Mortality
Christopher Hitchens
Mortality
ALSO BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Books
Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger
Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies
Imperial Spoils: The Curious Case of the Elgin Marbles
Why Orwell Matters
No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton
Letters to a Young Contrarian
The Trial of Henry Kissinger
Thomas Jefferson: Author of America
Thomas Paine’s “Rights of Man”: A Biography
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
The Portable Atheist
Hitch-22 : A Memoir
Mortality
Pamphlets
Karl Marx and the Paris Commune
The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain’s Favorite Fetish
The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice
A Long Short War: The Liberation of Iraq
Essays
Prepared for the Worst: Essays and Minority Reports
For the Sake of Argument
Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere
Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays
Arguably
Collaborations
James Callaghan: The Road to Number Ten (with Peter Kellner)
Blaming the Victims (edited with Edward Said)
When the Borders Bleed: The Struggle of the Kurds
(photographs by Ed Kash)
International Territory: The United Nations
(photographs by Adam Bartos)
Vanity Fair’s Hollywood (with Graydon Carter and David Friend)
CHRISTOPHER
HITCHENS
Mortality
Foreword by Graydon Carter
Afterword by Carol Blue
First published in Australia and New Zealand by Allen & Unwin in 2012
First published in the United States in 2012 by Twelve, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing, Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Copyright © Christopher Hitchens 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
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ISBN 978 1 74237 461 1
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Vanity Fair, in
which much of this book first appeared,
in somewhat different form.
Contents
Foreword by Graydon Carter
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
Afterword by Carol Blue
A bout the Author
FOREWORD BY
GRAYDON CARTER
At a dinner in Los Angeles this spring, a young actor named Emile Hirsch came up to me in a state of somewhat high excitement. He knew I had worked with Christopher Hitchens for many years, and he just wanted to talk about Christopher with someone who knew him. He’d read Hitch-22 and was well into the Kissinger book, and he said that Christopher’s writing had affected him in a way that almost no one else’s had. In the months following Christopher’s death, I had similar encounters with young people who felt compelled to talk about how his writing had touched them. It’s no exaggeration to say that Christopher had few equals in the sphere of spirited commentary. But there was something in his saucy fearlessness, in his great turbine of a mind, and in his sociable but unpredictable brand of anarchy that seriously touched kids in their twenties and early thirties in much the same way that Hunter S. Thompson had a generation before. Young Emile asked if there was going to be a memorial service, and I told him that there would be one in New York and that we were bookmarking April 20th as a tentative date.
The memorial was indeed held on the 20th, in the Great Hall at Cooper Union in Greenwich Village. My Vanity Fair colleagues Aimée Bell (Christopher’s longtime editor at the magazine) and Sara Marks organized the readings—all of them from Christopher’s own work. We wanted to produce a program that would be cozy and loving, but in no way sentimental or mawkish. And the great and the good of English letters turned up to pay tribute—and to console his widow, Carol, and his three children. Martin Amis, Tom Stoppard, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, and James Fenton were there and they all spoke. Editors such as Anna Wintour, David Remnick, Jim Kelly, and Rick Stengel came; so did Christopher’s brother Peter, Andrew Sullivan, Christopher Buckley, Andrew and Leslie Cockburn and their daughter the fine actress Olivia Wilde, and Andrew’s brother Patrick. The Bush administration was represented by former deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz—a remnant of the curious right turn Christopher took in the lead-up to the Iraq War. Hollywood was represented by Sean Penn—and, as I was pleased to see, by young Mr. Hirsch.
After the memorial, the participants retired to the Waverly Inn nearby and drank and smoked in the sunshine and reminisced about Christopher. Although the day was bathed in sorrow, there was a magical quality to the afternoon as it spilled into the evening and through to midnight, when there were still a dozen or more mourners. For those who were there, Christopher’s memorial was, as we used to say in the 1960s, a happening, and a day we will not soon forget.
For the fact is that Christopher was one of life’s singular characters—a wit, a charmer, a trouble-maker, and a dear and devoted friend. He was a man of insatiable appetites—for cigarettes, for scotch, for company, for great writing, and, above all, for conversation. That he had an output to equal what he took in was the miracle in the man. You’d be hard-pressed to find a writer who could match the outpouring of exquisitely crafted columns, essays, articles, and books he produced over the past four decades. He wrote often—constantly, in fact, and right up to the end—the words in this moving volume being among his last. And Christopher wrote fast, frequently without the benefit of a second draft or even corrections. Perhaps in the back of his mind he knew that his time on the stage would end in the second act, and he was racing to get it all in, and to get it all out. I can recall a lunch in 1991, when I was editing the New York Observer, and he and Aimée and I got together for a quick bite at a restaurant on Madison, no longer there. Christopher’s copy was due early that afternoon. Pre-lunch tumblers of scotch were followed by a couple of glasses of wine during the meal and then a couple of post-meal cognacs. That was his intake. After stumbling back to the office, we set him up at a rickety table and an old Olivetti, and in a symphony of clacking he produced a 1,000-word column of near perfection in under half an hour.
