Christopher Hitchens's Autobiography

To discuss Jewish topics and issues

Moderator: Moderators

User avatar
Jrosemary
Sage
Posts: 627
Joined: Sun Jul 12, 2009 6:50 pm
Location: New Jersey
Contact:

Christopher Hitchens's Autobiography

Post #1

Post by Jrosemary »

Ok, Hitchens's new autobiography is about much more than his discovery of his Judaism. I guess I just harp on that because something of the sort happened to my grandfather: his mother didn't tell him he was a Jew until he was grown.

The information, as far as I can tell, didn't affect my grandfather much, either positively or negatively. He still seems pretty neutral about the fact (and only marginally interested in it. Which is fine--no reason it has to be a big deal.)

Finding out that he's Jewish seems to have had a profound impact on Hitchens, however (who refers to himself as a semi-semite). He mentions it quite a bit in the pages I've read so far.

I wonder if being in the public eye makes a difference? I mean, many people (Jewish or gentile) regard Hitchens not only as an atheist, but as a Jewish atheist.

I'm not saying that being a public figure is the only thin that makes the discovery a big deal, of course. Heck, I'm not even sure how well known Hitchens was when he found out--I'm not that sure of the timeline. So I'm just kinda throwing this random speculation out there.

Anyway, it's a fascinating book so far--and heartbraking when he talks about his Mom. Highly recommended!

Oh--the title is "Hitch-22."

User avatar
Jrosemary
Sage
Posts: 627
Joined: Sun Jul 12, 2009 6:50 pm
Location: New Jersey
Contact:

Post #2

Post by Jrosemary »

Oy, forgive any spelling errors in the above post. I posted from my Blackberry, and it won't let me edit. Grrrr.

cnorman18

Christopher Hitchens's Autobiography

Post #3

Post by cnorman18 »

Jrosemary wrote:Oy, forgive any spelling errors in the above post. I posted from my Blackberry, and it won't let me edit. Grrrr.
That's funny; I can edit from mine. Good thing, too.

I sort of found out that I was Jewish as an adult, too, only in a different way...

I'll give the book a look. Sounds interesting.

User avatar
Jrosemary
Sage
Posts: 627
Joined: Sun Jul 12, 2009 6:50 pm
Location: New Jersey
Contact:

Post #4

Post by Jrosemary »

Cnorman wrote: I sort of found out that I was Jewish as an adult, too, only in a different way...
It's very good so far.
:lol:

One thing I love about Hitchens: he has the courage of his convictions. He used to defend the use of water-boarding and said it wasn't torture. Vanity Fair challenged him to undergo waterboarding himself. He accepted the challenge, submitted to waterboarding--and completely changed his tune! It is torture, as far as he's concerned now.

Re my Blackberry: it says I have to enable something, but I don't know how to enable it. :(

User avatar
Jrosemary
Sage
Posts: 627
Joined: Sun Jul 12, 2009 6:50 pm
Location: New Jersey
Contact:

Post #5

Post by Jrosemary »

Here's the New York Times review of Hitch-22:
New York Times wrote: Do I Contradict Myself?
By JENNIFER SENIOR

If anyone in this world is positioned to write a toothsome memoir, it’s Christopher Hitchens. He’s gone from international socialist to Iraq war enthusiast; he has a moving personal story and is a pasha of vice. His present solar system of intimates includes James Fenton and Salman Rushdie and Ian ­McEwan; his past included Susan Sontag and Edward Said (both deceased) and Gore Vidal (still alive, but banished to a growing Kuiper belt of discards and debris). He’s gone to a New York brothel with Martin Amis and delivered bluejeans to Polish dissidents; he’s gotten smacked on the tush by Margaret Thatcher and beaten up by thugs in Beirut. He argues ruthlessly and writes like a drunken angel, making targets of subjects as various as Mother Teresa, Henry Kissinger, the Clintons and God. (In 2007, he published the best seller “God Is Not Great� — a title Rushdie ruefully deemed one word too long.)

