LITERARY CRITICS WHO MAKE YOU ROLL on the floor laughing are a dime a dozen; what makes Christopher Hitchens rare is that he can do so intentionally. Readers who know Hitchens through his political polemics in the Nation and elsewhere will be grateful that he brings the same stylistic toolbox to his literary job. In the essays that make up Unacknowledged Legislation, there is bluntness, as in the essay that begins “Was T.S. Eliot an anti-Semite? What a question! Of course he was an anti-Semite, if the term retains any of its meaning.” There is understatement, as when Dylan Thomas appears in Christopher Isherwood’s diaries “and behaves just as every other published recollection of him suggests that he should.” There are against-the-grain arguments for forgotten works — Conan Doyle’s “grossly underrated” medieval romance The White Company, for in-stance. And there are elegant dismissals of such ballyhooed failures as Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full, in which the labored punning “reeks of midnight oil, and also of insufficient midnight oil.” To call these judgments unpredictable or quirky is just another way (odd, when you think about it) of saying they are based on principle. But what principle? In politics, Hitchens distrusts ideological “soundness.” He supports gay rights but opposes abortion. He hates identity politics but thinks the Elgin Marbles should be returned to Greece. He’s the same way with literature. On the evidence of these essays, Hitchens chose long ago to apprentice himself to two authors whose legacies are at first sight incompatible: George Orwell and Oscar Wilde. Hitchens admires Orwell as a man of action, an enemy of circumlocution and pretense willing “to risk calumny and anathema rather than acquiesce in a lie.” Indeed, Hitchens aspires to such engagement, and calls himself “one who regards ‘pamphleteer’ as a title of honor.” But it is through Wilde that we get a better glimpse of Hitchens’s literary method. Like Wilde, Hitchens thinks irony can carry considerable intellectual freight. He is a formidable wielder of paradox: Isaiah Berlin’s “emphasis on complexity had a strong element of…simplification,” for instance, or “Those who boast of taking the long view of history are hopelessly wedded to the short-term.” Hitchens is desperate to show Wilde as not just a wit but a serious socialist writer (the socialist subtext to The Importance of Being Earnest, he argues, is “what gives the play its muscle and nerve”), and by and large, he succeeds. After World War I, Hitchens laments, socialism degenerated into sterile Labourism on one hand and Leninism on the other. But this, he says, “does not entitle us to forget a more noble and defeated tradition, in which Wilde, among others, took an honorable place.” If “pamphleteer” is a term of praise for Hitchens, so is “parlor pink.” Orwell and Wilde are Hitchens’s guys, and their enemies are his. It is not just that Hitchens cannot forgive Sir Edward Carson for his prosecution of Wilde for sodomy; he can’t even forgive (as Wilde himself did) the treachery of Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. To know that the late British Marxist critic Raymond Williams despised Orwell is to anticipate that he will be measured against Orwell and found wanting. Hitchens accuses Williams of whitewashing the Stalinists’ murderous record during the Spanish Civil War. “The give-away stuff about ‘socialism and the people,'” Hitchens writes, “forces one to the conclusion that Williams — the Williams who joined the Party after the Hitler-Stalin pact and whose first published pamphlet was a defense of the 1940 Soviet invasion of Finland — had not by 1971 shed all of his early training in the Stalin school of falsification.” It’s worth noting that this broadside against Raymond Williams was delivered as the Raymond Williams Memorial Lecture at Hay-on-Wye two years ago. A writer’s integrity is almost a holy thing for Hitchens, something to be sought even if — perhaps especially if — it leaves him as “lonely, derided, near-bankrupt and desperately ill” as Orwell in his later days. There is a solidarity across the ages among those who possess such integrity, and among those who recognize it. H.L. Mencken, Hitchens notes, “composed an extremely well-wrought essay in defense of Oscar Wilde, perhaps in part because he recognized another victim of the jeering, taunting mob.” Such defenses, ideally, lead to a contagion of decency. Hitchens views Murray Kempton as a defender of nuance in a highly ideological time, and “it was partly this gift for nuance that caused Kempton to notice, while reviewing the work of Whittaker Chambers, something undeniably authentic beneath the bombast and self-pity. Indeed, it appeared paradoxically as if Chambers had had a real feeling for Marxism, whereas Alger Hiss understood only power and revenge.” Conversely, those who scamper towards consensus are