Hitchens

well, he is never dull.  On the strange creature who was Jorge Luis Borges, who admired Videla and Pinochet, and hated the Perons (Hitchens calls Evita "whorish") and was sexually perhaps a little dysfunctional.   Hitchens says that the critic F.H. Bradley has the right epitaph for Borges "For love unsatisfied the world is a mystery, a mystery which satisfied love appears to understand."

On America and American writing, Hitchens says that "Augie March" is the Great American Novel.  Well, that made me download it to my Kindle, but it will take a lot to push "Huckleberry Finn" off his perch for me.  I'll let  you know when I've read it.  Hitchens also tells us that Saul Bellow, who wrote "Augie March", went to Mexico to find Trotsky and got there the day after old Leon had been ice-picked, and viewed the body with blood in its hair.  Really?  This sounds like an urban myth.  Can anyone confirm?  I seem to remember a film about Trotsky, made in the 1970s with Richard Burton in the title role, in which the killing scene was made to look like a bullfight.  Must have seemed like a good idea at the time.

Hitchens is brilliant on Malcolm Muggeridge.  Boys of a certain generation (my brother) were quite often big fans of Muggs.  Not me.  Bloke was never off the telly, and this is what Hitchens has to say about why.
"...he was drawn compulsively to that which he found loathsome.  Television, he could plainly see, would be the death of literacy and the handmaid of instant gentrification: it would instill cheap and commercial values and invite the nastiest forms of populism.  He fell for it like a ton of bricks.  He wallowed exuberantly in its corruption.  He was a natural.  He was perfectly well aware, as his diaries show, that he was expending his spirit, in a waste of shame.  But he enjoyed it, and excelled at it, and he may have hoped to turn the greatest weapon of crass modernity against itself."  Marvellously, Hitchens goes on to mention a 1969 film of Muggeridge's, entitled "Something Beautiful for God" which Hitchens says "launched the person that we all came to know as Mother Teresa|, an then goes on to say nothing about her.  And yet we know what Hitchens thought about Mother Teresa, which is what I think too.  That she was a ghastly pro-totalitarian old bitch who sucked the dicks of dictators.  Excuse crudity.

And when I went to see 'Fahrenheit 9/11' - I could not stay until the end - I wish I could have written about it as Hitchens did.

"To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability.  To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental.  To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious.  'Fahrenheit 9/11' is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness.  It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of 'dissenting' bravery."

Hitchens (writing in 2001) on the defeat that year of the Taleban in Afghanistan.  "We are rid of one of the foulest regimes on earth... no possible future government in Afghanistan can be worse than the Taleban... those ultralieftists and soft liberals who said don't bomb, leave Afghanistan alone, etc... needn't be teased too much now.  The rescue of the Iraqi Kurds in 1991 taught them nothing; they were for leaving Bosnia and Kosovo to the mercy of Milosevic; they had nothing to say about the lack of an international intervention in Rwanda."  These people, or the generation that now follows them, are now saying "Syria is not our war".  Whose war is it then?  The person who said that to me recently would say "the Syrians' war".  He is a Christian who believes in a one-state solution for Israel-Palestine.  A Palestinian state.

Well, pardon the cliche, but we won't see the likes of him again.

some little Hitchens treasures

on Grahame Greene, Stamboul Train, which I have not read, though I have read a number of his others and forgotten them, must try harder "One must see unblinkingly into the pettishness and self-deception of the human condition.  Innocence is another word for prey.  Survival is the law."  Seems about right to me.  Also, excellent to bring the word "pettishness" back into the vocabulary.

on Evelyn Waugh, just the joyful little phrase we do not use often enough "Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole" - en passant, he says Bruce Chatwin was an overrated society traveller.  So indeed he was.  "they had loitered of old on many a doorstep and forced an entry into many a stricken home" (of journalists) - well, quite so.  Waugh does not seem to use many commas, perhaps I have become more American in my wish to use them.

on Byron, very interesting, except I have never read Byron, I grew up in in a Romantic age, but the last thing any of us wanted to do was to read the Romantic poets, at least in my circles.  And of course Byron died young.  Which is the Romantic thing to do.  Oh and by the way old Lordy-babe's recipe for apricot fool is fab.  I use it every summer.

on James Joyce - well, how silly I am, I had not thought before this that I should read the Odyssey and then read Ulysses again.  Incidentally we are having a Bloomsday here in Strasbourg next month, vg.  But which edition should I read?  (Of the Odyssey, obviously).