The problem is that if you’re a public figure, especially a writer as extravagantly colorful and prolific as Hitchens (he’s written 11 books, 4 pamphlets and 4 collections of essays, and today appears regularly in Slate, The Atlantic Monthly and Vanity Fair), you may scarcely be aware of how much of your own store of tales has dribbled out over the years, like a sack of flour with a small hole in it. This makes the business of writing your memoir much harder. And it turns out that much of the autobiographical pith of “Hitch-22� has appeared elsewhere, most notably in Ian Parker’s excellent 2006 profile of Hitchens in The New Yorker, and it’s surprising how little to it that Hitchens now adds — how little, indeed, is in this book that’s generally considered the lymph and marrow of a traditional reminiscence. We hear almost nothing of Hitchens’s two marriages or three children, and he certainly never discusses falling in love. (Though he talks about his experiments on the Wilde side at university — as well as at boarding school, even if those were abruptly brought to an end by a snitch “with the unimprovable name of Peter Raper.�) We do hear about his social life and dearest friendships, and those portraits and set pieces are some of the most pleasurable in the book. This is a man who’s cut such a fat swath through the smart set that a dinner with William Styron essentially gets relegated to a footnote, as does the revelation that he learned the identity of Deep Throat long before the public did, by pestering Nora Ephron, Carl Bernstein’s ex-wife (in fact, you would not believe the number of delectable footnotes in this book; the devil, apparently, is in the asterisks).

But we learn little about the friendships of Hitchens’s that soured as he began his political metamorphoses, and we hear practically nothing about his fondness for drink, though he does treat us to a brief audit of his intake (at least one bottle of wine and two slugs of “Mr. Walker’s amber restorative� per day). I understand that Hitchens is probably bored with people’s obsession with his boozing, but this is his memoir, and apart from his swift and spirited dispatches, he’s best known for his swift dispatch of spirits. Aren’t we entitled, in the name of science, to know how he does it, if the question of why is too dull and unprofitable to explore?

None of this means that “Hitch-22� isn’t marvelous in its own way. But it’s probably a misnomer to call it a memoir, and easier to enjoy if one thinks of it as a collection of essays instead. Our protagonist is a bit of a disembodied brain, highly capable of poignancy but not exactly introspection or, as is welcome in memoirs, overwhelming indiscretion. (Would it be primitive to say that he seems so English in this way, though he’s become an American citizen?) When he shares a tender memory, his preference is to quickly convert it into a larger political observation; for him, politics remains the most crucial sphere of moral and intellectual life. At the beginning, for instance, he draws a compact, empathetic picture of his mother, who struggled to make a glamorous life for herself in the British naval towns where his father was based, and who would one day run off to Athens with a lover and take her life in a suicide pact. (I was particularly moved by his story about her one attempt to take a solo road trip, only to return the next day with her neck in a brace, “having been painfully rear-ended by some idiot before she had even properly embarked on the treat that was rightfully hers.�) Yet only a few pages later, when he recounts his efforts to arrange her burial in Greece, he freely acknowledges his trip was as political as it was personal. He recognizes that the coroner in his mother’s case was a famous villain in the military junta’s machine; he makes reporting side-trips to talk to student protesters; at the cemetery where he lays his mother to rest, he stops to pile carnations on the grave of George Seferis, the poet and national hero.

