Christopher Hitchens - Hitch-22

Copyright 2010 by Christopher Hitchens

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The Postscript on first appeared in Vanity Fair, November 2007.

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First eBook Edition: June 2010

ISBN: 978-0-446-56896-8

For James Fenton

I can claim copyright only in myself, and occasionally in those who are either dead or have written about the same events, or who have a decent expectation of anonymity, or who are such appalling public shits that they have forfeited their right to bitch.

For those I have loved, or who have been so lenient and gracious as to have loved me, I have not words enough here, and I remember with gratitude how they have made me speechless in return.

The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews

Not to be born is the best for man

The second best is a formal order

The dances pattern, dance while you can.

Dance, dance, for the figure is easy

The tune is catching and will not stop

Dance till the stars come down with the rafters

Dance, dance, dance till you drop.

W.H. Auden, Deaths Echo

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of the Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow

Ah, words are poor receipts for what time hath stole away

John Clare, Remembrances

What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.

George Orwell: England Your England: Socialism and the English Genius [1941]

Read your own obituary notice; they say you live longer. Gives you second wind. New lease of life.

Leopold Bloom in Ulysses

B EFORE ME IS a handsome edition of Face to Face, the smart magazine that goes out to the supporters of Londons National Portrait Gallery. It contains the usual notices of future events and exhibitions. The page that has caught and held my eye is the one which calls attention to a show that starts on 10 January 2009, titled Martin Amis and Friends. The event is to feature the work of a gifted photographer named Angela Gorgas, who was Martins lover between 1977 and 1979. On the page is a photograph taken in Paris in 1979. It shows, from left to right, myself and James Fenton and Martin, ranged along a balustrade that overlooks the city of Paris. I remember the occasion well: it was after a decent lunch somewhere in Montmartre and we would have been looking over Angelas shapely shoulders at the horrible wedding-cake architecture of Sacre Coeur. (Perhaps this explains the faintly dyspeptic expression on my features.) In the accompanying prose, apparently written by Angela, is the following sentence about the time she first met the bewitching young Amis:

Martin was literary editor of the New Statesman, working with the late Christopher Hitchens and Julian Barnes, who was married to Pat Kavanagh, Martins then literary agent.

So there it is in cold print, the plain unadorned phrase that will one day become unarguably true. It is not given to everyone to read of his own death, let alone when announced in passing in such a matter-of-fact way. As I write, in the dying months of the year 2008, having just received this reminder-note from the future, that future still contains the opening of the exhibition and the publication of this memoir. But the exhibition, and its catalogue references, also exemplify still-vital elements of my past. And now, rather abruptly:

Between the idea

And the reality

Between the motion

And the act

Falls the Shadow.

T.S. Eliots Hollow Men do not constitute my cohort, or so I hope, even though one might sometimes wish to be among the stoics who have crossed, with direct eyes, to deaths other Kingdom. The fact is that all attempts to imagine ones own extinction are futile by definition. One can only picture the banal aspects of this event: not in my case the mourners at the funeral (again excluded by the very rules of the game itself) but the steady thunk of emails into my inbox on the day of my demise, and the way in which my terrestrial mailbox will also become congested, until somebody does something to arrest the robotic electronic stupidity, or until failure to pay up leads to an abrupt cancellation of the bills and checks and solicitations, none of them ever in my lifetime arriving in the right proportions on the right day. (May it be that I gain a lifetime subscription to