Farewell Christopher Hitchens

Farewell Hitch: We miss you

Christopher Hitchens and the tradition of English dissent

More than a decade later I can still recall the spine-tingling thrill generated by the opening paragraph of Christopher Hitchens’ essay on Henry Kissinger:

In a rather more judgemental time, history was sometimes written like this: “The evils produced by his wickedness were felt in lands where the name of Prussia was unknown; and in order to rob a neighbour whom he had promised to defend, black men fought on the coast of Coromandel, and red men scalped each other by the Great Lakes of North America.”

Who would have expected a leftist journalist to appreciate the Gibbonian cadences of Thomas Macaulay, or – with such easy assurance – to quote such an establishment figure as the opening salvo of an attack on a contemporary bogeyman of the Left?  I had been led to the essay by an earlier book on the British-United States relationship (Blood, Class and Nostalgia), and was so impressed by its wit, irreverence and learning that I knew I must read more, and so found the collection For the Sake of Argument. I picked up a copy from Gleebooks on a trip to Sydney, but instead of going out on the town as planned I spent much of that night in its combative pages, cheering Hitch on as he skewered one enemy of the people after another. No left-winger had written with such panache and erudition since Karl Marx himself.

As became apparent on further acquaintance, there was far more to Hitchens than muck-raking leftism. Anyone can call Kissinger a war criminal, but few can back up the accusation with relevant facts and convincing argument. When such a counsel for the prosecution opens his indictment with Macaulay’s verdict on the opportunism of Frederick II we know that we are dealing with no ordinary radical pamphleteer, but an advocate of unusual power and skill. In his autobiography Hitchens remarks that he was too busy playing politics and socialising with the glitterati to do any work at Oxford, but the knowledge of world history and literature revealed in his essays and reviews is so extensive that he cannot have neglected his studies as assiduously as he claims. No matter what the subject, he seems always able to summon the apt quotation or instance, with a facility that drives other writers to despair and leaves them breathless with envy.

Hitchens named moral and physical courage as one of the qualities he most admired, and he did not fail to practise what he preached. He never pulled his punches, but his attacks were always on the powerful or revered; he was not afraid to criticise those on his own side; and he did not shy from situations of personal danger. He defended – and physically sheltered –  Salman Rushdie when much of the cultural “left” was running for cover or mumbling about “not hurting deeply felt religious sensibilities”, and when Muslims had been promised a heavenly reward for murdering him. He did not hesitate to call Clinton a liar. In accordance with George Orwell’s principle that saints should be regarded as guilty until proven innocent, he questioned the credentials of such sainted celebrities as Mother Teresa. He faced personal danger reporting in Northern Ireland and in the Kurdish regions of Iraq, and remained a firm advocate of the Kurds’ right to self-determination. He was not afraid to break with old allies and his own tradition of social democracy when it came to supporting the Bush government’s decision to liberate Iraq from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein.

In supporting the Iraq war Hitchens was widely accused of deserting the Left and becoming an apologist for the Right, but he was the one who remained loyal to the values of the radical Enlightenment, while much of the Left (so-called) abandoned them to go whoring after ethnic particularists and theocratic fascists merely because they were anti-Western, not appreciating that to be anti-Western was to reject those principles of secularism and critical dissent that had given birth to the Left in the first place. Despite the talk about his move to the Right, it was not Hitch’s values that changed, but his perception of what threatened them. When the danger seemed to be capitalism/US imperialism it was logical to be a Marxist of some sort (preferably Trotskyite or Maoist), but when the threat came principally from Islamic fundamentalism and other forms of religious obscurantism it was time to adopt new strategies and find new allies. Hitch’s political trajectory confounds such inadequate categories as Left and Right, as he has always followed the same star: personal liberty, freedom of thought and expression, independence of mind, and opposition to any kind of tyranny, whether secular or sacred.

