rural and suburban boys who, like Ruskin when taking the railway across North London, would feel the impulse to pull down the blinds as my train went through scenes of ugliness and misery and desolation in places called Hackney Downs and London Fields. Once, after staying with a school friend on the Mumbles peninsula of South Wales, I had been as distressed as William Blake by my brief glimpse of the hell-mouth scenes of the steelworks and coal-pits around Port Talbot.
Hitchens knows his forebears. That is exactly like the time Ruskin wrote a Slate column about how “somebody should cluster-bomb Hackney Downs good and proper, drag the ghoulish Baathist shit-hole into the 19th century.” Or the time Blake angrily shook his fist at the steelworks, calling them “a hog-visaged pimp for Islamofascism” before downing an entire bottle of Johnnie Walker and marching off to appear on Morning Joe.
What else is in this thing? Instead of a boring summary, let’s do a numerical index:
1: Nightmarish visit to a New York brothel in broad daylight / self-administering of the Proust questionnaire at the back of Vanity Fair / strange conversation with Jorge Luis Borges .
2: Future members of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet Hitch slept with at Oxford, in a gay way; meetings with Latin American strongmen of opposite political stripes; wives.
4: Chapters devoted to one talented friend or another (James Fenton, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Edward Said); lands Hitch makes one long to visit (Portugal, Cyprus, Argentina, North Korea).
5: Authors of filthy limericks and/or Private Eye pieces who would’ve made fine contributors to the 1970s/1980s British edition of Wonkette (Each famous Amis, Rushdie, Robert Conquest, Francis Wheen).
Uncountable: Allusions to history, literature, and Marxist arcana of both the “hmm, must check that out” and “trying too hard” varieties.
So read it! And read Hitchens’ various essay collections. Read his friends, who are the justly fapped-over love interests of Hitch-22. Try Amis’ comic novels (his Serious Important ones aren’t as good), Rushdie at his best, and Fenton’s fine poetry and Vietnam journalism.
FULL DISCLOSURE: Your reviewer once met Christopher Hitchens, briefly, and he was Actually Very Nice Indeed.
SAD RELATED HEADLINE: Hitchens has got the esophageal cancer, and must undergo chemotherapy treatments, which is why he isn’t doing many book appearances right now.
{ 52 comments }
and he was Actually Very Nice Indeed. Was he SOBER at the time?
I am so going to get this book. He’s one kick – ass author even if I don’t agree with him.
But does is the book soaked in alcohol like Hitch? Does reading it get you drunk?
I hope he quits smoking.
The problem I have had, aside from, well, the whole being wrong, with consequences in lives about Iraq, is that he is so obviously devoting trying to live a quotation. As Emerson said, “Don’t quote. Tell me what you know.”
Hitchens is doing the Auden thing. Well, Auden was doing his own life, thank you very much, and didn’t get a choice in the matter. He’s also able, with each move, to quote someone, to echo, to make a reference, as if the allusion were the intention, as if impulse had never existed, except to go try out literature as an instruction manual, all the way to going on a John Dos Passos conservative conversion.
When you are the only one involved, that’s fine — fey, but fine. When people can die because you’ve championed a policy of invasion, the great sages will haunt your ass.
“Didn’t he become a bit dull over the last decade, when he became the Man With One Idea?”
Nothing says “I know I was wrong and won’t admit it” so much as refusing to shut the fuck up with the increasingly lame justifications. So much intelligence, so little wisdom.
Greer: I too have met the Hitch a few times; we once went to Timberlake’s on Conn Ave and, embarrassingly for me, I was in a rare sober period, so I had a club soda while he pulled on his JW Black. Anyhow, he was a nice man, and he allowed me to say unsophisticated things about Orwell without pouncing. Also, just finished Amis’ Pregnant Widow, and it was terrific.
I have a soft spot for the “drink-soaked former-Trotskyite poppinjay.”
[re=609885]Ye Olde Fap-Smith[/re]: Er, “popinjay” you dimwit.
Just read that he got throat cancer. Karma or predestination: the atheistic joker sees life as a contrarian.
