Hitch-22: The Life of Two Minds by Jason Cook
“what a sharp-tongued wit can do when yoked to a higher cause”
Fiction by Jason Cook
+++
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” I said to my poor mother, who had just finished trying to explain Christianity to a seven-year-old me. In that brief exchange, my mother and I had conspired to learn something important about me, about which we’d never had occasion to wonder before: I’m an atheist. Not only that, but the most obnoxious kind of atheist: vocal, impatient, and generally hostile. I’m sure the family who took me to their church had the best of intentions, but afterward I couldn’t mask my newfound contempt for this childhood friend who still believed in fairy tales and magic. And grownups with imaginary friends? It was years before I realized, with a shock, that adults actually believed this nonsense, too. Some days I still can’t talk myself into that one.
Being a nonbeliever in America can feel a lot like being a non-watcher of football: there’s a hugely influential cultural force all around you in which you have no interest and would never interact with if you could help it. You go about your life with the awareness that other people are not quite like you and, in fact, seem to live in a completely different world. You might roll your eyes and drop “under god” from the pledge of allegiance, deface a dollar once in a while, and sit for prayers while everyone else stands, but you just try to ignore other people’s superstitions, under the depressing impression that the vast majority of people are generally and just slightly insane. A little like watching your Facebook feed blow up with updates about games other people are playing. Often, you’ll run across people who also don’t like football, but still it can feel like, at best, islands of reason and solidarity, with the mainland too far away and not worth reaching anyway.
And then something beautiful happened in 2005, during that Terry Schiavo nonsense. I happened to catch an episode of Scarborough Country (don’t ask me why) featuring a rumpled, bearded, clearly very drunk Englishman who, without hesitation, tore into Scarborough, Phil Donahue, and the whole stupid “controversy.” Finally, someone who would go in front of the cameras and say what I was thinking, in a way I only wish I could have said it. Something about his refusal to respect the host, the almost off-hand way he destroyed the other guests, and the way his crisp accent seemed to hide a barb in every word. When we look for heroes, we’re not only looking for someone who can do the things we’d like to, we’re looking for someone who manifests the best expression of our defining qualities. “I’ve had to sit in this chair for half an hour listening to you being a megaphone for frauds, and I’m giving you my response,” Hitch said, and it was like a voice from my lost tribe calling me back home.
Hitch’s arguments always carried the self-assurance of experience, and he gave the impression of having read everything ever written, and of having remembered it all. He was inflexible and, like me, seemed nearly incapable of concealing his contempt for weak arguments and stupidity. In debates he steam-rolled over his opponents with the kind of relish of one who would rather crush than persuade and a comedian's good-natured malice. If a hero is the best possible expression of one’s own personal qualities, then Hitch was mine: this is what arrogance looks like with decades of learning behind it, what a sharp-tongued wit can do when yoked to a higher cause. Hitch was many things to many people, sometimes just an asshole, sometimes a pompous cad, but, for me, he was at last someone to look up to.
When he appeared on The Daily Show in 2010, he was, as he often was around Jon Stewart, off his game. Later, though, the world learned he’d been diagnosed with Stage IV esophageal cancer and, as Hitch himself was fond of saying, “there is no stage V.” I had just gotten his memoir, Hitch-22, and put it aside. I put off reading the book for over a year, as many of us do when our favourite author dies, knowing that the reserve of works yet to be read will, like any precious resource, dwindle slowly and run out. As memorials were planned and articles chronicling Hitch’s journey through Tumourtown appeared intermittently in Vanity Fair, I finally picked up the memoir. At least Mortality was coming. There’s always that.
Anyone expecting a personal journey through the inner life of Christopher Hitchens, a chronicle of private moments and softer sentiments, is bound to be disappointed. Those aspects of his life will have to live on in the anecdotes of his friends, as there is precious little of them in his memoir. Instead, Hitch-22 is, as near as can be imagined, an impersonal memoir, a portrait of the rise of socialism in the 1960s through the eyes of a “card-carrying socialist,” and the eventual failure of that movement on nearly every front. This book reads with the rueful tone of an old soldier, reminiscing on the privations of war and the constant risk of frostbite.
