Christopher Hitchens, right or wrong

My wife Lili Bita and I knew Christopher Hitchens before fame stalked him. We shared an interest in things Greek (Christopher's first wife was a Cypriot) and, at the time, a shared politics.

Christopher had an omnivorous mind and an insatiable need to speak it. He combined this trait with considerable grace, charm and wit. Physically, he seemed a bit uncomfortable, but that's often the case with people of fierce intellectual energy, for whom the body sometimes appears to be an impediment, or at any rate a sulky beast to be worked if not abused.

The abuse caught up with him in the form of the esophageal cancer that claimed his life on Friday but which, true to form, he made a project like any other. He had plenty of guts, which is one thing, and also courage, which is quite another. Guts is the visceral ability to deal with life's blows; courage is the ability to transcend them. In living as fully as possible up to the end, Christopher displayed both.

Jewish identity

Our acquaintance had lapsed by the time Christopher learned that he was part Jewish. This discovery occasioned an identity crisis about which, characteristically, he was publicly candid. It made him re-examine some of his political views, or at any rate the perspective from which he held them.

Nothing, though, could have prepared us for the apostasy of his sudden transformation into a Cold War intellectual après la lettre, supporting the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and, having become a naturalized American, voting for George W. Bush in 2004.

That same year, I registered to vote for the first time in many years for the explicit purpose of voting against the presidential imposter. Christopher and I had wound up on opposite sides of an implacable divide.

He could still write sympathetically about old heroes such as Tom Paine and George Orwell, and his anticlericalism remained bracing. But his embrace of the American imperium< was to me incomprehensible.

Like Orwell and Camus

H. L. Mencken once wrote that you should never trust a man who changes his fundamental principles, and that was what Christopher seemed to have done. Maybe he had Americanized himself the wrong way, as expatriates sometimes do. Maybe the very crassness of power in Bush's Washington exerted some fatal attraction or, after 9/11, the appearance of a clarifying vision. But there was no ground for argument. For us his apostasy was too complete.

We were saddened to hear of his illness, though I cringed a bit at his public display of it. Fame had given Christopher a little too much self-importance. He had become an institution, a heavily ironic fate for someone born to slay sacred cows.

Whether he will become a classic remains to be seen. It happened to Orwell and also to Camus, much to their detriment. A classic is someone who is not allowed to be inconsistent, and is never permitted to be wrong. That surely doesn't describe the Christopher Hitchens I knew, and whom I came to lament even before his death. But, if he and I are wrong about the afterlife— one of the subjects we continued to agree about— perhaps, even now, he is annoying the Devil.♦


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