[re=609885]Ye Olde Fap-Smith[/re]: not poopingjay?
Let us not forget how pro-torture this guy was until one day he woke up and said “maybe I was wrong, but how do I admit it? I know, I’ll get waterboarded myself!” – and of course, publicly, so he can justify changing his stance. In a controlled environment with the ability to make it stop and freakin ENGIMA playing he lasted a whopping 6 seconds.
Of course, if they were pouring whiskey on him he would have lasted all night.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7u-Wk1aU-E
Johnny Rotten Dandy. Kinda snoozers.
I like the guy. I finished the book last night and am in awe of how he (and a few of you commenters here at Wonkette share the trait) is not only so well-read, but retains so much of the literature. I wish I could do that. But if had to have been buggered in boarding school to get that talent I would politely decline.
[re=609881]Terry[/re]: He quit smoking a year or so ago.
[re=609887]ushekim[/re]: Yep, it’s in our post here. Seemed like a BUZZKILL before a “summer book review,” so we put it at the end. (And in the kicker headline.)
Hitch-22 sounds like a product that is sold to the olds during the nightly news.
[re=609884]GuyClinch[/re]: Yeah, I’ve heard good things about The Pregnant Widow. Perhaps I was Too Quick to Judge Martin’s serious books. Also, his essays and journalism are unbelievably hilarious. If I had to name the funniest writer currently working in the English language, I’d say it’s a tie between Amis and Kenneth Layne. I really do believe this!
I wonder if he’d be pissed off if we prayed for his cancer to be cured.
sounds fascinating. too bad i have more important things to do (the litter box is full to overflowing, and there is a local family of grackles needing eviscerating).
Speaking of books Wonketteers, the right wing’s beloved Human Events has a great offer for you. Iffin’ you sign-up for 35-weeks of wingnuttery, then they’ll send you FREE that great coffee table book “The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to the Civil War.” You and your friends can learn that Nathan Bedford Forrest, Johnny Reb General and founding Grand Wizard of the KKK, was a true American Patriot. When you’re done reading this book, you will toss-off your lefty sterotypes with a rebel yell and head out the door wearing your Sunday-best white sheets and carrying a length of hemp rope. True rapture, true rapture.
[re=609902]Greer Mansfield[/re]: “If I had to name the funniest writer currently working in the English language,I’d say it’s a tie between Amis and Kenneth Layne,” with the tie-breaker going to the one who signs my checks!
[re=609902]Greer Mansfield[/re]: Well, even his funny books are serious on some level. At any rate, The Pregnant Widow has some fine moments of vodka-nostrilling hilarity. Also, the looking-in-the-mirror motif that causes me to laugh with sad, dawning identification, which is also found in Money and The Information. And I’m inclined to agree with you about the funny-writer ranks.
[re=609892]Chernobyl Soup[/re]: getting buggered in boarding school was the finest 14 years of my life!
Ba-da-boom! I’m here all week, try the veal …
[re=609909]weejee[/re]: I have been known, on weekend mornings, to head into the back yard still wrapped in my sheet and carrying what might be called a hemp product. Which I am about to light. Does that count?
Like most intellegencia-hawks regarding Iraq, he could only see the net good (no more Saddam!) and not realize that ideas, when made real, have consequences.
[re=609889]lomri[/re]: Hitch getting waterboarded is one reason I love him (even though he sided with the Neo Cons con job).
That took some balls….and showed that the RW blowhard Hannity was a big fat baby for not taking on the waterboard challenge too.
The other is his atheism…’cause I am agnostic myself. Get well soon Christopher!
Nice post. No obvious typos as in the past couple of days. Also, no reference to books by other Wonkette editors/contributors, until that last unfortunate comment. Does Ken make that a condition for letting you post here?
[re=609917]Panquake[/re]: “he could only see the net good”
That leaves a lot of things for a smart guy like him not to see, starting with the idea, clearly enunciated at Nuremburg, that launching a war of aggression is the root cause of all the war crimes that inevitably follow.
[re=609916]x111e7thst[/re]: I’d say that for sure counts, if you consider the sillysauce that is the War on Drugs has tokin’ on a dube as perhaps a more serious felony that lynching.
