Our discussion about it on the phone yesterday led to this review, prompted by his comment that the Hitchens approach was that he was not battling cancer - it was battling him.
I love the writing of Christopher Hitchens much as I do the writing of Harold Louis Mencken. Yet both would often hold opinions deeply contrary to my own. Hitchens backed the war in Iraq while Mencken was a democracy-disdaining racist. Both positions I resile from.
The question often comes up as to the integrity of the work produced by people who might have backed not the dark horse but the wrong horse. The writer Frederic Raphael drew down seriously bad press for his attempt to salvage the reputation of Arthur Koestler 'and to drag the man from the pit into which Cesarani has cast him.' It is widely accepted that Koestler raped Jill Craigie, and some have insisted that his work, if perused at all, be read only through that prism. Yet Koestler was such a powerfully evocative writer that the cancel culture approach seems intellectually counterintuitive.
More than anything else I have found myself pulled into the pages of both Hitchens and Mencken because of their ability to ruthlessly cull the bull that theologians and clerics churned out with alarming regularity. The Hitch once claimed to be presiding over the United Front Against Bullshit.
Hitchens first noticed he was really ill the morning after he launched a new book, Hitch 22, in June 2010. One morning he was on the top of his game, the next he was struggling to make it across the room of his New York hotel to summon emergency services. From that point on his constant unsolicited and unwanted companion for the next nineteen months would be oesophageal cancer. When that journey ended in December 2011, the outcome was not even a perverse draw where both he and the cancer died at the same time. It died because it had no more work to do, nothing left to live for. For the author, his was a feeling of being oppressed by 'the gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for the next decade and felt I'd worked hard enough to earn it.' He wanted to live long enough to read or write 'obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger.'
This is what made Hitchens such a compelling writer, a force to be reckoned with. He was scathing but scything as he surgically and forensically cut through the falsehoods of powerful people. Books like No One Left To Lie To The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton and The Trial of Henry Kissinger were crucial indictments of two of the most powerful men in the world. If he had only lived to write one on Netanyahu.
He would not have been dismayed by those Christian pastors whose excitement at him burning in hell left them rigid. While he he did refer to those Catholics who prayed for him to both get better and see the light, he knew that salvation was their prime objective.
The futility of prayer was not lost on him, referring to a study which indicated that there was more evidence indicating the harm of praying while dying than its good. His attitude was best summed up in the line 'what if I pulled through and the pious faction contentedly claimed that their prayers had been answered? That would somehow be irritating.' Almost a good reason to die!
Hitchens pushed back against superstition to the very end despite many hoping he would have a death bed conversion that they could gloat about - much in the fraudulent tradition of Lady Hope who spoofed about Darwin seeing the light while the light was actually fading before his eyes.
His wit never abandoned him while he was in 'Tumourtown.' One anecdote concerns getting a 'kind note' from a Cheyenne Arapaho friend who told him to avoid tribal remedies as anybody who ever tried them had died almost immediately.
By the time he reached Stage four he knew it was the end of the line, there being no Stage five. He remained stoical, citing Sydney Hook's experience to end of life matters in which he railed against the pointlessness of lying on 'mattress graves' pointlessly expending medical resources.
For the nineteen months he lived with cancer he described it as living dyingly, Devoid of self pity he addressed the 'the dumb question 'Why me?" the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why Not?
He carried on living while dying:
The absorbing fact about being mortally sick is that you spend a good deal of time preparing yourself to die with some modicum of stoicism (and provision for loved ones) while being simultaneously interested din the business of survival.
Mortality is a work of an author deflated but not defeated by the prospect of death. He had no belief in everlasting life, just everlasting death, what Isaac Azimov calls the eternal dreamless sleep. I too
will settle for that in the irrefutable certainty that all life ends in destruction. What can't die can never have lived. To experience life we have to be able to die. Anything that never died never lived.
Christopher Hitchens, 2012. Mortality. Allen and Unwin. ISBN-978-1-742374611.
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