The Power of Facing: A Review of “Christopher Hitchens” by Ben Burgis

“One of the causes of tension with Noam Chomsky, for example, Burgis observes, was Hitchens’ recognition that the forces of anti-imperialism today are dissimilar to ‘Ho Chi Minh or the Sandinistas.'”

“Only the cultist or the academic,” Martin Amis says redundantly, “is capable of swallowing an author whole.” When we say we love a writer, we tend to refer to just about 50% of his work. This roughly is Ben Burgis’ view of Christopher Hitchens: the caustic journalist who—having (for example) at Oxford slept with two, future members of Baroness Thatcher’s government and later been publicly spanked by the would-be premier herself—compares to today’s hacks as industrial disinfectant does to spiked fruit punch. The book is the first to mark the tenth anniversary of the old boy’s death (appraisals by Matt Johnson and Daniel J. Sharp will follow soon), and only the third of its kind in Hitch literature, since the grasping and the oily—Richard Seymour and Larry Taunton—have already had their go.

One suspects that what Amis has in mind when he thinks of worthwhile writing is something like an inimitable idea or execution, perhaps like Vladimir Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading. (Otherwise how can one miss, say, the unfailing pen of Saul Bellow—each sentence worth its ink—even when an entire novel such as More Die of Heartbreak is forgettable?) Hitchens would have encouraged us to be radical in distilling his own contribution. The Nabokovian or Bellovian talent for prose aside, the twopence he adds to our intellectual treasury shines in a single footnote at the end of his memoir, Hitch-22:

“The synthesis for which one aimed was the Orwellian one of evolving a consistent and integral anti-totalitarianism.”