The greatness of Christopher Hitchens has always been his brutality. Say what you will about the guy — and there is plenty to be said — he has never let his concern for anyone get in the way of the truth. So let me say it like it is: not all of me, not all of me for sure, but a good part of me is glad that Hitchens is apparently dying at the age of 62.
It’s probably not for the reasons you think. I don’t hate him for attacking Mother Teresa, God, the Clintons or anybody else who has been in his sharp-quilled sights over the years. It’s funny the way he chomps sacred cows with salivating gusto. Nor do I hate him because he’s a bilious, self-important Brit with pretentious literary chums like Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie. (Did you see that Atlantic video with the scarecrow-haired, chemo-riddled Christopher — he dislikes being called Chris, and I’m not the type to call a dying man names — where Amis was lurking around what looked to be Hitchens’ living room? You know Amis must be taking notes for a forthcoming book: The Last Days of My Chum Hitch.)
In fact I don’t hate Hitchens at all. But I did not pray for his recovery on last week’s “Everybody Pray for Hitchens Day” even though I have been known to pray now and then.
No, part of me is glad that Hitchens is dying because his death would make me feel better about not pursuing the model of the writing life he exemplifies: the hard-living bad boy with a pen of gold.
In an interview, Charlie Rose asked if Hitchens if he could do it all again, would he drink and smoke like did, knowing that cancer might be the penalty. Hitchens answered:
I think all the time I’ve felt that life is a wager, and that I was probably getting more out of leading a bohemian existence, as a writer, than I would have if I didn’t. Writing is what’s important to me and anything that helps me do that – or enhances and prolongs and deepens and sometimes intensifies argument and conversation – is worth it to me, sure.
Although he was good enough to say he “wouldn’t recommend it to others,” his death would be excellent proof of the wisdom of that non-recommendation. If he hangs on until there is at least a seven in the first digit of his age, he might inspire others to risk this devil’s bargain.
Trust me, it is tempting for a writer, especially one like me who was laid off from a plum newspaper job last year, to try to produce words by chasing the old Hemingway/Kerouac/Hitchens “Bohemian” model. Maybe it would be mere mimicry, but how alluring it has seemed at times for me (who has made a decent but not spectacular living for 15+ years as a writer) and countless writing students to sink into a life of booze, cigarettes and willing women, hoping that the alchemy of drugs and flesh will propel us into some new level of literary achievement.
Look at the immortal Jack Kerouac. Is it that he was so brilliant when he wrote “On The Road” or just that when he was young he had a particularly good benzedrine binge and the foresight to have a typewriter loaded with a scroll of paper in front of him during it? Was it the brain or was it the brain on drugs? In the last section of his semi-autobiographical last book, Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46, he wrote, “There is nothing new under the sun. All is vanity. Pass me the chalice, wifey, and there better be wine in it.”
Some life strategy, that! At least he had the good grace to die at 47 and thus lay down a proper warning. Papa Hemingway, for his part in the building of the myth, had four wives, four great novels, and a mighty thirst. He killed himself with a shotgun at 61. Perhaps Ernie’s great writing was only possible because he was a depressive seeking to make something beautiful and soothing. He sought thrills to escape inner torment and then retreated with bottles of hooch and one or the other of his women to warm climes to indulge in fantasies with run-on sentences — often taking as his subject the way men fill their minds with crap in order to avoid life’s cruel truths.
There’s no amount of hooch you could pour into most of us to render us Hemingways. But isn’t it pretty to think so? So far at 44 I have published one thin and silly book, appeared on TV a handful of times to discuss stories I’ve reported and to be a foil on a reality show about a singer looking for love, and written a few stories for the New York Times (including one that provoked Hithchensonian levels of public outrage, a satirical piece that suggested bankers need and deserve to earn gigantic salaries because life in Manhattan can be expensive, man).
I’m no Hitchens, successwise. Sobrietywise, I have a couple drinks a week. A toke maybe three times a year. A cigar twice a decade. Yoga thrice weekly when I’m being “good.” Therapy for my head, vitamins and kale for my body. So far zero wives but a good record of monogamy.
I still have all my hair, so it wasn’t that I envied Hitchens the boyishly blond mane which lasted through his 50s. But I certainly did marvel at its luster through his years of debauchery, wondering what genetics or form of internal pickling was allowing it to hang in there so well. I cannot say I was glad to see that chemo took his hair from him. But I can say I noted it.
Sobriety, or semi-sobriety, is its own reward. It doesn’t have to pay off in bestsellers. When you are not drinking away your inner feelings, they matter more because you have to feel them. Hell, it isn’t, for example, easy writing a piece wishing a fellow writer death: my conscience is niggling at me.
I will heed it by noting that it is the idea that Hitchens represents that I want to die far more than I want the actual man to pass away. I am quite sure he came in naked like I did and has done the best he could for the most part.
But if Hitchens does outfox Cancer, I’ll have to revisit a fantasy I thought I left behind in my early 20s and wonder if really I’m a wimp, wonder if the life of whiskey, hangovers and hurt feelings is the path to shedding away internal interference and allowing a greater writer to emerge.
I’d like to think that maybe just maybe the new book I’m writing or the screenplay or something else someday will speak some truth I’ve been trying to get at for my entire career, that I was right to do it my way, not his.
You see, I value truth as much as Hitchens. I just don’t want to have to die for it.
