Warrior of words faces new enemy

Christopher Hitchens. Photo / Supplied

Recently, Martin Amis noted, half-jokingly, that becoming a grandfather was like receiving a telegram from the mortuary. If so, then the news that his friend, Christopher Hitchens, has cancer of the oesophagus is more like getting a generational summons from the grave.

That is not to overstate the seriousness of Hitchens' diagnosis - although oesophageal cancer is indeed a grim condition - but simply to recognise the legend of an indestructible constitution that has long attended the celebrated journalist, polemicist, author, anti-theist and bon vivant.

And no less to acknowledge the vitality habitually displayed by Hitchens in the dissemination and discussion of political and cultural ideas.

While history's recent tectonic movements have left the co-ordinates of Hitchens' politics subject to fierce debate, few would argue that for more than three decades he has consistently occupied the position of the hardest-working, hardest-living man of letters on either side of the Atlantic.

The author of 11 books (and co-author of six more), including the bestselling God Is not Great, and four pamphlets and four collections of essays, Hitchens is also a columnist for Vanity Fair, lead book reviewer for the Atlantic Monthly, has a weekly column with the online magazine Slate and is a contributor to countless other publications.

Taking his former friend Gore Vidal's advice, he tries never to decline an invitation to appear on TV. He is a formidable participant in public debates and a regular on the lecture circuit.

In between, he makes a point of going somewhere "dangerous or difficult" each year, usually a war zone. It says something about the gravity of his current setback that Hitchens has cancelled the remainder of his book tour for his memoir, Hitch 22.

For it is not in his nature to shy away from the spotlight, still less to retreat from his audience. A typical public engagement will see the 61-year-old writer in convivial exchange with acolytes and adversaries for hours after the event has finished, as long, that is, as there is a drink to hand.

Hitchens has voiced his resentment at the attention paid to his capacity to drink, seeing it as a wilful neglect of his even greater capacity to work.

Yet in Hitch 22 he does not play down his vices. He says that it was poet James Fenton who introduced him to the charms of alcohol and tobacco.

"This is to give you no idea of how much I improved upon his initiation ceremonies", although he does go on to give the reader some idea. Of his early days in journalism, he writes: "It wasn't all that easy to get a reputation for boozing ... in old Fleet Street, where the hardened hands would spill more just getting the stuff to their lips than most people imbibe in a week, but I managed it."

In the past, he has also been a vocal defender of smoking, including teenage smoking. Smoking and drinking, he once wrote, do not bring happiness: "Like money, booze and fags are happiness."

Many commentators have now pointed out that they are also the main causes of squamous cell carcinomas, one of the two types of oesophageal cancer.

Despite his conviction that nicotine delivers the "intense short-term concentration" required for writing, Hitchens stopped smoking in 2008.

Just six weeks ago he got through two packets of cigarettes during an interview.

It is almost as hard to imagine Hitchens without a cigarette as it must have proved for him to be without one. Rare are his book jacket photos that do not feature a half-consumed cigarette and a nimbus of tobacco smoke swirling around his broodingly tumid features.

Although he can never be accused of a fixation on personal image, Hitchens nonetheless does have an image: at once resolute and dissolute, well-spoken but not quite well-groomed. The New Yorker described him as "looking like someone who, with as much dignity as possible, has smoothed his hair and straightened his collar after knocking the helmet off a policeman".

And for most of his career, it's this vision of the slightly raffish figure that made him a pin-up boy for the left.

It began at Oxford, where he earned a name as a street-corner socialist and a high-end socialite. Friends later joked that the sentence least likely to emerge from Hitchens's mouth was: "I don't care how rich you are, I'm not coming to your party."

According to Hitchens, when he was a child his mother told his father, during an argument over whether they could afford to send him to private school: "If there is going to be an upper class in this country, Christopher is going to be in it."

His mother, to whom he was close, took her own life when he was 24. She had run away to Greece with a defrocked vicar and they killed themselves in a lovers' pact. It's one of the few areas of emotional autobiography into which Hitchens has ever strayed, even in his own memoir.

And just as his hero, George Orwell, managed to file reports from wartorn Europe after learning that his wife had died, so did Hitchens write a piece for the New Statesman from a junta-governed Greece on the point of revolt while on a trip to identify the body of his mother.

The Statesman enjoyed a golden period in the 70s, with Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and James Fenton among its contributors, who also formed the thrusting literary gang of which Hitchens was a part. But he had wearied of British politics by the end of that decade, and in 1981 he relocated to New York.

There followed disagreements with the left - for example, Hitchens took the side of Britain against the Argentinian fascist junta in the Falklands conflict - but his polemical assaults on figures such as Henry Kissinger and Ronald Reagan were enough to ensure his continued residence in radical circles.

That all changed, though, after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. Hitchens saw "a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate" and became perhaps the most outspoken opponent of "Islamic fascism". The breach with the left was completed with the Iraq war in 2003, for which he actively campaigned.

The accusations of betrayal and neo-con conspiracy were many and vitriolic.

That's the thing about Hitchens; for all his vast learning, erudition and advancing years, there remains an unpredictable, dangerous quality - part ironic, part Byronic - to both his words and actions. Last year, on a visit to Beirut, he came across a poster for the Syrian Social Nationalist party, a Nazi-style group with a fondness for armed henchmen.

Finding it impossible to tear down the poster, he took out a magic marker and defaced it with some frank and unflattering graffito. Moments later, a group of thugs tried to wrestle him into a car. He was punched, bloodied and knocked to the ground.

This kind of behaviour and Hitchens' unapologetic support for military intervention against bellicose tyrannies has led some observers to speculate on his psychological motives.

A common conclusion is that it all stems from his postwar upbringing. His father was a commander in the Royal Navy who had a "good war", and the suggestion is that living through a period of extended peacetime in the west, Hitchens felt he had failed to test himself as his father had.

In a recent interview, Hitchens said: "One of the things I've realised, writing [Hitch 22] ... is that it has to be true." Whatever their provenance, physical and moral courage are qualities that Hitchens has never lacked. Nor is he likely to be in want of them now.

- OBSERVER

HIGHS AND LOWS

Born April 13, 1949 in Portsmouth, he is the eldest son of Eric, a naval commander, and Yvonne Hitchens. His brother, Peter Hitchens, is a well-known political columnist.

The best of times

The massive success of God Is Not Great that propelled him to the closest public intellectuals get to being household names.

The worst of times

* The suicide of his mother in 1973 in Athens and the recent diagnosis of his oesophageal cancer.

He says

* "Mother Teresa was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty."

* "Why are women, who have the whole male world at their mercy, not funny?"

* "The United States was attacked by theocratic fascists who represent all the most reactionary elements on earth ... And how did much of the left respond? By affecting a kind of neutrality between America and the theocratic fascists."

Others say

* "Among the casualties [of 9/11], although unreported that week, was a middle-aged Nation columnist called Christopher Hitchens. He was never seen again. The vile replica currently on offer is a double." -

- Tariq Ali