Hitch-22

Reading Christopher Hitchens is like having depth charges being dropped around me. I find his prose style so silkily readable that I’m often just drawn along by the sheer pleasure of his writing, and don’t so much ignore as fail to recognize the point he’s making until later. When it’s had time to sink in. Hence the depth charge analogy.

The man was bursting with ideas, most of which I did and do find awfully hard to argue with. And this ‘autobiography’ is packed with them. I put the word in quotes because the book isn’t structured in the traditional form: I was born, grew up, started work, met so and so, moved to a new home…  It begins with his birth and parents and schooling, yes, but it’s not long before he’s writing about friends and influences, travels, writing assignments, changing nationality. Always in a manner you can follow, but only vaguely chronological. 

What you have instead is the feeling – well, it’s definitely how I felt – that you’re sitting in a bar with him, or perhaps a restaurant over a good meal, and you’re engaged in a conversation that lasts not hours but days. A conversation between people of two like minds that veers, like all good conversations, from topic to topic and then back again before setting off in yet another direction.

Long pieces about his friendships with Martin Amis and James Fenton; a whole chapter on Edward Said. Much discussion of Saddam Hussein’s ghastly rule and his – Hitchens’ - defence of the international intervention that toppled his regime. His shift from Radical Left to – well, I’m not quite sure where he ended up. Which, if I’ve read the book correctly, he wouldn’t have known either. (But he’s firm in his conviction that the movements that try to produce the perfect world, the Utopia, are the ones that often/usually lead to the most dreadful slaughter and suffering.)

And he includes a piece of advice – in a Foreword to the paperback edition that he wrote when he’d been diagnosed with final stage oesophageal cancer – I can’t praise highly enough.

If there is anybody known to you who might benefit from a letter or a visit, do not on any account postpone the writing or the making of it. The difference made will almost certainly be more than you have calculated.