‘Arguably’: Essays on Everything
A review of ‘Arguably’, by Christopher Hitchens; Atlantic Books, 2021.
I am slightly reluctant to write at any length about Christopher Hitchens. The millennial thinker whose passion for ideas was kindled by the Hitch’s YouTube archive is practically a trope. Of course, the irony is that Hitchens, following Marx, warned against hero-worship, and much enjoyed killing sacred cows (Clinton, Kissinger) while praising those, like the MLK biographer David Garrow, who did the same. He was also fond of finding redeeming traits in those who had been roundly condemned. In his memorable defence of ‘hate speech’ at the University of Toronto, he said he had learned more from the work of the Holocaust denier David Irving than he had from studying A.J.P. Taylor at Oxford. Hitchens was, if nothing else, a contrarian.
And contrarians are fun. In Arguably, a collection of some of his finest essays, he concerns himself with American isolationism, female humour (or the perceived lack of it), Gore Vidal, the hijab, waiters who pour wine without asking, and some 95 other subjects. Invariably he is stylish, funny, contentious, aggressive and utterly unapologetic, whether dissecting contemporary political events or analysing the work of Stephen Spender and Philip Larkin. In essays like ‘Why Orwell Still Matters’, he sketches a journalist who made ‘truth-telling a matter of style’ and was right on the three big questions of the 20th century: imperialism, Fascism and Communism. Elsewhere, he deals with the fallout of the American invasion of Vietnam, particularly the deformities of children caused by the U.S. military’s use of ‘Agent Orange’.
In essays like ‘Why Orwell Still Matters’, he sketches a journalist who made ‘truth-telling a matter of style’.
His most amusing essays concern subjects like the overuse of the word ‘like’, (‘The Other L-Word’) and how men’s bathrooms had fallen out of fashion as places where men could meet for a quick and easy sexual encounter. (‘So Many Men’s Rooms, So Little Time’). (Per the Labour MP Tom Driberg after the vote on decriminalising homosexuality, ‘I rather miss the old days.’) Hitchens’s brief history of the blow job (‘As American as Apple Pie’) is not just interesting but really quite striking in how it succeeds in elevating its grungy (and as we learn, very American) subject. It has to be said, though: Hitchens is more of a rhetorician and stylist than a serious intellectual, and that is plain to see when he concerns himself with more weighty subjects.
Much ink has been spilt in the attempt to clarify exactly what it was in which the Hitch believed. In his youth, we know he was a member of a small Trotsykist sect; he voted for Margaret Thatcher (describing her as ‘pure sex’); was a fierce critic of the nanny state; despised the religious and the spiritual; championed the War in Iraq (even when things went pear-shaped); and finally shed his socialism, admitting capitalism had proved itself to be ‘the more revolutionary system’. There are threads that run through his work, however, and they are plain to see in these essays. First among these is an extreme dislike of anything that, in his view, smacks of totalitarianism. He is deeply averse to control, whether by an Iranian theocracy or a state government that tells you not to smoke in bars. Hitchens was a small-l libertarian, in other words, but he did not think freedom was exclusively negative. He spoke of the unfreedom of a single mother without state support, and attacked political libertarians for fussing about the almighty state while ignoring the almighty corporation.
Much ink has been spilt in the attempt to clarify exactly what it was in which the Hitch believed.
I would not go so far as to say, as George Galloway did, that Hitchens ‘writes like an angel’, but he does write very well. Somewhere, he recalls Simon Hoggart, then of the Guardian newspaper, suggesting he ‘write more how you talk’, with the happy upshot being that Hitchens’s later style is elegant and witty and precise, but also personal: as I have written elsewhere, it is a hallmark of good writers, essayists in particular, that they make their readers feel personally addressed. Some will lament the absence of a unifying theme in Arguably, and Hitchens himself said in an interview about his writing that he feared he sacrificed depth for width. But the upside of such a tendency is that you get collections as eclectic as this one. You can quite happily open the thing at random and start reading.
It is a crying shame that Hitchens is no longer with us, for the simple reason that whatever he said, he said it well. He wasn’t boring. One gets the impression, too, that at a time of ‘culture war’, and the mass-taking of offence, he would have had a hell of a time hurling himself into the fray and upsetting people. In fact a small cottage industry concerned with predicting what Hitchens would have thought about this or that hot-button issue has emerged in his absence. But, as Auden informed us in his poem ‘In Memory on W.B. Yeats, ‘Time that is intolerant/ Of the brave and innocent,/ And indifferent in a week/ To a beautiful physique,/ Worships language.’ As such Hitchens lives on his writing, taking shots at cultural and political orthodoxies in his distinctive style. Arguably is — well, arguably his greatest collection of essays, and certainly, if you have not read his work before, reader, a very good place to start.
