Christopher Hitchens, the engaging and enraging
British-American author and essayist whose polemical writings on
religion, politics, war and other provocations established him as one of
his generation’s most robust public intellectuals, has died. He was 62.
Hitchens died Thursday night at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, said his literary agent, Steve Wasserman.
Hitchens was diagnosed with advanced esophageal
cancer in June 2010, when his memoir, “Hitch-22,” hit the bestseller
lists. He wrote and spoke unflinchingly of his grim prognosis and
acknowledged that years of heavy smoking and drinking had placed him at
high risk for the aggressive disease.
His openness about having cancer elicited thousands
of letters and e-mails to Vanity Fair, where he was a longtime
contributor. Many of the well-wishers offered prayers for the famously
atheistic author, who had made his case against religion in the 2007
book “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.” He maintained
that his illness had not changed his mind about religion and, borrowing
from Shakespeare, asked believers not to bother “deaf heaven” with their
“bootless cries.”
Erudition, a roguish sense of humor and passion for
intellectual combat were hallmarks of his writing, which was prolific.
In addition to Vanity Fair, he was a columnist for the online magazine
Slate and contributor to Harper’s, the Atlantic and a number of British
publications. He wrote two dozen books, including highly regarded
biographies of George Orwell, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, and
co-wrote or edited at least eight others.
A swashbuckling opinionator, he loved few things better than a good argument — and he knew how to pick one.
Once described by the New Yorker 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,” he
tarred Bill Clinton as a rapist, Mother Teresa as a fraud and Henry
Kissinger as a war criminal. He argued in Vanity Fair that women were
less funny than men, which stoked the wrath of female comics. “I am
programmed by the practice of a lifetime to take,” he wrote, “a contrary
position.”
In his personal life he was no less the “rapscallion
iconoclast,” as historian Douglas Brinkley once described him. He left
his pregnant first wife for another woman. He swore an affidavit during
the Monica Lewinsky scandal that put his friend, Clinton aide Sidney
Blumenthal, at risk of a perjury charge. Over the years he fell out of
friendship with a long list of notables, including novelists Gore Vidal
and Saul Bellow, who dismissed Hitchens as a “Fourth Estate playboy
thriving on agitation.”
After the terrorist strikes of Sept. 11, 2001, he
truly became the scourge of the left. Repulsed by what he saw as the
left’s desire to blame American foreign policy for the attacks, he
championed the Bush administration’s war on terrorism and resigned his
longtime post as Washington columnist for the liberal Nation magazine.
His polarizing views brought sarcasm from former allies, one of whom
described Hitchens’ shift as “the first-ever metamorphosis from a
butterfly back into a slug.”
“During all this I never quite lost the surreal sense
that I had become in some way a pro-government dissident,” Hitchens
wrote, “and that of all the paradoxes of my little life this might have
to register as the most acute one.”
Writer Martin Amis said the controversy merely
illuminated his friend’s “autocontrarian” nature. Hitchens “sees, not
only the most difficult position, but the most difficult position for
Christopher Hitchens,” Amis wrote in the London Guardian in 2011.
“Christopher is one of nature’s rebels. By which I mean that he has no
automatic respect for anybody or anything.”
He was born Christopher Eric Hitchens in Portsmouth,
England, on April 13, 1949. The elder of two sons, he had a cool
relationship with his father, Ernest, a commander in the British Royal
Navy, but a warmer one with his mother, Yvonne. She taught him to love
books and was determined that he would be the first Hitchens to attend
college. “If there is going to be an upper class in this country,”
Hitchens overheard her telling his father, “then Christopher is going to
be in it.”
His parents saved enough money to send him to Leys, a
boarding school in Cambridge, and then to Balliol College, Oxford,
where he studied philosophy, politics and economics and bloomed as a
political campaigner. He joined the International Socialists, a faction
of the anti-Stalinist left, and charged into the anti-Vietnam War
movement. A skillful debater, he discovered that “if you can give a
decent speech in public or cut any kind of figure on the podium, then
you need never dine or sleep alone.” British literary critic Terry
Eagleton, who had been a socialist comrade at Oxford, said Hitchens was
so nakedly ambitious that he “made Uriah Heep look like Little Nell.”
In 1969, Hitchens began writing book reviews for the
left-leaning London weekly New Statesman, where he forged important
friendships with writers Martin Amis, James Fenton and Ian McEwan. In
1970 he graduated with honors from Balliol and won a grant to travel
across the U.S., which left him smitten by his “New World.” He returned
to England, where he burnished his journalism credentials writing for
mainstream and leftist publications. One of his assignments was a New
Statesman profile of Margaret Thatcher in which he riled the future
prime minister’s Conservative Party supporters by calling her sexy. In a
subsequent encounter at a party, Thatcher called him a “naughty boy”
and swatted his behind.
