Remembering
Christopher Hitchens
A brilliant writer, he bellowed against all that annoyed him
By Toni Fitzgerald
Dec 19, 2011
There are some writers whose polite, carefully worded commentary endears them to everyone.
Christopher Hitchens was not one of those writers.
Brash, opinionated, provocative and above all incredibly smart, Hitchens was a gifted writer who criticized Mother Theresa in one breath and defended Salman Rushdie in the next.
He was an essayist who never ran out of fodder for his arguments, and he loved to argue above all else. His strong opinions ensured there was always someone willing to argue against him.
Hitchens, who most recently wrote for Vanity Fair, died Thursday at age 62 of pneumonia, a complication from the esophageal cancer he had been battling for more than a year.
His views were, to put it mildly, unconventional. Hitchens refused to commit to either the right or left, vocally opposing the Vietnam War and later throwing his support behind the unpopular war in Iraq.
During his four-decade career, Hitchens angered everyone from Catholics and Jews to Democrats and Republicans, not to mention women.
He was one of the foremost atheist voices, laying out his arguments against a higher power in the controversial 2007 bestseller "God Is Not Great."
He once wrote an essay for Vanity Fair entitled "Why Women Aren't Funny," and he stated that he thought life began at conception.
He hated Hillary Clinton so much that he actually registered as a Democrat three years ago in order to cast a vote against her during the 2008 primaries.
If that all makes him sound like a horse's behind, he actually wasn't.
In person he was polite and forthright, and he was friends with some of his biggest rhetorical opponents.
Even as cancer ravaged his body over the past year, and it became clear he would not win this battle, Hitchens refused to soften his stance on god, or anything else.
Yet when a rabbi friend told Hitchens that he had asked people to pray for him, the author said he was deeply flattered.
Here's a sampling of what people are saying about Hitchens following his death:
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, FoxNews.com
He was one of the world’s most strident and eloquent defenders of human freedom, going so far as to break with the left-wing intelligentsia in strongly supporting the invasion of Iraq to protest Saddam’s brutalization of his people.
Indeed it is immensely ironic – or if you’re more inclined to faith, providential – that he died on the very day that the United States announced the end to the nine-year war in Iraq, a conflict that he brought his unparalleled eloquence to defend because of his hatred of tyranny in all forms.
Henry Porter, The Observer
Journalists are notoriously sentimental about the loss of one of their own: gusts of hyperbole appear about the recently departed only to be forgotten by the next cricket season. But Christopher Hitchens was not a run-of-the-mill hack, although that is how he sometimes risibly described himself: he operated on a much greater canvas, plied his wares with unfeasible talent, energy and confidence, wrote more, spoke more, drank more and knew more people than any other member of his trade thought possible.
So while one blogger reacted to his death with "Good riddance to bad rubbish!" I take the view that Christopher, whom I knew pretty well for the last two decades, deserves a celebration as well as the rites of differentiation. Quite apart from anything else, life is going to be a hell of a lot less interesting without him around. Even those who were outraged by his positions on God or Iraq or Mother Teresa will miss the thrill of their own shock and indignation – of being able to agree on Christopher's utter baseness.
William Grimes, New York Times
He took pains to emphasize that he had not revised his position on atheism, articulated in his best-selling 2007 book, “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” although he did express amused appreciation at the hope, among some concerned Christians, that he might undergo a late-life conversion.
He also professed to have no regrets for a lifetime of heavy smoking and drinking. “Writing is what’s important to me, and anything that helps me do that — or enhances and prolongs and deepens and sometimes intensifies argument and conversation — is worth it to me,” he told Charlie Rose in a television interview in 2010, adding that it was “impossible for me to imagine having my life without going to those parties, without having those late nights, without that second bottle.”
Hillel Italie, Associated Press
Cancer weakened, but did not soften Christopher Hitchens. He did not repent or forgive or ask for pity. As if granted diplomatic immunity, his mind's eye looked plainly upon the attack and counterattack of disease and treatments that robbed him of his hair, his stamina, his speaking voice and eventually his life.
Simon Jenkins, The Guardian
Christopher Hitchens was a pain in the neck. When I last debated with him it was in New York. He stumbled late on stage to draw attention to himself, cigarette and drink in hand, uttering oaths like a prohibition hack. The identikit Trot of our early friendship had became a rabid Bushite defending the Iraq war. He demanded to know how I could love Saddam Hussein so much as to oppose a war against him. I thought he was either in the pay of the Kurds, or had undergone an apotheosis into the ranks of the great American intellectual, a fraternity whose members must spin ideology on a dime and flip a dozen epigrams a night on TV.
I respected Hitchens – or at least the American version – for two sterling qualities. He was fearless in his attacks, and he developed into a stylist of columnar baroque. His mastery of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations was devastating. Why abuse an opponent when you can get Dr Johnson to do it for you? Who cares if you change opinions more often than a shirt, provided the audience gasps? Why bother what you say, as long as you pay your dues at the hallowed shrine of the English language?
Nicholas Shakespeare, The Telegraph
He was, in the parlance of his old party, our maximum journalist. As his profession goes through Lord Leveson’s wringer, the death of Christopher Hitchens at the age of 62, is a reminder that journalism can be a noble calling and that, in answering its call, it is not necessary for its finest practitioners to hack into your telephone. Hitchens taught that it was a far, far more rewarding exercise to tune into the old verities of his 19th-century mentors: to read the right books, know the right people, ask the right questions. His improbable podium was Vanity Fair, but I wonder if he would not have been at his happiest in the coffeehouse culture of his beloved William Cobbett.
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