Left and Right

The memoirs of a man whose inconsistency makes him the best of thinkers and the worst.

AN unflagging journalist with a passion for provoking debates, Christopher Hitchens is one whose writings and lectures have given rise to responses of hate and love by intellectuals both on the Right and the Left. He has often wanted to withdraw from politics and return to his love of Proust, Borges, Joyce and Bellow: This is the love, he maintains, that matures in the cask, if you will, and deepens with time. And yet he has been disturbed by the condition of shipwrecks and prison islands that dot human history. He has been deeply wounded by the 9/11 disfigurement of Manhattan, which he identifies with breadth of mind, with liberty, with opportunity.

Though a romantic, he remains rather intractable in his observations, particularly in his hard-nosed dislike for Kissinger and God. Hitchens, the Anglo-American political thinker and literary critic, is disturbed by the sordid poetics that surrounds us today, especially the most toxic of foes, religion: the most base and contemptible of the forms assumed by human egotism and stupidity. And yet he is sanguine and agrees with Oscar Wilde's view: A map of the world that did not show Utopia would not be worth consulting.

Hitchens, whose books include Thomas Jefferson: Author of America and God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, has swung from the far Left to secular liberalism. In his recent memoir, comically titled Hitch-22, the reader gets a taste of his clever repartee and sharp-edged brilliance. A pre-eminent political thinker who has taken extreme views on the legitimacy of the American invasion of Iraq or a rather dogmatic view on Islam, he has nevertheless advocated free thinking and fearless dissent.

The first few chapters that speak of his early life bring out his love and admiration for his mother, Yvonne, and his admission to indulging in homosexual acts during his years at Balliol, Oxford, in the late 1960s. Often, the account is moving as well as comic and makes engaging reading about a mother who inculcated in her young son two maxims: The one unforgivable sin is to be boring and If there's going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it. It was for this reason that she ensured that her son got the best education though she could only manage a Methodist school for him. Oxford came next, where he got busy in breaking taboos, participating in demonstrations against the Vietnam War, pretending to be a Trotskyite, and engaging in homosexual escapades that resulted finally in his acquiring a third class in his graduation.

A poor academic record, however, did not shame him or prevent him from vehemently engaging in literary and political issues of major consequence that have bestowed on him the status of a dynamic though wavering political thinker.

One tends to disagree with him on a number of issues such as his reservations about the genuineness of Mother Teresa or the attack on Professor Christopher Ricks' book on Dylan Thomas. His argument that Saddam Hussein had to be exterminated for his blatant tyranny and for accumulating weapons of mass destruction does not appeal to the intellectuals on the Left and only underlines his invincible self-righteousness about his stand on world politics.

He seems to overlook conveniently the fact of the scramble for oil being the cause of the invasion of Iraq. Nor does one forgive him for abandoning his wife of eight years for a woman he met at an airport or his betrayal of his long-standing good friend, Sidney Blumenthal, whom he accused of lying during the Clinton impeachment trial.

Though he comes from modest beginnings, his unqualified certitudes about the theory of Marxism in the 1970s is now highly suspect. His moving to America itself suggests that the basic tenet of the American Left to hate everything American has now undergone a metamorphosis and turned into a love affair with the land of his adoption. Hitchens puts forward his reasons for applying for American citizenship after the 9/11 tragedy: The American Revolution got rid of the established church and the monarchy, which the British still have. The Constitution [includes] the Bill of Rights, and it said these documents are subject to revision. . . . And as an American, you are invited to take a part in that experiment.

Surely, something is wrong with the country is an idea that became the staple of the intellectual Left in the post-Vietnam War period and continues to be so, though contrary to the stand taken by the people in power and by Hitchens who is least troubled if the world hates America.

The destruction in Iraq is of no consequence to him, considering that he robustly feels that the war against terrorism is justified notwithstanding the ongoing insurgency in Iraq and the end of habeas corpus in the U.S. after the promulgation of the Patriot Act.

