Christopher HitchensCHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, a fierce polemicist in the tradition of Thomas Paine and George Orwell, has died in Houston, Texas, from pneumonia, a complication of oesophageal cancer. He was 62.
Hitchens trained his sights on targets such as Henry Kissinger, the British monarchy and Mother Teresa, wrote a best-seller attacking religious belief and dismayed former comrades on the left by enthusiastically supporting the US-led war in Iraq. He learned he had cancer while on a publicity tour in 2010 for his memoir Hitch-22and began writing and, on television, speaking about his illness frequently.
"In whatever kind of a 'race' life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist," Hitchens wrote in Vanity Fair, for which he was a contributing editor. He took pains to emphasise that he had not revised his position on atheism, articulated in his best-selling 2007 book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, although he did express amused appreciation at the hope, among some concerned Christians, that he might undergo a late-life conversion.
He also professed to have no regrets over a lifetime of heavy smoking and drinking. “Writing is what’s important to me. And anything that helps me do that – or enhances and prolongs and deepens and sometimes intensifies argument and conversation – is worth it to me,” he told Charlie Rose in a television interview in 2010.
Born in Portsmouth, Hitchens, a British Trotskyite who had lost faith in the Socialist movement, spent much of his life wandering the globe and reporting on the world's trouble spots for the Nationmagazine, the New Statesmanand other publications.
His work took him to Northern Ireland, Greece, Cyprus, Portugal, Spain and Argentina in the 1970s, generally to illuminate the malign practices of entrenched dictators or the imperial machinations of the great powers. After moving to the United States in 1981, he added American politics to his beat, writing for the Nation.
He wrote a monthly review-essay for the Atlanticand, as a columnist at Vanity Fair, filed essays on topics as various as getting a Brazilian bikini wax and the experience of being waterboarded – a volunteer assignment that he called "very much more frightening though less painful than the bikini wax". He was also a columnist for Slate.
Christopher Eric Hitchens was born in Portsmouth. His father was a career officer in the royal navy and later a bookkeeper. Though it strained the family budget, Christopher was sent to private schools in Tavistock and Cambridge. “If there is going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it,” he overheard his mother saying to his father.
Even before arriving at Balliol College, Oxford, Hitchens had been drawn into left-wing politics, primarily out of opposition to the Vietnam war. After heckling a Maoist speaker at a political meeting, he was invited to join the International Socialists, a Trotskyite party. Thus began a dual career as political agitator and upper-crust sybarite. After graduating from Oxford in 1970, he spent a year travelling across the United States. He then tried his luck as a journalist in London, where he contributed reviews, columns and editorials to the New Statesman, the Daily Expressand the Evening Standard.
"I would do my day jobs at various mainstream papers and magazines and TV stations, where my title was 'Christopher Hitchens,' " he wrote in Hitch-22, "and then sneak down to the East End, where I was variously features editor of Socialist Workerand book review editor of the theoretical monthly, International Socialism."
He became a staff writer and editor for the New Statesmanin the late 1970s and fell in with a literary clique that included Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, James Fenton, Clive James and Ian McEwan. After collaborating on a 1976 biography of James Callaghan, British Labour leader, he published his first book, Cyprus. A longer version was published in 1989 as Hostage to History: Cyprus From the Ottomans to Kissinger. His interest in the region led to another book, Imperial Spoils: The Curious Case of the Elgin Marbles(1987). In 1981 he married a Greek Cypriot, Eleni Meleagrou. The marriage ended in divorce.
After moving to the US, where he eventually became a citizen, Hitchens became a fixture on television, in print and at the lectern. Many of his essays for the Nationand other magazines were collected in Prepared for the Worst(1988).
He also sprang to the defence of his friend Salman Rushdie. To help rally public support, Hitchens arranged for Rushdie to be received at the White House by president Bill Clinton, one of Hitchens's least favourite politicians and the subject of his book, No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton(1999).
He had already broken with the International Socialists when, in 1982, he astonished some of his brethren by supporting Britain’s invasion of the Falkland Islands.
The drift was reflected in books devoted to heroes like George Orwell ( Why Orwell Matters, 2002), Thomas Paine ( Thomas Paine's Rights of Man: A Biography, 2006) and Thomas Jefferson ( Thomas Jefferson: Author of America, 2005). His polemicism was particularly evident when in 2001 he excoriated Kissinger, secretary of state in the Nixon administration, as a war criminal in his book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger. He helped write a 2002 documentary based on the book.
Hitchens campaigned against religious belief, most notably in his screed against Mother Teresa, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice(1995), and God Is Not Great. Hitchens's latest collection of writings, Arguably: Essays, published this year, has been a best-seller.
He discussed the possibility of a deathbed conversion, insisting that the odds were slim that he would admit the existence of God.
“The entity making such a remark might be a raving, terrified person whose cancer has spread to the brain,” he said in August 2010. “I can’t guarantee that such an entity wouldn’t make such a ridiculous remark. But no one recognisable as myself would ever make such a remark.”
Readers of Hitch-22already knew his feelings about the end. "I personally want to 'do' death in the active and not the passive," he wrote, "and to be there to look it in the eye and be doing something when it comes for me".
He is survived by his wife, Carol Blue, their daughter Antonia and his children from a previous marriage, Alexander and Sophia.
Christopher Hitchens: born, April 13th, 1949; died, December 15th.