Published: December 16, 2011
Christopher Hitchens,
a slashing polemicist in the tradition of Thomas Paine and George
Orwell who trained his sights on targets as various as Henry Kissinger,
the British monarchy and Mother Teresa, wrote a best-seller attacking
religious belief, and dismayed his former comrades on the left by
enthusiastically supporting the American-led war in Iraq, died on
Thursday in Houston. He was 62.
Christopher Hitchens in his home in Washington, D.C., in 2007.
The cause was pneumonia, a complication of esophageal cancer, Vanity Fair magazine said in
announcing the death,
at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. Mr. Hitchens, who lived in
Washington, learned he had cancer while on a publicity tour in 2010 for
his memoir,
“Hitch-22,” and began writing and, on television, speaking about his illness frequently.
“In whatever kind of a ‘race’ life may be, I have very abruptly become a
finalist,” Mr. Hitchens wrote in Vanity Fair, for which he was a
contributing editor.
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.”
Armed with a quick wit and a keen appetite for combat, Mr. Hitchens was
in constant demand as a speaker on television, radio and the debating
platform, where he held forth in a sonorous, plummily accented voice
that seemed at odds with his disheveled appearance. He was a master of
the extended peroration, peppered with literary allusions, and of the
bright, off-the-cuff remark.
In 2007, when the interviewer Sean Hannity tried to make the case for an
all-seeing God, Mr. Hitchens dismissed the idea with contempt. “It
would be like living in North Korea,” he said.
Mr. Hitchens, a British Trotskyite who had lost faith in the Socialist
movement, spent much of his life wandering the globe and reporting on
the world’s trouble spots for The Nation magazine, the British
newsmagazine The New Statesman and other publications.
His work took him to Northern Ireland, Greece, Cyprus, Portugal, Spain
and Argentina in the 1970s, generally to shine a light on the evil
practices of entrenched dictators or the imperial machinations of the
great powers.
After moving to the United States in 1981, he added American politics to
his beat, writing a biweekly Minority Report for The Nation. He wrote a
monthly review-essay for The Atlantic and, as a carte-blanche columnist
at Vanity Fair, filed essays on topics as various as getting a
Brazilian bikini wax and the experience of being waterboarded, a
volunteer assignment that he called “very much more frightening though
less painful than the bikini wax.” He was also a columnist for the
online magazine Slate.
His support for the Iraq war sprang from a growing conviction that
radical elements in the Islamic world posed a mortal danger to Western
principles of political liberty and freedom of conscience. The first
stirrings of that view came in 1989 with the Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini’s fatwah against the novelist Salman Rushdie for his supposedly
blasphemous words in “The Satanic Verses.” To Mr. Hitchens, the
terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, confirmed the threat.
In a political shift that shocked many of his friends and readers, he
cut his ties to The Nation and became an outspoken advocate of the
American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and a ferocious critic of what he
called “Islamofascism.” Although he denied coining the word, he
popularized it.
He remained unapologetic about the war. In 2006 he told the British
newspaper The Guardian: “There are a lot of people who will not be
happy, it seems to me, until I am compelled to write a letter to these
comrades in Iraq and say: ‘Look, guys, it’s been real, but I’m going to
have to drop you now. The political cost to me is just too high.’ Do I
see myself doing this? No, I do not!”
Christopher Eric Hitchens was born on April 13, 1949, in Portsmouth,
England. His father was a career officer in the Royal Navy and later
earned a modest living as a bookkeeper.
Though it strained the family budget, Christopher was sent to private
schools in Tavistock and Cambridge, at the insistence of his mother. “If
there is going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher
is going to be in it,” he overheard his mother saying to his father,
clinching a spirited argument.
He was politically attuned even as a 7-year-old. “I was precocious
enough to watch the news and read the papers, and I can remember October
1956, the simultaneous crisis in Hungary and Suez, very well,” he told
the magazine The Progressive in 1997. “And getting a sense that the
world was dangerous, a sense that the game was up, that the Empire was
over.”
Even before arriving at Balliol College, Oxford, Mr. Hitchens had been
drawn into left-wing politics, primarily out of opposition to the
Vietnam War. After heckling a Maoist speaker at a political meeting, he
was invited to join the International Socialists, a Trotskyite party.
Thus began a dual career as political agitator and upper-crust sybarite.
He arranged a packed schedule of antiwar demonstrations by day and
Champagne-flooded parties with Oxford’s elite at night. Spare time was
devoted to the study of philosophy, politics and economics.
After graduating from Oxford in 1970, he spent a year traveling across
the United States. He then tried his luck as a journalist in London,
where he contributed reviews, columns and editorials to The New
Statesman, The Daily Express and The Evening Standard.
“I would do my day jobs at various mainstream papers and magazines and
TV stations, where my title was ‘Christopher Hitchens,’ ” he wrote in
“Hitch-22,” “and then sneak down to the East End, where I was variously
features editor of Socialist Worker and book review editor of the
theoretical monthly International Socialism.”
He became a staff writer and editor for The New Statesman in the late
1970s and fell in with a literary clique that included Martin Amis,
Julian Barnes, James Fenton, Clive James and Ian McEwan. The group liked
to play a game in which members came up with the sentence least likely
to be uttered by one of their number. Mr. Hitchens’s was “I don’t care
how rich you are, I’m not coming to your party.”
After collaborating on a 1976 biography of James Callaghan, the Labour
leader, he published his first book, “Cyprus,” in 1984 to commemorate
Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus a decade earlier. A longer version was
published in 1989 as “Hostage to History: Cyprus From the Ottomans to
Kissinger.”