The origins of his apparent shift lie in the Iranian revolution in the 1980s and the rise of the Ayatollahs, for as he recalled in his autobiography: “At the moment when Iran stood at the threshold of modernity [having just toppled the Shah], a black-winged ghoul cam flapping back from exile in a French jet and imposed a version of his own dark and heavy uniform on a people too long used to being bullied.” But he identifies the crucial turning point as the fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie, the emblematic incident that crystallised everything he loved and hated:

In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humour, the individual, and the defence of free expression. … To restate the premise of the argument again: the theocratic head of a foreign despotism offers money in his own name in order to suborn the murder of a civilian citizen of another country, for the offence of writing a work of fiction. No more root-and-branch challenge to the values of the Enlightenment … or to the First Amendment of the Constitution could be imagined.

Despite the accusations of apostasy, Hitchens has been on the correct (i.e. progressive) side of all the key moral and political issues of our time. Invited to admire its achievements he nonetheless saw through Cuban socialism; he never fell for any of the Communist dictators, not even Mao; he denounced the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia; he supported the struggle of the Poles; he admired C.L.R. James (the black Marxist historian); he supported British Labour when everybody else was Tory, and then went Tory when Labour abandoned its principles; he supported the Kurds against Hussein’s genocide, and the Palestinians against the Israeli land-robbers; he was pro-Jewish but anti-Zionist.

Although Hitchens was delighted to learn that his mother was of Polish-Jewish descent, meaning that he was himself Jewish, and never allowed expressions of anti-Semitism to go unchallenged, he did not exempt Judaism from his rejection of religion, nor Jewish people from the obligation to behave in accordance with the principles of justice and decency. He provoked predictable howls when he agreed with a Right-wing Christian fundamentalist that god did not hear the prayers of the Jews (nor those of Christians, for that matter); he was never backward in criticising Israeli policy towards the Palestinians; and he attacked barbarous and backward elements in Jewish culture, such as circumcision, especially the practice of metsitsah, whereby the mohel sucks the baby’s penis after cutting off his foreskin.

Hitchens always displayed a frightening capacity for colourful invective – Mother Teresa as a shriveled Albanian dwarf, Ayatollah Khomeini  as a black-winged ghoul, Paul Johnson as an explosion in a pubic hair factory – but his arguments were never purely ad hominem. He attacks wrongs rather than individuals, but also individuals on the principle that people must take responsibility for their decisions: evil acts cannot be excused by the sorts of rationalisations that Sartre called bad faith, nor overlooked because they are carried out by one’s friends or allies. He has been called insensitive and tasteless because he does not automatically extend respect – much less deference – to those who expect or demand it merely because they have not been able to shake off the illusions into which they were indoctrinated as impressionable children. Respect is something a person has to earn by his own efforts.

It is this rather Protestant ethic that explains Hitchens’ attachment to the values of the Boys Own Annual and the Boy Scout Handbook, as identified by his fellow ironist Paul Fussell: learn to think; gather knowledge; have initiative; respect the rights of others. This also explains Hitchens’ fondness for so many of those old fashioned stories of heroic endeavour by John Buchan, Rudyard Kipling, Conan Doyle and Patrick O’Brian. The same eccentricity leads him to admire and enjoy other writers whom you would not expect him to approve of, such as the snobbish Evelyn Waugh, the suave Tory H.H. Munro (Saki), and the slightly ridiculous P.G. Wodehouse – whom he defends against the facile charge of making pro-Nazi radio broadcasts while interned in Germany during the war, and in some of whose Jeeves/Bertie Wooster stories he detects marked anti-fascist sentiments, such as ridicule of Moseley’s blackshirts.

In a disarming aside in his polemical God Is Not Great, Hitchens identified his intellectual formation as that of “a Protestant atheist”. This characterisation is spot on, for although he became a U.S. citizen there is something quintessentially English about the style and content of his radicalism, which lies in a long tradition of dissent represented by such diverse figures as William Tyndale (first English translator of the Bible), John Milton, Bunyan, Shelley, William Hone (father of press freedom), Charles Bradlaugh (fearless Victorian secularist) and George Orwell, to whom Hitchens is a worthy successor.

