He was a man of the 1960s left in ways that even bonding ignobly with Paul Wolfowitz during the Iraq War never induced him to disavow. Yet the late Christopher Hitchens had some impermeably sturdy 19th-century English qualities lurking in his iconoclastic DNA.
The ebullient, unrepentant vices that helped kill him had their 19th-century side, too. It’s not too hard to imagine a fabulously mutton-chopped Hitchens happily overdoing the brandy and tobacco as he scoffs in a London men’s club — on the verge of barring him for life for sneaking Das Kapital into its library, no doubt — because that vainglorious ass Chinese Gordon has just been sent to Khartoum.
Anyway, the very Victorian value that Vanity Fair‘s posh answer to Orwell ended up exemplifying after his 2010 cancer diagnosis may ring strange to modern ears: he died well. And also died game, which was the martial equivalent back when Britannia ruled the earth.
Hitchens, I’m sure, would have recognized the joke. In those days, to “die well” meant to accept one’s fate and make one’s peace with God. To die game meant to triumphantly fling your empty Browning at advancing Zulus as their spears entered your red-coated breast.
Hitchens was on the side of the Zulus. Without exactly accepting his fate — by his own account in the posthumously published Mortality (Twelve, $22.99), he drew some quickly dashed hope from every potential cure — he refused to be fazed by it. Because his own imminent demise provided a whole new stack of debate cards in his ongoing duel with organized religion, this very public intellectual treated terminal cancer as an opportunity to stay in, not abandon, the fray.
Hence these lapidary chronicles of a death foretold, originally printed in Vanity Fair during the last 15 months or so of his life. Considerate up to a point of the many believers who announced they were praying for him, he was rightly contemptuous of the internet yahoos who hailed his illness as divine retribution: “My so far uncancerous throat, let me rush to assure my Christian correspondent above, is not at all the only organ with which I have blasphemed,” is a typical riposte. Yet he got the most intellectual charge– and in these pages, Hitchens’s attachment to intellect makes William S. Burroughs’s fondness for heroin look like a hobby — out of picking apart the paradoxes underlying both types of wishful thinking.
That included undermining the prayerful by citing a 2006 scientific study (he never stopped boning up) documenting that patients unsaved by prayer often go to their graves feeling disconsolate about disappointing everybody. Yet he felt a similar dismay when “secular and atheist friends” bucked him up with reassurances like “Cancer has no chance against someone like you,” reflecting that “If I check out, I’ll be letting all these comrades down.” No one but Hitchens could have taken such pleasure in rescuing the word “comrades” from Stalinist taint and quaintness alike.
Otherwise, sentimentality wasn’t in the cards. “Must take absolute care not to be self-pitying or self-centered” is the advice he gives himself in the previously unpublished jottings that make up Mortality’s final chapter, which is moving not least because it’s editorial advice. He wasn’t addressing himself as a man who was presumably as prone to bad nights as anybody else facing the big sleep, but as a writer — the identity that meant the most.
Hitchens may have died as an American citizen, which does the land of the free modest credit. But perhaps the most stubbornly British thing about him was his determination to view his case as ordinary and potentially instructive, not unprecedented and uniquely appalling. “I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me” is about it for claiming he’s special.
His detailed descriptions of the “new land” he calls Tumorville — not just its physical debilitations and harrowing medical procedures, but its peculiar social etiquette — arevery much in the spirit of Orwell’s famously laconic account in Homage to Catalonia of what it’s like to get shot. The only sense in which Hitchens ever surpassed his master is that Orwell was writing after he’d recovered and Hitchens woke up every morning knowing there was no such thing.
In all honesty, we’ll only be able to judge this book’s real value on the day we wake up to learn we’re terminally ill ourselves. That’s because it’s meant to be — first and foremost — useful, which was Hitchens’s foliage-disguised goal throughout his career. Soon after he died, I remember telling one friend that he was the brilliant older sibling who drove all of his ceaselessly tap-tapping lessers crazy even when they knew he was wrong. So here’s a confessional ending he might approve of: I loved Big Brother. And I was so far from alone it’s not funny.