Dead Authors

What dead author would you most like to meet? For me, it would be Samuel Johnson. Or Plato. And, more recently deceased, Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011).

Responding to this question himself in an interview he gave in 2005, Hitchens pondered first George Eliot and Nabokov. Then he named George Orwell.

Why Orwell?

Hitchens said,

Orwell was the guy who seemed to come the nearest to making journalism into literature, which is what I’m trying to do.

Yet even more than trying to make journalism into literature, which Hitchens obviously did so well, he said in an interview for the New Statesman in May 2010, just a month before he was diagnosed with cancer,

Writing is all I ever wanted to do. It’s what I am, rather than what I do.

Interviews

Eight interviews Hitchens gave between 1987 and 2011 are reprinted in a new paperback released this month—Christopher Hitchens: The Last Interview and Other Conversations. It’s the latest installment in the “Last Interview” series published by Melville House.

In the introduction, Stephen Fry offers the following astonished summation of Hitchens’s prodigious intellect and talent:

How someone who socialized, drank, dined, debated, broadcast, wrote and traveled so much also found time to read and think so widely and deeply was a mystery that puzzled even those who knew him well.

He could quote Larkin, Baudelaire and Billy Wilder with the accuracy of a fanboy and the next minute anatomize the nuanced variations of  doctrine within Luxemburgist theory, the Pelagian heresy or Mevlevi Sufism.

Included are interviews with Hitchens about his love of literature, his views on the media, Mother Teresa, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and religious faith.

And then there is “The Last Interview: ‘Never be afraid of stridency,’” with fellow anti-theist Richard Dawkins, published December 2011 in the New Statesman, where Hitchens began his career as a staff writer.

Spirituality

As a chaplain, my favourite interview in this collection is Questions of Faith in which Hitchens spars with Marilyn Sewell, a liberal Christian, in light of his controversial book God is Not Great.

What did Hitchens think of Sewell’s preferred theology of Paul Tillich’s concept of God as the “ground of being”? He said that it should be classified under the heading of “statements that have no meaning—at all.” I can hear him say that last bit—at all—with relish.

Yet he came precariously close to admitting that he too had had “spiritual” experiences of his own. Approaching what he called the “x-factor” in life, using words such as “transcendent” and “numinous,” Hitchens refers to experiences while writing, for example, when he felt that “it wasn’t all done by hand.”

I think everybody has had the experience at some point when they feel that there’s more to life than just matter.

Still, he didn’t budge.

If someone says “I’m doing this out of faith,” I say, “Why don’t you do it out of conviction?”

Why it matters

With his own conviction and clarity, Hitchens challenged others to define and defend their own positions, which often they couldn’t do.

He was and still is invigorating to read, and this collection of interviews reminds us of what we have lost.

As Stephen Fry laments,

The acuity, insight, originality and power of his mind and language are more urgently needed now than they ever have been.

Amen!

Eaton, G. (2012) Christopher Hitchens: The New Statesman years. New Statesman, 2 Jan 2012.

Hitchens, C. (2017) Christopher Hitchens: The Last Interview and Other Conversations. With an introduction by Stephen Fry. Brooklyn and London: Melville House Publishers.