My friend Peter Robinson has written a moving tribute to the late Christopher Hitchens on the website Ricochet and Christopher Buckley has written another in the New Yorker (hat tip to Gregg Hurwitz, who sent it to me). Both these men knew Hitchens and so their remarks are worth reading. I met him once, so I’ll be very brief.
Both Robinson and Buckley resort to poetry to express their feelings about their lost friend. I think this must say something about the man, because a poem immediately came to my mind too when I heard about Hitchens’ death. It was some lines that Auden ultimately deleted from his wonderful memorial to the poet William Butler Yeats:
Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and the innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,AdvertisementWorships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives…
Hitchens wrote so well, so wildly well. Buckley reports that some people chided him for once calling Hitchens ”the greatest living essayist in the English language.” To which he responds: “O.K., name a better one.” And yes, I was trying to think of a better one last night or one even close to as good, and couldn’t.
I’m talking about pure prose here, the pure beauty of language, greater to me than music. And while I think I know why Auden cut those lines from his poem, they do express something in my heart as I think they must’ve expressed something in his. I would rather spend time reading good prose than right thinking or fine sentiments. It’s a joy when they all come together—as they sometimes did in Hitchens’ work—but if I have to choose one, I’ll take the prose. If this is sin in me, and it may well be, I think of it as Auden thought of his homosexuality: a sin I’m going to continue committing. Maybe—to be kind to myself—it simply reflects my understanding that beauty and truth are one.
Anyway, there are people who lost in Hitchens a loved one or a friend, and I’ll leave the real memorializing to them. All I lost was a wonderful, wonderful writer… but I do take that rather hard.
A very nice tribute to man with whom I assume you had many differences of opinion. I am only aware of Hitchens peripherally and I know that is my loss. I have Dinesh D’Souza’s Life After Death: the Evidence and Hitchens wrote a non-commital yet praise-worthy blurb for the back cover. This for a man with whom he regularly debated. He must have been a stand-up guy.
Christopher=
Χριστόφορος
Χριστός (Christ)
φορος (bearer)
Now tell me God has no sense of humor.
Have you never heard of Heaven’s Department of Irony?
Never, ever mess with the Department of Irony!
I think Obama should keep that in mind.
Came to know Hitchens’ writings rather late, only the last ten or fifteen years. Boy, he could really string some syllables together. Beautiful writing, most people would say. I saw it as beautiful thinking. Even his writings on atheism although annoying were worth reading. Always looked forward to catching a new piece by him. Alas, no more. God keep you, man.
The Devil speaks with a silver tongue–as they used to say before PC
Hitch was a wind up monkey who would brown nose the highest bidder for his time and talent
Hitch loathed hagiography and mocked both the dying and the dead
He is a footnote in the history of Troskyism
Although he was faithful to Auden’s wishes in The Collected Poems, Edward Mendelson, the poet’s literary executor, in the Selected Poems, restored the stanzas Auden cut. I think it’s a better poem with them in it.
As for Hitchens, any God that wouldn’t cut an indulgence for prose that good is the God of the comboxes, not the God this sinner worships. R.I.P.
A further thought; I don’t guess I dreamed it, but it was there when I woke up: Hitchens’ Purgatory involves an energetic spanking from old nun Mother Teresa. (Hell is a cell with murderer manque Leon Trotsky; Heaven, dinner with Orwell).
He could have been a classic 68-er, still spouting the party line forty years later. He became something more interesting.
ref: “Hitch was a wind up monkey…”
Oh, Victor, you are just so transgressive!
Surprised, though, that you weren’t best buds with Hitchens, at least on the “Zionism is Fascism” front. But if he was such a complete whore, how come he couldn’t be/wouldn’t be bought by AIPAC, along with everybody else: as Tommy Friedman so brilliantly showed us last week?