Cyprus became a specialty, and, later, the subject of his first book, which described the island as having been betrayed by outside powers; an accusing finger was pointed at Henry Kissinger.
By then, Hitchens and Meleagrou had married and moved to America. Meleagrou and their two children, now aged twenty-two and seventeen, live in London. That winter, Hitchens and Blue flew to Eastern Europe, to be witness to the revolutionary events of the time. It may need to be said: These were events that Hitchens welcomed. The brothers did not speak for four years.
Hitchens was irritated. And I have the sense he felt there was a liberal failure to get the point of what was happening.
Yet here was a case where people were forced to take the opposite view. Hitchens helped arrange a meeting between Rushdie and President Clinton, in Hitchens despised him, and charged him with drug running, rape, and other crimes.
The same year, he went to Bosnia at his own expense; as he called for armed intervention there, three years before the Clinton Administration acted, he found himself endorsing the same petitions as many neoconservatives, including Wolfowitz. Seemed like a good idea at the time, but it shrinks incredibly compared to Baghdad and Beirut and New York.
Verso, his publishing house, threw a party at Pravda, a SoHo restaurant. The Hitchens-Blue partnership has a grad-school air. Blue can get stuck at the post-shower, towel-wearing stage of the day. He has cut back from smoking three packs a day. He is a late-learning and scary driver.
He does not wear a watch, although he looks at his bare left wrist when trying to calculate the time. We left with sandwiches, a cherry pie, and two bottles of whiskey, and nothing that looked beyond the horizon of the next meal. On the walls around him were some color printouts of kittens and puppies sitting in lines. And I wanted to make an intervention. He had given his attention that day to the wiretap lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union against the National Security Agency; in January, he accepted the A.
He was not doing it for free, but the gesture was still generous; Hitchens, who is unusually lacking in professional competitiveness, makes himself available to younger writers and editors.
He also teaches: he is presently a visiting professor at the New School, and he is supervising the Ph. But he had written a thousand words, and he was not through hammering.
But he now saw that he could get it all done before eating. Not long afterward, he came into the kitchen and handed me the finished review. We had lunch outside. Hitchens ignored the sandwiches and put his fork in the cherry pie, moving outward from the center. He had a postproduction glow. He has contributed to dozens of publications including Golf Digest —he plays the game. He almost never uses the backspace, delete, or cut-and-paste keys.
He writes a single draft, at a speed that caused his New Statesman colleagues to place bets on how long it would take him to finish an editorial. It would be a drag for Henry Kissinger to live to a hundred and Christopher to keel over next year.
Hitchens, too, brought up the subject of alcohol before I did. And I can time it. But he drinks like a Hemingway character: continually and to no apparent effect. That evening at the guesthouse, Peter Berkowitz, the Straussian intellectual and Hoover Institution fellow, and Tod Lindberg, the editor of Policy Review , dropped by with family members.
The back-yard pool was suddenly full of children. Someone had brought champagne, and Hitchens poured it with exaggerated disapproval. A few years ago, he claimed that the four most overrated things in life were champagne, lobsters, anal sex, and picnics.
She went back to her friends. Hitchens and Blue flew back to Washington just after Labor Day. Robert Buzz Patterson, the conservative author and former White House military aide, introduced the event, and was applauded for a passing dig at the A. Horowitz has often spoken and written about his upbringing by Communist parents. Hitchens had to be up early in the morning, and he began to make his way out. I actually think the stakes of one person's late-life religious musings, or the absence thereof, are pretty low.
Christians will disagree, as they believe somebody's soul is at stake; atheist activists will disagree, as Hitchens was important to their movement; and those who knew and loved Hitchens will disagree, as they have an interest in seeing their friend or relative remembered accurately. But my interest was in the debate that has surrounded the book, which was one thing that I felt I could accurately report on. Are the stakes in this matter indeed so low?
It claims—in literally so many words—that a man admired by many was in fact a hypocrite, a liar, and a coward, motivated primarily by vanity and avarice. Privately, however, he was entering forbidden territory …. My private conversations with him revealed a man who was weighing the costs of conversion.
His atheist friends and colleagues, sensing his flirtations with Christianity and fearing his all-out desertion to that hated enemy, rushed to keep him in the fold. To reassure them, Christopher, for his part, was more bombastic than ever. But the rhetoric was concealing the fact that even while he was railing about God from the rostrum, he was secretly negotiating with him.
Fierce protestations of loyalty always precede a defection, and Christopher had to make them. At least he had to if he was to avoid the ridicule and ostracism he would surely suffer at the hands of the very same people who memorialized him.