[re=609909]weejee[/re]:Goddammit, I’m going to have to order soon-to-be senile grampa Fap-Smith a subscription so that he’ll be too distracted by the “War Betwixt the States” coffee book during Thanksgiving to regale the family with his yearly “ethnic humor” routine. On the topic of Hitchens, while a mea culpa on his Iraq war stance would be nice, I will always adore him for his take down piece on bitch charlatan Mother Teresa(Patron Saint of Cunts).
I’ve read some of his stuff and I came away thinking he was mostly a self-infatuated narcissist, just another ego with legs and pretensions. Am I wrong?
So Hitchens who has voiced his loud and obnoxious opinions about God, suddenly is in jeopardy of losing that voice, huh?
And they say there is no God…LOL!
I heard he started back smoking last fall during the writing of this book. See WaPo: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/02/AR2010060204649.html
[re=609928]Big Liver[/re]: Maybe.
That’s a necessary prerequisite for New Journalism (TM). However, it’s also a common thread to the English Public School (TM, pat. reg.). The thing is, being narcissistic these days means being famous, I gather, but being narcissistic and having political views is where things get rotten.
Again, going on a quest to be your great authors is fun! Let’s all meet for Bloomsday! Hooray! Let’s all walk from Harry Bailey’s to Canterbury! Let’s get drunk under the volcano. Let’s swagger through Madrid. Ripping stuff! Let’s mount whores and dodge junkies in Greenwich Village, yippee! We can write about it, afterward, and embiggen our aesthetics.
I have no quarrel with such necessary excesses of the young. However, when one then takes a gig and gets a soap box and starts going on television to say that the Dark Lord is right, that sending troops into a sovereign nation to determine for them how it should be run… well, that’s where narcissism becomes political criminality.
(Shoot, Dos Passos at least used qualifiers when he was a conservative. Hitchens didn’t. I could only think of the previous Christopher Hitchen, the under City Marshal of London, 1708-32 (see Wikipedia).)
Hitch was a writing machine that wove in and out of the left and the practically right, and the wtf; booze isn’t free—some things just had to be done. As others have said above, He Is Boring, lacks wisdom for all his craft, and can’t admit he was wrong. Booze is great for tenacity. Too bad there’s not enough of it on the planet to make him forget Alexander Cockburn. Poor Hitch.
[re=609930]actor212[/re]: Could you perhaps cite a couple of non-obnoxious opinions about god? For comparison. An academic exercise.
I hope it’s not funny, because if it is I just won’t get it! Chicks.
[re=609943]Troubledog[/re]: Oooh, can I?
Wittgenstein: The question of whether or not there is a God is impossible. When you ask the question, you have proposed the answer already.
Wittgenstein said that whether there was such a being as God was unknowable by logic or reason, but, as for him, he was too old for his knees to bend that way.
There: not obnoxious atheism. For not obnoxious Christianity, go to virtually anything prior to the 19th century, but also Kierkegaard. Humility seems to be the enemy of obnoxiousness, as well as the antithesis of fame.
Any man who has not simply been labeled a popinjay, but has actually earned that distinction, is worthy of much adulation.
Huzzah!
Bully!
Excelsior!
Hitchens is bombastic and boorish, but (when he’s not writing about Iraq) almost always entertaining, which is what a writer should be. I hope he recovers from this cancer thing.
[re=609930]actor212[/re]: Neither fortune nor misfortune, however ironic, speak to the existence or non-existence of a deity. A complete lack of evidence, on the other hand, points in the sensible direction.
[re=609919]sati demise[/re]: Meh, for such an intellectual it seems disingenuous to need to be waterboarded to change your mind and decide it is bad.
I’m an atheist, but lets be honest – his prior acceptance of torture was because those being tortured were religious zealots in his mind. So your lilly livered agnosticness is one step closer to being waterboarded than me, so I guess it’s all good!
