Opinion

The pleasures of Hitch

There is an odd thing about Christopher Hitchens. Having entered journalism as a Trotskyist in 1970s Britain (which he memorably described as “Weimar without the sex”), he has spent the last decade as a leading advocate of bombing Afghanistan “back out of the Stone Age.” Yet this ideological change has had little effect on the pleasures of reading him.

One would — at least I would — as happily read something he wrote about Nicosia in 1975 as something he wrote about Barack Obama this morning. The moving articles that Hitchens has written since being diagnosed with a serious cancer over the summer are of a piece with both.

Hitchens’ ideological engagements, however passionately undertaken and sincerely meant, turn out to be peripheral to his journalistic achievements, which are more literary than political.

His writing calls to mind something the Australian literary critic Clive James once wrote about the correspondence of Evelyn Waugh: that Waugh’s were the last great collection of letters we would see “unless the telephone is uninvented.” Hitchens is the last great practitioner of a literary journalism that was still robust in our lifetimes — it lingered into the 1980s at the Spectator in London — but is vanishing in the Internet age.

Until very recently, Hitchens’ (traditionalist) literary tastes were at loggerheads with his (utopian) political ones. He is fascinated by the great 20th-century battles between communism, fascism and liberal democracy. But the parallel struggles over 20th-century literary modernism leave him relatively cold. As a literary critic, he prefers the level-headed to the experimental.

In his recent autobiography, “Hitch-22,” he describes his upbringing: “I would escape to the library and lose myself in the adventure stories of John Buchan and ‘Sapper’ and G.A. Henty and Percy Westerman, and acquaint myself with imperial and military values just as, unknown to me in the England of the late 1950s that lay outside the school’s boundary, these were going straight out of style.”

Hitchens’ conversion in recent years to an idiosyncratic kind of conservatism — one that accommodates, for instance, gay rights and atheism — is not surprising. The red thread that runs through all his writing is a distrust of the doctrine that “the personal is political,” and he abandoned his leftist comrades to the extent that they embraced it.

There are two ways to reconcile the personal and the political. Since the 1960s, speech codes and petty legislation have tried to hold citizens’ personal actions to a standard of ideological purity, and thus to protect political ideologies from dissent.

Hitchens has done the opposite. He has sought — not always reasonably — to hold politicians to commonsensical standards of decency. Hitchens has impeccable manners in his personal life, and it is around manners that his wit, like a novelist’s, revolves.

Again, these manners are idiosyncratic. He is delighted by the late cartoonist Marc Boxer’s statement that “it’s the height of bad manners to sleep with somebody less than three times.”

In his latest article on cancer in this month’s Vanity Fair, he attacks a meant-to-be-uplifting video, made by a professor suffering from cancer and recently circulated on the Internet. “It ought to be an offense,” Hitchens writes, “to be excruciating and unfunny in circumstances where your audience is almost morally obliged to enthuse.”

For Hitchens, as for Henty or Buchan (or Kipling), bad political actors are not just adversaries. They are cads. What has made his political journalism gripping through four decades is the wide cast of villains who inhabit it. His enemies’ list is Balzacian in its variety, including not just Bill Clinton and Henry Kissinger, but also Mother Teresa, John F. Kennedy and Isaiah Berlin.

The danger of this approach is that it will degenerate into a witch hunt. Why has it not in Hitchens’ case? Having made malicious sport of other people’s gods, ideas and IQs, he has fewer enemies than you’d expect.

Hitchens was always an unusual leftist. Even when he believed in the Radiant Future, he seemed to think his role in it would be as some kind of saving remnant or in-house reactionary. What use did he think the people of the Singing Tomorrows would have for the Macaulay poems he enthuses about? For those sexist Kingsley Amis novels that he champions? For the rentier socialism of Oscar Wilde?

Hitchens remains more interested in joining the literary tradition than in purging it. In a speech about history and memory that he gave in Northern Ireland in 1997, he noted that, for better or for worse, Ireland’s literary tradition had been built out of nationalism, insularity, insurrection and reprisal, and that we “cannot be expected to be ashamed of having taken seriously certain ideas of nationality and religion and community.”

Nor need Hitchens be ashamed of the variety of discredited causes he has taken up over the years. People will be reading him long after the arguments that spurred him are forgotten.

Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.