‘Mortality’: A Deathbed Dispatch
A review of ‘Mortality’, by Christopher Hitchens; Twelve Books, 2012.
So the story goes, when a priest came to the bedside of the dying Voltaire and asked him, ‘Do you renounce the Devil?’, Voltaire replied, ‘Now, now. This is no time to be making enemies.’ The tale is probably apocryphal; but Christopher Hitchens, who admired Voltaire a great deal, liked to tell it. Some claim that on his own deathbed, Hitchens, who was about as staunch an atheist as an atheist can get, toyed with converting to Christianity. It was convenient for them that Hitchens could not argue back, because he would have disembowelled them for making such a laughable claim. Those around Hitchens at the time of his death put the record straight.
What Hitchens did do on his deathbed was write a wonderful collection of essays about dying. The seven essays that make up Mortality were first published in Vanity Fair, whose then-editor Graydon Carter, furnished the collection with a foreword. It is a wave-goodbye from a man who never surrendered to mawkishness or self-pity, even as his body gave in to oesophageal cancer, the result, perhaps, of close to a lifetime spent smoking. The result is something between a memoir and a meditation, a kind of deathbed dispatch, a journalist’s account of dying. It is full of the same easy erudition, lyricism and candour that marked all of his work. Mortality is wholly consistent with the man who wrote it.
It is a wave-goodbye from a man who never surrendered to mawkishness or self-pity.
It opens with the thud of diagnosis: Hitchens, on a book tour in the U.S. promoting Hitch-22, his memoir, loses his voice. Within pages, he has gone from being ‘a writer who wrote about death’ to ‘an object lesson in what it’s like to die.’ It is a theme he returns to repeatedly—not out of narcissism, but because it is his narrative centre of gravity. The voice, metaphorical and literal, is the drumbeat of the book: its loss is both medical symptom and symbolic insult. He lived by argument, conversation and rhetoric. It is a particularly cruel form of silencing. The ‘religious’ cranks who rejoiced in his pain claimed that God had taken away the organ he had blasphemed with. (Hitchens’s response: ‘That isn’t the only organ I blasphemed with.’)
The essays that follow veer between the philosophical and physiological, the political and the personal. Hitchens has little time for the euphemisms that have accumulated around illness. He dismisses the notion of ‘fighting cancer’, noting the silliness of assigning a military metaphor to a cellular rebellion. He winces at the condescension of those who urge him to stay strong, or engage in wishful thinking. Perhaps this a bit uncharitable—after all, it can be difficult to say the right thing to a dying man—but then again, he is dying. All that said, he never comes across as bitter. Certainly he does not feel sorry for himself or expect anyone else to.
It is to his massive credit that he does not deal with that with which many books on death deal, which is life. Of course, death and life are not opposed: death is merely the completion of life: without death, life is a redundant concept. But Hitchens wants to keep us here, in the present tense, concerned with the business of dying and the experience of accepting our coat from what Eliot calls the Eternal Footman—then joining him. There is no lengthy reflection on the beauty of living, on gratitude for past glories or regret for failures and mistakes. His restraint is admirable.
Hitchens wants to keep us here, in the present tense, concerned with the business of dying.
Despite all of this, the great theme of Mortality is not, in fact, death, but truth. This is not truth as comprehended by motivational speakers or theologians, but the grim, unvarnished, material truth of, say, a George Orwell—the truth that does not offer comfort but simply describes the way things are. Hitchens writes from the front lines of bodily decay with a reporter’s eye and a Stoic’s refusal to flinch. There are no consolations offered here. There is no faith, there are no promises or silver linings. As he puts it, with typical verve and brio, ‘To the dumb question “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: “Why not?”’
It helps that Hitchens is darkly amused by the theatre of dying. He is particularly good on the social performances surrounding illness — the way friends and strangers alike tiptoe round the word ‘cancer,’ or, worse, insist on injecting hope where none exists. As Hitchens puts it, he has Stage IV cancer and ‘there is no Stage V.’ He takes aim at those who, à la Simone Weil, hint that suffering might be ‘spiritually enriching,’ calling such suggestions ‘contemptible masochism.’
And even as he weakens, he keeps the prose sharp. There are moments of sudden, lyrical beauty, flashes of the stylist who could summon wit and wisdom in a single, fluid phrase. But more often than not, the prose is stripped-down, functional, even journalistic. He is not writing to impress. He is reporting from the frontline of The End.
There are moments of sudden, lyrical beauty.
The book ends much too soon; and consequently the last chapter consists of notes Hitchens jotted down in his final days: unfinished thoughts, aphorisms, fragments of argument that act as a kind of negative space around what he might have written, had he been allowed—or rather, able—to finish. Some are clever (‘If I convert it’s because it’s better that a believer dies than that an atheist does’) and others almost stirring (‘I want to do death in the active and not the passive tense’). But all feel like echoes from a voice already receding.
This absence of closure is not a failure of the book, but its point. We go to our graves with unfinished business; that is in the nature of dying. When tradition tells us that to come to terms with out death is to live fully, it is this very principle it is invoking. To come to terms with death is to accept everything, for there is no way to make things right. There is no resolution. We are here, and then we are not. Hitchens does not leave things in order. He dies, as it were, mid-sentence.
The Hitch, I imagine, would not have liked that last paragraph, and we can be sure he had no aim to convey some deep truth about the human condition by his dying. What he wants to tell us, or rather show us, is that death is not a metaphor, and it is not teachable. It is just the end. For him, courage in the face of death meant looking it squarely in the face and refusing to lie about what one sees.
What he wants to tell us, or rather show us, is that death is not a metaphor, and it is not teachable.
Of course, courage is redundant if one feels no fear. Courage depends on fear. And we can perceive it beneath the prose in Mortality. We wonder if his unyielding materialism and relentless rationalism might be straining beneath the enormous weight of impending death. His perceptible self-assurance never quite captures the emotional dimension of dying. In his desire to avoid sentimentality—to keep up the habit of lifetime—he leaves a space where, for instance, wife and children, friends and colleagues, might be found. The life receding behind these essays remains, in some sense, impersonal.
Still, it would be a bit petty to fault Mortality for not being something it never claimed to be. It is not a memoir. It is not a spiritual journey. It is not a plea for pity or a legacy project. It is a dispatch from the edge of the abyss, delivered with the same caustic lucidity that made Hitchens a compelling and indeed necessary presence in public life. And like all of his best work, it compels not because it flatters the reader, but because it presents a point of view with lyricism and humour and without reservation or—God forbid—apology. He wanted to have the last word, and though he didn’t—death always wins, after all—he spoke until he couldn’t. And in that sense, he died in the active tense.