On the subject of torture, Mr. Hitchens put the water where his mouth (nose?) was and immediately realized both he and waterboarding were wrong. He wrote about exactly why it was wrong and challenged others to try it. You torture captives because you’re angry with them and NOT to gain actionable intelligence. People will say anything to make it stop and so it’s notoriously unreliable. [Full disclosure: I have witnessed waterboarding as part of mock Prisoner of War exercises, so I have a higher level of awareness there.]
His writing about the invasion of Iraq did not make it happen. It was likely planned before W was sworn in. Many of our favorite Senators voted to authorize it, which is another reason why John Kerry lost to W 2004. Mr. hitchens probably met those assholes W was after on his world travels and knew what SOB’s they truly were. The invasion, of course, was a war crime, but no one will ever be in the dock over the rank of Sergeant, maybe Captain at the most.
Mr. Hitchens was absolutely correct on the subject of religion and his book “God is Not Great” makes a coompelling read. I wish him well in his recovery, but I don’t really think he has much of a chance. That much smoking will, in fact, kill you and his legendary drinking didn’t help. In fact, it likely led the way to the current target of his cancer.
Hate the man and/or his habits, if you must, but he certainly does not lack courage and writes very well. We could use more writers like him.
his intelligence on the pro-war camp was definitely wasted; and they didn’t trust him anyway. Isn’t there a right-wing-nut “Hitchens Watch” website still? My guess is he thought it would be “like Orwell” to be for the war, as if Orwell’s WW2 or Spanish Civil War support had any relation to the idiotic Bush wars. I hope he gets well with his recent cancer diagnosis.
Gee, talented British authors with silky accents make me feel so low brow, since my taste in literature runs more toward Bukowski, Rolling Stone, the beat writers, and detective fiction of the Raymond Chandler and James Cain variety, T.C. Boyle and James Ellroy.
Oh wow, that is sad about the cancer. Hitchens was the only war hawk for whom I had any amount of respect, and I adore his writing so much.
And seeing as how I drink at the rate he does, this will give me a glimpse of my future.
Hitchins is more popular than the Beatles, who are also half dead.
[re=609919]sati demise[/re]:
Damn right it took balls. And Hitch has 400lb balls (shaved, probably) , not just for that but this too and also…..
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/18/christopher-hitchens-beat_n_168035.html
[re=610028]whiterabid[/re]: That’s all really good stuff too. IN FACT, I’m considering using next week’s review as an excuse to briefly talk about the likes of Cain/Chandler/Bukowski, because Fred Thompson is a Hollywood guy, isn’t he?
Y’all don’t remember his One Idea before the Iraq one? That Clinton was morally unfit to be president because of a hummer? You know, like the subject of 97% of his Nation articles?
Anybody who was earnest enough to go to Cuba and cut sugar cane for Castro, as he did, lacks the nose for bullshit that is the hallmark of a real writer (cf: Hunter S. Thompson). Additionally, he dresses like a titty bar manager from New Jersey, so he is not in the real poppinjay league of a Tom Wolfe or a Richard Merkin. A high-end hack and name dropper. A noisome frondeur. Spare us the hero worship, Wonkette! Bummer about the cancer, though.
The moment that Hitchens started supporting Bush Dubbayah’s invasion of Iraq I ceased reading him. For a man of his so-called education, he’s a moral retard who probably did a lot of damage to what little remains of liberal intellectual criticism.
Is Hitchens now or was he ever funny, or even humorous? Not that I can recall. Mark Twain is humorous, James Walcott is thigh-slappingly funny and on the right side of the angels. For sheer stomach-hurting funny & consistently hilarious comedy, read The Bloggess (Jenny Lawson). This woman is a comic genius. When reading Jenny, do not consume anything you may spew – keep all beverages AWAY from the computer machine. (As for Amis being funny, some of you people must hard up for laughs.)
I did not read his putdown of Mother Teresa, but from what I gather, Hitchens disapproved of her mindset, religion and intent. So fucking what? Sister Teresa FED people, which is more than that fucking Limey twit ever did.
Lastly, for people who care about the God argument, Hitchens could have saved everyone a lot of valuable reading time if he had just printed a few thousand cards with Epicurus’ argument on it and sent it out in a mass mailing:
“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?”
[re=609943]Troubledog[/re]: Here, here sir.
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