Christopher Hitchens Memoir

Hitch-22: A Memoir is a memoir written by author and journalist Christopher Hitchens. Hitch-22; Author: Christopher Hitchens: Country: United States: Language: English: Subject. In memoir Hitch-22, Hitchens says the combination of raging teenage hormones and an 'all-male school featuring communal showers, communal sleeping arragements, and communal lavatories. In other words, Christopher Hitchens contains multitudes. He sees all sides of an argument. And he believes the personal is political. This is the story of his life, lived large. Christopher Hitchens has 144 books on Goodreads with 1197689 ratings. Christopher Hitchens’s most popular book is God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons. An absolutely masterful prose and memoir in which the late and great Christopher Hitchens holds nothing back. He describes his life to the reader and helps the reader gain a glimpse as to what made 'Hitch' Hitch! The memoir starts off with the tragic suicide of his mother and touches upon his upbringing including his Trotskyist days.

Hitch-22
by Christopher Hitchens
Twelve, 448 pages, $26.99

Christopher Hitchens writes best when he writes with disdain. In book-length attacks on Mother Teresa (“The Missionary Position”), The Clintons (“No One Left to Lie To”), and religion (“God is Not Great”), he has shown himself to be an entertaining and erudite polemicist. And though Hitchens is irritated by his reputation as a contrarian, only a contrarian would deny being a contrarian in the introduction to a book titled “Letters to a Young Contrarian,” as he did in 2001.

Elsewhere in that introduction, Hitchens wrote: “I myself hope to live long enough to graduate, from being a ‘bad boy’ — which I once was — to becoming ‘a curmudgeon.’” His new memoir, “Hitch-22,” suggests an altogether different trajectory. Hitchens has mellowed, almost alarmingly so. Now in his early 60s, the one-time “bad boy” has become something of a softy.

Born to an austere commander in the British Navy and a “thoughtful, loving,” yet slightly hippyish mother, Hitchens quickly established himself among the top-rank of Fleet Street wordsmiths. In the 1980s, Hitchens emerged on the American intellectual scene as the pugnacious, Washington-based scribe for the Nation magazine, where he remained until 2002, when his hawkish response to 9/11 led to his falling out with much of the left. Hitchens’s unwavering support of the war in Iraq, vociferous atheism, and hyper-intellectual showmanship has made him a not-so-mini celebrity.

Hitchens must be one of the more omni-connected figures of our time. At the University of Oxford, he chatted over cocktails with Isaiah Berlin, struck up a relationship with the “toneless” and “mechanical” Noam Chomsky, and, according to Hitchens, had two girlfriends in common with the “beefy” and “unscrupulous” Bill Clinton (who was a Rhodes Scholar at the time). After graduation, Hitchens’s circle of acquaintances expanded massively and sometimes bizarrely: Margaret Thatcher, in the mid-70s, playfully tapped Hitchens on the rear with a tight cylinder of rolled-up papers in response to an article he wrote in which he described her as surprisingly sexy; the “boring and dank” Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal invited him to enlist in one of his training camps (Hitchens declined), and Agatha Christie invited him to dinner, where, Hitchens writes, “the anti-Jewish flavor of the talk was not to be ignored or overlooked.”

Judaism looms surprisingly large in this atheist’s memoir. In 1987, Hitchens learned that his mother, by then deceased, was Jewish. “Your mother didn’t much want to be a Jew, and I didn’t think your father’s family would have liked the idea,” his maternal grandmother told him. “So we just decided to keep it to ourselves.” (In an aside that rings both false and creepy, Hitchens writes that when he first visited his grandmother after hearing the news, she “rather abruptly looked Jewish to me.”) Hitchens explains his mother’s deception this way: “I have become convinced that she was willing to give up even the smallest adherence to the synagogue if it would smooth the accession of her two sons into polite English society.” He recalls as a child overhearing an argument between his parents about whether they could afford to send him to private school. “If there is going to be an upper class in this country,” his mother said, “then Christopher is going to be in it.”

There was an added frisson to Hitchens’s discovery of Jewish roots: He was at that time a prominent anti-Zionist, having just co-edited a volume of essays with Edward Said titled “Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question,” a broadside against perceived anti-Palestinian bias in academe. In “Hitch-22,” Hitchens adopts a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tone, but reaffirms his opposition to Zionism, which he regards as an injustice against the Palestinians. Moreover, he is gloomy about Israel’s long-term prospects. “I have never been able to banish the queasy inner suspicion that Israel just did not look, or feel, either permanent or sustainable.”

Yet, even Hitchens’s critique of an old bugaboo like Zionism lacks the sense of outrage that energized much of his earlier work. There are, to be sure, some arresting and hilarious turns of phrase sprinkled throughout “Hitch-22.” The novelist Kingsley Amis’s drift to the political right led many to wonder if Amis “was confusing the state of the country with the condition of his own liver”; Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson are “tethered gas balloons of greed and cynicism.” But these sharp pen portraits sit alongside bland sections in which Hitchens lavishes praise on his friends. So, for instance, we learn over the course of an entire chapter that James Fenton is the “finest poet of his generation writing in English.” Most egregiously, Martin Amis is applauded at tedious length for, among other things, his grammar, his troubled but tender relationship with his father, and his ability to “blend pub-talk and mid-Atlantic idiom into paragraphs and pages that are also fully aware of Milton and Shakespeare.” However true — and Amis’s immense skills as a writer should not be minimized — there is something dull about Hitchens in full gush.

