About time, it would seem. The political writer who, more than any other in the English language, sought to model himself on George Orwell, has finally been recognised with an Orwell prize.
In a sense, it seems odd to think of Christopher Hitchens as an Orwellian. Here was a writer who, at his best, wrote with panache, lapidary refinement and a wide tonal range. One of his most damning adjectives was "atonal". It's hard to see much of Hitchens in the spare, terse prose of George Orwell. Nor is there much of Orwell in the Hitchens who became a Beltway gossip columnist, and later an amanuensis of the Bush administration. Yet, as someone for whom political writing was a literary effort, Orwell loomed large as a paragon of committed writing.
There are, however, other respects in which the comparison is rather unfair to Orwell. Hitchens was at times an extremely lazy writer. Not all of his writing was actually his. This much was convincingly demonstrated by the historian Noel Malcolm regarding his work on the Elgin marbles, and by John Barrell of his book on Thomas Paine. One had wondered, after Hari, if the Orwell prize would make a habit of honouring plagiarists. And Hitchens tended to be repetitive, depending on a small stock of choice phrases and cliches to solve the problems of composition.
Another of his flaws, responsible for some of his worst writing, was narcissism: Onan never shook a friendlier hand. He had a tendency to resolve the agglomerating contradictions in his worldview by means of such expedients as "I would have suspected myself more if…" or "I wasn't about to be told…" By far his worst pieces were two lugubrious articles, one written several months after 9/11, in which he emoted about the "benign" twin towers, and the other following the death of Mark Daily, to which his writing contributed in a small way. In each case, he dealt with a jarring aporia in his perspective simply through the affirmation of a soaring, if somewhat base, sentiment.
Most disfiguring, however, was the chippy, petty bourgeois resentment. Hitchens's social insecurity was well known. He flushed with pleasure when he, a provincial Englander from a middle-class background, was mistaken for a toff. But he also bristled with disgust at the rich and powerful, particularly the vulgar and thick among them. It is true that this resentment nourished him, sustaining his caustic "insider" journalism on the twisted sodalities traversing Washington politics, and later his criticism of Bill Clinton, Mother Teresa and Kissinger.
But this animus was indivisible from the "rodent slowly stirring" in his "viscera" – his instinctive affinity for Thatcherite meritocracy, and the macho bluster with which he reacted whenever he felt his patria was threatened. It was also implicated in the English philistinism that marred his writing at times: witness the car crash of non-sequiturs in his critique of postmodernism in Why Orwell Matters, or the resentful befuddlement in his attempted belabouring of Edward Said's orientalism while Said lay dying. One was faintly reminded of Laurence Moss from Abigail's Party, straining for a level of sophistication, and ultimately making do with snobbery.
As an intellectual, he could be staggeringly anti-intellectual. As a contrarian, he sought easy controversy, as in his article purporting to explain "why women aren't funny" (excepting "hefty or dykey or Jewish" women). As an ironist, he became most famous for a preposterously literal-minded diatribe against religion.
This latter descended into vulgar Islamophobia. Joining the neoconservative Mark Steyn in bemoaning a Muslim "demographic" threat to Europe, he asserted both that Islam must go through a reformation to be compatible with modernity, and simultaneously that it was incapable of doing so. Nor was he above resorting to that tradition of racist witticism that named the capital "Londonistan" for hosting Muslim immigrants – in the tradition of similar reactionary tropes about "Jew York". There was in this more than a trace of postcolonial melancholia – the feelings of despondency that come with the loss of fantasies of imperial omnipotence. Hitchens was never entirely comfortable with Britain's diminished post-empire status.
Of course, this is all rather unfair. There was a great deal more to Hitchens than his considerable flaws, not least his considerable gifts. Hitchens wrote of himself as keeping "two sets of books", and this applies above all in his writing. For every mean-spirited travesty, or low apologia for some crook such as Wolfowitz or Chalabi, that one can find in his archive, there is also sensitive and inquiring literary criticism, elegant political treatise, and mordant intellectual debunking.
Yet in his final years, Hitchens resembled nothing so much as the wretched apostate assayed by William Hazlitt – haunted by "the phantoms of his altered principles", driven "to loathe and execrate them", offering "all his thoughts, hopes, wishes, from youth upwards… at the shrine of matured servility", becoming, at last, "one vile antithesis, a living and ignominious satire on himself". And it is a sorry thing, but I suspect it is that Hitchens who has been posthumously honoured by the Orwell prize.
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