Our man all over the place
David Caute
LOVE, POVERTY AND WAR: JOURNEYS AND ESSAYS by Christopher Hitchens Atlantic Books, £14.99, pp. 475, ISBN 1843544512 ✆ £12.99 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 The day before this review was written Christopher Hitchens was insulted (‘ex-Trotskyist popinjay’ and other unrepeatables) during a Washington press mêlée by George Galloway. This incident may remind those who knew Hitch when he was in short pants how famous he has become, how much a celebrity as well as arguably the most brilliant, versatile, amusing and original journalist of his time. (More adjectives on request.) When Hitchens takes on the veteran Noam Chomsky, young people now ask, ‘Who is Chomsky?’ Indeed one may guess from Hitchens’s hairy account of a sullen, threatening crowd of male Muslims pressing in on him in Peshawar, on Pakistan’s north-west frontier, after he was spotted haggling over bin Laden T-shirts in the bazaar, that they knew who he was. Indeed (again) they may recently have burnt their Hitchens T-shirts.
The Palestinian interpreter who accompanied our man across the Kuwait border soon after the military ‘liberation’ of Iraq, addressed him as ‘Mr Christopher’: ‘Come along, Mr Christopher. These people are all liars.’ This form of address offers a nice solution for the present reviewer, still loyal to old sentiments while wishing to keep the necessary distance the job requires. But whenever Mr Christopher steps across that frontier of the former British colony, or interviews L. Paul Bremer, or accompanies Paul Wolfowitz to a meeting of the new city council in Najaf, or flies in a Black Hawk helicopter over Baghdad and rejoices that the lights are coming back on — it may have to be ‘Massah Christopher’. (He is, after all, a keen if equivocal admirer of Kipling, Lawrence, Waugh and the Orwell of Burmese Days.) In his report on Iraq, ‘A Liberating Experience’ (Vanity Fair, October 2003), there are passages of fellow-travelling adulation worthy of Lincoln Steffens, messenger of hope.
Love, Poverty and War is a collection of 46 separate essays and reviews, as well as pieces too short to deserve reprinting. One way of reviewing so heterogeneous an ingathering is not to read any of it, since attention to some (Borges, Joyce or Mr Christopher visits Abu Ghraib prison) would be an injustice to others (Orwell, Huxley, Greene, Waugh, Bellow or Mr Christopher lunches with the impressive, Arab-speaking US army commander in Iraq). Another justification for reading none of it would be that this appears to have been the policy of both the author and his editors. It may not matter how new or old is a piece about Joyce’s ‘mastur-piece’ Ulysses (the pun as usual belongs to Mr Christopher), or ‘I Fought the Law in Bloomberg’s New York’ (the libertarian still smoking, loitering, riding a bike with his feet off the pedals and no bell, oh dear); on the other hand, one takes a less relaxed view in May 2005 of pieces on Iraq running no nearer to us than October 2003.
Much bloody water has flowed under the bridges of the Euphrates and Tigris during those 18 months. Since Mr Christopher leaves us in 2003 with WMDs still bound to be found, then surely an alert editor might have called on him for some updated thoughts on why Bush and Blair were by no means lying when they lied to their citizens about WMDs, bullying their security services into producing the ‘intelligence’ on which they were of course compelled to act. As for his visit in 2003 to Abu Ghraib, seen by him only as a symbol of previous Saddam horrors, but subsequently a place of American shame, he might have been invited to add a word or two on why troops despatched on imperial wars against faraway races speaking faraway languages will not inevitably behave like they always have.
Our alert editor might have wondered, also, whether we need a series of short pieces repeating Mr Christopher’s disgust for Clinton’s shabby action attacking a Sudanese factory with cruise missiles. Admittedly, we have to give this writer credit for teaching the world since 1992 that nothing more loathsome than Clinton has been hatched since Adam, but each polemic repeats how Clinton’s popularity ratings gave a small leap, blip or burp as a consequence of the stealth-raid (which by the way killed one man as compared with, is it 200,000?, Iraqis dead in two years since the Bush–Blair liberation celebrated by Massah Christopher).
Highly recommended: ‘The Misfortune of Poetry’ (Byron–Austen–Auden); ‘The Strange Case of David Irving’; ‘Visit to a Small Planet’ (a report of a custom-built, guided tour of North Korea); ‘Unfairenheit 9/11: The Lies of Michael Moore’; ‘The Old Man’ (Deutscher on Trotsky). In this essay and elsewhere one discerns that Hitchens, like Mailer, is a Tory of the Left who uses the word ‘I’ a lot; like Mailer, he is an exponent of the personalised New Journalism, and he too is gifted with marvellous narrative agility. But Hitchens is much quicker on his feet than the recent Mailer, and more prone to an immediate punch-up; not for him the ominous stealth of a Joan Didion, the slow stalking of a prey before the kill.
To explain his support for the seizure and occupation (‘liberation’) of Iraq, one must take into account his loathing of Islamic fundamentalism (though Saddam headed a secular party which had notably advanced women’s education and emancipation — and now the veils are coming back); his loathing of Saddam’s wars, genocides, mass graves, sadistic cruelty (unanswerably the case); his absolute revulsion at the nature of, and motives for, the murder of 3,000 innocents on 11 September (though Saddam surely had nothing to do with it and how do the events of 9/11 compare with Sharon’s protracted aerial assault on Beirut?); and ...
And is it not fair to add his contempt for ‘the Left’, for political correctness, for sloppily sandalled fruit-juice drinkers who send him vexingly irrational emails, and for those dogood masochists who cannot tell the difference between the bad and the worse (Chomsky again elected); for antiAmericanism in general? I am grateful to my adopted country, Mr Christopher tells us, I admire its tolerance, restraint and benevolence, not least after 9/11, and I now make more money than I need.
His attacks on religion vary in severity. Recommended is a witty account, ‘The Devil and Mother Teresa’, recalling how Hitchens was formally interviewed by three clerics as part of the Pope’s formal inquiries into the future saint’s life. Despite previous differences over Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, Mr Christopher and I may yet share a cell with a one-eyed mad mullah as the first arrestees under New Labour’s ban on incitement to religious hatred. Yet even a dedicated atheist may flinch when discovering on the third page of the introduction a reference to:
that most toxic of foes, religion; the most base and contemptible of the forms assumed by human egotism and stupidity. Cold, steady hatred for this, especially in its loathsome jihad shape, has been as sustaining to me as any love.
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