Several blasts from a virtuoso iconoclast

As both political journalist and literary critic, Christopher Hitchens is a virtuoso. Absurdly erudite and fantastically footloose (a dispatch might find him musing on Waugh or Wodehouse or high in the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan), equipped with a fiercely dialectical habit of mind and armed with a stiletto for a pen, he writes with the impassioned prejudices of a man who refuses to obey. The conventions of deference mean little to him: Here, after all, is a man who spent much of the ‘90s beating up on a frail nun who worked in the slums of Calcutta and then went on to gleefully testify against Mother Teresa’s canonization.

For Hitchens, loathing is a kind of oxygen. As he tells us in “Love, Poverty, and War,” which collects a sheaf of recent criticism, polemic and reportage from numerous publications, including the Atlantic Monthly, Vanity Fair and the Nation, “I wake up every day to a sensation of pervading disgust and annoyance.”

One senses that this is not exactly a complaint, yet if Hitchens finds himself habitually disappointed by politics (“a sordid auction between banal populists”), literature taps into a deep reservoir of generous enthusiasm. For some years now, Hitchens has served as the Atlantic’s de facto chief book critic, an enviable brief that allows him to write about more or less what he wants to.

But fear not, Hitch hasn’t gone soft on us. Religion, “that most toxic of foes ... the most base and contemptible of the forms assumed by human egotism and stupidity,” inspires pages and pages of devastatingly argued bile. Or take his strenuous assault on the Winston Churchill cult, a brilliant bit of revisionism that leaves the statesman’s reputation in tatters: “He seems to have used crisis after crisis as an excuse to extend his own power,” concludes Hitchens, who also challenges us to reconsider what we think we know about the origins of World War II. His argument is breathtakingly elastic: He seriously entertains the notion that Britain might have negotiated a peace with Hitler, only to ventilate, a few pages later, on “the pornographic and catastrophically destructive nature of the foe.”

He is even more merciless on the JFK cult. But Hitchens’ contrariness does not always serve him well. In an embarrassing and deeply narcissistic instance of faux bad-boy grandstanding, Hitchens hits the streets of New York to break a series of Bloomberg era laws prohibiting smoking in restaurants and feeding birds in Central Park. Such bravery! Hitchens knows a thing or two about real oppression, and he unwittingly makes a mockery of those who have to endure daily life in a genuinely horrid place like Pyongyang, which he searingly evokes in one of the finest pieces in this collection.

This escapade highlights a troubling spread of hysteria and bombast in Hitchens’ social and political criticism. Since the mid-’90s, he has been undergoing a complex political transformation, bidding farewell to his erstwhile comrades on the left. The events of 9/11 accelerated this process. He broke with the Nation, where he was a longtime columnist, after a series of nasty exchanges (several reprinted here) with Noam Chomsky over Afghanistan. It has to be said that Hitchens gets the better of Chomsky, who exerts a depressing sway over certain sectors of the American left. Hitchens calls Chomsky “a great moral and political tutor in the years of the Indochina war” but rightly fillets him for his “weird and sinister assumption that bin Laden is a ventriloquist for thwarted voices of international justice.”

But other Hitchens’ post-9/11 commentaries make for jarring reading. In the days after the World Trade Center fell, I was one of those who found his notions about “Islamic fascism” soothing, but it strikes me now as an overwrought formulation. Or consider his positively apocalyptic proclamation about the forces of Bin Ladenism being “an enemy for life, as well as an enemy of life”: This sounds virtually indistinguishable from the kind of harangue one hears in a routine Al Qaeda transmission.

Hitchens has always been able to modulate his anger and aim a well-selected dart at his targets, but a figure like Michael Moore throws him way off his game: Moore may be a buffoonishly unsubtle filmmaker, but a Leni Riefenstahl he is not.

Finally, I question Hitchens’ wisdom in reprinting an October 2003 dispatch from Iraq, which at times comes close to sounding like a rewritten Bush administration press release. His tone is defensive and churlish, and he strains to justify the poorly handled occupation -- at one point, he resorts to a sterile whelp against the “defeatist mainstream press.” “What if it works?” Hitchens pointedly asks. Fair enough, but so is the rejoinder “When will it?” In “For the Sake of Argument,” a collection published in 1993, Hitchens stated admirably, “One must never let a euphemism or false consolation pass uncontested.”

At a time when our rulers have elevated false consolations into a political doctrine, it is distressing to see Hitchens endorsing such a dubious initiative.

Matthew Price is an occasional contributor to Book Review.