Hitch-22, by Christopher Hitchens

It was with some ambivalence that I ordered Hitch-22 from Amazon. I usually enjoy reading memoirs and biographies, as Marguerite Yourcenar used to say, History is made of person's histories, and an intelligent person remembering his life and times, or the story of an interesting person's course through life, can be very informative and enlightening about their time's history, and life in general. My ambivalence was due to, although generally agreeing with Hitchens's ideas (at least as far as I knew them) and liking his essays and denouncing of religious hypocrisy, I didn't much like the image I had from him from the media, and was somehow annoyed by the atheists hagiographic view of him, especially after his recent death (even if I admired immensely his brave attitude concerning his imminent demise). But my curiosity won, and I ordered it anyway - after all he came with the endorsement of some of my favorite contemporary writers, like Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie.

And I'm glad I did it, it's a very interesting read. It's true some parts are quite boring, like his school days, and he indulges too much in a kind of over elaborate writing that evokes the great Bloomsbury tradition that he's just not up to - how infinitely superior is the elegance of Lytton Strachey, that he seems to try to emulate - and then he looks as just too vain.

But in the end, I found myself admiring and respecting him more than I did. His evocation of the '70s writers set let me down a bit, but I loved the way he speaks about the Rushdie question, and the chapter about the Jewish issue is a masterpiece. I like the way he parted with the old Left - the loony Left, as a friend of mine calls it - and I think he would probably be equally critic of his involvement with the neocons in a few years time (as I read in a very good article of Salman Rushdie's after his death). And I was moved by this statement about himself:

Plainly, this unwillingness to give ground even on unimportant disagreements is the symptom of some deepseated insecurity, as was my one-time fondness for making teasing remarks (which I amended when I read Anthony Powell's matter-of-fact observation that teasing is an unfailing sign of misery within) and as is my very pronounced impatience. The struggle, therefore, is to try and cultivate the virtuous side of these shortcomings: to be a genial host while only slightly whiffled, for example, or to be witty at the expense of one's own weaknesses instead of those of other people.

How I relate to that! That single paragraph could be enough to make me forgive his vanity and flamboyant demeanor. And I couldn't agree more with the statement with which he ends the book:

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 still insisting that, yes, we on our side also have unalterable convictions and are willing to fight for them.

Yes, we must certainly do have to unashamedly assert our values and beliefs. And I think that Christopher Hitchens, in spite of his vanity and self-assured ways, did just that and I admire him for it, and think the world is poorer after his death. And I intensely admire the brave way he dealt with his terminal illness, so well expressed in the preface.