Hitchens - Mortality

ALSO BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

Books
Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger
Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies
Imperial Spoils: The Curious Case of the Elgin Marbles
Why Orwell Matters
No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton
Letters to a Young Contrarian
The Trial of Henry Kissinger
Thomas Jefferson: Author of America
Thomas Paines Rights of Man: A Biography
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
The Portable Atheist
Hitch-22: A Memoir
Mortality

Pamphlets
Karl Marx and the Paris Commune
The Monarchy: A Critique of Britains Favorite Fetish
The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice
A Long Short War: The Liberation of Iraq

Essays
Prepared for the Worst: Essays and Minority Reports
For the Sake of Argument
Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere
Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays
Arguably

Collaborations
James Callaghan: The Road to Number Ten (with Peter Kellner)
Blaming the Victims (edited with Edward Said)
When the Borders Bleed: The Struggle of the Kurds
(photographs by Ed Kash)
International Territory: The United Nations
(photographs by Adam Bartos)
Vanity Fairs Hollywood (with Graydon Carter and David Friend)

Copyright 2012 by Christopher Hitchens

Signal is an imprint of McClelland & Stewart, a division of Random House of Canada Limited

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency is an infringement of the copyright law.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Hitchens, Christopher
Mortality / Christopher Hitchens.
eISBN: 978-0-7710-3923-2
1. Hitchens, ChristopherHealth. 2. EsophagusCancerPatientsUnited StatesBiography. 3. Terminally illUnited StatesBiography. 4. JournalistsUnited StatesBiography. 5. Authors, AmericanBiography. 6. AtheistsUnited StatesBiography. 7. Death. I. Title.
PN 4874. H 52 A 3 2012 070.92 C2012-903508-4

McClelland & Stewart,
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v3.1

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Vanity Fair, in
which much of this book first appeared,
in somewhat different form.

At a dinner in Los Angeles this spring, a young actor named Emile Hirsch came up to me in a state of somewhat high excitement. He knew I had worked with Christopher Hitchens for many years, and he just wanted to talk about Christopher with someone who knew him. Hed read Hitch-22 and was well into the Kissinger book, and he said that Christophers writing had affected him in a way that almost no one elses had. In the months following Christophers death, I had similar encounters with young people who felt compelled to talk about how his writing had touched them. Its no exaggeration to say that Christopher had few equals in the sphere of spirited commentary. But there was something in his saucy fearlessness, in his great turbine of a mind, and in his sociable but unpredictable brand of anarchy that seriously touched kids in their twenties and early thirties in much the same way that Hunter S. Thompson had a generation before. Young Emile asked if there was going to be a memorial service, and I told him that there would be one in New York and that we were bookmarking April 20th as a tentative date.

The memorial was indeed held on the 20th, in the Great Hall at Cooper Union in Greenwich Village. My Vanity Fair colleagues Aime Bell (Christophers longtime editor at the magazine) and Sara Marks organized the readingsall of them from Christophers own work. We wanted to produce a program that would be cozy and loving, but in no way sentimental or mawkish. And the great and the good of English letters turned up to pay tributeand to console his widow, Carol, and his three children. Martin Amis, Tom Stoppard, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, and James Fenton were there and they all spoke. Editors such as Anna Wintour, David Remnick, Jim Kelly, and Rick Stengel came; so did Christophers brother Peter, Andrew Sullivan, Christopher Buckley, Andrew and Leslie Cockburn and their daughter the fine actress Olivia Wilde, and Andrews brother Patrick. The Bush administration was represented by former deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitza remnant of the curious right turn Christopher took in the lead-up to the Iraq War. Hollywood was represented by Sean Pennand, as I was pleased to see, by young Mr. Hirsch.

After the memorial, the participants retired to the Waverly Inn nearby and drank and smoked in the sunshine and reminisced about Christopher. Although the day was bathed in sorrow, there was a magical quality to the afternoon as it spilled into the evening and through to midnight, when there were still a dozen or more mourners. For those who were there, Christophers memorial was, as we used to say in the 1960s, a happening, and a day we will not soon forget.

For the fact is that Christopher was one of lifes singular charactersa wit, a charmer, a troublemaker, and a dear and devoted friend. He was a man of insatiable appetitesfor cigarettes, for scotch, for company, for great writing, and, above all, for conversation. That he had an output to equal what he took in was the miracle in the man. Youd be hard-pressed to find a writer who could match the outpouring of exquisitely crafted columns, essays, articles, and books he produced over the past four decades. He wrote oftenconstantly, in fact, and right up to the endthe words in this moving volume being among his last. And Christopher wrote fast, frequently without the benefit of a second draft or even corrections. Perhaps in the back of his mind he knew that his time on the stage would end in the second act, and he was racing to get it all in, and to get it all out. I can recall a lunch in 1991, when I was editing the New York Observer, and he and Aime and I got together for a quick bite at a restaurant on Madison, no longer there. Christophers copy was due early that afternoon. Pre-lunch tumblers of scotch were followed by a couple of glasses of wine during the meal and then a couple of post-meal cognacs. That was his intake. After stumbling back to the office, we set him up at a rickety table and an old Olivetti, and in a symphony of clacking he produced a 1,000-word column of near perfection in under half an hour.

Christopher was one of the first writers I called when I came to Vanity Fair, in 1992. Six years before, I had asked him to write for Spy. That offer was politely rejected. The Vanity Fair approach had a fee attached, though, and to my everlasting credit, he accepted and was the signature columnist for the magazine from then on. With the exception of Dominick Dunne (who died in 2009), no writer has been more associated with