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About the Author
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS was born in 1949 in England and is a graduate of Balliol College at Oxford University. He is the father of three children and the author of more than twenty books and pamphlets, including collections of essays, criticism, and reportage. His book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award and an international bestseller. His bestselling memoir, Hitch-22, was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. A visiting professor of liberal studies at the New School in New York City, he has also been the I.F. Stone professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been a columnist, literary critic, and contributing editor at Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, Slate, Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, New Statesman, World Affairs, Free Inquiry, among other publications.
HITCH-22
A MEMOIR
Christopher Hitchens
HITCH-22
Christopher Hitchens is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and Visiting Professor in liberal studies at the New School in New York. He is the author of numerous books, including works on Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, George Orwell, Mother Theresa, Henry Kissinger and Bill and Hillary Clinton, as well as his international bestseller and National Book Award nominee, god Is Not Great.
ALSO BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Books
Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger
Blood, Class, and Empire: The Enduring Anglo-American Relationship
Imperial Spoils: The Curious Case of the Elgin Marbles
Why Orwell Matters
No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton
Letters to a Young Contrarian
The Trial of Henry Kissinger
Thomas Jefferson: Author of America
Thomas Paine’s “Rights of Man”: A Biography
god Is Not Great: The Case Against Religion
Pamphlets
Karl Marx and the Paris Commune
The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain’s Favorite Fetish
The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice
A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq
Collected Eassys
Prepared for the Worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports
For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports
Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere
Love, Poverty, and War:
Journeys and Essays
Collaborations
Vanity Fair’s Hollywood (with Graydon Carter and David Friend)
James Callaghan: The Road to Number Ten (with Peter Kellner)
Blaming the Victims (edited with Edward Said)
When the Borders Bleed: The Struggle of the Kurds (photographs by Ed Kashi)
International Territory: The United Nations (photographs by Adam Bartos)
The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever (edited)
For James Fenton
Caute
I can claim copyright only in myself, and occasionally in those who are either dead or have written about the same events, or who have a decent expectation of anonymity, or who are such appalling public shits that they have forfeited their right to bitch.
For those I have loved, or who have been so lenient and gracious as to have loved me, I have not words enough here, and I remember with gratitude how they have made me speechless in return.
Contents
Foreword
Prologue with Premonitions
Yvonne
The Commander
Fragments from an Education
Cambridge
The Sixties: Revolution in the Revolution
Chris or Christopher?
Havana versus Prague
The Fenton Factor
Martin
Portugal to Poland
A Second Identity: On Becoming an (Anglo) American
Changing Places
Salman
Mesopotamia from Both Sides
Something of Myself
Thinking Thrice about the Jewish Question . . .
Edward Said in Light and Shade (and Saul)
Decline, Mutation, or Metamorphosis?
Acknowledgments
Index
The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews
Not to be born is the best for man
The second best is a formal order
The dance’s pattern, dance while you can.
Dance, dance, for the figure is easy
The tune is catching and will not stop
Dance till the stars come down with the rafters
Dance, dance, dance till you drop.
W.H. Auden, “Death’s Echo”
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of the Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.
Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow
Ah, words are poor receipts for what time hath stole away . . .
John Clare, “Remembrances”
Foreword
“Do not aspire to immortal life but exhaust the limits of the possible.”
— Pindar Pythian III
I hope it will not seem presumptuous to assume that anybody likely to have got as far as acquiring this paperback re-edition of my memoir will know that it was written by someone who, without appreciating it at the time, had become seriously and perhaps mortally ill.
In any case, I believe that it might strike some readers (as it now very forcibly strikes the author) that the first three chapters, as well as many of the ensuing passages, show a strong preoccupation with impending death, or with deaths in my family. To some extent this is natural and proper in any work of autobiography. I took on the job of writing it when I was approaching and crossing the small but noticeable frontier of my sixth decade: a time when one has begun to notice the names of contemporaries on the obituary pages. When the book was published, I had just turned sixty-one. I am writing this at a moment when, according to my doctors, I cannot be certain of celebrating another birthday.
On the other hand, so to say, and thanks to the brilliance and skill of these same physicians, I could hope to live for several more years and even to find them enjoyable and profitable. How different is this, in the last analysis, from the life I was living before? One always knows that there is a term-limit to the lifespan, just as one always knows that illness or accident or incapacity, physical and mental, are never more than a single breath away.
