A Hitch in Time: Writings from the London Review of Books

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As matters worsen, Hitchens suffers and suffers and refuses to be defined by it all. His last words were “Capitalism . . . downfall.” Hitchens went to his grave arguing outlandish positions, declining to bow before death’s tyranny. A few days earlier Hitchens had made the decision to “make the crossing,” as Amis puts it, like this: “Christopher was as usual being prodded and tested and shifted and hoisted, and he said (in a very forceful tone), ‘That’s enough. No more treatment now. Now I want to die.’ ” Amis, hearing about this, flew down to Houston. By the time he got there Hitchens had curled up into a fetal position and averted his face from the many guests in the room. “I went straight to him and kissed his cheek and said in his ear, ‘Hitch, it’s Mart, and I’m at your side.’ ” Hitchens’s wife (Carol Blue), his three children, two other relatives, and another friend were present. Death arrived the way it should, in a room full of loved ones. Amis had to be coaxed away from the corpse by Blue, who would have delighted her husband with her post-mortem unsentimentality. After “the continuously undulating line at the base of the heart monitor, like a childish representation of a wavy sea, stretched itself out into a dead calm,” the freshly minted widow paused hardly a moment before she started collecting her things. “Come on. There’s nothing there now,” she told Amis. “There’s nothing in it any more. It’s just—rubbish.” Just in time to help him out are two local schoolkids Paul (Michael McVey) and Fiona (Pheona McLellan) who respond to his cries for help when the professor finds himself trapped. She said she’d thought that it was excellent, and then went on to tell me just how galling she had found it that Jacobo’s son, Héctor (exile and US citizen, journalist and founder of the Americas half of Human Rights Watch) had in later life become Argentina’s Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Kirchner government. From 2010 –15 he made a major point of reigniting the hitherto fractionally quieter sovereignty argument over the Falkland Islands, announcing that they would “be under [Argentinian] control within 20 years”. The Commander “had seen action… in almost every maritime theatre from the Mediterranean to the Pacific, [and] had had an especially arduous and bitter time” during the war; but “in truth,” young Christopher continues, “when in Cyprus or in Palestine or southern Africa or elsewhere, I generally felt myself so much in sympathy with those who had resisted British rule that I thought it better for the Commander and myself to avoid the subject.” With consummate irony, there’s been a “major” outbreak of Covid in Stanley (50+ cases, currently; none requiring the hospital) the week before all remaining travel/quarantine regulations were scheduled to be finally lifted. Hey ho.

A Hitch in Time · LRB 22 November 2021 Sam Kinchin-Smith | A Hitch in Time · LRB 22 November 2021

The gentleman proceeded to give high praise to my speech. He underlined the fascistic nature of the junta and went on to call attention to its aggressive design on the Falkland Islands, where lived an ancient community of British farmers and fishermen. In 1978 this didn’t seem to be a geopolitical detail of any consuming interest, but I do remember agreeing with him that when challenged about its own depredations, the Argentine Right invariably tried to change the subject to the injustice of British possession of the Falklands.In a traditional Indian wedding, the rituals not only unite two individuals, but establishes the bond between two families and their culture. Having the bride arrive by herself in our beautiful Victoria carriage adorned with white floral sprays and helped out of the carriage by her father or grandfather to be given away down the aisle is breathtaking. In my album of things that seem to make life pointful and worthwhile, and that even occasionally suggest… that there could be a long arc in the moral universe that slowly, eventually bends towards justice, this would constitute an exceptional entry.” He proceeds to remind the reader of the “talismanic” name of Jacobo Timerman, one-time editor of Argentina’s La Opinion newspaper (“a vivid example of the great tradition of secular Jewish dissent”). He also points out Timerman’s own memoir, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, which “clothed in living, hurting flesh” the disgusting reputation of the junta regime, a sub-species of “radical evil, that spanned a whole subcontinent” and defiled the highest offices of a supposedly modern and civilised state. I wandered into a coffee shop with the memoir in my hand, and was promptly accosted by a lady I’d never met before (nor think I’ve seen since). She asked me what I thought of it. It seemed pretty good so far, I said, though I’d not made much progress with it. Wolfe is “safe” territory: glib conservative humorist sends up naive sixties idealists but misses the obvious “snigger potential” at Reaganite tables. Desert Storm ought to have been “safe”, too — the LRB would presumably have liked more in this antiwar vein throughout the 2000s — but on close inspection some of the post-2002 “trouble” was brewing in Hitchens’s disdain for the isolationism of America’s antiwar leftists circa 1991:

A Hitch in time | The New Criterion A Hitch in time | The New Criterion

Living on his wits, sleeping rough and accepting lifts that get him into bizarre and often dangerous situations, Andy’s six years spent on the road stand as a unique record of life as it was in the late 1970s and early 80s. In this hilarious memoir, they are juxtaposed with a host of earlier memories, resulting in a unique collection of dazzling funny stories that have been told and retold in countless bars and comedy clubs as well as on his regular guest spot on TalkSport Radio, but are collected together here for the first time in written form. A peek inside The marriage ceremony, a colorful and joyous event, can be spread over several days. An important and most entertaining ceremony, takes place during the arrival of the groom at the wedding venue. The procession known as the Baraat, which is made up of the groom’s family members, relatives and friends, accompany him to the venue. They are known as the Barati.Arthur Schlesinger insists that neither he nor Henry Kissinger has ‘any recollection’ of that evening at the Harvard International Seminar. How I wish I could have overheard the ponderous discussion during which these two men, both congested by a lifetime of apologetics, agreed on this now classic line of defence. ‘Statements allegedly made nearly forty years ago’ cannot be expected to be remembered by such busy fellows, who are not too busy to recall with crystal­line clarity that they would certainly have denied making them. So it goes. I sympathise with Schlesinger almost as much as with Mervyn Jones in this instance, because the task of keeping pace with his own protean story is indeed a daunt­ing one. That on the very day I walked down to look at Stanley’s Battle Day monument— commemorating the Royal Navy’s 1914 sinking of Admiral Graf von Spee’s marauding Scharnhorst et al. — I heard Hitch’s dulcet tones narrate how, on Boxing Day 1943, his father, Commander Eric Hitchens RN, “proudly participat[ed] as the Jamaica pressed home for the kill and fired torpedoes through the hull of one of Hitler’s most dangerous warships, the Scharnhorst [a later and equally ill-fated namesake, obviously]… a better day’s work than I have ever done”. Familiar bêtes noires – Kennedy, Nixon, Kissinger, Clinton – rub shoulders with lesser-known preoccupations: P.G. Wodehouse, Princess Margaret and, magisterially, Isaiah Berlin. Here is Hitchens on the (first) Gulf War and the ‘Salman Rushdie Acid Test’, on being spanked by Mrs Thatcher in the House of Lords and taking his son to the Oscars, on America’s homegrown Nazis and ‘Acts of Violence in Grosvenor Square’ in 1968.