It is the world’s loss that the gods took both Hitchens and Orwell to their heavenly reward long before their time. “Milton! thou should’st be living at this hour:/ England hath need of thee”, wrote William Wordsworth at the depth of the Pittite reaction against demands for reform unleashed by the French Revolution. How Orwell would have ridiculed the clichéd sanctimony of the knee-jerk “anti-racism” that makes it impossible for the police to arrest a non-white person without being accused of discrimination, and which automatically transforms illegal immigrants into asylum seekers and refugees merely because their place of origin is a Third World country. There is something in the current mood all too eerily reminiscent of Orwell’s comment on the 1930s (from “Inside the whale”):

The thing that …was truly frightening about the war in Spain was not such violence as I witnessed … but the immediate reappearance in left-wing circles of the mental atmosphere of the Great War. The very people who for twenty years had sniggered over their own superiority to war hysteria were the ones who rushed straight back into the mental slum of 1915. All the familiar wartime idiocies, spy-hunting, orthodoxy-sniffing (Sniff, sniff. Are you a good anti-Fascist?), the retailing of atrocity stories, came back into vogue.

Where is Hitchens when we need him to eviscerate the spineless Western response  to the latest outburst of “Muslim rage”, already involving hundreds of deaths and injuries, as well as children holding placards demanding that people who exercise their right to make unfavourable comments on religious figures be murdered, in traditional style, by decapitation? And all provoked by no more than a silly amateur film on Youtube. If the author is, as has been reported, a Coptic Christian, his own rage is rather more forgivable than that of his targets, considering that the Copts have suffered centuries of persecution by the more powerful and numerous Muslims, nearly to the point of annihilation. One can imagine Hitchens’ reaction on learning the response of the United States’ authorities: not to seek to calm and discipline the rioters, but to apprehend the filmmaker. No doubt their next step will be to arrest rape victims for causing the crime by walking around in public and dressing provocatively.

The death of Hitchens (to perfectly natural disease processes) is a loss that the free world can ill-afford. We must hope that we do not have too long to wait for his successor. Hitchens! Thou should’st be living at this hour:/ The world hath need of thee …

The Cartographer

Tom Sawyer in Richmond; or The Education
of a Secret Agent

Peter Twohig, The Cartographer: An Amazingly Bold, Inventive and Enchanting Novel (Fourth Estate, 2012)

This is the Great Australian Novel of Boyhood: Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Kim and Harry Potter, all rolled into one. Instead of the Mississippi and its paddle steamers we have the Yarra and its ferries; instead of Jackson’s we have Herring Island; instead of the caves where Tom gets lost and the robbers hide their loot we have the canals and drains of Richmond. Like Tom and Huck, the unnamed narrator, a precocious 11-year old identified only as T, witnesses a murder; has important business in graveyards; worries about meeting zombies, ghosts and vampires (though knows how to deal with them); and devises schemes to bring evildoers to justice. Instead of Hogwarts there are the nuns at St Felix’s, and the practical education provided by his petty crim granddad.

For once the cover blurb is accurate: The Cartographer is an enchanting story, as well as delightful and compulsively readable. T is resourceful, dynamic, independent, street-wise, adventurous, cheeky, imaginative, cunning and courageous, combining all the best qualities of both Slytherin and Griffendor. He seems to possess the observational powers of Sherlock Holmes, the inventiveness of Lyra Belacqua (His Dark Materials) when forced to come up with cover stories at short notice, and Harry Potter’s sense of social justice. Interrogated by the mysterious Mr Sanderson (obviously a spook), T hides his true identity, and when asked what he has been up to replies:

I’ve been visiting my cousin in New Zealand for a while. His father is a fireman, and recently had to put out a fire in an office building and rescue a whole lot of people by carrying them down to the ground, and they gave him a medal. My cousin’s name is Mick, and he’s a year younger than me, though we’re the same height. His mother says that’s because it’s a bit colder there than in Melbourne and it does something to kids’ bones to make them grow faster.

He’s also a bit of a smart-arse. He calls a dog bought for him on the cheap by his granddad Zac because that way he gets his money back, and he tells a tram conductor that he does not have enough money for the fare, but it’s OK because the driver is his dad. He proves this by saying something in Italian (Buon Natale), and yelling Ciao papa when he alights. Exploring a tram depot he is sprung by an employee, but has a ready excuse: “My dog ran in here, and I think he probably jumped on one of the trams because when we brought him home from the lost dogs home we took the Camberwell tram, and he liked it a lot.”

