Much of the material behind my portrait of Christopher Hitchens in the new issue of Prospect refused to be confined to a conventional profile. So for those with a bit of a “Hitchens kink,” I’ve compiled a selection of out-takes, further reflections and criticisms of the man for Prospect online. So what makes this divisive political pamphleteer worth the effort?
To spend time with Hitchens, to accept his hospitality, to drink late into the night with him, is to become inexorably partisan. The bargain of his hospitality, once accepted, is both rewarding and alarming. I arrived to see him one evening in Washington, and before our three-day interview had even formally begun, I discovered I had six hours of his ferociously lucid and entertaining exegeses on tape, still unflagging as a bottle of Johnnie Walker black label finally pleaded emptiness at 4.30am. The idea that this would be an objective exercise had similarly evaporated.
I don’t believe there is another writer of the ‘68 generation who could still give as good as this: compulsive, long-form conversation ranging from the politically recondite to the poetically high-flown to the raucously obscene. Hitchens reeled off much of Macaulay’s English civil war ballad, “The Battle of Naseby,” from memory, and he provided samples from his vast store of remembered limericks. With deference to the theme of our conversation—the disillusion of the political left—he unpacked Robert Conquest’s most famous number:
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