Here we have one snarky writer dissing another, and I admire both of them. This one is Laura Kipnis, writer and Northwestern University professor, going after Christopher Hitchens, who needs no introduction. It’s a fairly short piece in Critical Quarterly, free to read by clicking below (pdf is here).
Those of you who admire Hitchens—and I’m one—will have to endure him taking a drubbing about his retrograde views of women and politics, his fixation on Bill Clinton, and his overstatements about his sex life. Yes, he was wrong, but often he was right (viz., Mother Teresa, religion, the Elgin Marbles), but he was always witty and thoughtful.
Just a few excerpts, and I’m gonna go home and cook a nice dinner with a nice bottle.
I can be as humourless as the next leftwing feminist but for some reason Christopher’s, what to call it – lasciviousness? antiquarianism? – amused more than offended me, though his public anti-abortion stance was noxious and, one suspects, hypocritical. Colour me surprised if that particular edict was upheld in practice. In any case, I never thought of him as someone you’d go to for instruction on feminism, and increasingly not on any political question, yet it was perplexingly hard to hold his bad politics against him. Mocking him on gender could even be fun, as at least there, unlike elsewhere, the positions seemed lightly held. When he published his notorious ‘Why Women Aren’t Funny’ piece in Vanity Fair, I responded (I hope a teensy bit funnily) in Slate, where he also frequently wrote, that though it was a fascinating portrait of female nature and relations between the sexes, it was unclear to which decade it applied – it had the slightly musty air of 1960s-ish Kingsley Amis, wrapped in nostalgia ‘for the merry days when sexual conquest required an arsenal of tactics deployed by bon-vivantish cads on girdled, girlish sexual holdouts. “Oh Mr. Hitchens!” you imagine one of the potential conquests squealing at an errant hand on nylon-clad knee.’
My problem with Christopher, hardly mine alone, was (to state the obvious) simply that he was one of the more charming men on the planet and mixed with liquor, this is a dangerous combination. Like most people who knew him at all, a few of the drunkest nights of my life were spent in his company. Conversations were funny, flirtatious, frank. Yet the rightward turn and increasing political rigidity also made him seem ridiculous: eruditely shrill.
And Kipnis avers that Hitchens was obsessive about Bill Clinton, particularly about his philandering (or rape, or whatever he actually did):
Christopher, on the other hand … Something about Bill Clinton’s sex life seemed to derange him. He was off the rails on the subject, literally sputtering. I tried to put it to him that he seemed, well, overinvested. It seemed way too personal, somehow off. What was it about Bill Clinton that had this unhinging effect on him? (I was kind of drunk at that point myself.) I suppose I expected him to at least pretend to ponder the question, devote maybe a few seconds to a show of self-examination. Anyone would. Not him. He was barricaded against anything I could say, also against the ‘what is this “about” for you’ sort of conversation that drunk people are known to have, which is one of the fun things about drinking, Something obdurate and hardened switched on instead. Thinking was not what was taking place, just pre-rehearsed lines and a lot of outrage.
. . . . When I later tried (and failed) to read No One Left to Lie to, his anti-Clinton screed, it reminded me of what had seemed so deranged and shrill that evening in Chicago. Of course, there’d be much more of that to come: the bellicose over-certainty about Iraq, the increasingly militaristic posturing – there was a comic rigidity about it. I’m thinking of what philosopher Henri Bergson wrote in his 1900 book on laughter about what turns people into comedic figures:2 being unaware of something automatic or mechanistic in your attitudes or actions, like Lucille Ball on the chocolate factory assembly line, turning into an automaton herself as the line keeps speeding up. Inflexibility is funny, though also a tragic waste of whatever’s human in us. The human is elastic.
Kipnis is smart and is not without humor herself, so one has to seriously consider her point of view. But what we can all agree on is what she says towards the end:
There was a sentence of Christopher’s that I always remembered, from a review of something by Richard Yates. I wished I had written it. Regarding Yates: ‘It’s clear that he’s no fan of this smug housing development or the new forms of capitalism on behalf of which its male inhabitants make their daily dash to the train.’ It’s a sentence I’m sure he gave little thought to, but I loved its man-of-the-world swoop – from a writer’s oeuvre to the banalities of suburban marriage to the mode of production, crammed into an offhandedly elegant sentence. There were always things to admire in his sentences, even as his political instincts went to shit.
The man could write. And when he wrote and was right, it was great stuff, like “God Is Not Great.”
Kipnis’s article smokes, but she doesn’t inhale. But she does exhale rectitude.