A few years ago, Hitchens invited me to lunch at his apartment in Washington, D.C. I was there to report for an Israeli magazine on the success of “God is Not Great,” the first bestseller of his career, and I was struck by the undertone of anxiety even in his moment of triumph. After all, as I wrote at the time, Hitchens’s heresies are his muse; he thrives on being despised. How would this contrarian cope with being an object of adulation? Too well, it seems. Hitchens is happy, but it is contempt and exasperation that make his prose sparkle. Let’s hope he picks a fight soon.

Evan R. Goldstein is a staff editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Hitch-22: A Memoir is a memoir written by author and journalist Christopher Hitchens.

The book was published in May 2010 by Atlantic Books in the UK and June 2011 by Twelve, an imprint of Hachette Book Group USA, and was later nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. The planned worldwide tour for the book was cut short later the same month during the American leg so that the author could begin treatment for newly diagnosed esophageal cancer.^[1] Through the book's publisher and in the magazine for which he was a regular contributing editor, Vanity Fair, Hitchens announced: 'I regret having had to cancel so many engagements at such short notice.'^[2]

Description[edit]

Hitchens initially found the book hard to write: 'I found it fantastically difficult. Normally, when I'm writing, I'm making an argument, making a case. Also, when I'm writing, I'm trying to see how much I can pack into 5,000 words about a subject. But here's a subject I know too much about.' But he eventually produced a manuscript that was twice the length of the version finally published.^[3]

Hitchens used his memoir to discuss several incidents that were later picked up by reviewers and the media as notable for their revelatory nature: as a contemporary at Oxford University of the then-student Bill Clinton (who later became the American President), he knew that Clinton's later avowal that 'I did not inhale' in regard to marijuana was based on Clinton's allergy to smoke; but Hitchens also states that Clinton's consumption was via 'cookies and brownies';^[4] that during the writing of Martin Amis's novel, Money, Hitchens and Amis visited a New York brothel so that Amis could research the experience; ^[4] that during an encounter at a party with the then British Leader of the Opposition, Margaret Thatcher, she proceeded to 'spank Hitchens directly on the buttocks' and call him a 'Naughty boy!'^[4]

New foreword[edit]

The paperback edition of the book, published in 2011, featured a new foreword by Hitchens which mentions his newly diagnosed cancer: 'I suffer from Stage Four oesophageal cancer,' he writes. 'There is no Stage Five.' And 'I hope it will not seem presumptuous to assume that anybody likely to have got as far as acquiring this paperback edition of my memoir will know that it was written by someone who, without appreciating it at the time, had become seriously and perhaps mortally ill... When the book was published, I had just turned sixty-one. I am writing this at a moment when, according to my doctors, I cannot be certain of celebrating another birthday.'^[5][6]

Critical reception[edit]

Comments from critic Dwight Garner's article in The New York Times Book Review are quoted on the back cover. 'Electric and electrifying... He has a mind like a Swiss Army knife, ready to carve up or unbolt an opponent's arguments with a flick of the wrist.'^[7] and 'It is a fascinating, funny, sad, incisive, and serious narrative...' by Alexander Waugh of The Spectator.^[8]

Hitchens died of esophageal cancer in 2011, aged 62. His autobiography received positive reviews, and some critics felt his prose was impressive and wit was incisive.

References[edit]

1. ^Peters, Jeremy. 'Christopher Hitchens to Begin Cancer Treatment', The New York Times, 30 June 2010.
2. ^Books (2010-07-01). 'Book tour halted, The Telegraph'. London: Telegraph.co.uk. Retrieved 2012-04-14.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
3. ^Hillel Italie (2010-06-14). ''Christopher Hitchens On 'Hitch-22': Memoir Was 'Fantastically Difficult' To Write''. HuffPost. Retrieved 2012-04-14.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
4. ^ ^abcPine, Gideon (2010-06-08). ''Hitch-22': 6 Juicy Celebrity Bites From Christopher Hitchens's New Memoir (PHOTOS, POLL)'. HuffPost. Retrieved 2020-06-22.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
5. ^'Book preview, foreword'. Barnesandnoble.com. Retrieved 2012-04-14.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
6. ^Nicholas Lezard (2011-04-23). 'review'. London: Guardian. Retrieved 2012-04-14.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
7. ^Garner, Dwight (2020-06-22). 'In Memoir, Christopher Hitchens Looks Back'. New York Times. Retrieved 2012-04-14.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
8. ^'Spectator review'. Spectator.co.uk. 2010-06-05. Archived from the original on 2010-06-08. Retrieved 2012-04-14.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)

External links[edit]

Christopher Hitchens Book On Gandhi

• Book preview at Barnes & Noble

Christopher Hitchens Book Recommendations