No
bright reversion in the sky for Christopher Hitchens – he'd have
none of that ethereal humbug (even if the phrase was Alexander
Pope's). But our pre-eminent essayist is gone, the political flyting
never to resume, and the work with its elegancies and asperities
summarily rounded out. His friend Ian McEwan tells how, in his very
last days, Hitchens was completing a review of the new Chesterton biography, each sentence a torment to produce. But when it appears,
we can be certain that it will have his signature graces: stylistic
panache and intellectual rigour. Hitchens never permitted false
quantities to mar his prose, and if he was a good hater of the
Hazlittean stripe, he could articulate his loves with unsurpassed
passion and cogency.
His
political trajectory will be picked over and debated in the days to
come – his 'apostasy' from the radical Left evidently still rankles in
some quarters – but it might be worth reminding ourselves that
Hitchens was also a brilliant literary critic, possessed by the
conviction that literature still matters, as the great benefice of the ironic mind - even when imperilled
by the tohu-bohu of an uglified, celebrity-blighted culture on the one hand, and the enormity of political tyranny on the other. (Hitchens described the cultural landscape of the former as 'a tundra of pulverizing boredom' which could be applied to the former with equal justice.)