As David Plotz so nicely put it, Hitch was, at heart, a war correspondent. He liked conflict, thrived on it, and none more than the ones within himself. While Hitch-22 is the story of a writer told through the lens of the political movements of which he’s been a part, it’s also a story about never quite fitting in, about being the kind of person who, as Hitch says, “keeps two sets of books." One of Hitch’s most refreshing, and maddening to many, qualities was his unpredictability. The underlying logic that held his beliefs and arguments together may not have been perfect, but was undeniably different from those of many of his colleagues on the political left. Until he expressed his opinion, you could never be quite certain what his thoughts on any subject would be, a trait which lost him more than a few high-profile friendships. Being “of two minds,” which is what Hitch-22 is really about, meant Hitch had to parse things a little finer and couldn’t mask his contempt for people who agreed with him for bad reasons.
I have a hard time finding people with whom I agree. I’m very liberal, but hate most liberals for the same reason I hate most conservatives: the knee-jerk reactions, the habitually-held opinions, the unconsidered acceptance of the party line. It’s as bad as the atheist I met in Texas who didn’t believe in religion because his Pentecostal parents were mean to him. While I didn’t necessarily fully support the Iraq War as much as Hitchens so publicly did, I was never automatically, unreasonably, and unthinkingly against it as so many of my friends were. Watching Hitch reason through his sometimes seemingly contradictory opinions [war is bad unless it’s good (which isn't really a contradiction at all)] was like a summer storm in an atmosphere polluted with unquestioned talking points and secondhand ideologies. Unlike almost all other professional pundits, there was no way of knowing what Hitch thought about a subject until he'd offered his opinion.
Which, on occasion, Hitch could be, as his memoir reveals. Alongside the running outsider’s position is the firm positions he often took, usually in the “against” position. While the rest of the world lined up to kiss Mother Teresa’s feet, Hitch flew to Calcutta to investigate her “charities,” which he called a personal "cult of death and suffering." When, at Cambridge, Hitch decided he hated Bill Clinton, he kept that hatred alive until decades later he became President, hated him even as he supported Clinton’s campaign in former Yugoslavia. Beneath the pomp and intellectual smirkiness, there was a firm moral absolutist in Christopher Hitchens; when he made a moral stand he never backed down, and never concealed his acid contempt for his friends who didn’t have the spine to support Salman Rushdie when Iran was after his head.
The best part of Hitch-22, however, is Hitch’s excalibur, his best, and probably only, weapon: his voice. As a contrarian, a provacateur, a gadfly, and great friend Hitch’s reputation is secure. But he was, first and foremost, a writer. Hitch-22 is equal parts memoir and political history of the late 20th century, but it’s Hitch’s voice, the sonorous tone, the slow vowels that gave every witticism the air of a lazy backhanded bitchslap, that rises off the page and makes it something more. In my favourite passage, Hitch describes the effect his mother, Yvonne, had as:
"The exotic and sunlit when I could easily have had a boyhood of stern and dutiful English gray. She was the cream in the coffee, the gin in the Campari, the offer of wine or champagne instead of beer, the laugh in the face of bores and purse-mouths and skinflints, the insurance against bigots and prudes."
This was the voice that echoed back from the jungles of Uganda during Hitch’s hunt for Joseph Kony (way before it was cool), that reported back from waterboarding to confirm that it, indeed, is torture, that dryly quipped when respect was expected, and rose up when silence was demanded. But also the voice that traded puns with Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis through drinking bouts in restaurants, that counseled scores of young and hopeful writers, that gave probably the most profound piece of advice I’ve ever received: “It’s not what you think, but how you think that matters.”
On Death has been out for some time. I’ve got it sitting on my desk, but it will be awhile before I crack it open. The musings on death and jotted notes that make up this final book from Hitch’s pen may be interesting, but I think I prefer the Hitch of his memoirs—lustful, vengeful, jokes not so heavily darkened by the shadows of the gallows. Luckily, though, for fans of Hitchens and his thoughtful, acerbic, and sometimes maddening commentary, in his long and prolific career he penned a dozen books and countless articles on everything from the Acropolis to George Orwell. Even if you’ve read everything he’s written and seen many of his videos, I’d recommend reading Hitch-22. If you think you know the mind of Christopher Hitchens, he’s still here to tell you that you don’t.
+ + +
Jason Cook is the chief mastermind behind Ampersand Books. He loves dogs, books, classic cars, and thinks your hair looks great today.