How distant the world Christopher Hitchens departed in December 2011 seems today. The vice president, Joe Biden, was a spry and limber seventy-year-old, jogging around the White House with the tender-footed Obama, twenty years his junior. Donald Trump, still toiling in the kitsch world of reality TV, was about to resume hosting duties on the fifth season of The Celebrity Apprentice. There had as yet been no Snowden leaks, no Sandy Hook, no Pope Francis, no ISIS, no Maidan Revolution, no Ferguson, no Black Lives Matter, no Bataclan attack, no Charlie Hebdo shooting, no civil war in Yemen, no Brexit, no MAGA, no #MeToo, no Battle of Mosul, no pandemic, no George Floyd protests, no attack on the Capitol, no fall of Kabul, no King Charles III—all things Hitchens might reasonably have been expected to weigh in on for the Atlantic or Vanity Fair or Slate, or in a boozy and glowering appearance on Fox or MSNBC.
Like many others old enough to remember Hitchens, I sometimes find myself wondering what position he might have taken on, say, the 2016 presidential election or the current war in Gaza—a tricky parlor game, given Hitchens’s predilection for the unpredictable, or at least unfashionable, opinion. His friend Martin Amis, comparing Hitchens to a “self-shackling Houdini,” once suggested that the secret to his charisma may have been that he made you suspect he thought the only person really worth arguing with was himself.
Perhaps I am being too generous. In his final decade, after all, beginning with his career-nuking support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Hitchens became less and less provocative as he abandoned more and more of his former positions—especially, and most damagingly, on American foreign policy. The contortions it required for a man who once reported regularly on the crimes of the CIA and the State Department in Central America and who wrote a book accusing Henry Kissinger of genocide to go on to write admiringly, in his memoir Hitch-22, of the “sheer mass of [America’s] arsenal” or to compare the military occupation of Iraq to the 1974 Carnation Revolution in Portugal—well, these contortions were indeed self-shackling, but they were hardly Houdini-like.
Fortunately, A Hitch in Time: Reflections Ready for Reconsideration, the latest in a series of posthumous volumes (the others are Arguably and And Yet…) showcases Hitchens at the top of his form. The twenty essays and reviews collected here for the first time were all published in the pages of the London Review of Books between 1983 and 2002, and thus invite us to admire the arc of his career before it began its hawkish descent. Their many subjects include Harold Wilson, J. Edgar Hoover, John F. Kennedy, Kim Philby, Bill Clinton, Isaiah Berlin, Richard Nixon, Diana Mosley, Princess Margaret, and Augusto Pinochet. With few exceptions, these are all people Hitchens hated with gusto. (Hazlitt, in his 1816 essay “On Gusto,” wrote admiringly of Milton’s “double relish”: “He repeats his blows twice.” And as James Wolcott remarks in his smart introduction to A Hitch in Time, it is to Hazlitt that Hitchens owes his “classic, roguish, cant-defoliating English style.”)
Like Saul Bellow’s Von Humboldt Fleisher, Hitchens was a “champion detractor,” a terrific hater, and always more fun to read when he was denouncing than when he was praising. Rare is the enemy or ideological foe who gets mentioned in these pages without incurring a quick swat of the pen. Thus, we are treated to “the sinister cretin Reagan,” “that recreational vulpicide Roger Scruton,” “Senator Karl Mundt, a dinosaur Republican and tireless witch-hunter,” “James Jesus Angleton, crazed and criminal head of the CIA,” and so on. Some critics have found such comments silly or bad-mannered. “He was always too ready with abuse,” George Scialabba wrote after Hitchens’s death. I agree, and no doubt being so amused by name-calling is a bad habit, but reading these essays I found it one I was more than happy to indulge.
Less silly and just as amusing are those instances when, simply by exposing them, Hitchens lets his targets do the (self-)ridiculing for him. When George Bush Sr. quotes Tom Paine (“These are the times that try men’s souls”) in a speech announcing the 1991 invasion of Iraq, Hitchens has only to point out that Bush was quoting from Paine’s pamphlet The American Crisis, which goes on to speak with scorn of “summer soldiers and sunshine patriots,” for the president to look a fool. And when Harold Wilson boasts that he never got beyond the footnote on the second page of Das Kapital, Hitchens simply comments: “I turned…to the second page of that arduous but seminal work. There is no footnote on page two. In this it is unlike Wilson’s ingratiating Oxford entry for the Gladstone Memorial Essay Prize, which was entitled ‘The State and the Railways in Great Britain 1823–63’ and which contained four hundred of them.”