Something similar happens when Hitchens discusses his Jewish heritage, which he discovered only in 1987. (This, too, his mother kept a secret, in addition to her terrible pain.) He starts with an affecting visit to his maternal grandmother, to whom he “somewhat awkwardly uttered the salute ‘Shalom!’ � as he took his leave; but soon enough he uses his genealogical exploration to make the more brutal, unsentimental point that “a great number of Stalin’s enforcers and henchmen in Eastern Europe were Jews.�

Even when he was a young man, Hitchens’s bête noire was Stalin. Born in 1949, the author came of age during that heady moment of “revolution within the revolution,� that time when Trotskyism had captured the imaginations of an international class of students, intellectuals and organizers. He was a natural soixante-huitard, a Labour Party member and anti-Vietnam War demonstrator in advance of 1968 itself, and one can feel his enthusiasm for that era still. “If you have never yourself had the experience of feeling that you are yoked to the great steam engine of his­tory,� he says, “then allow me to inform you that the conviction is a very intoxicating one.�

As soon as we leave Oxford, however, and follow him on his tour through the revolutionist’s Fodor’s (he goes to Havana and Prague, Poland and Portugal), we begin to hear about the ways that international socialism isn’t quite delivering on its promise, either from his young perspective or from the perspective of disillusioned comrades he meets along the way. We also follow Hitchens to the Iraq of 1976, which he now more or less admits to have gotten wrong — “I should have registered the way that people almost automatically flinched at the mention of the name Sad­dam Hussein� — and we follow him back there after Desert Storm, when he very much wished to get it right. And there’s a whole chapter about Salman Rushdie, whose involuntary fugitive status occasions a moment in 1989 when the personal and the political truly do inter­twine, with Hitchens looking aghast at those on the left who, under the guise of multi­cultural ­sensitivity, were unwilling to condemn the ayatollah’s fatwa.

By the time 9/11 comes along, we are hardly surprised to hear the author describe its barbarism as “fascism with an Islamic face� — a phrase he coined back then that has since evolved into the blunter, catchall term “Islamo­fascism.� Little by little, he has been setting us up for his divorce from the left, and his surrender to the conviction that “the only historical revolution with any verve left in it, or any example to offer others, was the American one.� Some will find his version of events sympathetic; others will find it a cliché, the inevitable rightward drift of an old Trotskyist; and still others will violently quarrel with his tangents and disquisitions, as Hitchens so often makes one do (he may be smarter than most of us, but when he’s hellbent on making a point, he’ll haul out straw men one would just as soon leave to the cows). Personally, I didn’t lose all patience with him until the end, when he claims that although he wanted the “moral arithmetic� to add up so that he could remain on “the ‘left’ side of the column,� he couldn’t when it came to Bosnia: “I was brought to the abrupt admission that, if the majority of my former friends got their way about non­intervention, there would be another genocide on European soil.� Perhaps this was true of the intellectual left, but it was Bill Clinton, a center-left president Hitchens detested for his opportunism and slipperiness, who finally ordered the troops in, and he did so over a squall of conservative objection, with 29 Republican senators voting against the intervention, versus only one Democrat. (How’s that arithmetic?)

The truth is, by Hitchens’s standards, his examination of how he and the left parted company is surprisingly un­strident and nonpolemical. It is, in fact, almost melancholic. He’s not claiming with his typical adamantine force that the balance sheets work out. And perhaps the strongest theme in “Hitch-22� is just this — that sometimes the balance sheets are an unholy mess. From the time he was young, Hitchens says, he’s tried to keep dueling notions in intellectual and emotional equipoise. His need to manage contradictions came early, with an exotic spirit for a mother and an embittered Tory for a dad. By the time he got to Oxford, he was quite accustomed to “keeping two sets of books,� passing out leaflets at car plants by day and racing off in fancier dress to the Gridiron Club by night. When he began his work at The New Statesman, he realized that “journalism was the ideal profession for someone like myself who was drawn to the Janus-faced mode of life,� in that one had to seduce both sides to hear the whole story.

So yes, Christopher Hitchens may long to be a cogent man of reason, and he can certainly be a pitiless adversary. But he knows there are two sides to any decent match, and it’s touching, in “Hitch-22,� to see how often he’ll race to the other side of the court to return his own serve. Which may explain why, though he tries to be difficult, he’s so hard to dislike.