Christopher was one of the first writers I called when I came to Vanity Fair, in 1992. S
ix years before, I had asked him to write for Spy. That offer was politely rejected. The Vanity Fair approach had a fee attached, though, and to my everlasting credit, he accepted and was the signature columnist for the magazine from then on. With the exception of Dominick Dunne (who died in 2009), no writer has been more associated with Vanity Fair. There was no subject too big or too small for Christopher. Over the past two decades he traveled to just about every hot spot you can think of. He also subjected himself to any manner of humiliation or discomfort in the name of his column. I once sent him out on a mission to break the most niggling laws still on the books in New York City, one of which forbade riding a bicycle with your feet off the pedals. The photograph that ran with the column, of Christopher sailing a small bike through Central Park with his legs in the air, looked like something out of the Moscow Circus. At the suggestion of Tom Hedley, an old hand from Harold Hayes’s Esquire, I set him off on a cause of self-improvement for a three-part series, in which he would subject himself to myriad treatments to improve his dental area and other dark regions. At one point I suggested he go to a well-regarded waxing parlor in town for what they indelicately call the “sack, back, and crack.” He struggled to absorb the full meaning of this, but after a few seconds he smiled a nervous smile and said, “In for a penny…”
Christopher was the beau ideal of the public intellectual. You felt as though he was writing to you and to you alone. And as a result many readers felt they knew him. Walking with him down the street in New York or through an airplane terminal was like escorting a movie star through the throngs. Christopher was not just brave in facing the illness that took him but brave in words and thought. He did not mind landing outside the cozy cocoon of conventional liberal wisdom, his curious, pro-war stance before the invasion of Iraq being but one example. Friends distanced themselves from him during those unlit days. But he stuck to his guns. After his rather famous 1995 attack on Mother Teresa, one of our contributing editors, a devout Catholic, came into the office filled with umbrage and announced that he was canceling his subscription. “You can’t cancel it,” I said. “You get the magazine for free.” Years ago, in the midst of the Clinton impeachment uproar, Christopher had a very public dustup with his friend Sidney Blumenthal, a Clinton White House functionary—the dispute was over which part of a conversation between them was or was not on the record. Christopher wound up on television a lot defending himself. He looked like hell, and I suggested we bring him to New York for a bit of a makeover and some R&R away from the cameras. The magazine was pretty flush back then, and we set him up with a new suit, shirts, ties, and such. When someone from the fashion department asked him what size his shoes were, he said he didn’t know—the pair he had on was borrowed.
I could not begin to list the pantheon of public intellectuals and close friends who will mourn his passing, and it is not limited to those who made it to his memorial. Christopher had his share of lady admirers too, including—but certainly not limited to—Ms. Wintour, back when he was young and still relatively fragrant. His wife, Carol, a writer, filmmaker, and legendary hostess, set a high bar in how to handle a flower like Christopher, both when he was healthy and during his more weakened days. An invitation to their vast apartment in the Wyoming, on Columbia Road in Washington, D.C., was a prized reward for being a part of their circle or even on the fringes of it. We used to hold an anti–White House Correspondents’ Dinner party there in the 1990s and 2000s; the Salon des Refusés, he called it. You could meet anyone there. From Supreme Court justices to right-wing windbags to, well, Barbra Streisand and other assorted totems of the left. He was a good friend who wished his friends well. And as a result he had a lot of them.
Christopher had an enviable career arc that began with his own brand of fiery journalism at Britain’s New Statesman and then wended its way to America, where he wrote for everyone from the Atlantic and Harper’s to Slate and the New York Times Book Review. And we all called him our own. He was a legend on the speakers’ circuit and could debate just about anyone on anything. He won umpteen awards (although that was not the sort of thing that fueled his work) and in the last decade he wrote bestsellers, including his well-received, best-–selling memoir, Hitch-22, that finally put some money into his family’s pocket. In the last weeks of his life, he was told that an asteroid had been named after him. He was pleased by the thought, and inasmuch as the word is derived from the Greek, meaning “star-like,” and asteroids are known to be volatile, it is a fitting honor.
