The best of the friends I’ve been privileged to count as close (his name was Ed, see here) beguiled us all with his fierce intellect, immoderate wit, and a truly liberating command of the scatological.
Which makes it all the more surprising that I never came across Christopher Hitchens (“Hitch”) during his lifetime—a shortfall which I rue to this day.
Here was a man who lived by argument and debate. A voracious reader—who seemed never to forget a single thing he’d read—he travelled the world’s trouble-spots and interviewed the world’s change-makers, bringing a critical and independent (his words) mind to challenge all forms of settled belief with an almost otherworldly fluency and coherence.
He was also a prolific writer and broadcaster.
Just a few book titles will give you some idea: “No One Left to Lie To” (his indictment of Bill Clinton); “The Missionary Position” (ditto Mother Teresa—“. . . was not a friend of the poor . . . was a friend of poverty. . . . said that suffering was a gift from God . . . spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women . . . ”); “God Is Not Great” (subtitle “How Religion Poisons Everything”); “The Trial of Henry Kissinger”, and so on.
But Hitchens was not just a polemicist. He also authored biographies of men he admired (George Orwell, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine), and left us with essay collections on any number of topics. Plus a splendid memoir (“Hitch-22”—as good a place to start on his writings as any).
British-born, he moved to the USA in his early thirties, finally becoming a US citizen in 2007.
He died of cancer in 2011.
Seek him out, I urge you. For even if you disagree with his views, his manner of putting them across always delights, not to mention the wit and learning-lightly-worn.
You’ll find plenty of videos of him in full flight on YouTube. I’ve chosen one of the very last of these: an interview by Britain’s Jeremy Paxman shortly before Hitchens’ death.
Paxman was a famously abrasive interviewer (he once said his default mindset when interviewing politicians was “why is this lying bastard lying to me?”). But here he becomes almost (gasp!) deferential, as these two fine intellects range over career, beliefs, illness, and impending death.
Would that Christopher Hitchens were still alive today—his breadth of knowledge, his clear and incisive thinking, and the tangential slash* of his wisdom would be welcome—nay, essential—correctives to the madness that is our current world . . .
[ * So wish I’d coined this, but in fact I lifted it—if memory serves, from Frank Herbert’s “Dune.” q.v. ]