Jennifer Senior is a contributing editor at New York magazine.

cnorman18

Christopher Hitchens's Autobiography

Post #6

Post by cnorman18 »

Jrosemary wrote:Here's the New York Times review of Hitch-22:
New York Times wrote: Do I Contradict Myself?
By JENNIFER SENIOR

If anyone in this world is positioned to write a toothsome memoir, it’s Christopher Hitchens. He’s gone from international socialist to Iraq war enthusiast; he has a moving personal story and is a pasha of vice. His present solar system of intimates includes James Fenton and Salman Rushdie and Ian ­McEwan; his past included Susan Sontag and Edward Said (both deceased) and Gore Vidal (still alive, but banished to a growing Kuiper belt of discards and debris). He’s gone to a New York brothel with Martin Amis and delivered bluejeans to Polish dissidents; he’s gotten smacked on the tush by Margaret Thatcher and beaten up by thugs in Beirut. He argues ruthlessly and writes like a drunken angel, making targets of subjects as various as Mother Teresa, Henry Kissinger, the Clintons and God. (In 2007, he published the best seller “God Is Not Great� — a title Rushdie ruefully deemed one word too long.)

The problem is that if you’re a public figure, especially a writer as extravagantly colorful and prolific as Hitchens (he’s written 11 books, 4 pamphlets and 4 collections of essays, and today appears regularly in Slate, The Atlantic Monthly and Vanity Fair), you may scarcely be aware of how much of your own store of tales has dribbled out over the years, like a sack of flour with a small hole in it. This makes the business of writing your memoir much harder. And it turns out that much of the autobiographical pith of “Hitch-22� has appeared elsewhere, most notably in Ian Parker’s excellent 2006 profile of Hitchens in The New Yorker, and it’s surprising how little to it that Hitchens now adds — how little, indeed, is in this book that’s generally considered the lymph and marrow of a traditional reminiscence. We hear almost nothing of Hitchens’s two marriages or three children, and he certainly never discusses falling in love. (Though he talks about his experiments on the Wilde side at university — as well as at boarding school, even if those were abruptly brought to an end by a snitch “with the unimprovable name of Peter Raper.�) We do hear about his social life and dearest friendships, and those portraits and set pieces are some of the most pleasurable in the book. This is a man who’s cut such a fat swath through the smart set that a dinner with William Styron essentially gets relegated to a footnote, as does the revelation that he learned the identity of Deep Throat long before the public did, by pestering Nora Ephron, Carl Bernstein’s ex-wife (in fact, you would not believe the number of delectable footnotes in this book; the devil, apparently, is in the asterisks).

But we learn little about the friendships of Hitchens’s that soured as he began his political metamorphoses, and we hear practically nothing about his fondness for drink, though he does treat us to a brief audit of his intake (at least one bottle of wine and two slugs of “Mr. Walker’s amber restorative� per day). I understand that Hitchens is probably bored with people’s obsession with his boozing, but this is his memoir, and apart from his swift and spirited dispatches, he’s best known for his swift dispatch of spirits. Aren’t we entitled, in the name of science, to know how he does it, if the question of why is too dull and unprofitable to explore?

None of this means that “Hitch-22� isn’t marvelous in its own way. But it’s probably a misnomer to call it a memoir, and easier to enjoy if one thinks of it as a collection of essays instead. Our protagonist is a bit of a disembodied brain, highly capable of poignancy but not exactly introspection or, as is welcome in memoirs, overwhelming indiscretion. (Would it be primitive to say that he seems so English in this way, though he’s become an American citizen?) When he shares a tender memory, his preference is to quickly convert it into a larger political observation; for him, politics remains the most crucial sphere of moral and intellectual life. At the beginning, for instance, he draws a compact, empathetic picture of his mother, who struggled to make a glamorous life for herself in the British naval towns where his father was based, and who would one day run off to Athens with a lover and take her life in a suicide pact. (I was particularly moved by his story about her one attempt to take a solo road trip, only to return the next day with her neck in a brace, “having been painfully rear-ended by some idiot before she had even properly embarked on the treat that was rightfully hers.�) Yet only a few pages later, when he recounts his efforts to arrange her burial in Greece, he freely acknowledges his trip was as political as it was personal. He recognizes that the coroner in his mother’s case was a famous villain in the military junta’s machine; he makes reporting side-trips to talk to student protesters; at the cemetery where he lays his mother to rest, he stops to pile carnations on the grave of George Seferis, the poet and national hero.