I'll finish up with Hitchens tomorrow.  Because I've got a lot more to say.  About other things.  I can't do Hitch justice.

Hitchens on Kipling

Christopher Hitchens' writing has the gift, among others, of making me think again about writers I have read, and wanting to read some I have not.  Like many children of my generation I read, or had read to me, Kipling's "Jungle Book" and "Just So Stories", but did not really read him other than that.  And his reputation is not a good one, these days.  But Kipling was all-get-out interesting, as Hitchens shows us.  He praised Indians as equal human beings, not a fashionable view in his time and milieu, but opposed independence.  Hitchens notes that in the first fourteen years of the twentieth century British politics was almost completely remade by the forces of organised labour, Irish nationalism, and female suffrage.  This, I suspect, is right, and Kipling understood it as few others did.  He cites here George Dangerfield "The Strange Death of Liberal England", published in 1935.  Which I have not read, but surely must one day soon.  Hitchens notes too that as a boy he saw bound volumes of Kipling in his school library, with a left-handed swastika on the covers, and as I was informed in the comments on a previous post this was not uncommon before 1939 - but Kipling insisted in the mid-1930s that the symbol be removed from all editions of his work, in which too he was ahead of his time.

I have posted previously about this symbol, as I found it on a book given as a Sunday school prize to my late great-uncle Ridley, always known as Tigs, when I recently helped begin to clear my aunt's house after she died in February this year.  Another thing we found was a diary that Tigs kept of a trip he made to southern Africa, by sea, in 1959.  This is being serialised as the Tigs' Trip blog, and you can read it here.  Fascinating social history.

Love. poverty and war

is the title of a book of essays by Christopher Hitchens, published in 2005, which I re-read very recently because I was thinking about him when he died earlier this year.  He was such a great writer and such a clear thinker.  No-one writing now seems to come close.  Unless, readers, you know different...

I thought about Hitch because I happened today, by chance, on an interview with Andy Kershaw, who used to do world music on Radio 4,  Kershaw quoted the title and referred in the interview to Hitchens himself.  Apparently they went to North Korea together.  How cool is that?  I used rather to like Kershaw's radio stuff, being a Womad fan and all - the only festival where you spend most of your time with your back to the stage.  Anyway, that's in the past - the last Womad festival I went to was in 2003 and I won't be going again, but that is another story.

Kershaw was being interviewed because he was appearing at the Hay festival, so naturally enough he has a book out.  Damn, one-click ordering, curse you, there it was on my Kindle before I knew what I was about.  You'll remember Andy Kershaw, with his Lancashire accent - he went a bit bonkers a few years ago on the Isle of Man, and was a bit down and out and a fugitive from justice for a while, but now he's a lot better.  I thought his book might be interesting.  We'll see.

Hitchens was wonderful.  In the very first essay in  his book he debunks Churchill and prays in aid Josephine Tey's book 'The Daughter of Time' which is one of my great faves - I bought it recently for a young Australian relative who is studying Shakespeare.  Where was I?  Focus, woman, focus.  Ah yes, the Second World War.  He reminds us that the British burned the French fleet in north Africa, with many French lives lost, and that the fleet was there to get it away from the Germans, who did not acquire a single vessel.  He also reminds us that the Roosevelt administration recognised Vichy France.  He points out, probably rightly, that Churchill's demarches were opportunistic, vainglorious, and, crucially, lucky.  More Hitchens jewels later.  I have to go and celebrate Manchester City's victory with significant other.