His interest in the region led to another book, “Imperial Spoils: The
Curious Case of the Elgin Marbles” (1987), in which he argued that
Britain should return the Elgin marbles to Greece.
In 1981 he married a Greek Cypriot, Eleni Meleagrou. The marriage ended
in divorce. He is survived by their two children, Alexander and Sophia;
his wife, Carol Blue, and their daughter, Antonia; and his brother,
Peter.
Mr. Hitchens’s reporting on Greece came through unusual circumstances.
He was summoned to Athens in 1973 because his mother, after leaving his
father, had committed suicide there with her new partner. After his
father’s death in 1987, he learned that his mother was Jewish, a fact
she had concealed from her husband and her children.
After moving to the United States, where he eventually became a citizen,
Mr. Hitchens became a fixture on television, in print and at the
lectern. Many of his essays for The Nation and other magazines were
collected in “Prepared for the Worst” (1988).
He also threw himself into the defense of his friend Mr. Rushdie. “It
was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus
everything I loved,” he wrote in his memoir. “In the hate column:
dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying and
intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the
individual and the defense of free expression.”
To help rally public support, Mr. Hitchens arranged for Mr. Rushdie to
be received at the White House by President Bill Clinton, one of Mr.
Hitchens’s least favorite politicians and the subject of his book “No
One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton”
(1999).
He regarded the response of left-wing intellectuals to Mr. Rushdie’s
predicament as feeble, and he soon began to question many of his
cherished political assumptions. He had already broken with the
International Socialists when, in 1982, he astonished some of his
brethren by supporting Britain in the Falkland Islands war.
The drift was reflected in books devoted to heroes like George Orwell
(“Why Orwell Matters,” 2002), Thomas Paine (“Thomas Paine’s ‘Rights of
Man’: A Biography,” 2006) and Thomas Jefferson (“Thomas Jefferson:
Author of America,” 2005).
His polemical urges found other outlets. In 2001 he excoriated Mr.
Kissinger, the secretary of state in the Nixon administration, as a war
criminal in the book “The Trial of Henry Kissinger.” He helped write a
2002
documentary film by the same title based on the book.
Mr. Hitchens became a campaigner against religious belief, most notably
in his screed against Mother Teresa, “The Missionary Position: Mother
Teresa in Theory and Practice” (1995), and “God Is Not Great.” He
regarded Mother Teresa as a proselytizer for a retrograde version of
Roman Catholicism rather than as a saintly charity worker.
“I don’t quite see Christopher as a ‘man of action,’ ” the writer Ian
Buruma told The New Yorker in 2006, “but he’s always looking for the
defining moment — as it were, our Spanish Civil War, where you put
yourself on the right side, and stand up to the enemy.”
One stand distressed many of his friends. In 1999, Sidney Blumenthal, an
aide to Mr. Clinton and a friend of Mr. Hitchens’s, testified before a
grand jury that he was not the source of damaging comments made to
reporters about Monica Lewinsky, whose supposed affair with the
president was under investigation by the House of Representatives.
Contacted by House investigators, Mr. Hitchens supplied information in
an affidavit that, in effect, accused Mr. Blumenthal of perjury and put
him in danger of being indicted. At a lunch in 1998, Mr. Hitchens wrote, Mr. Blumenthal had characterized
Ms. Lewinsky as “a stalker” and said the president was the victim of a
predatory and unstable woman. Overnight, Mr. Hitchens — now called
“Hitch the Snitch” by Blumenthal partisans — became persona non grata in
living rooms all over Washington. In a review of “Hitch-22” in The New
York Review of Books, Mr. Buruma criticized Mr. Hitchens for making
politics personal.
To Mr. Hitchens, he wrote, “politics is essentially a matter of character.”
“Politicians do bad things,” Mr. Buruma continued, “because they are bad
men. The idea that good men can do terrible things (even for good
reasons), and bad men good things, does not enter into this particular
moral universe.” Mr. Hitchens’s latest collection of writings,
“Arguably: Essays,” published this year, has been a best-seller and
ranked among the top 10 books of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review.
Mr. Hitchens discussed the possibility of a deathbed conversion,
insisting that the odds were slim that he would admit the existence of
God. “The entity making such a remark might be a raving, terrified person
whose cancer has spread to the brain,” he told The Atlantic in August
2010. “I can’t guarantee that such an entity wouldn’t make such a
ridiculous remark, but no one recognizable as myself would ever make
such a remark.”
Readers of “Hitch-22” already knew his feelings about the end. “I
personally want to ‘do’ death in the active and not the passive,” he
wrote, “and to be there to look it in the eye and be doing something
when it comes for me.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 23, 2011
Because
of an editing error, an obituary in some copies on Friday about the
writer Christopher Hitchens referred incorrectly to the circumstances of
his death. While he did die at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in
Houston, he had not entered hospice care there, and he had not stopped
treatment. The obituary also misstated the source of a remark by Mr.
Hitchens, an avowed atheist, about the possibility of a deathbed
conversion. It came from a 2010 interview with The Atlantic, not with
The New York Times. And the obituary also misstated the frequency of
“Minority Report,” the column Mr. Hitchens wrote for The Nation. It
appeared biweekly, not bimonthly.
An obituary last Friday about the writer Christopher Hitchens
referred incorrectly to the Falkland Islands war of 1982, in which he
supported Britain. Britain responded to Argentine military action in the
Falklands; Britain did not invade the Falklands.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/16/arts/christopher-hitchens-is-dead-at-62-obituary.html?pagewanted=all
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