Something similar happens when Hitchens discusses his Jewish heritage, which he discovered only in 1987. (This, too, his mother kept a secret, in addition to her terrible pain.) He starts with an affecting visit to his maternal grandmother, to whom he “somewhat awkwardly uttered the salute ‘Shalom!’ � as he took his leave; but soon enough he uses his genealogical exploration to make the more brutal, unsentimental point that “a great number of Stalin’s enforcers and henchmen in Eastern Europe were Jews.�

Even when he was a young man, Hitchens’s bête noire was Stalin. Born in 1949, the author came of age during that heady moment of “revolution within the revolution,� that time when Trotskyism had captured the imaginations of an international class of students, intellectuals and organizers. He was a natural soixante-huitard, a Labour Party member and anti-Vietnam War demonstrator in advance of 1968 itself, and one can feel his enthusiasm for that era still. “If you have never yourself had the experience of feeling that you are yoked to the great steam engine of his­tory,� he says, “then allow me to inform you that the conviction is a very intoxicating one.�

As soon as we leave Oxford, however, and follow him on his tour through the revolutionist’s Fodor’s (he goes to Havana and Prague, Poland and Portugal), we begin to hear about the ways that international socialism isn’t quite delivering on its promise, either from his young perspective or from the perspective of disillusioned comrades he meets along the way. We also follow Hitchens to the Iraq of 1976, which he now more or less admits to have gotten wrong — “I should have registered the way that people almost automatically flinched at the mention of the name Sad­dam Hussein� — and we follow him back there after Desert Storm, when he very much wished to get it right. And there’s a whole chapter about Salman Rushdie, whose involuntary fugitive status occasions a moment in 1989 when the personal and the political truly do inter­twine, with Hitchens looking aghast at those on the left who, under the guise of multi­cultural ­sensitivity, were unwilling to condemn the ayatollah’s fatwa.

By the time 9/11 comes along, we are hardly surprised to hear the author describe its barbarism as “fascism with an Islamic face� — a phrase he coined back then that has since evolved into the blunter, catchall term “Islamo­fascism.� Little by little, he has been setting us up for his divorce from the left, and his surrender to the conviction that “the only historical revolution with any verve left in it, or any example to offer others, was the American one.� Some will find his version of events sympathetic; others will find it a cliché, the inevitable rightward drift of an old Trotskyist; and still others will violently quarrel with his tangents and disquisitions, as Hitchens so often makes one do (he may be smarter than most of us, but when he’s hellbent on making a point, he’ll haul out straw men one would just as soon leave to the cows). Personally, I didn’t lose all patience with him until the end, when he claims that although he wanted the “moral arithmetic� to add up so that he could remain on “the ‘left’ side of the column,� he couldn’t when it came to Bosnia: “I was brought to the abrupt admission that, if the majority of my former friends got their way about non­intervention, there would be another genocide on European soil.� Perhaps this was true of the intellectual left, but it was Bill Clinton, a center-left president Hitchens detested for his opportunism and slipperiness, who finally ordered the troops in, and he did so over a squall of conservative objection, with 29 Republican senators voting against the intervention, versus only one Democrat. (How’s that arithmetic?)

