Hitch-22: A Memoir

Hitch-22: A Memoir Review

Christopher (don't ever call me Chris) Hitchens, as he lays (or sits) dying from Esophageal cancer, has penned as his "immortality project," a memoir that opens up the doors to his always untidy life. As one who admired "Hitch" when he was at a safe distance, I am not sure this memoir was entirely a good idea? The "gloss" on his "one-of-a-kind" gadfly image has now been forever tarnished. Now that we easily can discern what makes him tick (the class complex that neither he nor his family ever got over), he seems exceedingly simple (too simple in fact) to understand. I am frankly disappointed.

The lesson in this memoir, is profoundly Freudian. It seems to me that it is: it behooves us all to look at what is propelling us from beneath before we make reservations for our random walk through life. Nervous energy often causes us to want to fill the space by "doing it all." But looked at from a deeper level, it is just another "garden variety" Freudian compulsion in disguise making all the noise as it systematically works its way from the background through our fragile mind and bodies.

Hitch was bright enough to have gotten a grip on himself long before his insecurities metastasized and took over his otherwise fine mind. But somehow this book reveals that he never quite "took the time to take a look." Thinking that one is superior has a way of keeping us always under a murky cloud of intellectualization. I am sure he would argue with me about this, but it seems that Hitch never quite took the time to find out who was really inside his skin.

The clues (that his insecurities were about his and his family's tenuous hold on their always evaporating class status) were everywhere, and was always staring him in the face (that is when it was not literary eating at his heels). He "looked" but was simply too bright to actually "see" what was eating away at him at the same time that it had permanently transformed him.

Every family has its dysfunctions. And such was the case with the Hitchens: the pathological Commander, his father, beaten down by the same compulsion that consumed the rest of the Hitchen family; and Yvonne, his mum, the "closet Jew" English Lady who ran off with her younger lover only to commit suicide together? It would have been romantic were it not so profoundly Freudian, and so profoundly pathological. And the rest of the family? Well, you get the picture.

Hitch's motto as gleaned from this retrospective could well be: "When in doubt, do something (even if it is wrong)! -- and then find a convenient (always class drenched) justification for it later. Next to "intellectualizing," arguably, "class rationalizations" are among the most insidious in existence. And Hitch was a master at them both. He willingly learned the "games English Gentlemen play." And then "pretended" that all along he did not want to play them. But play them he did: Nothing in life was more important to him or more formative in structuring who he became than the inner compulsion to be an English Gentleman. Indeed, what more can be said about a kid who samples life only at its extremes: Hitch (as he prefers to be called) was a willing homosexual, a "closet Jew," a Castro-ite-Communist, an Atheist, who nevertheless moved to Babylon (the USA) to become a neo-con?

Maybe there is a template out there somewhere that says that in order to live a life worth living one must sample its extremes? But that is not what Arthur Koestler, Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre (a few of both Hitch's and my heroes) did. The times called them up, and even when they were not quite ready for "prime time" they responded and then they rewrote the template for the next generation.

In Hitch-22, we get the distinct impression that throughout his life "Hitch" has been "play-acting," forcing himself on the times, rather than waiting to be called up by them. Our times (I am a contemporary of Kitchens) were neither pregnant, nor calling out for the template that Hitch followed. With the grim reaper knocking at his door, Hitch still has some work to do (as I suppose is true of us all), but he has lived a round life fuller than most, yet he was so richly endowed. These troubled times are going to miss him. Five stars.

Hitch-22: A Memoir Feature

• ISBN13: 9780446540339
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Hitch-22: A Memoir Overview

Over the course of his 60 years, Christopher Hitchens has been a citizen of both the United States and the United Kingdom. He has been both a socialist opposed to the war in Vietnam and a supporter of the U.S. war against Islamic extremism in Iraq. He has been both a foreign correspondent in some of the world's most dangerous places and a legendary bon vivant with an unquenchable thirst for alcohol and literature. He is a fervent atheist, raised as a Christian, by a mother whose Jewish heritage was not revealed to him until her suicide.

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.

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