Rushdie on Hitchens

January 6, 2012 • 4:26 am

UPDATE: See Occam’s comment below for the Rushdie-Le Carré-Hitchens exchange and some bonus photographs.

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This essay, in February’s Vanity Fair, is a belated remembrance by Rushdie of his beloved friend; his previous statement was, I believe, limited to a Twitter post.  And to those who cheaply memorialized Hitchens in condescending ways, such as “Yes, he was an atheist. Yes, he wrote eloquently. But that’s about it”, Rushdie reminds us that Hitchens, at no small risk to himself, defended Rushdie during the fatwa associated with The Satanic Verses.  That was of a piece with Hitchens’s lifelong campaign to defend freedom of expression against its enemies on both right and left.

The le Carré dispute [JAC: read about that one!] took place during the long years of argument and danger that followed the publication of my novel The Satanic Verses and the attack upon its author, publishers, translators and booksellers by the minions and successors of the theocratic tyrant of Iran, Ruhollah Khomeini. It was during these years that Christopher, a good but not intimate friend since the mid-1980s, drew closer to me, becoming the most indefatigable of allies and the most eloquent of defenders.

I have often been asked if Christopher defended me because he was my close friend. The truth is that he became my close friend because he wanted to defend me.

The spectacle of a despotic cleric with antiquated ideas issuing a death warrant for a writer living in another country, and then sending death squads to carry out the edict, changed something in Christopher. It made him understand that a new danger had been unleashed upon the earth, that a new totalizing ideology had stepped into the down-at-heel shoes of Soviet Communism. And when the brute hostility of British and American conservatives (Podhoretz and Krauthammer, Hugh Trevor-Roper and Paul Johnson) joined forces with the appeasement politics of sections of the Western left, and both  sides began to offer sympathetic analyses of the assault, his outrage grew. In the eyes of the Right, I was a cultural “traitor” and, in Christopher’s words, an “uppity wog,” and in the opinion of the Left, the People could never be wrong, and the cause of the Oppressed People, a category into which the Islamist opponents of my novel fell, was doubly justified. Voices as diverse as the Pope, the Cardinal of New York, the British Chief Rabbi, and John Berger and Germaine Greer “understood the insult” and failed to be outraged; and Christopher went to war.

He and I found ourselves describing our ideas, without conferring, in almost identical terms. I began to understand that while I had not chosen the battle, it was at least the right battle, because in it everything that I loved and valued (literature, freedom, irreverence, freedom, irreligion, freedom) was ranged against everything I detested (fanaticism, violence, bigotry, humorlessness, philistinism, and the new offence-culture of the age). Then I read Christopher using exactly the same everything-he-loved-versus-everything-he-hated trope, and felt…understood.

He, too, saw that the attack on The Satanic Verses was not an isolated occurrence; that, across the Muslim world, writers and journalists and artists were being accused of the same crimes – blasphemy, heresy, apostasy, and their modern-day associates, “insult” and “offence.” And he intuited that beyond this intellectual assault lay the possibility of an attack on a broader front. He quoted Heine to me. Where they burn books they will afterwards burn people. (And reminded me, with his profound sense of irony, that Heine’s line, in his play Almansor, had referred to the burning of the Qur’an.) And on September 11, 2001, he, and all of us, understood that what began with a book-burning in Bradford, Yorkshire, had now burst upon the whole world’s consciousness in the form of those tragically burning buildings. . .

. . . Paradoxically, it was God who saved Christopher Hitchens from the Right. Nobody who detested God as viscerally, intelligently, originally and comically as C. Hitchens could stay in the pocket of god-bothered American Conservatism for long. When he bared his fangs and went for God’s jugular, just as he had previously fanged Henry Kissinger, Mother Teresa and Bill Clinton, the resulting book, God Is Not Great, carried Hitch away from the American Right and back towards his natural, liberal, ungodly constituency. He became an extraordinarily beloved figure in his last years, and it was his magnificent war upon God, and then his equally magnificent argument with his last enemy, Death, that brought him “home” at last from the misconceived war in Iraq.

Go after his views on Iraq, if you will, but do remember Hitchens’s tireless defense of something we all stand for—freedom of expression—even at risk of assassination by Muslim fanatics.  And he was never happier than when that free expression was turned against himself.

There’s more; go read the piece. There is a group of anecdotes at the end, and the last one is very sad.

h/t: John Danley

21 thoughts on “Rushdie on Hitchens”

  1. I first came across Christopher Hitchens when I was a student activist in the late 60’s. I have not always agreed with him but I have always been impressed with his courage and intellectual honesty.