To take this up in narrative form, and to resume the story regardless, I had been becoming aware, as the book neared completion, that I was becoming increasingly easily tired. Once or twice, people who had seen me on television wrote to express concern about my appearance. But I invariably recuperated from exhaustion without much trouble, and all my routine medical examinations found me in exceptional health for someone of my age. In any case my life is my work, and vice versa, and I have always arranged it so as to be deliberately overstretched. I positively enjoyed traveling to writing assignments or speaking engagements, on the average of about once a week, while meeting a series of columnar deadlines. And I never lacked for friends or company, and continued to seek out both voraciously. Like the man in the old story, I sometimes laughed that if I’d known I was going to live this long I would have taken better care of myself. Stories about my Bohemian “life-style” have been exaggerated, as I go on to discuss in these pages, but perhaps not by all that much. I had evolved a very productive and, to me, satisfying regime. If some of it depended a bit on cocktails and late nights of reading or argument or even (in the course of writing this book) a lapse back into the smoking habit, I thought the wager was worth it.
Thus was my state of relative insouciance until the spring of 2010, when I received the advance schedule of the upcoming publicity tour for this book. It was to be a brilliant and lavish thing, extending from Australia to Britain to the United States and Canada. I take no stock in precognition (it’s very obvious to me now that my body was trying to tell me something) but merely set down the fact that I read through the schedule and quite calmly thought: “I shall never get to the end of it.” Mentally, I was preparing myself to take several months “off” (something I have never wanted before) and book a serious appointment with a doctor. The tour began well but my system soon asserted itself: I was felled first in New York, where I learned that I should seek a cancer biopsy, and then – having had the biopsy and deciding to keep as many engagements as possible while I waited for the result – in Boston. My dear friend Cary Goldstein, who was with me on both occasions, is the reason why these paragraphs can be written. Ever since, I have lived from one chemotherapy application to another and, in some periods, from one painkiller to the next, while awaiting the possibility of a treatment that is specific to my own genes and my own malignancy. (I suffer from Stage Four esophageal cancer. There is no Stage Five.)
A continuous theme in Hitch-22 is the requirement, exacted by a life of repeated contradictions, to keep two sets of books. My present condition intensifies this rather than otherwise. I am forced to make simultaneous preparations to die, and to go on living. Lawyers in the morning, as I once put it, and doctors in the afternoon. One of the happier dimensions of my life, that of travel, has been foreclosed to me: a great misery. But I have found that I still possess the will to write, as well as the indispensable thing for any writer, the avid need to read. Even when attenuated by the shorter amount of time that I am conscious during each day, and circumscribed by the thought of an eventual loss of consciousness altogether, this is only a little less than I used to be quietly grateful for: the ability to earn a living by doing the two things that mean most to me.
Another element of my memoir – the stupendous importance of love, friendship, and solidarity – has been made immensely more vivid to me by recent experience. I can’t hope to convey the full effect of the embraces and avowals, but I can perhaps offer a crumb of counsel. 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.
The cause of my life has been that of combating superstition, which among other things means confronting the dreads upon which it feeds. For some inexplicable reason, our culture regards it as normal, even creditable, for the godly to admonish those who they believe to be expiring. A whole tawdry edifice – of fabricated “deathbed conversions” and moist devotional literature – has arisen on this highly questionable assumption. Though I could have chosen to take offense (at being silkily invited to jettison my convictions when in extremis: what an insult and what a non-sequitur too) I was actually grateful for the heavy attention I received from the faithful. It gave my atheism, if you like, a new lease on life. It also helped me keep open a long debate to which I am proud to have contributed a little. To say that this debate will outlast me would have been true at any time.
Instead of attending “prayer breakfasts” in my own honor on what was actually designated on the Web as “Pray for Hitchens Day,” I have spent much of the past year registering myself as an experimental subject for various clinical trials and “protocols,” mainly genome-based and aimed at enlarging human knowledge and at shrinking the area of darkness and terror where cancer holds dominion. My aim here is obviously not quite disinterested, but many of the experiments are at a stage where any result will be too far in the future to be of help to me. In this book I cite Horace Mann’s injunction: “Until you have done something for humanity you should be ashamed to die.” So this is a modest and slight response to his challenge, to be sure, but my own. The irruption of death into my life has enabled me to express a trifle more concretely my contempt for the false consolation of religion, and belief in the centrality of science and reason.
Not all my views have been vindicated, even to me. I see that I write that “I personally want to ‘do’ death in the active and not the passive, and to be there to look it in the eye and be doing something when it comes for me.” I cannot quite sustain this jauntiness in light of what I now know. Should the best efforts of my physician friends be unavailing, I possess a fairly clear idea of how Stage Four esophageal cancer harvests its victims. The terminal process doesn’t allow for much in the way of “activity,” or even of composed farewells let alone Stoic or Socratic departures. This is why I am so grateful to have had, already, a lucid interval of some length, and to have filled it with the same elements, of friendship and love, and literature and the dialectic, with which I hope some of this book is also animated. I wasn’t born to do any of the things I set down here, but I was born to die and this coda must be my attempt to assimilate the narrative to its conclusion.