It has been twenty years or more since I sat in my apartment living room watching C-Span and witnessed the brown field mouse of a moderator introduce a slouching, smoking, honest-to-God roué named Christopher Hitchens. His presence alone was astonishing–has there ever been another creature so louche, so much a denizen of the halflit world on C-Span before or since?–and when he began to speak in a manner fluid, recondite, controlled, voluminous, and yet outrageous, it was almost as if the screen of the set had opened up and life had some how leapt out. It was obvious, right from the first, that this man was not like other men.
I was never quite certain what I thought or felt about him. I admired him–you had to admire him–but I never wanted to trade places. I certainly, and this happened more so as time went on and was only redoubled as he started his experience with cancer, wanted to know him. I, of course, never did.
I was in a room with him once. A rather large room normally called an auditorium. He was on the stage with Salman Rushdie and a professor of my acquaintance, and I was about a dozen rows back in the audience, one seat off the aisle, house right. It was a great discussion between two great writers and talkers. Their friendship and regard for one another was obvious and abundant.
Which brings me to the story of how I forgave Christopher Hitchens.
The never-actually-consummated friendship between Mr Hitchens and me was torn asunder by the Iraq War. I was firmly and from the beginning against it. Whatever the benefit might be derived from ousting Saddam, I could never see the point in killing Iraqi citizens in their tens and ultimately hundreds of thousands for his sins. I had been against our protracted and wrongheaded insistence on destroying the infrastructure of Iraq in the years following the Gulf War, against when Bush the First was President and against it when Clinton joined in. Since it was simple for any reasoning person who wasn’t so blinded by messianic patriotism to realize that there were no nuclear (the only true “weapons of mass destruction”) or usable chemical weapons in Iraq, it was also simple to understand that the war could not have been instigated for the reasons stipulated, and I was appalled to find Mr Hitchens shilling for the witless thugs who led us at that time.
I didn’t stop reading his work. I just read it with a grudge. And then the turnaround came.
In February 2009, Vanity Fair published a Hitchens piece that concerned the fatwa that the now long dead Ayatollah Khomeini had leveled against Rushdie for his having had the temerity to write The Satanic Verses. The opening paragraphs about Sir Salman (as I’m sure he is uncomfortable to be known) were large-hearted and generous and reminded me of grand qualities that Mr Hitchens possessed. And the totality of a man is far more important than his opinion about this issue or that, especially if it is not his responsibility to make the decisions. Then, no matter how well known, he is just some guy popping off about the passing show.
And so it goes. A person, a famous person, dies and I feel sadness an a loss. The unknown are not burdened with this extraneous mourning and bereavement. But now, at the end, it comes down to this for me: Never again will I get the complex pleasure that came from clicking on link and thinking, “I wonder what Hitch is going to be on about this time.”
