Hitchens: In the Heart of Darkness

I’ve just finished Love, Poverty, and War by Christopher Hitchens, the collection of reviews, essays, and columns that he published in 2004 to well-deserved acclaim. Reading through these particular selections, one keeps imagining Hitchens chuckling slyly to himself as he dives into his own canon, cutting and pasting his old contrarianisms into a brutal, gorgeously-written volume of heresy. His reviewers are right to say that the result is impressive. He may as well have called it I Bloody Well Told You So.

And then one reaches the Vanity Fair column entitled “Pakistan: On the Frontier of Apocalypse,” written in its namesake country a little more than a month after 9/11. As an enthusiastic and often dogmatic fan, I have trouble chewing on this bit of derision:

“All-male crowds, with no outlet for their emotions after listening to inflammatory sermons from the mullahs or the Jamaat-Ulema-i-Islami Party demagogues, spilled out of the mosques and displayed what I can only call an attitude.”

I hate it when a single chapter or a single short story or a single essay cast a shadow on an entire work. This article, detailing a trip to the Orient in the aftermath of the region’s most important geopolitical event in two decades, scowls at the anxiety of the people living there. And it scowls at the reader too.

Hitchens is a creature of the mid-twentieth century left, a Nation-contributing former Trotskyist whom people keep comparing to George Orwell. As a journalist, though, it seems to me that he takes his cues from Karl Marx, who covered the American Civil War for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune quite brilliantly. Empiricism and materialism were the cruces of Marx’s critical thinking, but in truth he never ventured far from his moral center. Dismayed as he was with the “contradictions” and exploitation of Yankee capitalism, he never ceased to be disgusted by the arrogance and banal evil of the feudal atrocity that was “Southern civilization.” Hitchens writes in the same polemical vein – his journalism is always accurate and always pointed, always fair and never balanced.

But “Pakistan” is an unsettling, distracting departure. Traveling in a Pakistani border city he “used to love” five weeks after an attack on a pair of American cities he loves more, he garners some discomfiting satisfaction out of annoying the locals. Roaming through the refugee camps (the attack on the Taliban next door is understood to be imminent) on the outskirts he happens upon a man selling t-shirts bearing the image of Osama bin Laden. He begins to haggle with the vendor, and a crowd of nervous people begins to form around the white English-speaking man who suspiciously wants to buy a souvenir celebrating his country’s sworn enemy. When the agitated crowd demands to know why he is not scared to deign to show his (full) wallet in front of them, he taunts them with “Why should I be scared? Muslims do not steal from guests.” Narrating the scene, he remarks that he never uses dehumanizing terms like ‘teeming’ and ‘seething’ to describe a crowd, and tastelessly opts instead to evoke a “peripheral” vista of “writhing, baffled beards and mustaches.” It’s painful to the reader that Hitchens clearly does not appreciate the irony of his revulsion with these peoples’ “miasma of self-pity mingled with self-righteousness.”

Shall we be clear? His criticisms of this society’s sexism, fear, demagoguery and autarky are legitimate. But they are not truly Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens’ work is almost invariably informed by Marx’s journalistic ethos – an appreciation for context, an exceptional knowledge of history, and a nearly universal empathy for downtrodden and exploited nations. And his writing is almost invariably what I call eloquent, a union of the writer and his character, his purpose, his subject, and his subtle mastery of the craft.

The diction, the syntax, the construction of metaphors – yes, Hitchens cannot help but write elegantly, but in this article his instinctive eloquence escapes him. He is not honest. He is not angry. He is not gentle, even in his polemical way. He is superior, and superior in the very way that Joseph Conrad found so odious. One critic put it well: He is an Englishman in a hot country snarling at the natives.

At the First International, Marx was engaged in a heated leadership struggle with Mikhail Bakunin. After he had won the narrow vote, he sneered, “Bah! I do not trust any Russian.” In the weeks after 9/11, most of us had thoughts possessed of the same spirit. But like Marx, we had the grace to be somewhat ashamed of them, and managed to avoid publishing them in a compilation of our best work. “Pakistan” is a bane on an otherwise masterly book, and one exceedingly worth the read. On the thermometer of intellectual merit, this article sits considerably below its author. For shame, Mr. Hitchens.

Today’s Musical Insight (Sarcastic Anticlericalism Edition):

“Sunday morning’s every day for all I care, and I’m not scared; light my candles in a daze ‘cause I’ve found God…”