T is surprisingly well read in a huge range of comic literature, movies and TV shows, and draws on these to build the superhero identities that he assumes. He begins as a cartographer, mapping the streets, houses, drains, people and events of Richmond, but can easily transform himself into a masked avenger or even

Railwayman, who lives underground and drives his jet-propelled train around the tunnels deep beneath the city, spoiling the plans of evil men and helping the police to send them to Pentridge to rot or to hang. Railwayman, who is often armed with a pinch bar that he found in a railway shed, and who has his own secret supply of hand-grenades; and who, with his faithful companion, Shadow the Wonder Dog, has taken a solemn vow to explore underground railways everywhere, and to make maps of them, so that he won’t accidentally have the same adventure twice.

Like superman or Harry Potter, T has an acute sense of fairness and a determination to right wrongs, even when the evildoers turn out to be figures in authority. He rescues the Harrigan boy from the sadistic kidnapper, plants stolen watches and the boy’s shoe in his hideout and leads the police there to ensure that he is caught and convicted. He can’t save Flame Boy from being subjected to Electro-Convulsive Therapy by the sinister Dr Stern, but avenges him by smashing the machine afterwards, thus protecting others. He tries to ensure that the crooked cops who beat the man to death in Shamrock Street are brought to justice by firing a bullet into the corpse and dumping the shotgun in the boot of their car. And if he is misguided when he tries to save the kids in his class from the polio injections, by turning on a firehose, at least he does so from noble motives, recognizing that the principal purpose of medical treatment in those days was to torture children, especially boys.

The danger with books narrated in the first person is that the tone becomes monotonous and the wisecracks repetitive. The Cartographer does not fall into this trap, as T remains fresh and inventive throughout, with an amazing range of voices, as befits his changing identities. He can be as hard-boiled as Sam Spade: “Much as I wanted to catch up on old times – ask him who he had strangled lately and so on – it really was way past my bed-time” – as he dashes past the murderer sprawled on the front steps of the Palmers’ house. Or as didactic as a teenager explaining new technology to his granny: “Cemeteries are generally terrific places to play: they have no adults who are alive, and no dogs, as dogs are afraid of ghosts.” The only problem is zombies, but the trick is to carry a big stick and smash its brain before it can bite you. He has a powerful line in whimsy:

It’s true that Railwayman does like a bit of a drink after a hard day’s railroading – he’s a man who likes to live hard and play harder. That’s why he’s a Railwayman, for Christ’s sake. But he does not get a big thrill from waking up as sick as a parrot.

And at times he displays the rueful goofiness of none other than Bertie Wooster:

I resumed my walk, though it had lost all of its jaunt, and try as I may, I could not find one single jaunt in my whole body.

I wasn’t as bold as brass: I was more like bold as corrugated iron.

Now I’m not one of those kids who, on hearing that he has to have an injection, says: “What, just the one?” No, I’m more like one of those kids who suddenly remembers that he has to be visiting his sick grandmother that day.

The one personality that T never seems to display is that of an 11-year old larrikin from Richmond: he is far too articulate, well-read and reflective for that. And it’s just as well: in real life a boy from his background, even in 1959 (long before TV and smart phones crushed individuality), would have uttered little more than grunts, groans and colourful profanities – none of which would have made for a lively reading experience. T has more in common with Saki’s self-assured “feral ephebes” and impish boys whose sense of strategy when outwitting adults (especially aunts) puts the average general to shame.

One such (in “The Lumber Room”) is Nicholas, who refuses to eat his bread and milk one morning, offering the frivolous excuse that there is a frog in it. When his aunt states firmly that there could not possibly be a frog in his bowl he shows it to her: he knows very well it is there, as he had put it there himself. His aunt was wrong: “ ‘You said there couldn’t possibly be a frog in my bread-and-milk; there was a frog in my bread-and-milk’, he repeated, with the insistence of a skilled tactician who does not intend to shift from favourable ground.”

