HITCH-22, A Memoir by Christopher Hitchens. Hachette Book Group. 435 pages. $26.99.
Dubbed the finest writer in English and most formidable debater of our time, Christopher Hitchens self-identifies today as a convinced atheist whose roots of iconoclastic rejection of all religious belief dates back to his early public (“private” in American English) school days.
Chapel attendance was rigidly required. But his overseers were impotent to enforce active participation in these devotional exercises. One of the other students duly impressed him by sitting there unbowed like all the others who dutifully bent forward at the call to prayer. So the two became fast friends.
Since Hitchens already viewed the state-mandated Anglican Church (Church of England) as a national absurdity, he began to emulate his newfound mate by also declining to engage in the event. This defiant act of total disdain for the humiliation of supplicating to an unseen and non-existent deity presaged a much later appearance in court on a charge of “inciting to riot” when he steadfastly refused to swear on the Bible as he took his oath.
When asked by the magistrate to explain his action, he responded: “I am an atheist and a Marxist.” But linking his blatant unbelief with the world’s foremost purveyor of religion as the opiate of the masses was just too irritating and politically incorrect for the judge who imposed a disproportionately hefty fine on the impecunious student defendant.
From the get-go, this scribe’s political activism has always kept pace with his flourishing journalistic endeavors and prolific literary output from his very first gig on the staff of the British social journal “The New Statesman,” to be followed by the U.S. bicoastal magazines “Mother Jones” and “The Nation”and capped in 1992 with his appointment to prestigious “Vanity Fair.”
His peripatetic assignments have taken him to such remote and extremely dangerous venues as Afghanistan, North Korea, Iraq, Lebanon and many others. Accustomed as the writer is to living on the edge, it was no big deal for him to invite his close friend, the highly controversial and fatwah-condemned writer Salman Rushdie, to be his house guest with all the attendant security nightmares involved.
His intrepid in-your-face style stood out in boldest relief when he voluntarily submitted himself not once but twice to the experience of waterboarding and under the ignominy of insisting that the professional waterboarders treat him like any other prisoner. His second try did outlast the first by a few seconds.
In one of the most touching passages in the book, he attempts to reconcile his feelings of grief with the reality of an American soldier who died in Iraq having been greatly influenced to join the military in the misbegotten war and inspired by the reporter’s writing from the front lines of the conflict.
Although he was already 24 years old at the time, the trauma of his beloved mum Yvonne’s death has haunted him throughout his life because it occurred as part of a suicide-murder pact with her illicit lover. She left behind the shameful and scandalous dual legacy of her choosing to have an adulterous affair and to end her own life.
He has always deplored the nickname Chris, which he considers an unjust circumcised shortening of his given name. However, since his Naval officer father (referred to as the Commander) was always known as Hitch, that same moniker has caught on with him as well.
He concludes by stating that defense of science and reason becomes the greatest imperative of our time. Whereas unbelievers must have unalterable convictions and even be willing to fight for them, they must simultaneously keep an open mind with continuous doubt and self-criticism. This dilemma, this conundrum, this catch-22 our peerless pundit cleverly parodies as his own Hitch-22, hence the title chosen for his magnum opus.
Lamentably, at age 61, Hitchens has been diagnosed with esophagal cancer. Cruel fate has allowed lightning to strike twice in the same family. His father, the Commander, suffered from the same affliction. Consequently, these wonderful reminiscences have transmogrified into an especially poignant, extended, extensive, self-composed epitaph.
Mr. Akerley may be contacted at benakerley@aol.com
