From Andrew Sullivan's diagnosis of Christopher Hitchens' cause of death:
"But what struck me about alcohol and Hitch was that it was a kind of rocket fuel. What killed him was not the alcohol as such or the many years of smoking, but the force of will that simply didn't rest, and seemed to punish his body with ludicrously brutal days and nights of sleepless drive."See, this right here is exactly the kind of romanticized, besotted fluffernutter that gets people into all kinds of trouble. Tempts them to, say, invade the wrong country under false pretenses or radically revise the record of a dangerously bad president and his disastrous agenda into a modern Conservative creation myth.
Because of Mr. Hitchens' death, four facts are known.
1. Mr. Hitchens died of complication of the esophageal cancer.
Christopher Hitchens' esophageal cancer, in his own words
December 16, 2011|By Eryn Brown, Los Angeles Times Writer Christopher Hitchens, 62, died Thursday of pneumonia, a complication of the esophageal cancer he battled for more than a year.
...
2. Mr. Hitchens was an alcoholic with a prodigious addiction.
3. Mr. Hitchens was a chain-smoker.
4. The links between esophageal cancer and alcohol are well-established, as is the fact that the risk increases dramatically when when smoking is added to the mix:Until the day he died, my old man swore that it wasn't booze that had doomed him.
Nearly 50 percent of cancers of the mouth, pharynx, and larynx are associated with heavy drinking. People who drink large quantities of alcohol over time have an increased risk of these cancers as compared with abstainers (8,9). If they drink and smoke, the increase in risk is even more dramatic (5,6).
It was stress. Or it was the effects of formaldehyde he had worked with as a science teacher years before. Or it was something else. He was adept at spinning out rhetorically interesting reasons why various things -- large and small -- had gone wrong in his life, including why he was ending it in a shabby nursing home half a continent away from his children in the custody of very unpleasant people to whom he had signed his rights away.
But it was the booze.
The booze cost him his first marriage, lashed him to the mast of a deeply dysfunctional second marriage, crippled his career and, the day before Christmas Eve several years ago, I got the call that it had finally killed him.
So, Mr. Sullivan, memorialize your friend to your heart's content. Drape the black bunting. Turn your mirrors to the wall. Start a once-a-week feature called "The Hitchin' Post".
But it wasn't a "force of will" that killed him any more than it was the vengeful act of an invisible Sky God.
It was the alcohol and the cigarettes that killed him.
And a million words of wishful bluster will not make it otherwise any more than they can remake the real, tragic legacy of Ronald Reagan or the real, tragic consequences of the conquest of Iraq.
17 comments:
There may be no clearer indicator to me than the desperate need to disguise the addiction and defend against any possible attack on the supply lines. The lies, obfuscation, misdirection and eventual flight are familiar to me.
Sullivan is what we in the trade call a contemporaneous mythologist...
...others might say he just makes shit up.
Hey... completely unrelated but how about that guy in Iowa calling Newt a "fucking asshole"....right to his "fat face" (quote the rude)!!
It just brightened up my whole day! I cant watch it without hearing "Ode to Joy"!! Yay!!!
I'd say Sullivan was worse than that.
He was using the classic broken pot defense:
-The pot was already broken when I borrowed it;
-The pot was fine when I returned it;
-I never borrowed the pot in the first place.
In this case the booze and smokes didn't kill him and if it did, it was absolutely necessary to his prodigious writing skills.
Basically he was casting Hitchens as some sort of literary Gallagher Plus
Katha Pollitt (one of his long suffering editors) had a very good piece on Hitchens which really demolished this argument:
His drinking was not something to admire, and it was not a charming foible. Maybe sometimes it made him warm and expansive, but I never saw that side of it. What I saw was that drinking made him angry and combative and bullying, often toward people who were way out of his league—elderly guests on the Nation cruise, interns (especially female interns). Drinking didn’t make him a better writer either—that’s another myth. Christopher was such a practiced hand, with a style that was so patented, so integrally an expression of his personality, he was so sure he was right about whatever the subject, he could meet his deadlines even when he was totally sozzled. But those passages of pointless linguistic pirouetting? The arguments that don’t track if you look beneath the bravura phrasing? Forgive the cliché: that was the booze talking.
Hitchins is just another asshole I can check off my list of people I've outlived.
Everbody's wrong about something; Sullivan about nearly everything, and Hitchens about Iraq.
That, and the causes of his demise, do not diminish his reasoning on man-made religions. Not at all.
To imply that alcoholism and smoking, however deadly, immediately renders his arguments on everything suspect is juvenile at best, willfully ignorant at worst.
His is a great mind despite his personal foibles, and he was flat-ass wrong on Bush, but he nailed pretty much everything else.
Let him be, he did more good than most I have known.
Pollitt nailed it, I think. From some of this hagiography, you'd think Hitchens always won, but I saw him flummoxed on more than one occasion, always looking half in the bag and sort of sputtering (one of these was an appearance on The Daily Show, actually, and Stewart wasn't exactly holding his feet to the fire).
BUT...playing DA here, we really have no evidence that he was an alcoholic, at least based on, say, DSM criteria (although we could make a good guess). We just know he seemed to drink a lot. Seems to me Sullivan's post about his friend reflected his observation that Hitchens was driven in all things, burned the candle, etc. Of course booze and cigs killed him...I just felt Sullivan was making a subtler point.
If you think Sullivan was glossing over CH's self-destructive habits, then, I guess I'd disagree. Doesn't make Hitchens less of the asshole he was. I'll definitely miss him, though.
As I count on you to provide timely, useful commentary and advice, the foremost questions on my mind are what will do in Andy, Bobo et al, and where can I order them a fatal supply?
