Christopher Hitchens: Hitch 22

let's talk squits book TV from the 2010 Book Expo America in New York City he discusses his memoir hitch 22 for half an hour Christopher Hitchens who talked you into doing an autobiography I think it may well have been the person who wrote Maya bitchery by accident in the catalogue of the National Portrait Gallery in London a couple of years ago there was a an exhibit about a group of people friends of mine and Martin a missus a sort of set if you like and in the catalog copy referred to the late Christopher Hitchens and they were terribly upset and say don't worry we'll recall them all will pulp the whole thing and I said no no I want several copies of that because nothing focuses the mind like reading about yourself in the past tense and it immediately dissolved any objection I had when I was asked to do a memoir which is well isn't it too early I think well I certainly can't leave it to it's too late so there was that and then mmm I told myself excuse me I talked myself into it a bit because I didn't much mine being 40 or 50 I barely noticed it but 60 hit me harder than I thought he would and I found I was looking backwards quite a lot brooding on things so this is probably the right moment why hits 22 well I end up having described a lot of commitments I've had in my life and a lot of ideological battles I've taken part in with the general polemic against certainty and against purity against consistency if you like I'm no longer a member of any party or any biological grouping but I am associated with a group of skeptics who are sure of one thing which is the nothing's for sure and you're absolutely about the uncertainty principle and so my hitch 22 is that my commitment is entirely to the to doubt so that's the idea and then there was a game I have a lot of word games in the book some of them dope you are indeed schoolboy humor but getting better as time goes on and one of them is a game invented by Salman Rushdie well you have to think of a book title it didn't quite make it for whom the bell rings for example or mr. Shivaji or good expectations was another one a farewell to weapons a portrait of a woman and one that he considers her that she was hitched ready to and I thought yes I think I might borrow that death is a theme in your body yes why well because because I begin with my own obituary accidentally then because it's not an autobiography exactly but it I thought that everyone doing a memoir they have to do one chapter each about their parents and death I'm afraid is a big subject there because my mother took her own life in very tragic circumstances their dramatic tragic substance that I described and my father was in the war business he was a lifelong naval officer it had a very tough war and I was brought up entirely on stories of chiefly British valor at sea and on landing in the air I mean it was I can't remember how old I was so I realized that all television all books and all films were not about the Second World War I thought they were chapter about your mother Yvonne yes I could've gone well because it was her name and because that's what I used to call her she liked it and because it's a nice name and it's the way when I think about I don't I don't think mummy I think or mama or I think you Yvonne we were very close and and I was used to think because we came from a slightly drab part of English societies of lower middle-class with aspirations naval and military and my mother was a sort of failed milliner she kept trying to open dress shops that never quite made it and so the sort of the wives of my father's brother officers will call things like Ethel or Marjorie or Nancy or names like that and I always thought when I was little that Yvonne had a touch of class to it a little bit more cosmopolitan perhaps a bit more stylish bit more Swan yay and she was that in my life she I described her as the Djinn in the Campari and the cream in the coffee she was cheerful and humorous and once said to me that the really only the really only unforgivable sin was to be boring which is haunting me all my life fear of bores fear of becoming a bore or being boring terror starts Arabic idiom yes it's with me always I mean if I think it's probably the most devastating word that one can use against somebody or or risk having used against yourself yes don't be boring nothing good morning this book is full of names bold-faced names as I said I'm just going to throw some out and have usual respond Martin Amis yes who is he what's his relationship well Martin is um as I'm sure Laurel Woody's will know isn't it brilliant novelist both humor and of gravity I mean he's written novels about the Holocaust and about the Gulag Archipelago but he's also written I think with his best humorous one best known one is called money which is study of so anglo-american degeneracy and the the cusp of the 1980s in which I appear once or twice fairly heavily disguised and he's my best friend and has been since we were in our 20s and a chapter of the book is that basically a sort of love letters Martin and I'd say in the in that chapter that the question I'm trying to answer is phrase it like this can you have a heterosexual relationship with another guy so I don't know whether you can or not but I decided to give it the sort of old college try and I described the infancy out of my writing the way in which we used to have very long languorous very tender very intense discussions about women the inexhaustible subject and I show how you can make lead into gold as I described a visit we both made to a terrible massage parlor brothel outfit in New York which he had to go to because his character and money John self had to go and expose himself to this so it was field work and it was the most intensely sorted and horrible and depressing shameful really morning of my life I think and for him too absolu gossip you can read it in money I even give