… in the coming days, but she doubts she can do better than this remarkable one from David Brooks in today’s New York Times. Brooks says all the right things. Excerpts:
… Hitchens’s model is Orwell, who combined left-wing politics and economics with traditionalist morality.
Starting in the ’60s, academic specialization and sobriety came to dominate intellectual life. But Hitchens writes more like the educated generalists of the previous generation — people like Isaiah Berlin, Malcolm Muggeridge and Raymond Williams. He makes a quick mention of Bob Dylan in his book, but by the first few pages of his memoir, he has already cited his key sources: W.H. Auden, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot and so on — the literary paragons of an earlier time.
When Hitchens came to the U.S., he brought a style that was at once more highbrow, more ribald and more conversational than is normal here…
Dictatorship, religion and censorship against literature, irony and free expression. There were no shadings; he judged everybody by whether they passed this test of moral courage.
His literary perspective has made him a more fully rounded person than most of the people one finds in this business. Unlike many Americans, he seems to completely trust his desire for pleasure, and has been open about his delight in sex, drink, friendship and wordplay.
… Most of all, his is a memoir that should be given to high school and college students of a literary bent. In the age of the Internet and the academy, it will open up different models for how to be a thoughtful person, how to engage in political life and what sort of things one should know in order to be truly educated.
Especially because of his excesses, it seems important that Hitchens make a speedy recovery.
Bravo.
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Wow. Just found an appreciation I wrote back in 2005. I’d forgotten about it.
July 2nd, 2010 at 8:42PM
I think Conquest, Amis Sr, and Empson (and even rebarbative Oxonian wits like Trevor-Roper), and further back – the great looming model of English intellectual sociability and argumentativeness, Johnson – make for more fitting comparisons and more direct connections than Muggeridge, Berlin, and Williams. The irascibility is the animating thing – the ‘take it or leave it’ dogmatical challenge. A good kind of outward, open dogmatism, I should specify: one that obligatorily seeks and surrounds itself with scepticism and contrary dogmatists.
July 3rd, 2010 at 1:39PM
Add me to the list of those who’s never been persuaded by this talking up of Hitchens as the new Orwell. There’s something about CH’s writing that’s too selfconsciously clever, too pleased with itself – a sense I never get reading Orwell. Orwell wanted to understand things. Hitchens wants to win. There’s the difference, I think.
July 4th, 2010 at 1:30AM
Hitchens would not take the citation of Muggeridge, whose work (not just on Mother Teresa) he’s expressed contempt for many times, as a compliment.
July 4th, 2010 at 2:12AM
‘Orwell wanted to understand things. Hitchens wants to win. There’s the difference, I think.’
I think this is a difference in appearances only – and the television, magazine, and mass-publishing environment of mandatory exposure and engagement that Hitchens works in tends to exaggerate appearances. I think it safe to think and assert that Orwell despised losing arguments at least as much as Hitchens, and I think it a jointly safe (very safe) proposition that he liked and wanted to win.
July 5th, 2010 at 12:39PM
I’ve always found Hitchens too thin for in-depth study, and too lugubrious for casual reading. However, his crusade against Mother Teresa (“Hell’s Angel”) should not pass unappreciated. Nor the title of his review in the Village Voice of the Brideshead Revisited TV series, which might have been the work of a brilliant copy editor, but I like to think was Hitchens himself: “How we lived in a big house and found God.” Nothing sums up that novel better, and nasty enough I expect even Waugh would have approved.
July 5th, 2010 at 1:11PM
Two quick things, Chris: The Vatican invited Hitchens to testify against Mother Teresa in her beatification review (not sure what one calls it). Score one for the Vatican, no?
And – Hitchens on Waugh:
July 5th, 2010 at 1:25PM
I think it safe to think and assert that Orwell despised losing arguments at least as much as Hitchens, and I think it a jointly safe (very safe) proposition that he liked and wanted to win.
No, I think that’s wrong. For instance, it’s hard to imagine Hitchens being as generous towards one of his antagonists as Orwell was towards Alex Comfort after their ‘Obadiah Hornbrooke’ poetic exchange in Tribune in 1943 (amongst other things Orwell admitted that Comfort’s poem was better than his own.)
July 5th, 2010 at 4:55PM
Comfort was probably – no, certainly – easier to treat civilly and generously than Henry Kissinger or George Galloway – for Hitchens to have shown jovial deference in either case would have been something of a tactical and rhetorical mistake. Orwell’s private letter to Comfort (shading towards being an interlocutor more than an antagonist) speaks of a substantial common ground, and a couple of shared acquaintances – terms in which it is difficult to see quite a few of Hitchens’s opponents, towards whom it is correspondingly difficult to frame a ‘generous’ attitude that isn’t either fake or argumentatively hobbling. Kissinger and Mother Teresa, for example, had more than enough experience in being deferred to and bathed in courtesy.
Hitchens’s scorn for Eagleton is ripely warranted. Eagleton’s review of Hitch 22 in the New Statesman was horribly awkward and awkwardly horrible.