Minority of One

Lionel Trilling once observed in his diaries that, to his genuine surprise, he was no longer simply a critic of literature but had become a fact of literature himself. His essays were not just responses but positive additions to the stock of reality; they had their own consistent vision of life.

Christopher Hitchens, political and literary journalist extraordinaire, should now be considered a fact of political and cultural reality. His astounding capacity for work has produced a body of work; his vastly ranging, deeply driven devastations and illuminations make up a reliable outlook on the world. In mingled yarns of fine ethical passion and grandstanding leaps, of noble choler and self-righteous zeal, of withering eloquence and numbing prolixity, he has famously attacked Mother Teresa and Princess Di and Bill Clinton and, most recently, Henry Kissinger. Yet if the abuse of power or influence is a negation of human freedom, Hitchens’ seeming negativity is actually a replenishment. It is a kind of restoration of democratic decencies.

Trilling is an appropriate, if incongruous, figure to bring up in the context of Hitchens’ recent volume of essays, “Unacknowledged Legislation,” because it was Trilling who spoke, with bookish histrionics, of “the bloody crossroads where politics and literature meet.” In his foreword, Hitchens quotes that phrase because he wants us to understand that such a place of convergence is where these essays occur. Hitchens respectfully demurs from Trilling’s call for caution: “[P]roperly understood and appreciated, literature need never collide with, or recoil from, the agora.” The legislators of Hitchens’ title are the poets and novelists who are, in Shelley’s famous phrase, the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Like Shelley, Hitchens believes deeply in the power of art to change social reality.

Yet for all his high-mindedness, Hitchens sometimes loses hold of his judgments in the velocity of his zeal. He poignantly argues that because the writings of the anti-war poet Wilfred Owen have “outlived all the jingo versifiers, blood-bolted Liberal politicians, garlanded generals and other supposed legislators of the period ... [Owen] is the most powerful rebuttal of Auden’s mild and sane claim that ‘Poetry makes nothing happen.”’ But Hitchens has fallen into the trap of too many left-wing intellectuals when they turn their attention to art: To compensate for their unrelenting skepticism about what passes for the politically respectable, they approach art with an implausible optimism and a willful naivete. Owen died on the battlefield in World War I, along with millions of other young men. That is not an argument for the efficacy of art. It is an argument for the excoriations and exposures of a Christopher Hitchens.

Needless to say, Hitchens knows all this. He knows, as Shelley did, that art is successfully “political” insofar as it expresses honesty through right proportions, insofar as it invents a voice for what men and women think and feel but cannot or dare not say. In fact, this book does not present an argument for the capacity of art to change social or political reality. (And it should be said that quite a few of these essays, like the brilliant unsparing study of Raymond Williams’ resentful responses to George Orwell, are not about art and politics at all.) Instead, the question of art and politics gives Hitchens the opportunity to test and interrogate and expand the humanity of his politics.

Hitchens has been carrying on this self-scrutiny for some time. The lazily strung together “Letters to a Young Contrarian” is one result of that odyssey. Writing in opposition “is something you are, and not something you do,” Hitchens says at one point. At another, he writes in a memorable phrase that the critic of society and culture lives “at a slight acute angle to society.” He asserts that he doesn’t think “the solidarity of belonging is much of a prize,” and he advises, interestingly: “Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.” The true adversarialist, he seems to be saying, contrary to every Marxist, or Marxist-derived, precept, lives alone, within himself or herself, as wary of adversarial movements or parties or factions as of institutions. No wonder he keeps referring affectionately to Prince Peter Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist.

Hitchens famously hates religion, but he has come to an almost religious sense of mortal solitude. It is why he has isolated himself on the left by writing about Sept. 11 with Orwellian--he would hate the term--common sense, calling the attack “fascism with an Islamic face,” castigating the brutishness of societies that crush human dignity under the pretext of faith. And though Hitchens hates the way admonitions to see the “complexity” in things paralyze truth-telling, he has, in recent years, and used moral chiaroscuro paradoxically to electrify his assertions. More and more he has come to see the problem of injustice as a problem of--he would hate this term also--human nature.

