Damon Linker reviews Hitchens’s new book of essays in the NYT

Damon Linker, author and senior correspondent at The Week, is also a Catholic, which, it would seem, makes him less than objective as a reviewer of Christopher Hitchens’s new book of essays, And Yet . . . .

Linker has also criticized New Atheists on several occasions, chastising us for not being sufficiently lugubrious (you know the argument: like Camus, we need to be totally devastated at our realization that there’s no God); I’ve discussed Linker’s ridiculous argument on this site.

Nevertheless, except for a blip or two, Linker does a creditable job of assessing Hitchens’s book in today’s New York Times. (He also reviews Roger Scruton’s Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands, but you can read that bit for yourself.) As it happens, I finished Hitchens’s book yesterday. It’s a short book, and I’d read many of the essays before, but I found it a satisfying conclusion to his oeuvre. The selection is eclectic, and not all the pieces are brilliant, but Hitchens’s eloquence, diversity of interests, and enormous erudition made me wish once again that he were still alive. (You can see the table of contents here). What would Hitch have made of the Republican candidates, of the terrorist attacks, of Hillary Clinton? It would have been fantastic to see how he covered the U.S. Presidential election. Linker, it turns out, wonders exactly same thing:

In the four years since Christopher Hitchens’s untimely death at age 62 from complications brought on by esophageal cancer, I’ve often found myself wondering what he would say about this or that event in the news. What I wouldn’t give to read him on Hillary Clinton’s email imbroglio, the rise of ISIS or, best of all, the darkly demotic presidential campaign of Donald Trump.

Indeed.

In general, Linker proffers substantial but qualified praise for the man, as seen in this bit of the review:

Objectivity has nothing to do with it. Hitchens — fair-minded on Hillary? ­Levelheaded on Islamic terrorism? Impartial on a demagogic bully? You’ve got to be kidding. What I miss is this man, with this unique sensibility, these foibles and blind spots, this particular mix of literary and cultural references, moral obsessions and undeniable brilliance as a prose stylist.

“And Yet . . .” is the closest any of us are likely to come to a resurrection of the man. There is, alas, no Trump in this collection of four dozen articles, book reviews and opinion columns, most of them written for The Atlantic, Vanity Fair and Slate during the final seven years of Hitchens’s life. But there is so much else: dazzling, vintage Hitch on Che Guevara, George Orwell (twice), Clive James, Edmund Wilson (who “came as close as anybody has to making the labor of criticism into an art”), Arthur Schlesinger Jr., V.S. Naipaul, Barack (“Cool Cat”) Obama, Rosa Luxemburg, Joan Didion, Charles Dickens and G.K. Chesterton.

I would add to this panoply Hitchens’s essay on Paul Scott’s four novels, The Raj Quartet, which I consider the greatest unrecognized literary work in English since World War II. However, Hitchens did appreciate its greatness (the sequel, Staying On, won a Booker Prize), and I urge readers, if they have time, to absorb all five books. They contain some of the best English writing ever, and the story, about the British departure from India in the Forties, is mesmerizing.

Back to the review. In the first paragraph above, Linker mistakes passionate and considered criticism with prejudice. Hitchens, after all, gives reasons why he didn’t like either of the Clintons, and, for Linker, to be “levelheaded” on Islamic terrorism apparently means some sort of understanding attitude—or even blaming it on Western colonialism. There’s only one levelheaded stand to take on Islamic terrorism: to despise it and combat it, and that’s what Hitchens did. To imply that he was not “objective” is to imply that he didn’t consider other viewpoints, and I reject that. If Hitchens did anything, he read and considered opinions contrary to his. You may not agree with his conclusions, but give him this: his dislike of the Clintons wasn’t simply post facto rationalization of a predetermined stand—the kind of attitude people take toward religion.

