Do I Contradict Myself?
By Jennifer Senior
Published: June 10, 2010

A Memoir
By Christopher Hitchens
Illustrated. 435 pp. Twelve. $26.99

If anyone in this world is positioned to write a toothsome memoir, it’s Christopher Hitchens. He’s gone from international socialist to Iraq war enthusiast; he has a moving personal story and is a pasha of vice. His present solar system of intimates includes James Fenton and Salman Rushdie and Ian ­McEwan; his past included Susan Sontag and Edward Said (both deceased) and Gore Vidal (still alive, but banished to a growing Kuiper belt of discards and debris). He’s gone to a New York brothel with Martin Amis and delivered bluejeans to Polish dissidents; he’s gotten smacked on the tush by Margaret Thatcher and beaten up by thugs in Beirut. He argues ruthlessly and writes like a drunken angel, making targets of subjects as various as Mother Teresa, Henry Kissinger, the Clintons and God. (In 2007, he published the best seller “God Is Not Great” — a title Rushdie ruefully deemed one word too long.)

Left - Author illustration by Edward Sorel

The problem is that if you’re a public figure, especially a writer as extravagantly colorful and prolific as Hitchens (he’s written 11 books, 4 pamphlets and 4 collections of essays, and today appears regularly in Slate, The Atlantic Monthly and Vanity Fair), you may scarcely be aware of how much of your own store of tales has dribbled out over the years, like a sack of flour with a small hole in it. This makes the business of writing your memoir much harder. And it turns out that much of the autobiographical pith of “Hitch-22” has appeared elsewhere, most notably in Ian Parker’s excellent 2006 profile of Hitchens in The New Yorker, and it’s surprising how little to it that Hitchens now adds — how little, indeed, is in this book that’s generally considered the lymph and marrow of a traditional reminiscence. We hear almost nothing of Hitchens’s two marriages or three children, and he certainly never discusses falling in love. (Though he talks about his experiments on the Wilde side at university — as well as at boarding school, even if those were abruptly brought to an end by a snitch “with the unimprovable name of Peter Raper.”) We do hear about his social life and dearest friendships, and those portraits and set pieces are some of the most pleasurable in the book. This is a man who’s cut such a fat swath through the smart set that a dinner with William Styron essentially gets relegated to a footnote, as does the revelation that he learned the identity of Deep Throat long before the public did, by pestering Nora Ephron, Carl Bernstein’s ex-wife (in fact, you would not believe the number of delectable footnotes in this book; the devil, apparently, is in the asterisks).
Full piece including photos at NYT.
Footnote
Published by Allen & Unwuin in NZ & Aust.