Nicholas is punished by not being allowed to visit the beach with his cousins. This suits him very well, as what he really wants to do is explore the attic, the place where his aunt stores all her beautiful and interesting things. He lays a false scent for her by giving the impression that he wants to play in the forbidden gooseberry garden, and while she is keeping an eye on that he snaffles the key. Among the hidden treasures is a tapestry showing a hunter who has just shot a stag, but does to seem to notice four wolves galloping towards him. Nicholas is fascinated: “Would the man and his dog be able to cope with the four wolves if they made an attack? The man had only two arrows left in his quiver, and he might miss. … Nicholas sat for many golden minutes revolving the possibilities of the scene; he was inclined to think that there were more than four wolves and that the man and his dogs were in a tight corner.” Nicholas gets into further trouble that afternoon when he declines to rescue his aunt from a water tank into which she has fallen, explaining that he was sure the voice was really the devil tempting him to enter the gooseberry garden. The frozen atmosphere at tea does not worry him, however, for he has much to think about: “It was just possible, he considered, that the huntsman would escape with his hounds while the wolves feasted on the stricken stag.”

It’s the same capacity for entering imaginatively into stories that makes T such lively and endearing character.

The Cartographer’s only rival for the title of the Great Australian Boyhood Novel would be the novels of Paul Radley, especially Good Mates. These are ruled out, however, by three problems. First, they are not primarily about boys, but adolescents. Second, they contain too much sex – though admittedly not more than is appropriate or would be expected in a novel about teenagers. (In fact, T’s complete silence about sex is a touch implausible: even at 11 years most boys are quite interested in their dick, and fascinated by questions like the origin of babies. Since one cannot imagine somebody as streetwise and canny as T lacking curiosity about or knowledge of these matters we must assume that his extreme reticence is an instance of the pas devant les grown-ups principle – poor dears, they are so easily hurt and offended they must be protected from such brutal realities.) Third, and perhaps most significantly, Radley’s books, several of which won young writers’ awards, turned out to be not entirely his own work, but were co-written by his scheming uncle (evidently somebody with certain characteristics in common with T’s granddad). I don’t see how these revelations make the stories any less engaging, but they seem to have cast a cloud over their respectability, and nobody much has anything to say about them these days.

There are no such problems with The Cartographer, which does, however, present a different kind of problem, and a few puzzles. At one level the novel is a straightforward story about the adventures of an 11-year old superhero, but you cannot help suspecting that it has other layers of meaning as well – that there is something else going on behind the scenes. For a start, there is the mystery of T’s relationship with his dead twin, Tom; as he explains (in a rare unguarded moment): “Tom was my twin brother. He died a year ago down the park in an accident. No one could tell us apart. He was a bit of a kidder. He liked to have fun. He liked to do dangerous things.” It sounds like a description of T himself, and there are moments when both his father and his mother call him Tommy. And this is not the only mystery. There is also the counterfeiter/murderer and the puzzle of how he gained access to the underground railway; the connection between T’s granddad, Auntie Queenie (evidently a retired madam) and the copper who shot T’s dog; and the hints about his mother’s secret work (in Military Intelligence?) during the war, and the nature of her surprising connection with Mr Sanderson.

So strong are the hints of cloaks and daggers that I was reminded of Kim (the story of an Anglo-Indian orphan recruited by British Intelligence for the Great Game) long before Mr Sanderson actually gave the book to T. We should have expected something along these lines, given that the murder house stands in Kipling Street. The name Tom recalls Tom Sawyer, but his surname Blayney suggests Thomas Blamey, commander of the Australian military forces during World War 2 and, legend has it, patron of Alf Conlon’s mysterious Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs.

For all the thrilling episodes of gripping (apparent) realism you get the nagging feeling that something else is going on. The drawing of T’s ever-expanding map mirrors the process of writing the story, and you can’t help wondering whether he is imagining these adventures as he reads the Phantom and other hero comics. (Perhaps they take place in his head during his “turns” and blackouts. Is this why the evil Dr Dunnet suggests ECT as a cure for his “lies”?) There is no apparent “frame” to the novel that would authorize or direct such a reading, but I am left with the suspicion that I have missed something important, some key that would explain why the central character is never named or given any physical description, and why the narrative is peppered with flashbacks to the playground accident in which Tom was killed.

For all that, T is such an engaging and indeed lovable character that you would like to prolong the acquaintance and might even dream about moving to Richmond in the hope that he might drop in for creamy soda and biscuits. He seems so alive – and perhaps he is. As I was writing this appreciation I suddenly noticed that somebody had pencilled the letter T on the wall beside the staircase from the kitchen. Spooky!