the page reference and I thought when I read that section John selfs Fiasco in the massage bar I thought well that in the morning of squalor and misery it's now be sort of totally redeemed it's become literature it's almost Proust to moment he actually you can what get wasted lost time back and feel it wasn't squandered off after all so I do if I'm giving you a hint and you know he's been a great source of enthusiasm and risk it's on in my life James Fenton you dedicate the bill to him James some changed my life when I met him at Oxford in the late 60s where we were exactly temporaries he is I think easily the finest poet writing in English least of his generation now and probably best known to your audience for the purpose he wrote from Indochina it's a surprising thing when you think about it there's almost no poetry generated by the Vietnam War or if there is there isn't a poem everybody knows as they have been poems and other Wars the best is written by James I quote some of this and here as well as Marcin and a few others taught me that there was more to writing and mortar journalism than polemic you know I used to think that the test of a good article was how well I'd argued the case how well I had sort of laid out the arguments for the left how bad I could make the right wing look how I'd marshaled the arguments it was all very didactic and though James like me was very much to the left so here it mattered much more how the article was written making every word count using irony and understatement and humor and we actually even wrote a couple of articles together the HIV vote on a joy by lying with anybody and he was he was immensely influential on me in that way I think prevented me perhaps undergoing boring to revert to the the death trap subject Peter Sedgwick yes Peter session would be less well known to audience but he was a he's a Marxist intellectual of a very rarefied kind in other words he he was one of those people who was of the left of the left the left against the left very very artists honest very much against some of the cult figures of the sixties like Herbert Marcuse and RD Laing who were being much bandied about they were conjuring names when when I was beginning to cut my teeth he thought the sixties were probably a bit of a false promise the counterculture didn't interest him very much he was a scientist as a psychiatrist believed in objectivity wasn't easily swayed introduced me to this little dissident Marxist tradition of writing Rosa Luxemburg particularly some of Leon Trotsky George Orwell the great CLR James the great West Indian historian who wrote the best really the only book on the Haitian Revolution it's called black jacobins fantastic book about the slave rebellion in Haiti and also incidentally was the best writer on cricket has ever been produced by the British Empire I don't think for a revolutionary to be doing but that was the thing about Peter he introduced you to idiom pratik types the sort of tradition of the revolutionary left that got buried by the Hitler Stalin pact and by the Cold War and which was had something of a revival in the 1670s Salman Rushdie will summon a whole chapter to him and to his cause because I was just getting to know him I'd become a friend of his when he suddenly became even more famous than he thought he was gonna become and even more well known for his writing all in all of one go rather unfortunately by dint of getting an incredibly bad review from the Ayatollah Khomeini who as well as not content with a bad review offered money in his own name to suborn Salman's murder an unbelievable sort of frontal attack on civilisation so for many years he had to go into hiding and be off the map and there were a number of us who were very proud to be his friend at that time so arranged keep in touch with him keep up his spirits he was afraid at one point not so much that they would find him and kill him but that the effort of staying alive would mean he couldn't right turns out he was wrong to feel that he's written a lot of great stuff since then he's very emblematic figure of this of the 20th century the the idea of the intellectual migrant the person who's at home in two continents it's incredible to me that English's is only his second language the first languages audio he writes it and I would say speaks it really better than any native speaker does and as I say he hugely improved the level of our rather childish boy boyish school boyish word games I'll give you an example he was once asked without any preparation what would a Shakespeare play be titled if Robert Ludlum was I won't tell you how that all came up takes too long with just picture if you will and look rather than naming a Shakespeare face someone said okay try me and was okay Hamlet and he said the Elsinore vacillation just like that don't believably clever I said okay I bet you can't do that twice but Beth says it the Dunsinane deforestation for a fellow the kerchief implication for The Merchant of Venice the rialto sanction Oh like that are there are some more in the book he has a real hold on English literature he he he loves it and really knows it and in addition because if that wasn't enough he's become one of the great symbolic figures in the pin the Battle of over free expression which never ends we never thought perhaps we would have to defend the First Amendment against such an incredibly fantastically violent fundamental literally fundamentalist assault but I think it was right to notice when the hour had struck when it did proud to have had anything to do with that go on at length that it would taking the citizenship test oh yes yeah shortly after 9/11 I realized I'd been living in the States for a long time more than two decades nearly three I had a green card that was so old they didn't have an expiration date on it was one of those old ones these to get out a platinum green card you might say I had three