By Christopher Hitchens
Twelve, 448 pages
At the start of his memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens writes that he hopes “to give some idea” of what it means “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.”
His readers will definitely know what it means to keep opposing ideas alive in the same mind. For while Hitch-22 is in many ways a beautiful book, intensely passionate and finely written, as one would expect, its considerable allure is marred by multiple jarring portions and ugly moments. One moves gingerly through the pages, borne by Hitchens’s frisky, penetrating sentences, and then bam: something—a needlessly crass description, a condemnatory generalization, or, worse, blatant hypocrisy—halts all the fun. To read this book, then, is to be of two minds: to appreciate its author’s talent, zeal, and clarity; and also to deplore its evasions, simplifications, and pretensions.
We begin with Hitchens’s mother, Yvonne, whom he depicts in the first chapter as a uniquely vibrant woman, captivating in both physique and affect. She met in the midst of war the man she would eventually marry. That man, Hitchens’s father, was a practical, often dour fellow, and it didn’t take long for Yvonne to grow bored with him. She yearned for style, glamour, the big city, and got instead a life of gray lived out in provincial towns. But Yvonne cherished her first son and determined that his years would be fuller and richer than her own. Thus, despite the family’s rickety financial situation, she insisted that Christopher attend pricey schools: “If there is going to be an upper class in this country,” she told her husband, “then Christopher is going to be in it.”
After finishing up at Oxford, Hitchens was back in that town one day (to keep “pressing political and sexual engagements”) and serendipitously ran into his mother on the street. She was accompanied by a man who was not Christopher’s father. The next time Yvonne and son met, she unburdened herself to him: she was having an affair, and she was planning to move in with her paramour. Also, she added, she had had two abortions, one before Hitchens’s birth, and one after.
Lots going on here. How will Hitchens react? “The one [abortion] after I could bring myself to think of with equanimity, or at least some measure of equanimity, whereas the one before felt a bit too much like a close shave or a near miss, in respect of moi.” He continues: “This was the laid-back early 1970s and I had neither the wish nor the ability to be ‘judgmental.’” So he lackadaisically arranges to meet Mom and beau in London at his favorite Bengali restaurant. The dinner conversation, we learn, was pretty decent, and Hitchens footed the bill.
To respond to news of one’s mother’s two abortions with “equanimity,” to respond to news of her infidelity by treating her and the offending male to macher jhol and mango chutney—this is all wrong. That the 20-something Hitchens comported himself thusly is unfortunate; worse is that the 60-something version offers in Hitch-22 no commentarial corrective. This is a man, after all, who has made it his life’s work to offer correctives.
And yet, Hitch-22’s chapter on Yvonne is in many ways majestic. It is written with love, and evidently so, but the emotion is well-controlled and well-deployed, and the words summoned are often just the right ones. Not long after their shared dinner, Hitchens’s mother and her boyfriend kill themselves in Athens. It is a tragedy, and Hitchens doesn’t pretend otherwise. But he does leave us with memories of the laughing, shimmering Yvonne, “the cream in the coffee, the gin in the Campari, the offer of wine and champagne instead of beer, the laugh in the face of bores and purse-mouths and skinflints, the insurance against bigots and prudes.” I ended the chapter acutely sorry that I will never meet her.
To read even just the first 30 pages of Hitch-22, then, is to be hit with dissonance, which thereafter comes fast and hard. Here it comes in a frequently lovely chapter on Martin Amis, Hitchens’s best friend, as Hitchens recalls a party that they both attended:
At one soirée in Holland Park, he was introduced to a young woman with a result that was as close as made no difference to witnessing a lightening strike or a thunderbolt. His then-girlfriend was present at the party, as I think was the other young lady’s husband, but what then happened in the adjoining room was unstoppable and seemed somehow foreordained. We both knew that the subsequent pregnancy was almost certainly also a consequent one, but so gentlemanly was the husband in the case that it was not until two decades later that Martin received the letter from his missing daughter…the bonding with whom…is one of the most affecting things I have ever chanced to see.
How bizarre to tell this tale so jauntily, so happily-ever-after. I mean, come on—this is not a sweet story. It’s a distasteful one. And how odd that its narrator, tolerant in relating it, is the same man who in other circumstances takes such umbrage at dishonesty and betrayal. But the stinkiest bit about the thing is that Hitchens is being evasive; he has not told the whole tale here. The married “young woman” with whom Amis shared such an electrified sense of the inexorable was named Lamorna Heath. Some two years after giving birth to Amis’s daughter, she killed herself. Her husband, Patrick Seale, was left to raise the baby as his own, by himself, for the next 16 years before only then revealing to a teenage Delilah Seale the name of her famous biological father.
Hitchens sticks up for his best friend, eliding unflattering details, holding his critical tongue, and gently applauding Amis’s derisive behavior. So what? Would most others not do the same for their pals? Maybe they would, maybe they wouldn’t, but Christopher Hitchens can’t. For, like one of his heroes, George Orwell, Hitchens is bound by this rule: if one makes his name as a crusader for truth, if one lives by his reputation as a tell-it-as-it-is-no-matter-who-or-what-it-is type, then he will be, and should be, judged by more-rigorous criteria—by the criteria he himself has set for others. Such criteria Hitchens regularly fails to meet. Substitute someone Hitchens detests—Bill Clinton, say—for Martin Amis in the above story and you can be sure it will no longer be recounted in Hitch-22 as a humorous, blameless situation. The book’s author has his own double standards.
The double-standard problem is exacerbated by Hitch-22’s tendency to fervency. Certain people in its pages can do no wrong, others can do only wrong. Characters are saints or villains, heroes or cowards, the arrival of their names heralded by ranks of trumpeting adjectives. (In the book, Hitchens deplores Manichaeism, perhaps unaware that he is a regular practitioner.) Certain topics receive this treatment too. Hitchens’s hatred of religion is well-documented, but even dyed-in-the-wool, nun-nuncling atheists can only sigh as they encounter time after time in Hitch-22 the same flippant disparagement of God coming in the midst of yet another passage unrelated to Him. Fanatic stridency becomes quickly boring.
More dissonance, more showing “two faces at the same time,” arrives when Hitchens writes disapprovingly of the style of argument of “the pseudo-Left,” “whereby if your opponent thought he had identified your lowest possible motive, he was quite certain that he had isolated the only real one.” Can Hitchens miss that the style that he bemoans is, in fact, frequently his own?
One struggles to understand how a man so conversant with literature, in love with it, who writes enchantingly about it, can be obstreperously cocksure and prescriptive about so many things. Does not literature teach the opposite attitude, give a sense of the wonder and beauty that can arise precisely from the inherent confusion and uncertainty of life? Hitch-22 does contain passages that reflect this teaching, in which a curious writer is contentedly turning over thoughts, searching for answers. But then, suddenly, that same person settles on an answer and gets nasty about it.
Is Hitch-22 the story of a courageous man of conviction whose life has been shaped by the pursuit of ideas and knowledge and justice? Or is it the story of a man who doesn’t particularly want to grow up and who would rather have an argument than wisdom? I think it’s probably both.