Her article is a missed opportunity, since what it is crying out for is a comparison between Mr H and the worst, or second-worst PM in British history. The same command of English, but with a penile Tesla self-drive mechanism gone awry.
Well said!
Got to agree on C.H.’s weird obsession with Bill Clinton – I never agreed with that. I also differed regarding the Iraq war, but most everything else C.H. said I agreed with.
And he was a bulldozer against (all) religions, including Islam which is a rare, brave position.
I like to think he would be very opposed to the woke today – he knew phoniness and evil when he saw it.
The writer herself sounds a bit shrill to me as well as practising obvious “presentism”, judging the past by today’s puritan culture. There’s a class of feminist writers who resent men’s sexual desire in all its forms. They gave us such stupidities as “the male gaze”, a gift to both stupidity and comedy at the same time.
D.A.
NYC
What’s funny about it?
For that matter, what’s stupid about it?
I’m going to wade in and say that the grim comedy of making the “male gaze” a punishable offence is that there is no credible defence against the charge. If the woman thought she was getting a male gaze and the gaze came from someone she didn’t fancy, guilty as charged. “So stop doing it” might be good advice to our sons, but their adherence to the advice will not protect them from zealous HR enforcers.
I believe ‘obsessed’ is being used here as a kind of ad hominem in an attempt to dismiss Hitchen’s accusations without addressing them. Newsflash: A person can be obsessed and entirely correct. It is incumbent on those who disagree to prove not that he is obsessed but that he is incorrect.
It’s interesting that people call Hitchen’s obsessed for wishing to see justice done in the case of a modern hero of the Democrats, Clinton; but that nobody levels that accusation against him for going after one of their villains, Kissinger, with equal fervour. Here, Hitchen’s impartiality ends up making him look rather better than those who call him ‘obsessed’.
I’m so tired of the “Hitchens turned right wing” lie. He supported Iraq because his Iraqi socialist friends were in favour of it. He bothered himself to go to the place and ask the locals, instead of making his positions around internal American politics.
Also, the strawmen of the women can’t be funny article is unbearable. It was a comment human sexual dimorphism and an attempt to state an ev-psych hypothesis… (which, IIRC, was later on proved right; even as the main author of the study tried to distance the results from Hitchens’ proposition, to no avail).
Re: abortion, yes, he didn’t personally like it; and yet he was for pro-choice policy. Isn’t that what we actually want from people who dislike abortion? You don’t have to like it, just don’t try to make your preference into law.
Anyway, the usual intellectually dishonest shots.
Yes, re: her ” . . . his public anti-abortion stance was noxious and, one suspects, hypocritical.”
Well, what can’t one “suspect”? (I could “suspect” that Kipnis is from a planet in the Andromeda galaxy.) If she knows anything thusly hypocritical, she should say so. Can Kipnis not be bothered to say specifically why his stance was “noxious”? Because Hitchens gave some benefit of the doubt to the fetus?
I reasonably assume that Hitchens was for contraception. (What would be a “noxious” stance on contraception?) I have perceived that at least a few have predicted in the past that contraception would make abortion rare. How has that been going? How often does it happen that abortion is the necessary remedy because one, in the heat of the moment, cannot be bothered with contraception? If there is a constitutional right to abortion, surely there is such a right to contraception.
Like the Boss, I admire both Kipness and Hitchens. I’m probably alone here in simply liking her essay. Her endorsement of Hitchens which the Boss quoted is a pretty powerful reason for reading Hitchens (if for the first time or for the nth time) as well as a reminder of his extraordinary talent. It was always on display and seemed so effortless.
Kipness is not so bad a writer either when she wrote about what she loved about his writing. I loved the phrase describing Hitchinson’s work: “crammed into an offhandedly effortless sentence.”
Thanks for posting this and good cooking to you.
Not sure what the occasion was for this piece, but whatever the motivation, all in all I think Kipnis was pretty fair. She shows Hitchens as a brilliant man with an amazing facility for language. But, like us all, he had his weaknesses. She obviously felt the need to point some of these out, but also it seems apparent that they were friends. Despite the criticism I think her affection for him (if not all of his views) is there to be seen.
No one is right about everything (not even me, much as it pains me to say it). But whenever I have found myself aligned with Hitchins’ views, I have been thankful to have such an insightful and eloquent writer/speaker leading the charge.
Funnily enough, this is what proves you wrong. 😉
I remember an obviously drunk Hitchens losing an argument from the lead singer of Better Than Ezra on Bill Maher’s old show Politically Incorrect.
My favorite Hitchens is excoriating the Catholic church.