But perhaps what is most striking about many of these essays is how ahead of their time they were when first published. In “The Oklahoma Bombing,” Hitchens warns of “the militarization of a wing of the American right” and bemoans the Democrats’ feeble response to it: “If the best the Democrats can do is to ask people to be grateful for all that the state does for them, then they will repeat exactly the condescending errors that cost them the Congress in 1994 and may lose them the White House.” (Sound familiar?) In a long, onion-peeling portrait of Isaiah Berlin, Hitchens, zeroing in on the Russian-British philosopher’s political quietude, accuses him of always striving “to find a high liberal justification either for the status quo or for the immediate needs of the conservative authorities,” not least when it came to Vietnam. “A Hard Dog to Keep on the Porch,” an essay on Bill Clinton, becomes a penetrating—and much too timely—analysis of the cliché of “the lesser evil”:
Postmodern politics has dinned into us the concept of the lesser evil. One must, in other words, always be ready to accept Clinton (or Blair, or Mitterand) lest worse befall. At one level, this is what is called a zero-sum game. If true, that is to say, it must be true all the time, and true in the same way as a theorem. How odd; that those who speak of a limitless offering of free will and free choice should be so insistent that one of the main items of decision involves no choice or alternative…. By stressing the idea of “no alternative,” the non-ideological have redefined politics as a question of management, and eviscerated the idea that “the art of the possible” is indeed an art of possibility.
We can marvel at Hitchens’s prescience here while bemoaning how little things have changed: twenty-eight years later, the spin-physicians of the Democratic Party are still selling the same old remedy.
While the essays in A Hitch in Time are primarily political and historical, we are reminded of what a brilliant stylist Hitchens was and what an ear he had for prose. (In his earlier collections, there are compulsively re-readable essays on Oscar Wilde, Philip Larkin, Anthony Powell, Rudyard Kipling, Saul Bellow, Jorge Luis Borges, James Baldwin, and Victor Serge, among others.) He had the rare gift of saying things worth remembering in a memorable way. On Operation Desert Storm: “If you happen to want a war, preparing for it is a very good way to get it.” On Queen Elizabeth: “Monarchs may be able to elude responsibility for many things, but surely the state of the monarchy is not among them.” On Harold Wilson: “Nothing became [his] political career like the leaving of it.” In a consideration of the legacy of J. Edgar Hoover, we come across this gem of a paragraph:
I keep an idle watch on new congressmen in Washington, and also on the electronic moralists of the airwaves. No sooner do they start bawling about sodomy and degeneracy than I contentedly set my timepiece. Soon enough, Congressman Snort will be found on all fours in the Capitol men’s room, his every negotiable crevice and orifice crammed with delinquent members; the Reverend Jim-Bob Vermin will be entrapped with an expired Visa card in some drear motel, where he has paid well over the odds to be peed on by an Apache transvestite.
Reading this passage reminded me of Hitchens’s appearance on an episode of Hannity & Colmes marking the occasion of Jerry Falwell’s death. Before they finally cut off his microphone, Hitchens can be heard saying of the late reverend: “If you gave Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox.”
The forthcoming biography of Hitchens by the journalist Stephen Phillips will no doubt provide an occasion for many reconsiderations of his life and career. What is most striking to me, though, is how many of his most vocal admirers these days seem to be tremulous debate bros or anti-cancel-culture “contrarians”—an unfortunate development A Hitch in Time should help redress. At the very least, it is a salutary reminder of a time when being a so-called contrarian was more than just a fast track to lucrative speaking engagements and appearances on Joe Rogan. At his finest, Hitchens was motivated by the old dissident ethos to speak truth to power, not least because he lived in a time when far too many very powerful people got away with doing very bad things. Forget the “Hitchslap” YouTube clips and the Byronic machismo: here was a journalist and essayist who—for a time, anyway—truly mattered.
A Hitch in Time
Reflections Ready for Reconsideration
Christopher Hitchens
Twelve
$30 | 336 pp.
