Essays remind us why we miss Christopher Hitchens
When a voice as distinct, direct and pugnaciously poetic as that of Christopher Hitchens is lost, the silence can be deafening.
Especially in an election year.
And Yet... fills the Hitchens void — for the moment — with a posthumous collection of reviews, essays and reportage previously unpublished in book form. (Hitchens died at age 62 in December 2011 after battling esophageal cancer.)
And Yet... offers the literary (subjects include George Orwell, G.K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens, Salman Rushdie and Joan Didion); the political (Che Guevara, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Colin Powell and Edward Kennedy); and the personal — frequently all three in combination.
And, as always, the British-born, Oxford-educated, chain-smoking, booze-infused Hitchens leaves a trail of brilliant, brawling and provocative quotes and ideas to consider, admire or deplore, depending, of course, on one’s point of view.
A polemist armed with extraordinary powers of refined thought and brawny wit, Hitchens pulled few punches and took even fewer prisoners. A self-described socialist and Marxist (though he would also later be described as a neoconservative), he was, first and foremost, a contrarian.
He was, however, certainly consistent in his disdain or outright contempt for some of his favorite targets.
In “The Case against Hillary Clinton” (Slate, March 31, 2008), Hitchens rails against the idea of a Hillary candidacy calling her: “Indifferent to truth, willing to use police-state tactics and vulgar libels against inconvenient witnesses, hopeless on health care and flippant and fast and loose with national security: the case against Hillary Clinton for president is open-and-shut.”
“What,” he wondered, bringing husband Bill into the mix, “do you have to forget or overlook in order to desire that this dysfunctional clan once more occupies the White House and is again in a position to rent the Lincoln Bedroom to campaign donors and to employ the Oval Office as a massage parlor?”
While published in time for Christmas, And Yet… might not be the ideal stocking stuffer. Hitchens is the man, after all, who wrote God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. And in both “Bah, Humbug” (Slate, December 20, 2005) and “The True Spirit of Christmas” (The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 24, 2011), Hitchens is mockingly and entertainingly unapologetic about his discomfort with the whole celebration and disbelief in the stories that drive it.
Readers will find Hitchens was just as ruthlessly unsparing when he turns his pen on himself.
The most memorable and revealing piece of the And Yet… collection is the three-part series Hitchens wrote for Vanity Fair “On the Limits of Self-improvement.”
In a withering look into the mirror that precedes an extensive and only marginally successful makeover, the author admits to “British teeth” that scare children as well as giving off “a scent that resembles that of an illegal assembly, either of people or of materials, in the hog wallows of Tennessee or in the more remote and primitive islands of Scotland.”
Assessing the final results after almost a year of effort, he finds: ““Weight: the same, only slightly better distributed. Life expectancy: presumably somewhat increased, but who’s to say? Smile: no longer frightening to children.”
Sadly, he would be gone just a little more than three years later.
And Yet...Essays
By Christopher Hitchens
Simon & Schuster, 352 pp.
3.5 stars out of 4