The essays in “Legislation” make up the self-examination of an honorable man of the left, who wishes to place his rage against public hypocrisy alongside his sense of human complexity; who wants to see, in the end, if wisdom about the limitations of human nature is compatible with expectations for a better world. Hitchens wants to stay true to his political principles while, to an extent, fending them off; he wants to somehow stick to a moral position--whose creed is the denial of the existence of “morality”--that has devoured so many of its ardent children. With so many intellectuals on the left disappearing into stock institutional attitudes, or into a mewling self-consciously virtuous “pragmatism,” or into an empty pragmatic “centrism” or simply disappearing altogether, Hitchens’ project is an exceptional one.

His desire, to enlarge social possibilities without being blind to what really makes people tick, is why so many of these essays take up the subject of the great literary figure possessed by foul human values. They are test cases for the future of a progressive politics. You might call this the “Ezra Pound Conundrum,” after the American poet who composed seminal, if not immortal, verse but who made anti-Semitic broadcasts on fascist airwaves from Italy during World War II.

Hitchens doesn’t wrestle with Pound, but he writes about the Byzantine mores of H.L. Mencken and Rudyard Kipling and T.S. Eliot and Philip Larkin. He is wonderful on these disturbing figures, whose jingoism, racism, anti-Semitism seemed strangely to be the protective carapace they threw on in order to coax their gifts out of their uncannily susceptible natures. The essay on how the death of Kipling’s son in World War I affected the father’s writing and values brims with a sober sympathy. On Larkin, Hitchens has written a poised masterpiece of intellectual honesty, capturing the simultaneity of the late English poet’s ugliness and humanity--and then finding the humanity in the ugliness and new darker inflections in the humanity.

Hitchens is a dazzlingly multivalent writer. He has a beautiful quality of obsession, a driving sense of injury that cannot be appeased by success or bought off or cowed into timorous calculation. He is an Achilles who writes with his heel. A truth-compulsion is the poultice that he applies to whatever is inflaming him from within. He is gorgeously and eternally pissed-off.

There are the brilliance and the erudite display and the stunningly apt turns of phrase. But it is because of Hitchens’ uncompromising obsessiveness that one forgives him his excesses: that is, a tendency toward Oxbridge sneering--it sometimes seems that he was born with a silver scourge in his mouth--and the occasional grating snit of pedantic correction. (In Hitchensian style, I would like to point out that the late Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, the leader of the Lubavitcher sect, lived in the poor to middle-class Crown Heights; he was not, as Hitchens writes, “the charismatic loony rebbe from Brooklyn Heights,” an affluent enclave where this Messianic figure would have found himself preaching to a sea of baseball-caps, not yarmulkes.)

Twice Hitchens uses the same vivid rhetorical figure: “With Mencken, the face grew to fit the mask, and the playful Prejudices became the drone of authentic prejudice.” And, in the essay on Larkin: “True, the thing about the sustained epater style is that the face can grow to fit the mask.” There is something conscientious and self-admonitory about this image. As is true of Mencken and Larkin and others, there can be a baleful sub-energy to Hitchens’ playfulness and his epaterations and his bombshells. His rampages in the name of decency can verge on contempt for the decent conventions. You sometimes read Christopher Hitchens and wish that Christopher Hitchens--the Hitchens who writes in this book so beautifully and complicatedly and humbly about beautiful, complicated heroes of the pen like George Orwell and Murray Kempton--would take this other Hitchens on.

Hitchens is not, for example, a Holocaust denier. But he is without doubt a Holocaust hair-splitter. When I read him pointlessly observing that the Nazis did not incinerate Jews on German soil--only on non-German soil--or that Europe’s Jews were not made into soap--only tortured and exterminated--I want the face to show the mask the door. His truth-compulsion has wandered away from its context and fallen into the dry well of a false emphasis. Abstract principle brings him close to the living, breathing thing he hates.

And yet Hitchens’ long defense, on the grounds of free intellectual inquiry, of the British Holocaust denier David Irving--though he recently bade a long overdue farewell to Irving in these pages--is of a piece with his project of outraging the right-thinking left back to its first principles. Hitchens’ brief for Irving was continuous with his essays on Larkin and Kipling, with his efforts to balance concrete, consistent politics with rejection of ideological purity. And because, by his very apologias for such figures, he himself enacts their ambiguities, Hitchens is at the same time astringently, and in full public view, examining himself as a writer and a thinker and a man.