In 1973, when he was 24 and living in London, his
mother committed suicide with her lover, a defrocked vicar, during a
trip to Greece.
Years later, he discovered one of her secrets: She
was Jewish, which made him Jewish. “My initial reaction, apart from
pleasure and interest, was the faint but definite feeling that I had
somehow known all along,” he wrote in a 1988 essay, “On Not Knowing the
Half of It.” But he remained anti-religion and anti-Zionist.
With London as his base, Hitchens spent the 1970s
covering revolutions and human rights: nail bombers in Belfast,
anti-fascists in Portugal, persecuted leftist journalist Jacobo Timerman
in Argentina.
While on assignment in Cyprus in 1977, he met Eleni
Meleagrou and married her in 1981. He left her when she was expecting
their second child and in 1991 married Carol Blue, a freelance
journalist.
In addition to Blue, he is survived by their
daughter, Antonia; two children from his first marriage, Alexander and
Sophia; and a brother, Peter, a conservative columnist for the British
paper Daily Mail.
Some Hitchens watchers trace his disillusionment with
the left to 1992, when he called for military intervention in Bosnia,
but Hitchens said it began later, during the Clinton era. The rupture
was complete after the 9/11 strikes in New York and Washington, when
Hitchens drew a line between himself and other leading liberals, such as
Noam Chomsky.
He was contemptuous of Chomsky and others who argued
that American imperialism, by turning much of the world against the
U.S., had drawn the terrorists here.
“I can only hint at how much I despise a left that
thinks of Osama bin Laden as a slightly misguided anti-imperialist,”
Hitchens wrote later. “Instead of internationalism, we find among the
left now a sort of affectless, neutralist, smirking isolationism” and “a
masochistic refusal to admit that our own civil society has any merit.”
In September 2002 Hitchens wrote his last column for
the Nation, which he said had become “the voice and the echo chamber of
those who truly believe that John Ashcroft is a greater menace” than bin
Laden, and organized intellectuals and activists to campaign against
Saddam Hussein’s rule. He was criticized just as harshly by his former
allies, such as New Left Review editor Tariq Ali, who wrote that the
Hitchens he knew disappeared in the 9/11 inferno, leaving a “vile
replica” in his place.
In 2007, on his 58th birthday, Hitchens enjoyed a
moment of high patriotism and irony: The one-time Trotskyite took the
oath of U.S. citizenship in a private ceremony at the Jefferson
Memorial, conducted by George W. Bush’s homeland security chief, Michael
Chertoff.
What Hitchens once said of Vidal was also abundantly
true of himself: He possessed “the rare gift of being amusing about
serious things as well as serious about amusing ones.” In Vanity Fair,
which he joined in 1992, he wrote of his personal encounters with
waterboarding and Brazilian bikini waxes with self-deprecating humor and
cerebral detachment.
Both qualities informed his writing on his bleakest subject: his cancer.
“I have more than once in my time woken up feeling
like death,” he wrote in Vanity Fairin September 2010, shortly after
learning he had esophageal cancer that had spread to his lungs and lymph
nodes. “But nothing prepared me for the early morning last June when I
came to consciousness feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own
corpse.” Noting that his father had died of the same type of cancer, he
added, “In whatever kind of a ‘race’ life may be, I have very abruptly
become a finalist.” His cancer was classified Stage 4 and he readily
conceded that “there is no Stage 5.”
His illness caused him to cancel the publicity tour
for “Hitch-22,” which opens, eerily, with a rumination on death prompted
by his recollection of an incident years ago when he was referred to as
“the late Christopher Hitchens.” In this prologue, he rejects fatalism
and declares “I personally want to ‘do’ death in the active and not the
passive, and to be there to look it in the eye and be doing something
when it comes for me.”
He aggressively sought treatment, which included
genetic testing to determine which chemotherapy drug might be most
effective on his cancer. He was encouraged to try the experimental
approach by his friend, Dr. Francis Collins, the eminent geneticist and
born-again Christian with whom he had debated the existence of God.
He also kept up a frenetic pace of writing and, until he lost his voice, public speaking.
In one of his most publicized appearances after being
diagnosed with cancer, he faced Tony Blair, the former British prime
minister and recent convert to Catholicism, in a sold-out Toronto debate
on whether religion was a force for good in the world.
Despite his obvious frailty, Hitchens was in top
form, provoking wide laughter when he compared God to “a celestial
dictatorship, a kind of divine North Korea.”
At the debate’s end, the audience of 2,700 voted him the winner.
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