Sometime in the early 1970s, Frank Johnson, later editor of the British Spectator but then a young parliamentary correspondent, came into my room at the Daily Telegraph and began waxing enthusiastic about a newcomer to Fleet Street, one Christopher Hitchens, with whom he had dined the previous night.
Eulogies of Christopher have poured from the press both before and since his recent death from cancer. His extraordinary courage on the edge of eternity; his justified pride in never missing a deadline (with only hours to live, he delivered a major essay on Chesterton to The Atlantic); his lack of self-pity over an illness he had earned fair and square by his chain-smoking; his wit, clarity, and unyielding firmness in debate — all these earned him admiration, sympathy, and even love from millions of people who had never met him. They ranged across the spectrum from radical atheists who saw him as their champion to evangelical Christians praying for his conversion.
So it requires a slight feat of memory to recall a time when Christopher wasn’t the celebrity “Hitch” but an unknown young, ambitious aspiring journalist just down from Oxford.
He wasn’t entirely unknown even then. He had cut quite a dash at Oxford, as his memoir Hitch-22 recounts, by combining sandwich lunches on the picket line with formal dinners at the most reactionary high tables. One Oxford contemporary dismissed him as a salon revolutionary with the words, “Oh yes, Hitchens. Never seen in black tie at the Oxford Union, never seen outside it in anything else.” Private Eye magazine had picked up this caricature of him and introduced it to a wider metropolitan audience under the rather feeble pseudonym “Christopher Robin.”
So I had heard of Christopher, but not exactly favorably.
Frank, however, was entranced. After a good dinner the previous night, he and Christopher had wandered for hours around London debating politics and literature. Towards the end, they had stopped for supper at a fish-and-chip shop, where Hitchens had loudly denounced the working classes in an exaggerated upper-class accent in order, said an amused but nervous Frank, to sharpen class contradictions and advance the revolution.
I was less impressed than Frank by this because I recognized it as the Pappenhacker gambit. In Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, Pappenhacker is a journalist who is seen being inexcusably rude to a waiter. His conduct is explained by Mr. Salter of the rival paper, the Daily Beast:
He’s always like that to waiters. You see he’s a communist. Most of the staff at the Twopence are — they’re University men, you see. Pappenhacker says that every time you are polite to a proletarian you are helping to bolster up the capitalist system. He’s very clever of course, but he gets rather unpopular.
Christopher himself loved Waugh. He quoted the Pappenhacker passage above in a 2005 Vanity Fair article. So he was presumably amusing himself in playing the revolutionary, but he was partly serious too.
Until his famous change of mind over the Iraq War, Christopher’s politics were resolutely left-wing, belonging to a school that Frank once defined as “country-house Trotskyism.” (He was describing the ideology of the Tatler magazine, then edited by Tina Brown, who is now running the Daily Beast — in the real world, that is, and in a small world too.)
At that time, however, the generation of ’68ers was beginning to make itself and its politics felt on Fleet Street. I knew that I was immovably on the other side of the barricades.
So when Frank told me about his evening out, I suspiciously pigeonholed Christopher as the distilled spirit of 1968. That didn’t prevent me from being charmed by him when the three of us met later, or from enjoying debates with him both private and formal, or even from developing a friendship that was real and sustained though not very close. But I nursed my suspicion of him as an inveterate enemy of the traditional in everything from politics to morality — until a small incident one evening in the late ’70s.
My sister, Margaret, was in London on business. So I invited her to a restaurant party at which Christopher was another guest. One of the ways in which 1968 had changed life was that swearing, including the f-word, had become more acceptable socially. Christopher in full flight was employing it vigorously when Margaret suddenly said, “I really don’t think you should use language like that in the presence of ladies.”
Christopher was not the only man at the table to look first surprised, then shame-faced. After the briefest of pauses, however, he apologized handsomely and with apparent sincerity. For the rest of the evening, he minded his manners very closely. I realized, only dimly at the time, that inside the revolutionary there was a traditionalist struggling to be let out.
This traditionalist was most evident in his literary and historical essays (to be found in Unacknowledged Legislators and in the just-published complete collection, Arguably.) His essays — including ones on writers whose politics he disliked, such as Dr. Johnson, Evelyn Waugh, P. G. Wodehouse, Philip Larkin, and Edmund Burke — are not flawless. But they demonstrate love and knowledge of their subjects, a willingness to subordinate political to literary judgments, and a very firm attachment to scholarly standards across the board. He recognized and loved the best even against his prejudices.
But back in the 1970s and for a decade or two after, it was the revolutionary who dominated. His leftist politics led Christopher into many follies more serious than the fish-and-chip-shop escapade. He was a kind of Left neutralist in the Cold War. He was undoubtedly soft on Middle East terrorism. His denunciatory book on Mother Teresa was memorably savaged by the Canadian critic David Warren as lacking any serious evidence for its ludicrous, monstrous charges. And his campaign book for the return of the Elgin Marbles to Greece was shown by the historian Noel Malcolm to have been plagiarized wholesale from a 19th-century scholar.
Many of these follies he explicitly renounced when he turned against the Left over the Iraq War. He attacked the Left’s refusal to resist political evil when it came from an anti-Western direction. He renounced any belief in socialism — not so difficult after the end of the Cold War revealed the Soviet bloc to be an economic wasteland. And in his glowingly affectionate review of George MacDonald Fraser’s final Flashman novel, Christopher came within a saber’s edge of excusing the British Empire. He did not become a man of the Right — he remained a pugnacious Left liberal — but he abandoned the actually existing Left. Only in his continued atheism — if that’s the right word for defiance of a God in whom you profess disbelief — did Christopher cling to his antinomian radicalism to the end. (The next world is beyond the scope of this column — but, for what it’s worth, I find it hard to believe that God would punish a sincere opponent who acted from motives very distant from pride.)
The mystery of Christopher’s split personality was, I think, revealed in Hitch-22. Most of its reviews understandably concentrated on his account of how his beautiful and greatly loved mother had run off with an ex-clergyman, with whom she had then ended her life in a joint suicide. That tragedy, occurring in his early 20s, certainly marked Christopher, as it would any son. Later chapters, however, relate how Christopher over time came to appreciate the solid, sober, and decent virtues of his father, a not very successful naval officer of conventional conservative views, who he realized had stood by unfashionable values abandoned by his political “betters” and had suffered uncomplainingly for this loyalty.
Not coincidentally perhaps, Christopher also admits that he had been born into — and shaped by — the last generation of old England. For most of his journalistic career, he had embraced causes and ideas inimical to that distant country. That England had been badly and unfairly managed in various ways; he did not apologize for opposing them. But it had its virtues and, now that it was vanishing, he knew he would miss it — that England of the stiff upper lip, emotional self-control, the Royal Navy (and its campaign against slavery), the instilling and maintenance of high educational standards, lively and free debate — and, not least, chivalry towards the fair sex.
— John O’Sullivan is editor-at-large of National Review.