Talking of his emotional upheaval on the days the twin towers came down, he writes: Before the close of the day, I had deliberately violated the rule that one ought not to let the sun set on one's anger, and had sworn a sort of oath to remain coldly furious until these hateful forces had been brought to a more strict and merciless account.

Says one contemporary: He had a reputation for being AC/DC and, although a Trot, he was fancied by quite a few gay Tories and moved in those circles.

The Right is Hitchens' refuge, a party of so-called reform, to unravel the forces of global economics and transnational trade and responsible for doing away with socialist nostalgias. But this is far from the truth. Take the case of Indonesia where the government, persuaded by the International Monetary Fund, imposed food subsidies, resulting in riots engulfing the entire country. It is well known that high rates of interest and the compulsions of free trade led to bankruptcy or the economic annihilation of small industries, and that neoliberal initiatives are more destabilising and prone to lower growth rate.

Bundle of contradictions

A bundle of contradictions, Hitchens is at once trustworthy and dishonest, dreary and charming, good-looking and revolting. In him the personal becomes the political and the political personal: It turns out, as I have found in other ways and in other places, that the separation between personal and political is not so neat.

He spouts malice on Kissinger and God, or Clinton and the Left, for profoundly individual reasons. If Clinton does not offer his support for Salman Rushdie during his fatwa days, Clinton becomes his adversary. He abhors Martin Bauber for moving into Edward Said's house in Jerusalem.

However, Martin Amis and Rushdie are his finest friends with whom he whores as well as stands by in times of trouble: I find now that I can more or less acquit myself on any charge of having desired Martin carnally. (My looks by then had in any case declined to the point where only women would go to bed with me.)

An inveterate bohemian, he not only has had a number of affairs but drinks his scotch and half a bottle of wine every afternoon and evening. His bisexuality is apparent: Every now and then, even though I was by then fixed on the pursuit of young women, a mild and mildly enjoyable relapse would occur and I suppose I can claim this . . . of two young men who became members of Margaret Thatcher's government.

The inquisitive are aroused and the suspense about the identity of these two men with whom Hitchens had a relationship is still being curiously conjectured upon. Hitch-22 is therefore synonymous with a complex multidimensional writer too protean to place a finger on. When asked if the title of his memoir does not evoke connotations of trap' or paradox' inherent in Catch- 22, Hitchens replied: I am identified with a group of people whose main principle is that of doubt and adamant scepticism. . . . This rationalist commitment puts us in opposition to modern totalitarians, the ones who say . . . the truth has been revealed to them. Opposing that mob has been the principal cause of my life.

He joins demonstrations against the Vietnam War but supports the American intervention in Iraq. He has no regrets for supporting George Bush in his war on Iraq: Iraq is clearly better than it was under the private ownership of Saddam [Hussein]. . . . It's the only country in the Arab world that has free elections and . . . the only place where the Kurdish people, the largest group of people who have no state of their own, have an autonomous region of their own. And yet he thinks President Bush went too far and that's why I was a member of the ACLU's class action suit against the White House's illegal wiretapping.

Hitchens has always battled with the absolute and the relative, a task that counters the notions of totalitarianism and at the same time stands up for an ideology based on unalterable convictions.

To be a non-believer and to support Marx for being an advocate of doubt and self-criticism and yet have extreme personal views on public matters, this is Hitchens' Hitch-22, an inconsistency that makes him the best of thinkers and the worst, having conviction and yet lacking it in many ways. The credit of unaffectedness, however, goes to him for admitting that he is not the best of writers but certainly one who has taught himself to think.

He maintains at the end of the book: I suspect that the hardest thing for the idealist to surrender is the teleological, or the sense that there is some feasible, lovelier future that can be brought nearer by exertions in the present, and for which sacrifices are justified. Without this illusion, humanity indeed would be poorer and so would be the unpredictable Christopher Hitchens.