The self-scouring is necessary, for the face tips into the mask in some of these essays, the provocateur suddenly hardening into the very thing that provokes him. “Good-bye to Berlin” is a richly layered and weirdly fixated rumination on how Isaiah Berlin’s insecurity about being a Jew in England made him servile in the presence of power. Hitchens’ caustic conclusion, that Berlin’s pluralism came as a result of his obsequious “long service to a multiplicity of masters” is something to reckon with, not least because Hitchens refuses to detach Berlin’s political thought from his idea of Berlin’s character the way he separates Larkin’s poetry from its creator’s clotted values. Perhaps in the end, for this highly political animal, art is the only human activity independent of the agora.

In the course of subtly savaging Berlin, Hitchens calls him--ridiculously--”vulgar.” This is where the noble choler, colliding with the self-righteous zeal, sinks into the Oxbridge sneer. Driven by his avenging fury, Hitchens becomes the bully he most despises.

The same hardening occurs on the subject of Zionism. Hitchens likes to observe, in essay after essay, that one of Zionism’s founders, Max Nordau, also wrote a book called “Degeneration,” which seethed with misogyny, homophobia and crude phrenological notions and which the Nazis used in their assault on “decadence.” Thus Zionism, as Hitchens likes to see it, is the desiccated fruit of self-hatred, the mirror image of the Jew in anti-Semitic eyes.

But Hitchens fails to mention that aestheticism’s emphasis on the self, its destruction of bourgeois morality, its tendency toward dehumanization paved the way, not always unwittingly, for fascism, and that this was the crux of Nordau’s prescient critique, vicious as its excesses were. We do not learn from Hitchens, the thoroughgoing secularist, that Nordau was blocked from succeeding Theodor Herzl, founder of Zionism, because of his thoroughgoing secularism; and that, despite Nordau’s notorious remark that “he didn’t know” there were Arabs in Palestine, he made sharp objections to their displacement. In other words, the tangle of Nordau’s values resembled that of Larkin and Mencken, but Hitchens excludes Nordau from his complicated project of humanizing an adversarial politics. As for the Nazis’ exploitation of Nordau’s book, I am praying that Hitchens’ Trotskyist obliteration of Clinton does not fall into the wrong hands.

When Hitchens keeps his face, his humanity, in the ascendant, he is a blessing. His hatred of consensus produces gems, like the corrective to Raymond Williams (originally given as an address to the Raymond Williams society!) and his lovely essay on the debt the Irish owe to the example of American democracy (first presented as a lecture at the Belfast Literature Festival!). An essay on Tom Clancy is hilarious and surprisingly fresh; Hitchens on Andy Warhol has almost a boyish openness and curiosity; he is sympathetic and lithe on Dorothy Parker; admiringly, mischievously, almost parodically mondain on Gore Vidal; wry and wise and disenchanted on Christopher Isherwood. A long marvelous essay on Patrick O’Brian, the author of sea adventure stories, reveals in its celebration of O’Brian’s earthly facticity something about Hitchens’ worldview. O’Brian’s “stark realism,” his naked taxonomies, seem to affect Hitchens like the liberation of an occupied city. He viscerally hates the way power separates the names of things from the meaning of things.

Oscar Wilde’s name appears over and over in this volume, as if it were a self-administered benediction. It was Oscar Wilde, of course, who (precariously) struck a humane balance between the vulnerable face and the gadfly’s icy mask. For Hitchens, who writes so feelingly and well about Wilde, the image of The Great Inverter is perhaps a spur and a reminder. But the temptations of the mask are too great if one stays with Wilde. Hitchens is well aware of this; the O’Brian side of his nature is too strong. For Hitchens does not navigate by Wildean paradox and Wildean style, but by the cold earthly facticity of Wilde alone, in jail, broken by the bullies and the bigots and the philistines. As Hitchens says of life at sea in an old man-of-war: “One false guess about the weather and it was all over.” It is necessary and good to have Christopher Hitchens, and his compass, and his coruscating forecasts.