The Theologians
Near the end of his life, Jorge Luis Borges was visited by a then-little known English writer of the Left, who deplored the reactionary politics Borges adopted, or had at least seemed to adopt in his old age (Borges’ attitude toward politics, like his attitude toward the world in general, was sufficiently ironic that his true views on both were always difficult to discern), but who did not let this distressing fact interfere with his appreciation of the man’s immense literary gifts. Here is Christopher Hitchens’ description of the end of their meeting:
The hours I spent in this anachronistic, bibliophile, Anglophile retreat were in surreal contrast to the shrieking horror show that was being enacted in the rest of the city. I never felt this more acutely than when, having maneuvered the old boy down the spiral staircase for a rare out-of-doors lunch the next day—terrified of letting him slip and tumble—I got him back upstairs again. He invited me back for even more readings the following morning but I had to decline. I pleaded truthfully that I was booked on a plane for Chile. ‘I am so sorry,’ said this courteous old genius. ‘But may I then offer you a gift in return for your company?’ I naturally protested with all the energy of an English middle-class upbringing: couldn’t hear of such a thing; pleasure and privilege all mine; no question of accepting any present. He stilled my burblings with an upraised finger. ‘You will remember,’ he said, ‘the lines I will now speak. You will always remember them.’ And he then recited the following:
What man has bent o’er his son’s sleep, to brood
How that face shall watch his when cold it lies?
Or thought, as his own mother kissed his eyes,
Of what her kiss was when his father wooed?The title (Sonnet XXIX of Dante Gabriel Rossetti)—’Inclusiveness’—may sound a trifle sickly but the enfolded thought recurred to me more than once after I became a father and Borges was quite right: I have never had to remind myself of the words. I was mumbling my thanks when he said, again with utter composure: ‘While you are in Chile do you plan a call on General Pinochet?’ I replied with what I hoped was equivalent aplomb that I had no such intention. ‘A pity,’ came the response. ‘He is a true gentleman. He was recently kind enough to award me a literary prize.’ It wasn’t the ideal note on which to bid Borges farewell, but it was an excellent illustration of something else I was becoming used to noticing—that in contrast or corollary to what Colin MacCabe had said to me in Lisbon, sometimes it was also the right people who took the wrong line.
That Christopher Hitchens died on the very day that marked the official end of the U.S. war in Iraq is the kind of coincidence that would have led the ever-ironical Argentine to remark upon the mysterious ways of the God with whom Hitchens so famously quarreled.
I’ve observed Hitchens’ descent into a puddle of madness since he was at The Nation in the 80s.
I’m not sad to see him go, for he left this world decades ago.
He apparently was already in decline by the time I became consciously aware of him. I have never gotten what people see in this obvious bullshitter. In particular, I am mystified by publications with pretensions of standards repeatedly tossing pages down the rat hole of his writing. This was one of the reasons I dropped my subscription to The Atlantic. Even apart from the wasted page count, it betrays poor editorial judgment. (In fairness, I think it was devoting pages to Ross Douthat discoursing on whether pornography is adultery that was the last straw.)
Haters gonna hate.
If either of y’all has written anything as good as an essay by Hitchens, kindly link to it.
If the writing’s the thing, maybe I haven’t written a better essay than Hitchens.
I’ve been a helluva lot more right than him in the past ten years though.
Thirty years from now, we’ll still read Orwell and we’ll still read Borges.
Sorry, Hitch.
It’s amazing how many brilliant writers try to go down the George Orwell path only to end up in the dustbin of history. Lionel Triling while pointing out the various virtues Orwell had also explicitly said he was “not a genius” (to quote The Royal Tenenbaums, “Why would a reviewer make the point of saying someone’s not a genius?”) doesn’t have the reputation of Orwell, there have been a lot articles recently asking why we forgot who Dwight MacDonald, and I’m looking forward to forgetting Hitchens.
I would suggest one of the biggest differences is the level of empathy in George Orwell. Social critics have a nasty tendency to never wonder why society acts the way it does. They write more as aliens hanging over Earth than residents. Orwell made it his purpose to always know the facts on the ground.
Or in Homage to Catalonia you have the vision of a writer that is realizing that he was wrong about a great many things.
Humility was not a part of Hitchens’ character.
I’ve just finished reading two of Orwell’s novels (Burmese Days, and 1984), and a collection of his short non-fiction. Several years ago, I read Animal Farm. My take-away is this: he was a good, but not great novelist, and he was an unabashedly honest essayist. What I like about him is his honesty. He believes in socialism, but he acknowledges that there are costs, and they are steep, and people should be prepared to pay them if they want socialism.
Orwell wrote about the things that concerned him, sometimes through the lens of his own thoughts and actions.
Hitchens wrote about Hitchens, first, last, and always.
Succinct and correct.
Like John Barth, my favorite group of theologians from that Borges story is the Histrioni, some of whom imagine that the world will come to its glorious end when the number of its possibilities is exhausted. There can be no repeated acts, they thought, and so it was the duty of the pious to commit, and therefore eliminate from the future, the most atrocious abominations.
If Hitchens has contributed to such a project, I would be satisfied.
“All great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”
Mencken. Hitchens.
Ahem. Mr. Hitchens never quarreled with any gods, nor did he debate with unicorns, tooth fairies or Klingons. He actually disapproved of conflating fictional characters with things that exist in reality.
Fortunately
everyone, almost everyone, knew what he meant.I submit that he’s dramatizing for effect (affect even, perhaps) and that he felt no such thing. Because writing about spending personal time with Jorge Luis Borges was too pedestrian to leave to the simple and obvious. He was interviewing a poet, for crying out loud— poets never search for words to describe what’s in front of them, that would be too OBVIOUS and wouldn’t have the dramatic punch of Hitchen’s comparative feeling.
snarf