From Hitch to Eternity

This past Christmas, like the Christmas before, we held a book swap in Joey's honor. Friends and relatives from around the country submitted books that we associated with Joey or that we thought he might like, and a few of us gathered in my grandmother's living room in Oklahoma to swap the books and tell stories. As with the previous year, the assortment of books was pretty diverse - they ranged from Larry McMurtry and Annie Proulx to E. Nesbitt and PG Wodehouse - and together they formed a touching, and quite accurate, picture of the world that Joey inhabited. There were funny books and English books and really quite formidable books, the sorts of books you'd read on a dare: a 500-page travelogue (Blue Highways), an omnibus collection of short novels (the Wodehouse), a biography of Walt Whitman, a collection of Twain essays.

I don't know for sure, but I believe my contribution may have been the most formidable of all. Arguably, by Christopher Hitchens, runs to over 700 pages and is roughly the size and heft of a newborn. It's a collection of Hitchens' best essays on political, literary, and cultural matters. The range of topics is truly Joey-like in its scope and sweep, with a particular focus on British novelists of the twentieth century (Orwell, Wodehouse, Waugh, Maugham, Greene, Ballard), political conflicts and personages (Jefferson, Lincoln, etc), tendentious pieces propounding outlandish positions for the sheer contrarian joy of it (e.g., "Why Women Aren't Funny"), and a handful of pieces about what it means to live the good life ("Wine Drinkers of the World, Unite"). Joey undoubtedly read many of these essays in the Atlantic or Slate, but I would have given him the book anyway, so that he could catch the ones he'd missed. Although he certainly didn't agree with Hitchens about everything, I know he admired him. He may even have run into him a time or two in Washington, DC. The last time I was in Washington with Joey I kept saying to him, while we were walking down the street, "Hey, is that Christopher Hitchens?" Eventually he grew impatient with me and said, "You just think every guy with long hair is Christopher Hitchens," which was true.

Whether they ever bumped into one another or not, the Washington Joey inhabited was quite similar to the one in which Hitchens lived. Theirs was the Washington of bookstores and good restaurants and classy-but-shabby bars, not the Washington of lobbyists and politicians and interns and television reporters. They were intellectuals in a city of soundbites, realists in a city of idealists, connoisseurs in a city of philistines, and readers of large books in a city famous for its short attention spans. Am I being too hard on Washington? I probably am. What I mean to say is that both men simultaneously thrived on the city's energy - its built-in cosmopolitanism, its grandeur and pretensions, its many secret nooks of power and influence - and conducted their lives in ways that were slightly at odds with the city's dominant ethos. When they were alive you could be sure that at least someone in Washington had read Tolstoy or heard of Samuel Johnson, and that was somehow reassuring.

If their tastes were rather similar, however, I don't think their personalities were. Hitchens was a famed conversationalist and a man of unbounded energy (there's a reason why his "best-of" collection of essays is over 700 pages long) who continued to write and read prodigiously right through his final illness. Joey was quiet, parsimonious with his energy, and uneasy in the spotlight (unless it happened to be karaoke night and they happened to have some Johnny Cash songs). Nevertheless, I like to think of the two of them chatting away in some book-lined afterlife, staying up way too late and drinking way too much whisky, energetically debating the affinities between, say, Oscar Wilde and Elmer Fudd. I think they would crack each other up.

Recently the Atlantic (to which we were given a gift subscription by David, my father-in-law, who also happened to get the Hitchens book in the swap) published the essay on which Hitchens was working when he died. It's about the British novelist G.K. Chesterton, who is not much read these days (apart, perhaps, from his Father Brown mystery series) but who was among the most prolific and influential writers of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It's typical of Hitchens' later essays in that it's a little less barbed, and a little less coherent, than his best stuff, but that's certainly understandable. The man was dying of cancer, after all, and here he was writing a long essay on a half-forgotten (and by Hitchens not much admired) British writer. Still, it's an erudite and incisive exploration of the moral world that Chesterton inhabited, and it's well worth a read if you have the time and patience. Joey had read at least one Chesterton novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, but he didn't much care for it. He read it on my recommendation, actually, but, since I hadn't read it myself (and still haven't), I concede that it was rather an irresponsible recommendation. As I understand it, thar book is about a civil war that erupts in London, pitting the various neighborhoods (the East End, Chelsea, Southwark, etc) against one another. I liked the idea and thought I'd write a similar novel about Boston one day, but the sense that I got from Joey was that, as with much speculative fiction, the idea was rather more interesting than the execution.

Anyway, Chesterton is not the point here. The point is that along with Hitchens' essay the Atlantic printed a short remembrance of Hitchens by Benjamin Schwarz, the editor who'd worked with Hitchens on the Chesterton thing. Schwarz says that the last gift he gave to Hitchens as he was entering the hospital was a collection of Orwell's essays in which Schwarz had inscribed his favorite Orwell line: "One is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals." It's a touching, if somewhat gloomy, sentiment; it gives us permission to go on caring about people despite the risks, and that's a pretty good way to be. I suspect Hitchens, who admired Orwell immoderately (he even wrote a book called Why Orwell Matters) may nevertheless have thought the quote a tad sentimental, but I think Joey (who also quite liked Orwell) would surely have agreed with it wholeheartedly.

And then there's me. Kate and I, as you may know, have for the last several months been creating a brand new "human individual" of our own (although I do believe Kate's doing most of the work), someone to whom we expect to fasten quite a bit of our love. It's exciting, of course, but it's also terrifying, and not just in the way that becoming a new parent is always terrifying. The past few years have instilled in me a very keen sense of the fragility of life and have left me more-or-less permanently braced for disaster, so as I inch toward fatherhood I find that I'm carrying more than the usual bundle of fears and anxieties. But when it comes to fastening my love upon other human individuals, I just don't see that I have any choice in the matter: if life really is as fragile as I think it is (and it is), and if catastrophe really can strike at any moment (and it can), then what the hell's the point of withholding one iota of love (or joy, or humor, or sympathy, or understanding) from my loved ones even for a moment? Carpe diem and all that, right? Or, in this case, carpe baby.