Many people would give their life to attain a fraction of the achievements and talent Christopher Hitchens had. With over twenty books published; reportage, essays, literary criticism and columns, ‘Hitch’ really did give his life to his work and writings. In spite of his diagnosis of advanced oesophageal cancer in 2010, he would show no signs of weakness on the podium. He continued to debate, travel and write until passing away in November of last year.
Mortality, formulated from the columns he wrote on his terminal illness for Vanity Fair, is not merely the coda to his life’s work as a polemicist. As he writes emphatically about the ‘alien’ colonizing his lymph nodes, he remains inquisitive about the monopolistic etiquette that cancer victims can inhabit, and how hospitals – like Hollywood – are a realm where you will probably die of advice first. Don’t be fooled into thinking that these are the ramblings of a despondent victim though. As his editor at Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter remarks, his words, ‘free as they are of sentiment or self-pity…. are also among his best’.
If Mortality confirms his literary stamina and spirit, then it is also a testament to Hitchens’ unwavering character. As a steadfast atheist and outspoken orator on institutionalized religion, he was often dogged (to put it very mildly) by bitter comments from various faith groups. Responding to one such attack on how his throat cancer ‘was God’s revenge for him using his voice to blaspheme him’, Hitch responds in typically sensible fashion: ‘If you maintain that god awards the appropriate cancers, you must also account for the numbers of infants who contract leukaemia’.
As each page is turned, the constraint of time and thought is laid cripplingly bare. In the final chapter, a publisher’s note underscores the page; a note on the intention of preserving his unfinished jottings. His structure may be fragmented, but his ideas are at his most profound. ‘No one ever comes into his own’ the last line reads. ‘Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free.’
Whilst that may seem the final flourish, Hitch will always have the last word. The kaleidoscopic legacy of work he left behind; subjects from Henry Kissenger to Islam; P.G Wodehouse to Russian Orthodoxy, Orwell, Zionism and much more besides, my real fear isn’t the prospect of terminal illness – but of a world without a man as brave, intelligent and articulate as Christopher Hitchens.
Mortality is available now from Atlantic.
Words: Ben Meagher