{"id":802,"date":"2011-12-16T10:45:00","date_gmt":"2011-12-16T18:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2011\/12\/christopher-hitchens-r-i-p.html"},"modified":"2011-12-16T10:45:00","modified_gmt":"2011-12-16T18:45:00","slug":"christopher-hitchens-r-i-p","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2011\/12\/christopher-hitchens-r-i-p.html","title":{"rendered":"Christopher Hitchens, R.I.P."},"content":{"rendered":"

SOMETIMES even when you know something’s coming, it knocks the wind out of you when it arrives. That’s the way I felt this morning when I opened the paper and saw that Hitchens had succumbed to cancer that virtually every reader knew he had. (Here<\/a> is the New York Times obit.)<\/p>\n

<\/a>I’ve spent the last few mornings reading an essay or two in his latest collection, Arguably. I don’t always, or even often, agree with Hitchens, and on some political matters, such as the Iraq War, I tend to disagree rather strenuously. But I can’t think of a livelier or wider ranging writer: The essays on turmoil in the Middle East, rebel John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, Orwell’s Animal Farm<\/i>, or conservative hero Edmund Burke could only have come from Hitch.<\/p>\n

I’d long enjoyed Hitchens’ writing, but thought of him as a kind of witty, debate-club contrarian until I met him in 2004, during an article<\/a> I was writing about his friend Martin Amis. Hitchens and I had a drink — it was about noon, so mine was lemonade, his a double (or was it a quadruple?) Johnny Walker. Hitch was funny and engaging as we spoke about shared interests — the life and work of Salman Rushdie, George Orwell — and entirely sincere on the matter of the Iraq War. (Which ended, sort of, the same week he died.) I was not convinced of this war launched by an incompetent boy king, but I was entirely persuaded that Hitchens had his reasons, and they were not merely for show.<\/p>\n

(Here<\/a> is a smart piece for Salon about the told-you-so by religious zealots after the death of the atheist writer.)<\/p>\n

Since then, out mutual friend and literary agent Steve Wasserman, who was at his bedside last night,\u00a0has kept me apprised on Hitch’s condition; I felt like I knew him even though he would not likely have recognized my name. I’ll wager that Hitchens, because he wrote so personally and so forcefully, had that effect on a lot of people. We won’t see his like again.<\/p>\n

UPDATE: Here<\/a> is a fascinating Katha Pollitt obit that does not let him off the hook for his political switch, his bullying or his self-destructive drinking.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

SOMETIMES even when you know something’s coming, it knocks the wind out of you when it arrives. That’s the way I felt this morning when I opened the paper and saw that Hitchens had succumbed to cancer that virtually every reader knew he had. (Here is the New York Times obit.) I’ve spent the last […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[88,34,65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-802","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-brit-culture","7":"category-literary","8":"category-politics","9":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=802"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/802\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}