… Christopher Hitchens, who has been diagnosed with esophageal cancer.

Hitchens is one of our best stylists. He learned much of what he knows about writing from one of his heroes, George Orwell.

Let’s be precise about what he learned by starting our salute with the first three paragraphs of one of Orwell’s typically intense and brilliant essays, “How the Poor Die.”

Note first the title itself — Blunt, brisk, short, monosyllabic, pragmatic… And yet hardly a simple pragmatism. The very cut and dried feel of the language, applied to vulnerable human beings, already hints at the horror and indignation Orwell feels. I mean to say that the title is as much as a conclusion as it is a beginning; the essay will after all narrate Orwell’s education in how the poor die, how the Parisian poor are so obscenely mistreated in welfare hospitals that they are killed en masse and in the same ways by the doctors and nurses there (the essay was written in 1946). The title signals Orwell’s achieved emotional education – from naivety to shock to horror to rage to something beyond rage, a hard-won detachment that allows him to write about what he has experienced and learned in a way that gives the unanswerable physical and moral reality of the atrocity he’s describing full verbal expression.

The emotion, I mean, is still there; but it is intricately leashed. We pick up on that suppressed intensity; we sense that it might spring out with violence at any moment, and this makes reading Orwell exciting, tense…

This will be one of the tricks Hitchens learns: Understatement is almost always the way to go, especially when you are describing extremities of suffering, of injustice. Also when you are describing extremities of passion, of joy. Dial it back, make your language, not your feelings, powerful, and let the reader find her own way through your sentences to the emotion you want her to feel.

This will of course only work if your writing voice, your social approach to the reader, has been so welcoming as to create in the reader a strong identification with you.  Once you’ve locked on to your target, as it were, once the reader is with you — I really want to say once the reader is you — you’re free and clear.  If you can sustain that fellow feeling, your essay is liable to work brilliantly.

Mainly what you want to do is describe, with acute precision, the aspect of the world you want your reader to see, feel, and understand. Artfully you will thread, throughout that description, little words and phrases that intimate how strongly you feel; but you will never bluntly, emotionally, manipulatively, tell your reader how you feel. Basically your tone throughout should be stoic, rational, observant, perhaps philosophically amused. When you do decide to break that even tone, you will do it sparingly, and it will likely have immense impact on the reader.

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Here’s the beginning of George Orwell’s essay, “How the Poor Die.” My bracketed comments are in blue.

In the year 1929 I spent several weeks in the Hôpital X, in the fifteenth arrondissement of Paris. [No emotion at all.  Mere reportage.  The point is to work slowly up to emotion, as occurred in the actual course of events Orwell narrates.] The clerks put me through the usual third-degree at the reception desk, and indeed I was kept answering questions for some twenty minutes before they would let me in. If you have ever had to fill up forms in a Latin country you will know the kind of questions I mean. For some days past I had been unequal to translating Reaumur into Fahrenheit, but I know that my temperature was round about 103, and by the end of the interview I had some difficulty in standing on my feet. At my back a resigned little knot of patients, carrying bundles done up in coloured handkerchiefs, waited their turn to be questioned.  [Note that the tone is casual, friendly, confiding, conversational.  He addresses you directly:  You will know the kind of questions… Clashing, though, with this ordinary speech is the already extraordinary circumstance of the writer’s ill-treatment at the hand of the clerk.]  [Note too the careful choice of figurative language, here stressing already the dehumanized aspect of the other patients:  The line behind Orwell is described as a knot, and then immediately their bundles – knotted handkerchiefs – are described.  Of course the reader doesn’t consciously register the implied equivalence here between bundles and people, but a hint of their objectification has been planted.]