indecent, contemptible — Isaiah Berlin, for example, who “in every instance…known to me, from the Cold War through Algeria to Suez to Vietnam…strove to find a high ‘liberal’ justification either for the status quo or for the immediate needs of the conservative authorities.” In literature as in politics, Hitchens’s measuring stick is the individual. He judges by looking at both sides of an issue and entering the battle against the side he thinks is arguing in bad faith. When he describes how Dorothy Parker’s final bequest to the NAACP was contested by Lillian Hellman (“surely one of the least attractive women produced by the American ‘progressive’ culture in this century”), he is manifestly less gleeful that the NAACP got the money than that Hellman didn’t. This man’s-the-measure turn of mind can lead Hitchens astray. In his essay on the tenth anniversary of the fatwa Iran issued against Salman Rushdie (to whom this book is dedicated), Hitchens shows that Rushdie’s enemies meant business, murdering his Japanese translator and Norwegian editor, and that Western writers responded with cowardice, slipping out of the room when petitions were being signed and rallying to Rushdie with considerably less readiness than Muslim writers who were actually in the line of fire. But Hitchens also insists that the rise of Mohammad Khatami’s liberalizing regime in Iran, which lifted the fatwa, has brought a final victory for Rushdie — and he cannot bear to think otherwise. He rages against a 1998 Commentary article in which Daniel Pipes wrote that Rushdie should not necessarily assume the coast was clear. To Pipes’s report that “in [Iran’s] Parliament, 150 of the 270 members signed an open letter stressing the edict’s utter irrevocability,” Hitchens hits back feebly that 120 parliamentarians didn’t sign. This grasping at straws, which Hitchens lambastes without mercy when others commit it, surely has less to do with Rushdie’s situation than with Hitchens’s dislike of Daniel Pipes and Commentary — a dislike imported from other arguments. In defending Philip Larkin against the criticism of the English Marxist Terry Eagleton and a variety of New Left critics in — of course — the New Left Review, Hitchens begins by raising the stakes considerably. “Larkin was not just a bigot or a foul-mouth or a chauvinist, or any other modish personifier of ‘insensitivity,'” Hitchens writes. “He was an artist, and he was a thwarted fascist.” Hitchens proves his own (textual) sensitivity with a close (if arguable) reading of the poems and a subtle charting of Larkin’s debt to the race-and-blood obsessions of D.H. Lawrence. Hitchens pillories the Left for treating Larkin as a propagandist rather than a poet, and the Right for assuming that once the accusation of propaganda is parried, there’s nothing left in the poems to argue about. Thus a Hitchens credo, which appears in different forms throughout the book: “Hesitate once, hesitate twice, hesitate a hundred times,” he writes elsewhere, “before employing political standards as a device for the analysis and appreciation of poetry.” In passages like these, Hitchens is not describing the overlap of literature and politics so much as he is defending the claims of literature against the claims of politics. He has his priorities right. A literary view of politics leaves you with a literary politics, but a political view of literature leaves you with no literature at all. In a lecture on historical memory delivered at a Belfast literature festival in 1997, he warns his listeners that we “did not get here from nowhere,” “did not arrive without baggage, and would be boring and banal if we had.” What is more, we cannot be expected to be ashamed of having taken seriously certain ideas of nationality and religion and community. Some imperishable writing and some unforgettable history has emerged from this crucible and become common property even in an age where Faith is the most overestimated of the virtues, and physics more awe-inspiring than religion….Redemption will begin when the life of all free citizens is enhanced in common by music and letters and philosophy, and the qualities of eloquence and irony. For Hitchens, then, irony is a redemptive thing. This is the central paradox of Hitchens himself. He considers irony a paramount cultural virtue, and yet culture in a broad sense is the one thing that he is never, ever ironic about. So Hitchens’s “irony” is not at all the same thing that others on the left mean by the term. To borrow Albert O. Hirschman’s distinction, Hitchens seeks a “voice” within Western culture for his politics, while the vast majority of leftist critics seek an “exit” from it. He is interested in arguing literature, not in arguing it away, and of how many politically committed critics (on the left or the right) can that be said? Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at The Weekly Standard. May 21, 2001; Volume 6, Number 34
