This is a difficult book to describe. It is, in its way, an autobiography. But it isn't quite that, since Christopher Hitchens isn't all that concerned with the day-to-day details of the life he has lived. He's rather more concerned with the ideas that have driven that life (Marxism, socialism, justice, truth, the decline of the left) and the historical encounters and moments that have marked it. He is, for instance, more expansive and open about his support for George W. Bush's war in Iraq than he is about his feelings for his wife and children.
That's not to say he isn't forthcoming about his emotions or his friendships. It's just that these emotions are so weighed against his political thoughts and feelings that Hitch-22 is not like Martin Amis's Experience, say, or Gore Vidal's Palimpsest. It is every bit as revealing as those memoirs, but it's a book that makes you want to argue with its subject rather than absorb – or contemplate – the lessons of the life lived. It's an apologia – a self-justification – as much as a memoir.
Hitch-22: A Memoir, by Christopher Hitchens, McClelland & Stewart, 422 pages, $32.99
Early on, Hitchens acknowledges the seemingly unavoidable intermingling of the personal and the historico-political in his life. On the death of his mother, he had to travel to Athens to claim her body. But as it happened, Athens was then a site of demonstrations against a noxious, military junta (the so-called regime of the colonels). So the deep emotions Hitchens felt at the suicide of his mother were adulterated – or, perhaps, heightened – by the outrage he felt at the regime and the solidarity he had for the demonstrators. About this, he dryly writes that “… it turns out, as I have found in other ways and in other places, that the separation between personal and political is not so neat.” Hitch-22 is testament to his life's dearth of the neat.
Now, accounts of the mixing of personal and political (or historical) are not wanting. Few memoirists from the latter part of the 20th century seem willing to draw a line between public and private, the personal and political. This has led to memoirs that are full of passion.
He is one of those men ... who is made up of dozens of combative selves
It also leads to one of Hitchens's failings here: an inability to appreciate that the personal and political are sometimes desirably kept apart. Hitchens is a man who has deep – often insufficiently explained – hatred for certain individuals. He can be casually nasty – as when he refers to Martin Buber as a “pious old hypocrite,” seemingly because Buber had the gall to move into the house in Jerusalem that had belonged to the family of Hitchens's close friend Edward Said – or he can be more systematically mean-spirited, as he is whenever he refers to Bill Clinton, whom, evidently, he loathes.
Hitchens's dislikes make for vivid reading, but they also lead to dissonant moments. He expresses his outrage at president Clinton's refusal to side unequivocally with Salman Rushdie after the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwah. But Clinton had among his constituents any number of men and women who believed that Rushdie's The Satanic Verses was blasphemous. To have, in his capacity as president, unequivocally backed Rushdie would have been for Clinton to put his personal views above his responsibility to represent a varied constituency.
This is a matter we can argue about. My point is, though, that there is no argument chez Hitchens. So visceral is his dislike that anything Clinton does – or fails to do – is used as proof that Clinton is beneath contempt.
