Much of the material behind my portrait of Christopher Hitchens in the new issue of Prospect refused to be confined to a conventional profile. So for those with a bit of a "Hitchens kink," I've compiled a selection of out-takes, further reflections and criticisms of the man for Prospect online. So what makes this divisive political pamphleteer worth the effort?
To spend time with Hitchens, to accept his hospitality, to drink late into the night with him, is to become inexorably partisan. The bargain of his hospitality, once accepted, is both rewarding and alarming. I arrived to see him one evening in Washington, and before our three-day interview had even formally begun, I discovered I had six hours of his ferociously lucid and entertaining exegeses on tape, still unflagging as a bottle of Johnnie Walker black label finally pleaded emptiness at 4.30am. The idea that this would be an objective exercise had similarly evaporated.
I don’t believe there is another writer of the '68 generation who could still give as good as this: compulsive, long-form conversation ranging from the politically recondite to the poetically high-flown to the raucously obscene. Hitchens reeled off much of Macaulay’s English civil war ballad, “The Battle of Naseby,” from memory, and he provided samples from his vast store of remembered limericks. With deference to the theme of our conversation—the disillusion of the political left—he unpacked Robert Conquest’s most famous number:
There was a great Marxist called Lenin, Who did two or three million men in. That’s a lot to have done in, But where he did one in, That grand Marxist, Stalin, did ten in.But there was plenty of room for other out-takes from Hitchens’ neurologically archived reels of doggerel:
There was a young fellow called Shit, A name he disliked quite a bit. So he changed it—to Shite— A step in the right Direction I think you’ll admit.Literary-intellectual entertainment of the Hitchens kind is a rare commodity. Words and ideas matter to him, and he makes them matter to others. But in this performance lies a peril too. One cannot remain neutral in the face of his vertiginous positions: on religion, Iraq or the squabbling remnants of a defunct, sectarian left—to which, in a factional, Trotskyist sense, he still belongs. There is a violence in his arguments. There is no place for modest divergences of opinion. One phrase you’ll never hear in a conversation with Hitchens is, “Ok, we’ll agree to differ.” As he explains in Prospect: “I’ve never been impressed by middle ground, or compromising, or art-of-the-possible stuff. Why would people bother with politics if that’s all they wanted to do? If you weren’t trying so see if you could expand the art of the possible at least, break the limits of the feasible, redefine them, expand them—why would you bother? Who wants to be just a manager?”
Arguments for or against any issue become arguments for or against him. If you can’t agree to differ, and you haven’t got the head for dangerous heights required to share all his views, what are you doing in his kitchen at 4.30am? Any interview requires an element of bad faith, of acting up to your subject. But with Hitchens, you feel that something real is at stake, that whatever your own assumptions, you will have to rethink them. That’s what makes him remarkable; but it’s also where you will fall short, unless you’re prepared to go the whole way in an argument with him—one that you’ll almost certainly lose.
I was surprised, recently, when I told the political philosopher John Gray that I’d failed to keep my distance with Hitchens; that I had overwritten, and spent too much time trying to understand him. Gray is perhaps the most convincing opponent of the new atheists—unveiling the quasi-religious mythologies behind rationalist absolutism—so his interest was unexpected. “I think radical rationalism is a form of magical thinking,” he told me. “Hitchens is a prototypical version of this combination, but restrained by his natural intelligence. He’s much more interesting than Dawkins. It’s worth persisting with him.”
There’s a great distinction, made by the philosopher-psychiatrist Karl Jaspers, between scientific explanation and clinical understanding. My profile of Hitchens does not claim to be an objective explanation; rather it’s a clinical encounter in which the observer recognises he is being shaped by the observed, and attempts a diagnosis nevertheless. Extra notes are provided here: on the sectarian habits of the left, on his view of the “Protestant revolution,” on his brother Peter and on other fractious relationships. With luck the result is some understanding of a performative thinker suffering from an incurable argumentative condition who—warts and all—forces his allies to think again and his opponents to think harder.
