Christopher Hitchens 1949-2011: A thank you, of sorts

It’s strange  to mourn the passing of a person you’ve never met. It feels hollow, just a little unjustifiable, and as though you’re somewhat unequipped for the undertaking. Usually we are left with a myriad of moments to recollect and reconcile, to render into something approaching the complexity of life. Here we are left holding scraps of paper, dog-eared and lovingly wrecked, that we must read again for clues, or even simply the pleasure of a previously overlooked aphorism.

For those of us who only read (and watched and heard) Christopher Hitchens, who were never lucky enough to play spectator to the late night drinking and later night writing, who had to wait until the morning to see in print the fierce disputation and bone-dry wit that marked his life,  the hole left by his death is not a dramatic wrench to the heart, but one that will appear more slowly, deepening and widening as his absence is felt more and more with every passing event. Why? Because Hitchens was not a stock figure who could be rolled out to offer controversy. He was a journalist who made himself vital, who – as he tells us in his memoir – was constantly nagged by the feeling of being “found out” at any moment.

For Hitch, it seems to those of us who truly admired him, was not simply an atheist, a polemicist, and least of all a contrarian. Nor was he a poster boy the left, a banner boy for Iraq, or the harbinger of the apocalypse. He was, in a small part, the 21st century’s answer to the enlightenment. He stood, first and formost, for thought. Thought that would always – by definition – question inherited truth and inherited experts.Thought that could break the chain and cull the living flower. In fact,  he can be  - and often is – mentioned alongside Dostoyevsky, Voltaire, Orwell and Trotsky not for what he thought, but for how he thought. If, as Joseph Conrad wrote, criticism is the fine flower in the garden of letters, Hitch – before a culling of a more brutal kind –  was amongst the finest of the season.

It is not exactly true to say that I have had no ‘real’ contact with the man. After being given his e-mail address by a colleague (upon request) I wrote to offer my condolences and thanks. Asking for some reassurance that the itch to scribble is at least worth scratching he replied (in lightning speed):

“Pay heed to Rainer Marie Rilke’s question about whether you could go on living if you were prevented from writing. Once answer “no”, and the lesser problems fall away. This is simply because you have chosen to do what you should and must and are immune from petit-bourgeois regrets about other career-paths not taken. Then it begins, and you have a life and not an ‘occupation’.”

This is the great gift of the hitch. His lust for the living, the documentation and the criticism of life has cut a path that we are implored to follow. Especially those of us who, at the start of our journey, look upon the road less travelled by and notice its general lack of congestion. Even now, in the response to his death, coverage has been painfully predictable. Take the BBC who, in one of the worst mischaracterisations of a career since Darwins deathbed recanting, claimed Hitchen’s “called himself a contrarian.” It wouldn’t be so bad if a 10-minute YouTube spiral didn’t so easily reveal that ‘contrarian’ was a label against which he regularly railed, and for which he lambasted his publishers.

However, stranger still have been the stock responses, which were published with such speed that it would seem they have been written for weeks. And as though confirming the conspiracy, the lines, the conclusions, even the pithy turns of phrase, have been heard before, everyday. From diagnosis to departure, the sycophancy has been shocking. An event hosted by Stephen Fry on South Bank, which saw Hitch replaced with touching camaraderie by his closest friends (and Sean Penn), was so sickeningly fawning that a circle-jerk would have ended more tastefully. It was a memorial service without the casket. And how its subject must have blushed. Hitchens was not Mother Theresa; those of us who loved him should not fall victim to the same candy-coated canonisation as those who loved her. We are better than that.

We must remember him for who he was; one of us. One of a “stupid, poorly-evolved mammalian species, whose pre-frontal lobes are too small, and adrenalin glands too big, whose thumb-finger opposition isn’t all that it might be, who is afraid of the dark, and afraid to die.”

Admittedly, though, a remarkably good example of one.

As of this morning we have lost one of our best. We have been left standing in the dark, holding a candle lit at both ends and arms filled with scraps of paper, dog-eared and lovingly wrecked, the cover of which reads:

“Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.”

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