The truth is, by Hitchens’s standards, his examination of how he and the left parted company is surprisingly un­strident and nonpolemical. It is, in fact, almost melancholic. He’s not claiming with his typical adamantine force that the balance sheets work out. And perhaps the strongest theme in “Hitch-22� is just this — that sometimes the balance sheets are an unholy mess. From the time he was young, Hitchens says, he’s tried to keep dueling notions in intellectual and emotional equipoise. His need to manage contradictions came early, with an exotic spirit for a mother and an embittered Tory for a dad. By the time he got to Oxford, he was quite accustomed to “keeping two sets of books,� passing out leaflets at car plants by day and racing off in fancier dress to the Gridiron Club by night. When he began his work at The New Statesman, he realized that “journalism was the ideal profession for someone like myself who was drawn to the Janus-faced mode of life,� in that one had to seduce both sides to hear the whole story.

So yes, Christopher Hitchens may long to be a cogent man of reason, and he can certainly be a pitiless adversary. But he knows there are two sides to any decent match, and it’s touching, in “Hitch-22,� to see how often he’ll race to the other side of the court to return his own serve. Which may explain why, though he tries to be difficult, he’s so hard to dislike.

Jennifer Senior is a contributing editor at New York magazine.
Okay, NOW I want to read it.

BwhoUR
Sage
Posts: 555
Joined: Sat Jan 23, 2010 5:20 pm
Location: California, USA

Post #7

Post by BwhoUR »

I'd like to peruse it myself, having read 2 of his books (God is Not Great, The Portable Atheist) and really like his writing style. This guy has truly lived an eventful life. Thanks for the review JRosemary.

User avatar
McCulloch
Site Supporter
Posts: 24063
Joined: Mon May 02, 2005 9:10 pm
Location: Toronto, ON, CA
Been thanked: 3 times

Post #8

Post by McCulloch »

I've read the book. Hitchens strikes me as being intelligent, insightful and intellectually and emotionally honest. I still cannot bring myself to like him, although I think that I can perhaps understand him better.
Examine everything carefully; hold fast to that which is good.
First Epistle to the Church of the Thessalonians
The truth will make you free.
Gospel of John

User avatar
Slopeshoulder
Banned
Banned
Posts: 3367
Joined: Wed Mar 10, 2010 1:46 pm
Location: San Francisco

Post #9

Post by Slopeshoulder »

On the negative side, Hitchens has always struck me as a blowhard, a showoff, overly pugilistic, arrogant, and frequently and predictably inclined to have his passionate immoderation overcome his capacity for discernment in both thought and action.

But on the positive side, he's smart, witty, brave, honest, a lover of life and, oddly enough, ultimately a moralist, insofar as he seems motivated by the value of truth and reason to improve human welfare. These good qualities I associate with Judaism.

If there's God of judgment, he'd probably give Hitch a slap on the wrist for getting the details wrong and then reward him for getting the big picture right.

I'll likely read his book.

User avatar
Jrosemary
Sage
Posts: 627
Joined: Sun Jul 12, 2009 6:50 pm
Location: New Jersey
Contact:

Post #10

Post by Jrosemary »

suckka wrote:I'd like to peruse it myself, having read 2 of his books (God is Not Great, The Portable Atheist) and really like his writing style. This guy has truly lived an eventful life. Thanks for the review JRosemary.
You're very welcome!
McCulloch wrote:I've read the book. Hitchens strikes me as being intelligent, insightful and intellectually and emotionally honest. I still cannot bring myself to like him, although I think that I can perhaps understand him better.
Lol! I like him a great deal, though I think he has this affect on a lot of people.
On the negative side, Hitchens has always struck me as a blowhard, a showoff, overly pugilistic, arrogant, and frequently and predictably inclined to have his passionate immoderation overcome his capacity for discernment in both thought and action.

But on the positive side, he's smart, witty, brave, honest, a lover of life and, oddly enough, ultimately a moralist, insofar as he seems motivated by the value of truth and reason to improve human welfare. These good qualities I associate with Judaism.
I love that assessment of Judaism! It's far from perfect, but it's got a lot going for it. O:)

Post Reply