Book: Hitch-22 Christopher Hitchens  Atlantic Books  Pg 422Rs 599

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A look at the index of author, journalist and polemicist Christopher Hitchens’ memoir is enough to convey that the man wants you to know he’s rubbed shoulders with the famous and infamous, been friends with the who’s who, and travelled to more countries than you can point to on an atlas. Famous for his shift from the Trotskyite Left to the American right and his abrasive opinions on a variety of subjects from Mother Teresa to the non-existence of the Almighty, his Hitch-22 is a capacious volume that unpacks an incident-filled life.

He tells us that quite early in life, when dealing with a schoolyard bully, he discovered that words can be weapons. An insight gilded later by the observation that “if you can give a decent speech in public or cut any kind of figure on the podium, then you need never dine or sleep alone”.  His style can be prolix, not to mention allusive, as though the pen is hurrying up to put on to paper all that his mind teems with.

Those who seek the outspokenness that he is famous for will not be disappointed. There are broadsides against figures such as Gore Vidal and Susan Sontag, as well as assertions such as “the Nobel Prize is a huge bore and fraud”; “I neither know nor care anything about sports”; and “Cuban socialism was too much like a boarding school in one way and too much like a church in another”.

It was at Oxford that Hitchens’ interest in the Left Movement was awakened, and there are several passages dealing with his interactions with the International Socialists: the debates, the meetings, the conversions. Here, too, Hitchens was to make two of the friends he still swears by, Martin Amis and James Fenton.

He also confesses his dalliance with bisexuality, claiming to have slept with two men who later went on to become members of the Thatcher cabinet. That the two remain unnamed is one of the rare instances of restraint in the book.

In 1981, Hitchens moved to New York, writing for The Nation and other publications, and this awakened a deep love for the United States, made official by his receiving citizenship two decades later. With a convert’s zeal, he spends several paragraphs describing his passport. After the events of 9/11, he swore “a sort of oath to remain coldly furious until those hateful forces had been brought to a most strict and merciless account”. This, among other things, meant renouncing his Left credentials as well as supporting the second Gulf War, something that drew howls of protest from his former compatriots.

His coterie of comrades remains impressive, something he draws attention to time and again. (In fact, the words “my dear friend” recur more often than one can count.) Salman Rushdie is another close ally, whose defence he sprang to immediately after the fatwa, which also made him reinforce what he stands for: “In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humour, the individual, and the defense of free expression. Plus, of course, friendship…”

A Freudian would observe that much of Hitchens’ self-regard and indeed his thick skin arose from his close relationship with his mother, Yvonne, who, by her son’s warm and moving account, was a sparkling, supportive personality. (She was tragically to commit suicide while in Athens.) It was Yvonne who once proclaimed, “If there’s an upper class in this country, Christopher is going to be in it” — words that bring to mind the statement of one of Hitchens’ heroes, George Orwell: “I belong to the lower-upper-middle class”.

Much later, Hitchens was also to discover that she had kept her Jewish ancestry secret.

Though he may like to give the impression that his life is a constant round of parties, friends and alcohol, it’s clear that he’s an extremely hard worker. As he writes, “on average I produce at least a thousand words of printable copy every day, and sometimes more. I have never missed a deadline. I give a class or a lecture or a seminar perhaps four times a month and have never been late for an engagement”.

The title Hitch-22 refers to a state of ‘doubleness’ that Hitchens says he inhabits — for example, fighting for workers’ rights in the morning and attending a long, drunken Notting Hill lunch in the afternoon. As he writes, “What I hope to do now is give some idea of what it is like to fight on two fronts at once, to try and keep opposing ideas alive in the same mind, even occasionally to show two faces at the same time.” Whatever else you may say about him — and people say a lot — there’s no denying that he pours himself into whatever takes his fancy, and marshals all arguments possible against what doesn’t.