American children an American wife it's unlikely I'd get deported and I had a European Union passport in a green car I could have gone on like that happily beings of anglo-american for the rest of my days but I thought I began to feel I was sort of cheating on my dears but I should I've really felt a strong solidarity with American society after that appalling attack on it just down the road from here and began to feel much more like an American even strange to feel more like a Washingtonian I mean I Washington was more like my base I used to destroy identification so I applied and well it's got very hard to do the paperwork these days and they kept on making appointments and then breaking them and putting them off but ever then they sent me an exam which I think even had the answers in it about questions you might be asked at an interview and some of them will rather trivial like what are the advantages of becoming an American citizen you you you wanted to think there would be some something noble could be said there we you looked at the answers given by the official Germany who said you can apply for a job in the federal government and you can bring your relatives in from that's overseas Network one would hope one Climaco states can say a bit more for itself than that then there are questions where you mustn't try and be funny like against whom did we fight in the American Revolution well I think the answer is the user ping Hanoverian royal family that had used up Perrin Britain but the correct answer is the British so you have to get all that right it's a bit dispersing but I set up the night before not in any fear of failing the exam but I just said haven't read through the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and I have a section in there about how you can read off the whole history of America by looking at the dates of those amendments the ways in which they came about and it's it's very nice because it's nice in itself is actually does demonstrate progress which sometimes you wonder about second we'll have doubts about the second it shows where this is such a great country for a writer because it's based on written documents which are deliberately there in order to express themselves to rewrite their work in progress they can be revised so that the the words and the music of the words and the meaning of them and the legality of them are all very important and that's the unique privilege I think so then I was able by good luck to get the Department of Homeland Security to allow me to have my ceremony take the earth at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington DC on his birthday and 13th April which is also mine and I'd by then written a short biography of him and I held a copy of the Virginia statute on religious freedom which was one of the four things he wanted to be remembered for and that was that was a wonderful day really was Sylvia Plath so the path keeps on coming up in my story because she wrote about two things well she didn't write about suicide she committed suicide but she's the occasion of an enormous number of books about female self-destruction and I have to I did just write a chapter about my mother's soul sort of suicide but I also write a coda a short chapter my reflections on suicide then the Plath story keeps coming up in that and then in one of her most famous lines it's in the bell jar she describes her family coming from some manic-depressive Hamlet in the German Polish border lands and it so happens that that's where my mother's family comes from it was a secret kept in my family for a long time I didn't fight it out till I was about thirty but my mother's family was of Jewish descent from what is now Poland but was then Germany it's always very horrible in that border moves at any time European history terrible things happen when that border changes and I have a chapter on why I think it is that she kept her secret from my father and from two sons and forever what she knew almost she died before we could have the conversation and I make a routes trip I go to Poland find the old shtetl and see if I can find any traces many remaining relatives no it's a clean sweep they're all they're all dead they will be murdered by fascism and so the the Sylvia Plath's concept of the manic-depressive Hamlet comes very alive to me on that trip Peter Hitchens Beatriz is my younger brother he was born two years after me slightly too close laughs I used to not to notice about things like birth order and all these articles you read about it I didn't actually I think it's quite important and things for potential parents to think about if you have a brother who's at she was more like eighteen months younger than me he's too close to be a baby brother but close enough to be a rival for of all things my mother's attention oh my god imagine how I must have felt I don't remember it but I'm told that I became very jealous and I can believe it and as siblings we've never been very close we've haven't lived in the same town since we were quite small he lives in Oxford now and he's a very well-known newspaper and broadcast newspaper columnist and broadcaster in England of the extreme right he's also very well known as a Christian believer I thought he's even written to a book you I hope you'll do something about it it's come out it's coming out this month or so it's called the rage against God subtitle is how atheism Lebanese our faith and it's a it's in part an extended dialogue with me for my unbelief and for me anyway the biggest difference I could have with anyone is no matter all political differences absolutely dwarfed by the difference between those who believe believe there's a supernatural dimension like him and there's slightly you do not and it's the basis really of all other arguments that's where philosophy begins it's where arguments about biology actually begin to so he is I have to say very good writer