Linker offers more criticism:

If Hitchens flourished when he brought his literary sensibility to bear on the kaleidoscopic spectacle of American life, his greatest weakness as a critic and analyst was his tendency at times to take his instinctual hatred of illegitimate authority to absurd lengths. This led him to elevate a seemingly arbitrary list of villains — Henry Kissinger, Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton, Saddam Hussein and God — to the status of History’s Greatest Monsters. Thankfully, these personal moral fixations, and the reckless judgment calls they sometimes inspired, make relatively few appear­ances in this volume. (Yes, I’m talking about his foolish, and never withdrawn, enthusiasm for the disastrous Iraq war, but also the unalloyed, incurious contempt for religion that filled every page of his best-selling “God Is Not Great.”) “And Yet . . .” really does give us Hitchens at his best.

Again, I reject the notion that Hitchens’s hatred was “instinctual” rather than reasoned. Read his books on Kissinger, Mother Teresa, or the Clintons, and see if there is a dearth of reasons for his opprobrium. As for the Iraq war, yes, many of us—including me—think he was mistaken, but it was a reasoned mistake based on his hatred of tyranny and his love of the Kurds. And yet so many people completely dismiss Hitchens simply because of his stand on the Iraq war. What is wrong with us these days that we cannot assess someone’s views one by one, but simply use a single erroneous or disputed opinion to dismiss someone entirely?

Finally, Hitchens’s contempt for religion was not “incurious.” In fact, he apparently knew a lot more about religion than Linker—who repeatedly makes dumb criticisms of atheism—knows about nonbelief. God is Not Great is a reasoned polemic, to be sure, but it’s not incurious.  And, as we’ve seen from Linker’s previous writings, he may not be incurious but he’s sometimes ignorant, as when he claimed that human altruism, because it can’t be explained by science (it can), is evidence for God.

Linker’s favorite piece in the book is “On the limits of self-improvement,” Hitchens’s three essays in Vanity Fair about his “makeover,” involving visits to spas, waxing of his “back, crack, and sack”, exercise, attempts to stop smoking, and dental veneers. It’s a hilarious series, which, fortunately, you can read free online (Part I, Part II, and Part III). And it once again reminded me that besides being a great essayist and polemicist, Hitchens had a fantastic sense of humor. Here’s an excerpt from Part I of the series where he assesses his physical condition:

The fanglike teeth are what is sometimes called “British”: sturdy, if unevenly spaced, and have turned an alarming shade of yellow and brown, attributable perhaps to strong coffee as well as to nicotine, Pinot Noir, and other potations.

Proceeding south and passing over an almost vanished neck that cannot bear the strain of a fastened top button or the constriction of a tie, we come to a thickly furred chest that, together with a layer of flab, allows the subject to face winter conditions with an almost ursine insouciance. The upper part of this chest, however, has slid deplorably down to the mezzanine floor, and it is our opinion that without his extraordinary genital endowment the subject would have a hard time finding the damn thing, let alone glimpsing it from above.

Matters are hardly improved on the lower slopes, which feature a somewhat grotesque combination of plump thighs and skinny shins, the arduous descent culminating in feet which are at once much too short and a good deal too chunky. This combination, of ratlike claws and pachydermatous-size insteps, causes the subject to be very cautious about where, and indeed when, he takes off his shoes. There have been unconfirmed reports of popular protest whenever and wherever he does this. Nor do his hands, at the same time very small and very puffy, give any support to the view that the human species does not have a common ancestor with the less advanced species of ape. The nails on the hands are gnawed, and the nails on the feet are claw-like and beginning to curl in a Howard Hughes fashion (perhaps because the subject displays such a marked reluctance to involve himself in any activity that may involve bending).

Viewed from the front when clothed, the subject resembles a burst horsehair sofa cushion or (in the opinion of one of us) a condom hastily stuffed with an old sock. The side perspective is that of an avocado pear and, on certain mornings, an avocado pear that retains nothing of nutritious value but its tinge of alligator green. . .

I love the sly reference to his “extraordinary genital endowment” and his appearance as a “burst horsehair sofa cushion.” And who but Hitchens could use the phrase “ursine insouciance” to describe his hairy chest?

A photo from the Vanity Fair essay:

Ah, Hitch, you died at just the wrong time. He loved his “gaspers” so much (he even smoked in the shower) that they finally did him in—and right before the U.S. and the world went mad. What living journalist can give us the sardonic and uncompromising take he would have had on terrorism, Charlie Hebdo, and the follies of the U.S. political season?