As to Mr. Hitchens, I can say I will miss him very little. Despite his talents, he was, at root, an intolerant boor whose words lent less to the alleviation of human suffering than his persona and demeanor took away.
Where will we ever find his likes again? Why would we even look?
I knew Christopher Hitchens, who introduced me to Martin Amis, and liked them both quite a bit.
We talked at length one evening before going out for a drink, and he was kind, courteous and attentive to my every word.
Of course, I'll have to forgive him for not being drunk and not showing me his true colors or how much he detested most women.
We talked about literature, favorite writers (he adored George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) as the greatest of the English writers as did I (at the time)). He even agreed to read one of mine with whom he was not familiar.
I told Martin that I adored his father's, Kingsley, novels and he was gracious (even with the raised eyebrow and curled lip -CH's description) and told me softly that he would relay the compliment.
Now, did I believe Martin really would? No. Not really, but what a nice reply, I thought.
Did I believe Christopher really was interested in my every opinion? Perhaps, but it didn't make any difference to my honoring his work. Ever.
Did I think his Iraq attacks were justified by Salman's fatwa? Nope, but there again, that's my political persuasion, and although it bothered me quite a bit that he liked Wolfowitz, et al., and defended their idiocy, I attributed it to the craziness involved in some odd personal attractions and overwhelming Rushdie-love. And, yes, I've read most of his writings (okay, a lot of them anyway) and know how the Iraq flip looked in the face of his antiwarmongering past.
So, I'll miss him more than I can explain to strangers and wish that he hadn't died before he could change his mind about the Iraq crowd. Again.
S
I've enough acquaintance with humans, addictions, and alcohol to recognize projection when I see it.
I've seen, from a front row seat, three Hitchens debates, dozens on YouTube, read the books, essays, etc.
If Hitchens is brave enough to tell us that he recognizes his death at 62 was due to drink and cigs, and he's willing to die for the life it gave him, then it's really poor judgment to scurrilously attack him because others make excuses.
Hitch was fearless. And he wasn't anonymous.
I wish this blog equalled his insight and eloquence. I'm saddened by this skewed attack.
Hitch had blood on his hands. And refused to his dying breath to admit it.
So much for insight and eloquence. Like many writers, he found a profoundly dishonest way to say and write things such that he could be paid well. However, most dishonest writers didn't devote years of energy to igniting and then defending a senseless war that killed between 65,000 and a quarter million civilians, most of whom only committed the crime of being in the way of a war machine.
I really don't care what else he was or what else he did. All that blood makes everything else stink.
I'd prefer an honest man who can write a fair stick.
Hitchens wrote about IslamoFascism, a term useful to those who can parse the concept of theocracy versus democracy.
Now, I like neither, but the human prospect gleams a little brighter with the latter. Hitchens was less phlegmatic than I about it, and attacked refusals to see the Umma as a threat as blindness, personified by being against the Iraq war for what he thought trivial idealism.
Really, if you can't adjust your historical perspective to see Islam as a continuing and encroaching threat, I suppose it's best for your own peace of mind to hate Hitchens, Cassandra of anti-militarism.
Perhaps you hope humanity will cope with this ideological war better than it has with nationalism, racism, tribalism. Hitch was against all of them. His perspective was as broad as you brought. I've seen it over and over again, his delight in historical broadening, his deep erudition on how to think about future conflicts.
Up against Hitch are the caravan dogs, barking, barking...
Ormond, lovely; simply lovely.
It's like "they" said, you either love him or hate him; no middle ground.
Count me amongst those who love him.
"to see Islam as a continuing and encroaching threat"
I don't see any difference between the Christian Crazies and the radical Islamic fundamentalists Crazies. It's the theocracies that are the continuing encroaching threat to the planet. Now the Repug nutters want to let Churches engage in politics without losing their tax exempt status. See Walter Jones (R-NC) HR 3600. It would be hard not to find some good in anyone, but supporting an unjust an illegal war founded on obvious lies and resulting in so much harm to so many would seem to sort of overshadow most all else. I mean everyone makes mistakes but it is a dubious distinction to make a mistake resulting in unimaginable misery and death for so many innocent people. No, I might have trouble following all the arguments offered I do understand Islam and umma and it is no different than our Christian Crazies, you lost me there. I believe Bush used the word "crusade" in justifying the war that really appeals to the nuts out there which we seen to be so well endowed with.
Sorry to hear about your father's demise, and the fact that it coincides with this Season forevermore. Peace, DG.
See, IslamoFascism is where religion, business, the military, and the civil service all combine in one great all-powerful State. That's so totally different from what's happening here in the US. Because, um, Mohammed, not Jesus, QED.
From the Islamofascism wiki, quoting Hitchens: "both [fascism and Islamofascism] are bitterly nostalgic for past empires and lost glories. Both are obsessed with real and imagined "humiliations" and thirsty for revenge...Both are inclined to leader worship and to the exclusive stress on the power of one great book. Both have a strong commitment to sexual repression—especially to the repression of any sexual "deviance"—and to its counterparts the subordination of the female and contempt for the feminine. Both despise art and literature as symptoms of degeneracy and decadence; both burn books and destroy museums and treasures."
Hitchens aligned himself with the fascists while decrying fascism; it was pathetic to watch, and millions died in part because of his words. No tears for him from me, except as a fellow alcoholic and loudmouth who lost his way and never found it back.
My condolences too to driftglass on the memory of his father's life and death. May you find peace.
I live in a working-class neighborhood where many people medicate their existential pain with copious smoking and drinking. This lifestyle makes them look so very much older than they really are.
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