• Full Title: Hitch‑22: A Memoir
• Authors: Christopher Hitchens
• Year: 2010
• Genre: Memoir, Autobiography
• Publisher: Hatchette Books
• ISBN 978-0-446-54034-6 (trade paperback)
• Wikipedia page
• Author’s Wikipedia Page

 

Summary

Trivia Question: What’s the only book in the world (besides, possibly, an unabridged dictionary) to contain ALL the following words: scrofulus, oleaginous, apposite, trahison, arrogation, lepidopterist, uninvigilated, demimonde, shambolic, quotidian, skirling, lugubrious, supererogatory, meretricious, crepuscular, and pulchritudinous?

Answer: Hitch-22

Often named among the world’s leading “intellectuals” (Noam Chomsky topped the list), author Christopher Hitchens writes as if he must prove he belongs on that list. The multisyllabic inventory I formulated above is only from the latter third of the book, when I finally decided to start keeping track.

As the helpful subtitle declares, Hitch‑22 is indeed a memoir. As memoirs do, this one relates bits of the author’s life that he thinks are worth relating. My copy is a reprint that includes a new preface by Hitchens written in the final year of his life, in which he is precisely aware of his impending doom. I thought to myself how fortunate he was to have written his memoir so close to the end of his life — because it always strikes me as odd to read biographies of people who are still living, though when the subject is also the author it usually happens that way. If I were to attempt an autobiography (highly likely to be read only by myself), I would want to delay its publication until I was loosening my final grip on this mortal coil.

 

What I Liked Least About It

As I complained about god is not Great, Hitchens is rarely able to construct a sentence without mashing into it every possible literary device. His favorite part of writing is the parenthetical phrase, and he employs this device even if already in the process of writing a different parenthetical phrase. Though I usually strive to read authors more erudite than myself — because otherwise how could one increase one’s own knowledge? — I also appreciate a sentence so well-constructed it doesn’t require multiple built-in deviations to explain itself.

There is also a not insignificant number of double-negatives (see what I did there?) and references to people, places, and literature assumed by the author to be well-known but which I’m convinced are obscure. Taking a sample nearly at random:

“The great J.G. Ballard, who had had the reverse of the Ian Watt experience in that he’d been interned by the Japanese (Empire Of The Sun) as a small boy, before being sent to the same house in the same boarding school as me, once did jokingly say that the food at The Leys was inferior to the Lunghua camp in Shanghai, but was later to admit that he’d been agreeably surprised by how comparatively little torutre there had been.”

— page 67

For many of these sentences, I had two choices: (1) either begin again and re-read, helped by the extra knowledge I already gained of how it would end, or (2) skim through and attempt the next one. This makes for wearying, laborious reading. The (to me) obscure literary references were mostly wasted, because I don’t keep Google open in one hand while I read books in the other. (By the second half of this book, I indeed was keeping a device handy so I could search out words and references.)

 

What I Liked Most About It

Aside from toilsome sentence structure and multiple references per page to writers and activists I’ve never heard of, this book is fascinating. In fact, one of the reasons I read biographies is for insights on how other people’s lives are different than my own. (Perhaps obviously, if everyone’s lives were identical, there would be no biographies.) Hitchens, being close in age to my parents but born and raised in an England grappling with the aftermath of World War 2, had a childhood entirely unlike anyone I’ve known — including many years at an all-boys boarding school.

The memoir is also a window into the British political scene, especially the 1950s and 1960s, something with which I’m wholly unfamiliar. Even the relatively common terms “conservative” and “left” become strangers when seen through the eyes of a 1960s teenage British socialist.

There is also a smattering of sensitive topics including suicide, closet homosexuality (still illegal in Britain then) in the all-boy schools, corporal punishment, bullying, and of course religion. All of these, Hitchens manages to treat thoroughly and insightfully while also carefully interjecting remarks sure to offend someone. In other places, he’s surprisingly meek and vulnerable.

“Although I am generally glad not to be gay, I learned early on that most debates on this question are vapid or worse, since what we are discussing is not a form of sex, or not only a form of sex, but a form of love. As such, it must command respect. Then, and from having been the object of homosexual attention and predatory jealousy — this went on happening to me until I was almost out of university — I believe that the whole experience gave me some sympathy for women. I mean by that to say that I know what it’s like to be the recipient of unwanted or even coercive approaches, or to be approached surreptitiously under the guise of friendship. (Assaulted once by a truck driver when I was hitchhiking, and quite lucky to have broken away from him unharmed, I can never listen to any excuses about how the victims of such attacks in some way “invite” it.) I always take it for granted that sexual moralizing by public figures is a sign of hypocrisy or worse, and most usually a desire to perform the very act that is most being condemned.”

— pages 77-78

 

A Few More Thoughts

Some quotations I would like to remember:

“In Europoe I had been told by sapient academics that there wasn’t really any class system in the United States; well, you couldn’t prove that by the conditions in California’s agribusiness, or indeed its urban factories.”

— pg. 217

“I was moved above all not by the thought that my death would ‘count’, but that it would not count in the least.”

— pg. 345

“It’s quite a task to combat the absolutists and the relativists at the same time: to maintain that there is no totalitarian solution while also insisting that, yes, we on our side also have unalterable convictions and are willing to fight for them. After various past allegiances, I have come to believe that Karl Marx was rightest of all when he recommended continual doubt and self-criticism. Membership in the skeptical faction or tendency is not at all a ‘soft option’. The defense of science and reason is the greatest imperative of our time...”

— pg. 422

Conclusion

I won’t recommend this book. I think that to enjoy it one must be a particular type of reader, an incredibly narrow subset of readers, unlikely to be among my audience here. In addition to a general fondness for biographies, one must have the willingness to pass over (or also enjoy) the ubiquitous name-dropping, casual and unexplained references to people and places unheard of by most people, and unrelated asides inserted into numerous sentences. One must also possess a monumental vocubulary or else be regularly confounded.

If you do enjoy books that average readers find difficult, purely for the pleasure of enjoying your own superiority, or if you have a particular fondness for Hitchens, then this might be the book for you.

Related: god is not Great

 

 

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