To his friends, Christopher will be remembered for his elevated but inclusive humor and for a staggering, almost punishing memory that held up under the most liquid of late-night conditions. And to all of us, his readers, Christopher Hitchens will be remembered for the words he left behind. These last ones, free as they are of sentiment or self-pity, are among his last. They are also among his best.
June 2012
New York City
Mortality
I
I HAVE MORE THAN ONCE IN MY TIME WOKEN UP feeling like death. But nothing prepared me for the early morning in June when I came to consciousness feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse. The whole cave of my chest and thorax seemed to have been hollowed out and then refilled with slow–drying cement. I could faintly hear myself breathe but could not manage to inflate my lungs. My heart was beating either much too much or much too little. Any movement, however slight, required forethought and planning. It took strenuous effort for me to cross the room of my New York hotel and summon the emergency services. They arrived with great dispatch and behaved with immense courtesy and professionalism. I had the time to wonder why they needed so many boots and helmets and so much heavy backup equipment, but now that I view the scene in retrospect I see it as a very gentle and firm deportation, taking me from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady. Within a few hours, having had to do quite a lot of emergency work on my heart and my lungs, the physicians at this sad border post had shown me a few other postcards from the interior and told me that my immediate next stop would have to be with an oncologist. Some kind of shadow was throwing itself across the negatives.
The previous evening, I had been launching my latest book at a successful event in New Haven. The night of the terrible morning, I was supposed to go on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and then appear at a sold–out event at the 92nd Street Y, on the Upper East Side, in conversation with Salman Rushdie. My very short–lived campaign of denial took this form: I would not cancel these appearances or let down my friends or miss the chance of selling a stack of books. I managed to pull off both gigs without anyone noticing anything amiss, though I did vomit two times, with an extraordinary combination of accuracy, neatness, violence, and profusion, just before each show. This is what citizens of the sick country do while they are still hopelessly clinging to their old domicile.
The new land is quite welcoming in its way. Everybody smiles encouragingly and there appears to be absolutely no racism. A generally egalitarian spirit prevails, and those who run the place have obviously got where they are on merit and hard work. As against that, the humor is a touch feeble and repetitive, there seems to be almost no talk of sex, and the cuisine is the worst of any destination I have ever visited. The country has a language of its own—a lingua franca that manages to be both dull and difficult and that contains names like ondansetron, for anti–nausea medication— as well as some unsettling gestures that require a bit of getting used to. For example, an official met for the first time may abruptly sink his fingers into your neck. That’s how I discovered that my cancer had spread to my lymph nodes, and that one of these deformed beauties— located on my right clavicle, or collarbone—was big enough to be seen and felt. It’s not at all good when your cancer is “palpable” from the outside. Especially when, as at this stage, they didn’t even know where the primary source was. Carcinoma works cunningly from the inside out. Detection and treatment often work more slowly and gropingly, f
rom the outside in. Many needles were sunk into my clavicle area—“Tissue is the issue” being a hot slogan in the local Tumorville tongue— and I was told the biopsy results might take a week.
Working back from the cancer–ridden squamous cells that these first results disclosed, it took rather longer than that to discover the disagreeable truth. The word “metastasized” was the one in the report that first caught my eye, and ear. The alien had colonized a bit of my lung as well as quite a bit of my lymph node. And its original base of operations was located—had been located for quite some time—in my esophagus. My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was seventy–nine. I am sixty–one. In whatever kind of a “race” life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.
The notorious stage theory of Elisabeth Kübler–Ross, whereby one progresses from denial to rage through bargaining to depression and the eventual bliss of “acceptance,” hasn’t so far had much application to my case. In one way, I suppose, I have been “in denial” for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can’t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it’s all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me. Rage would be beside the point for the same reason. Instead, I am badly oppressed by the gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read—if not indeed to write—the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger? But I understand this sort of non–thinking for what it is: sentimentality and self–pity. Of course my book hit the bestseller list on the day that I received the grimmest of news bulletins, and for that matter the last flight I took as a healthy–feeling person (to a fine, big audience at the Chicago Book Fair) was the one that made me a million–miler on United Airlines, with a lifetime of free upgrades to look forward to. But irony is my business and I just can’t see any ironies here: Would it be less poignant to get cancer on the day that my memoirs were remaindered as a box–office turkey, or that I was bounced from a coach–class flight and left on the tarmac? To the dumb question “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?
