Remembering Hitchens

I first became a regular reader of Christopher Hitchens as I was beginning a year abroad in Chile in 2003, through a pair of his pieces addressed to the life and work of the literary scholar Edward Said: first, an ambivalent Atlantic Monthly review of the updated edition of Said’s Orientalism, and then, a few weeks later, a touching Slate obituary to Said, who had recently succumbed to leukemia.  Living, studying, and volunteering thousands of miles from home—and from anywhere else I knew—constantly tested the borders of my independence and experience, and in the occasional lonely or unscheduled moments of those months abroad I often found myself, for 20 or 30 minutes or more, plumbing Hitchens’s new or old writings wherever I could find them online.

My ability to lose myself in his work would continue when I bought some of his books over the next few years.  At one moment, I’d be rearranging my bookshelf; at the next, I’d be flipping open an anthology of his, vowing to snap it closed again; and an hour later, I would have gotten myself accidentally engrossed in explorations of Kipling, Saul Bellow, the death penalty.  His command of politics and literature was impressive, his perspectives incisive, and his prose punchy.  At his best, he achieved a beauty of both language and analysis that was perhaps most on display when he joined books and politics.  Only one such example was his wonderful, counter-narrative Atlantic essay on Churchill, “The Medals of His Defeats,” which I found myself reading and rereading one Christmas vacation.  His writing also found a unique register when he was on attack.  He could sometimes allow personal slights and vendettas into arguments where they did not seem to belong, but when the target was clear, and the target’s character legitimately at stake, it was a thrilling ride.  I practically tore through The Trial of Henry Kissinger, and would again.  The fire extended to non-personal matters: he wrote frequently, and devastatingly, against capital punishment. 

Pieces like these showed, further, that he could both revel in American ideals while subjecting his adopted homeland to a skepticism for which he was famous.  He underwent waterboarding, for heaven’s sake, and found yet more reason to oppose torture.  At their best, his writings evinced a concept he once advanced (I don’t remember, and can’t find, where): that the measure of intelligence is in one’s tolerance for contradiction—which indeed he turned into the title of his Atlantic piece on Kipling, “A Man of Permanent Contradictions.”  If Hitchens’s views of America and its leaders could be multidimensional, his ardent defense of the Iraq war was at times indulgent, and led him to gloss over both the effects of battle and legitimate criticisms of it.  Yet his constant reminders of the authentic threats to organized civilization were a healthy counterpoint to my own opposition to the Iraqi conflict, and more.  Reading Hitchens gave me deeper, more nuanced ways of viewing post-9/11 politics.  Most of all, it made me skeptical of the widespread skepticism--felt on the Left, and which I’d felt myself--toward American purpose and power.

After a couple years reading his work, I was thus well aware of the qualities of Hitchens’s prose and persuasive power—to say nothing of his brash, biting public persona.  But it was a serendipitous meeting with Hitchens in the summer of 2005 that exposed me to a perhaps less prominent feature—his personal generosity. 

I was on campus at Stanford that summer doing research for my senior thesis.  I noticed Hitchens would be coming to the Hoover Institute as a Media Fellow.  I contacted the coordinator of the fellowships: Would the writer be holding any public events?  She got back to me: No, he would be here for a week, and would have no such events, but you should keep an eye out for other appearances in the future.  Very well, I thought, it was worth a shot, and I sent an email thanking the woman for getting back to me.  It was to my great surprise, then, to receive another email, the next day, from this same lady: Mr. Hitchens would be happy to meet with you one-on-one.  Please go ahead and contact him at the following email.

I don’t remember where I was sitting when I got this, but I surely catapulted out of my chair.  I emailed an introduction, and to at least attempt to justify this meeting that I had not solicited, stated an interest in discussing various topics I’d touched on in school and knew he was interested in: Chilean politics, Kipling, the Iraq war.  On the appointed day, when I knocked on the door to the Hoover office he’d asked me to come to, he turned from his computer with his characteristic slight smirk, cocked his head, and intoned, in full throaty British, “It is I.”  

This wasn’t going to my normal afternoon, that’s for sure.  He stuffed me into his maroon Volkswagen, and before we’d even gotten to the nearby Trader Joe’s to pick up lunch, he was discussing Jefferson and Paine.  At his in-laws near campus—where he spent the summer—he kicked off his shoes, padding into the kitchen to pull out the choice of spirits.  (It was more than a double-take to see my literary hero in his socks.  What can I say?  He didn’t look quite poised to confront Islamic fundamentalism at that moment.) 

As we sat outside, eating lunch and drinking, I’d lob him a topic and sit back to enjoy the response, emitted between puffs on his cigar.  He talked about Kipling’s poem White Man’s Burden, acknowledging the author’s contempt toward the colonized peoples yet elucidating a connection to the way American intervention in Iraq would one day be viewed.  He discussed the Pinochet investigations in Chile.  He recited some poetry aloud.  We were joined for some time by his wife, Carol Blue, whom I found very engaging (in one jaw-dropping moment for me, she came out to the patio, and asked her husband, in my paraphrase, “Sean Penn wants to know what’s better for us, Thursday night, or Saturday?”).  When he drove me back to campus a couple hours later, he curbed the VW, stretched out a paw, and nodded at me: “It’s been real.”

While I can’t say our meeting was exactly a two-way conversation—it didn’t take much to get Hitchens talking, and I was happy enough to listen—it represented quite a generous act on his part.  I hadn’t asked for a one-on-one, he had plenty going on, I was young.  He didn’t have to reach out, but he did; he didn’t have to invite me to his home for a long lunch, but he did.  About a year later, when I was considering applying for journalism jobs or internships, I emailed him for advice.  Again, there was no reason he should have felt he had to do anything, but he referred me to a contact at Slate.

The personal connection to Hitchens was meaningful, but tiny in the grand scheme of things.  Nevertheless, it made it all the harder to hear of his diagnosis with esophageal cancer 18 months ago.  The fact that he could be so battered by a disease—that it might at one point take his life—was so at odds with the verve and conviction I’d seen both publicly and in private.  As he confronted cancer, it brought out a new dimension in his writing.  His portraits of others—Said, Sontag—had shown Hitchens’s capability to be empathetic, even affecting.  But in a series of essays he wrote about sickness and death, he turned those skills on himself and rendered tender and deeply intimate reflections.  His June essay in Vanity Fair detailing the loss of his voice ended this way:

What do I hope for? If not a cure, then a remission. And what do I want back? In the most beautiful apposition of two of the simplest words in our language: the freedom of speech.

When I heard Hitchens had passed away, early Friday morning, I was surprised by how socked I felt by it.  It wasn’t so much the small personal connection we’d made a half-dozen years ago as the larger impending absence to the world of words.  His voice punctuated the Web six, seven, eight times a month.  It was a voice not just frequent but muscular, a voice that stood out.  And it was singular, a voice that forwarded unique ideas, made unlikely connections, took on unassailable targets.  It is not clear who could say the things he was able to say, say them as often as he did, say them as well as he did--or who will.