To cross the aisle politically was one thing. There was precedence for that. Churchill had very famously done it. But Christopher well knew that whatever criticisms and loss of friendships he had suffered then would pale in comparison to what would follow his religious conversion. Hatred of God was the central tenet of their faith, and there could be no redemption for those renouncing it.
And it is here that his courage failed him. In the end, however contrary our natures might be, there are always a few people whose approbation we desire and to whose standards we conform. From Hitchens himself, however, there is only silence in the place where the supporting quotation or anecdote should have been. What Taunton offers in lieu of evidence are two lines of argument whose merits are … well, you decide for yourself what they are. After all, a real atheist must agree with Peter Singer that a human baby is of no greater moral significance than a piglet.
Since Hitchens did not agree with Singer, Hitchens must be moving toward agreement with Taunton. As for the first argument, it mistakes curiosity for assent. The off-stage Christopher Hitchens often paid respectful attention to points of view he thought partly or wholly mistaken. He was already a Labour supporter at school, organising the party's "campaign" in a mock election, and joining a CND march from Aldermaston.
At Balliol College, Oxford, where he read philosophy, politics, and economics, he "rehearsed", as he put it, for But he led a curiously dualistic life.
By day, "Chris" addressed car workers through a bullhorn on an upturned milk crate while by night "Christopher" wore a dinner jacket to address the Oxford Union or dine with the warden of All Souls.
He did not, in fact, like being called "Chris" — his mother would not, he explained, wish her firstborn to be addressed "as if he were a taxi-driver or pothole-filler" — and found "Hitch", which most friends used, more acceptable.
While not exactly a social climber, Hitchens wished to be on intimate terms with important people. Equally dualistic was his sex life.
He was almost expelled from school for homosexuality and later boasted that at Oxford he slept with two future male Tory cabinet ministers. But also at Oxford, he lost his virginity to a girl who had pictures of him plastered over her bedroom wall and he eventually became a dedicated heterosexual because, he said, his looks deteriorated to the point where no man would have him.
The "double life", as he called it, continued after he left university with a third-class degree — he was too busy with politics to bother much with studying — and found, partly through his Oxford friend James Fenton, a berth at the New Statesman. He supplemented his income by writing for several Fleet Street newspapers, but also contributed gratis to the Socialist Worker.
It was while working for the Statesman that he experienced a "howling, lacerating moment in my life": the death of his adored mother in Athens, apparently in a suicide pact with her lover, a lapsed priest. Only years later did he learn what she never told him or perhaps anyone else: that she came from a family of east European Jews. Though his brother — who first discovered their mother's origins — said this made them only onend Jewish, Hitchens declared himself a Jew according to the custom of matrilineal descent.
Later in the s, Hitchens became a familiar Fleet Street figure, disporting himself in bars and restaurants and settling into a literary set that included Fenton, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Clive James and others. It specialised in long lunches and what to others seemed puerile and frequently obscene word games.
But he was hooked on America as a year-old when he visited on a student visa and tried unsuccessfully to get a work permit. In October , on a half-promise of work from the Nation, he left for the US. It was the making of his career: Americans have always had a weakness for plummy voiced, somewhat raffish Englishmen who pepper their writing and conversation with literary and historical allusions.
He became the Nation's Washington correspondent, contributing editor of Vanity Fair from , literary essayist for Atlantic Monthly, a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and a talking head on innumerable cable TV shows.
He authored 11 books, co-authored six more, and had five collections of essays published. The targets included Kissinger, Clinton and Mother Teresa "a thieving fanatical Albanian dwarf" ; his books on Orwell, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine were more positive, and less widely noticed. His most successful book, which brought him international fame beyond what Susan Sontag called "the small world of those who till the field of ideas", was God Is Not Great, a mocking indictment of religion which put him alongside Richard Dawkins as a leading enemy of the devout.
A great heart stops. And there was no belief he held that he did not advocate with passion, commitment and brilliance. He said: "Christopher just swam against every tide. He was a supporter of the Polish and Czech resistance of the s, he supported Mrs Thatcher because he thought getting rid of the Argentinian fascist junta was a good idea.
He loved words. The publication of his book God Is Not Great made him a major celebrity in his adopted homeland of the United States, and he happily took on the role of the country's best-known atheist. He maintained his devout atheism after being diagnosed with cancer, telling one interviewer: "No evidence or argument has yet been presented which would change my mind.
But I like surprises. The author and prominent atheist Richard Dawkins described him as the "finest orator of our time" and a "valiant fighter against all tyrants including God". He said Hitchens had been a "wonderful mentor in a way".
Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, who once worked as an intern for Hitchens, said: "Christopher Hitchens was everything a great essayist should be: infuriating, brilliant, highly provocative and yet intensely serious.
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