  4. Christopher Hitchens is a sound lesson to all orators on how to make a valid point and yet provide dignifide entertainment. Thankfully on can still be educated by this great speaker on You Tube and many other good places.

  5. Sidenotes:

    1. Extracts of the Rushdie-Hitchens-Le Carré exchanges are accessible online:
    http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/burning/le-carre-vs-rushdie.html
    (The fortunate ones with access to a Harper’s subscription may consult the magazine’s Feb 1998 issue, available online.)

    2. Has anyone noticed how the portrait of Christopher Hitchens featured on Pigliucci’s blog, referred to by Jerry, mirrors the famous one, by Henri Cartier-Bresson, of Albert Camus?
    http://artportraiture.blogspot.com/2010/05/henri-cartier-bresson-albert-camus.html

    Incidentally, has Dottor Magnifico noticed? Perhaps not, or he wouldn’t have paid Hitchens such an impressive photographic compliment.

    Nor am I the first to point out the similarity. At least one keen eye by the deck name of “Deckard23” has already linked it:
    http://cheezburger.com/Deckard23/lolz/View/2584248320

    1. 1) The whole exchange makes for an interesting read, if one likes literary blood sport, but it’s not very inspiring. Rushdie basically opens by saying that he won’t raise to the defence of Le Carré because Le Carré didn’t rose to his; and then it goes downhill.

      2) As someone who admires Albert Camus, the fact that the photo of Hitchens was modelled after a famous one of Camus annoys me more than I could write here. For one thing, Camus never engaged in misogynistic rhetoric, even toward his contradictors. Even more importantly, he never applauded war, and definitely not a war of aggression. (Not that he was an utopian-minded pacifist, either. He lived during WWII and two anti-colonialist wars and knew the difference between legitimate struggle of a people against oppression and using military strength to further a government’s political aims.)

      Maybe the bigger difference is that he had more empathy than Hitchens. Let’s face it, Hitchens was a tireless opponent of religious oppression, but he did it by being a bully. He could wax poetic about cluster bombs when they were used on his side. And he stubbornly avoided to ever admit he could be wrong.

      In comparison, Camus was a man who, in 1945, added his name to a petition against the death sentence for Robert Brasillach, a high-profile partisan of the Nazis during the Occupation. Camus wrote to explain that he had signed because he was against the death penalty, even for a fascist.

      2. I’m sorry but your second to last paragraph seems particularly unfair to Hitchens, who actuall did change his mind on several points, and who could entertain the notion that even he could be wrong.

        It also isn’t clear how one can say he was a bully. I’ve noticed this characterization of him a few times in print and don’t think bully means what most of the people making the accusation think it means. He could be forceful, and passionate, and rude. That hardly a bully makes.

  6. “Christopher became almost ferally polite”.

    A perfect description.

    This guy has a way with words, he should try writing novels.

  7. Solomon Rushdie is one of the few people who’ve really been able to give Christopher Hitchens a proper send off.

      1. If I had the wisdom of King Salman, I probably wouldn’t respond to this.

        I suppose it wouldn’t do to divide the baby and call him Saloman. His true mother would have him by any name, of course. 😉

        1. As far as I know, “Solomon” is referred to as “Sulaymaan” and not “Salman” in Arabic/Persian/Urdu.

  8. “He [Hitchens] was an intellectual with the instincts of a street brawler”

    Brilliantly put.

    Lovely piece. Thanks for posting.

    1. It really is a profound observation (which is not surprising in the least coming from Mr. Rushdie).

  9. Vanity Fair recently published this postmortem piece by Christopher Hitchens on Charles Dickens:

    http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/02/hitchens-201202

    When I saw it announced, for a second I forgot that its inimitable author was no longer around. . . but then it dawned on me and melancholy overtook me.

    I’m also waiting for a review of Ian Ker’s biography of Chesterton, which according to Ian McEwan’s moving description quoted below, was written shortly before Hitchen’s passing.

    “Consider the mix. Chronic pain, weak as a kitten, morphine dragging him down, then the tangle of Reformation theology and politics, Chesterton’s romantic, imagined England suffused with the kind of Catholicism that mediated his brush with fascism, and his taste for paradox, which Christopher wanted to debunk. At intervals, his head would droop, his eyes close, then with superhuman effort he would drag himself awake to type another line. His long memory served him well, for he didn’t have the usual books on hand for this kind of thing. When it’s available, read the review.”

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