After the questioning came the bath — a compulsory routine for all newcomers, apparently, just as in prison or the workhouse.  [Apparently carries the semi-amused observing consciousness here, the Brit surveying with mild astonished disdain French ways.] My clothes were taken away from me, and after I had sat shivering for some minutes in five inches of warm water I was given a linen nightshirt and a short blue flannel dressing-gown — no slippers, they had none big enough for me, they said — and led out into the open air. [Very, very precise description, this.   Orwell identifies no specific people interacting with him — were taken away, was given, led out — because the nurses are interchangeable indifferent automata…  One could certainly miss, in visualizing all of this, Orwell’s elegant assonance, his repeated use of one particular sound:  shivering, minutes, inches, given, slipper, big…. Just a dull bland almost soundless sound in that deeply hidden letter I, but it somehow conveys the total drabness, the deadness, the claustrophobia, of his setting.  This writing doesn’t exactly sing.] This was a night in February and I was suffering from pneumonia.  [Note how long he waited to tell us this dramatic fact, to explain why he’s in the hospital.  Stoic, selfless, hits you up with it at the end of the sentence and shocks you.] The ward we were going to was 200 yards away and it seemed that to get to it you had to cross the hospital grounds. [Seemed.  Does the same job as apparently.  I was in a crazy, mad, world, slowly attempting to assimilate the madness… It was like a bad dream — this seemed to be the case; that apparently was the case… Orwell is dramatizing not his emotions, but the minute by minute actuality of his efforts to make sense of what is gradually revealing itself to be a nightmare. He brings the reader along with him in that immediacy.]  Someone stumbled in front of me with a lantern. The gravel path was frosty underfoot, and the wind whipped the nightshirt round my bare calves. When we got into the ward I was aware of a strange feeling of familiarity whose origin I did not succeed in pinning down till later in the night. It was a long, rather low, ill-lit room, full of murmuring voices and with three rows of beds surprisingly close together. There was a foul smell, faecal and yet sweetish. [Strange, ill-lit… Our sense of nightmare, of the terror of the half-known, grows.  What’s the smell?  What’s the origin of the feeling? And don’t forget how controlled, how oddly beautiful, Orwell’s prose remains, with his lilting repeated L’s:  long, rather low, ill-lit room, full… This stylish self-consciousness may seem a small thing, but it’s conveying something very important amid this manifestly out of control experience.  It is conveying control.  So even as we follow the writer into this helpless fear, we sense, in his masterful prose, a kind of eventual triumph over it…  Maybe prose for Orwell – and Hitchens – ultimately comes to convey what we have to fall back on in our efforts to retain our dignity and lucidity in a difficult life.  In this sense, writing – language – really, really matters.]  As I lay down I saw on a bed nearly opposite me a small, round-shouldered, sandy-haired man sitting half naked while a doctor and a student performed some strange operation on him. First the doctor produced from his black bag a dozen small glasses like wine glasses, then the student burned a match inside each glass to exhaust the air, then the glass was popped on to the man’s back or chest and the vacuum drew up a huge yellow blister. Only after some moments did I realize what they were doing to him. It was something called cupping, a treatment which you can read about in old medical text-books but which till then I had vaguely thought of as one of those things they do to horses.

The cold air outside had probably lowered my temperature, and I watched this barbarous remedy with detachment and even a certain amount of amusement. The next moment, however, the doctor and the student came across to my bed, hoisted me upright and without a word began applying the same set of glasses, which had not been sterilized in any way. A few feeble protests that I uttered got no more response than if I had been an animal. I was very much impressed by the impersonal way in which the two men started on me. I had never been in the public ward of a hospital before, and it was my first experience of doctors who handle you without speaking to you or, in a human sense, taking any notice of you. They only put on six glasses in my case, but after doing so they scarified the blisters and applied the glasses again. Each glass now drew about a dessert-spoonful of dark-coloured blood. As I lay down again, humiliated, disgusted and frightened by the thing that had been done to me, I reflected that now at least they would leave me alone. But no, not a bit of it. There was another treatment coming, the mustard poultice, seemingly a matter of routine like the hot bath. Two slatternly nurses had already got the poultice ready, and they lashed it round my chest as tight as a strait-jacket while some men who were wandering about the ward in shirt and trousers began to collect round my bed with half-sympathetic grins. I learned later that watching a patient have a mustard poultice was a favourite pastime in the ward. These things are normally applied for a quarter of an hour and certainly they are funny enough if you don’t happen to be the person inside. For the first five minutes the pain is severe, but you believe you can bear it. During the second five minutes this belief evaporates, but the poultice is buckled at the back and you can’t get it off. This is the period the onlookers enjoy most. During the last five minutes, I noted, a sort of numbness supervenes. After the poultice had been removed a waterproof pillow packed with ice was thrust beneath my head and I was left alone. I did not sleep, and to the best of my knowledge this was the only night of my life — I mean the only night spent in bed — in which I have not slept at all, not even a minute.

Humiliated, disgusted, and frightened — When the visceral emotion comes out, it really comes out. But having held it back, leashed it for so long, slowly created the conditions for its release, Orwell now produces an especially intense result …

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I don’t say Hitchens is as a great a prose stylist as Orwell. But he is quite, quite good. Even people who detest particular positions of his often delight in his writing. He has that same gift Orwell had, that ability to draw you in, to make you be like him, or want to be like him, or feel you are him, for the duration of your lodging in his prose.

Part of what draws you into Orwell and Hitchens is, strangely, their insolence. They speak bluntly and don’t particularly care who they hurt. When we read naughty insouciant people – add Oscar Wilde and Gore Vidal — we intuit a wildly attractive world of looseness, relaxation, wit, and laughter; we intuit a subversive, seductive, knowledge.

On one level this knowledge is the knowledge of brats, and we connect with it because many of us were to one extent or another brats, and that was fun. Yet the childish, I’ll-say-anything aspect of all of these writers is wedded to a very mature erudition. Orwell, Wilde, Vidal, Hitchens — all are or were first-class literary scholars, deeply informed and sensitive readers of the western aesthetic tradition. This immature/mature combination gives their prose a high burnish and a low scrawl. Both at the same time. Which keeps you guessing. Keeps you off balance. Makes you burst out with laughter.

I’ll post this much now. More on Hitchens in a moment.