here Hitchens after all he's a very serious person I think a bit more solemn than neither haps and when I say right-wing I mean genuinely right-wing in other words he's people people who regard things like the argument over Iraq for it for instance as a left-right one I was think have it wrong because in my experience anyway the Iraqi and Kurdish left the group friends of mine row in favor of removing Saddam Hussein large numbers of the American right people had Pat Buchanan as you know the so called kissing a realist and so well generally against it and the same is true of a kind of isolationist conservative force in Britain of which my brother as a pardon me and he actually one point says the war in Afghanistan is the sort of stupid left-wing war the only someone like my brother could possibly support and there's more truth in that I find than in the rather cheap allegation made that if you are in favor the liberation of Iraq who somehow become right-wing which I also try to deal with in the book I have a chapter about my experience in Iraq going back to the 70s on the back of your book or the typical blurbs that a book would have and Christopher Buckley for instance says that you're the greatest living essayist in the English language a suite of whom Gore Vidal's if he wished to nominate a successor he writes an inheritor of Bill fat I have decided to name Christopher Hitchens that's on here but it's marked out yes we'll go brother took that back the other day we had a very big falling-out over and I live where he made the I think disgraceful suggestion that it was put inside jobs in which the administration are taking part I can't that's more than a different server politics it's not a difference in society I find that unshakable that's all at all and so he made a cover of the sour remarks about me at one point even seeming to suggest that I had made that statement not at any rate it seems to me he was taking it back so I thought well I went I went waiting to take you back that I'll take it back myself but I didn't doesn't waspish away as I quote he is said to like a feud well I mean I think you should have one Chris Hitchens yes the bane of my life my ugly smile younger brother hum I've tried to obliterate him ever since I was small my mother hated bill Corry me Chris if your next name is Hitchens Chris Hitchens means the H is almost bound to go it's pretty vulgar Christopher's a nice name Chris isn't I say that even though Christopher Buckley calls himself Chris I wish you wouldn't Kristof actually is what I call him we compromise on that people at school would try and call me that and it's actually it can be very different in America because people hear fantastically friendly and they'd like to get to first-name terms very fast and then shorten them to even more friendly almost before you've got to know them so unless you quickly say at shad rather you said Christopher you're gonna sound like a snob or someone who's you know repudiating friendly advances so it's it's a constant battle for me and I think now I've won it because people don't call me Chris anymore no one who knows me it all does and anyway a lot of my friends call me hitch at last which is the other reason for the title and was I discovered when I went to my father's navel reunion he took me to a reunion of his old shipmates years ago before he died rather touchingly was I think it was the last reunion they were gonna have his old sea dogs and I noticed that they'll call him hitch I'd never known that before that was what my friends were beginning to call me so that's a another reason another another fold or wrinkle in the title what was the process of writing a memoir like for you well it was a good bit harder than I had expected it would be and I tried to work out why it was giving me such a hard time and there are two or three reasons I think one usually what I write I'm trying to make a case push an argument not always but most of the time or at least I know exactly what I'm doing I'm trying to describe a foreign country say as best I can I've done a fair bit of that with this I'm not making case I'm not making an argument it's not an apologia so this sort of style of writing gets a little softer perhaps if you're not careful and then again I would normally be trying to see how much I could pack into a given number of words 5,000 for an article say or long I say might be more or short book would be 90,000 how much you can press into this when you're trying to remember things if you're like me there's a very good memory you may well find your remembering more than you thought you would and then you think I must get this down while it's still in my cortex so things start a balloon rather alarmingly are not being cursed at all you're being very discursive and that was another difficulty I turned in almost twice as much as the publisher originally asked for I've never done that before and then of course in agent it you don't know how it's going to end but to be exact kouchuu ended I had a very hard time wrapping it up I didn't know really when I was done in fact I'm not done I wake up every day thinking down I should have put that in or I should have put that differently but more often than not something I remembered that it's too late to put in now people say it's a good sign it gives me the blues but look it's probably dull if you're still rising it in your head it may have some vitality to it hope so anyway Christopher Hitchens his memoir hits 22 this weekend on book TVs in depth noted feminist author and legal Scott

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Length: 28min 25sec (1705 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 13 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/juuular]

Its amazing he got cancer right when he's on his book tour for his autobiography/memoirs. Imagine if he had just waited a year to publish, it would have been too late.