A prayer for Hitchens

I read somewhere that Paul Foot, an atheist, used to get shirty with people who told him they had  prayed for him when he was ill.  Most of us wouldn’t be so ungracious if our religious friends and colleagues performed a ritual for us in our hour of need, even if they might as well have gone to the pub and played darts for all the good it would do us.  We would appreciate the thought and concern behind the action. 

If I thought praying would help cure Christopher Hitchens’s cancer of the oesophagus I would be in the church now, of course.  I want the guy to live for purely selfish reasons, that is, because I love reading him.  He’s only sixty-one and we should get another ten years or so of writing out of him.  Two of my favourite writers, Jane Austen and George Orwell, both died far too young - Austen at forty-one, when she was really getting into her stride as a novelist, Orwell at forty-six when he was starting to earn good money from Nineteen Eighty-Four.  It’s especially galling that Jane Austen’s brothers and sister lived to their seventies and eighties. The length of lifespan should have been more equably managed in the Austen family, with the rest of her siblings sharing out a couple of years apiece to her, without much inconvenience.

There are others who believe in the power of prayer but are in a quandary about it eg Christina Odone:-

I would like to get on my knees and say the “Our Father” for someone for whom I have a sneaking admiration. But is it right to pray for someone who claims to find prayer hateful?

The short answer to that is if you thought your prayers would work, of course it’s right, just as it’s right for a doctor to give someone medicine even though they don’t like the taste or amputate their gangrenous leg against their objections.  However, evidently Odone’s view of prayer is that it's something you do to make yourself feel good, rather than for any results it brings to the one you're praying for.  (For further takes on Odone’s views see here and here.) 

I’ve been leafing through Hitchens’s collections of essays, For the Sake of Argument, Love, Poverty & War and Unacknowledged Legislation to find a piece that would encapsulate his brilliance.  But I don’t find Hitchens very quotable, not like Orwell, say.  He himself though is deft with the quotation and illuminating with the allusion.  Hitchens says as a riposte to those who accuse him of being a drunk that he turns out 1000 publishable words a day.  He evidently loves to write and what you get from his work is gusto and enjoyment.  He describes James Joyce:-

His universe of words was a torrent of puns, palindromes, parallels, parodies and plagiarisms (with a good deal of Parnell stirred into the alliteration).  Every now and then I will see a word as if for the first time, and suddenly appreciate that Evian is “naïve” spelled backward, or that Bosnia is an anagram of “bonsai”. . Joyce could do that at an infinitely higher standard of multiple entendre, drawing on several languages, for pages on end, so that - depending on your level of awareness, and your capacity to spot new allusions and analogies - you never reopen the same book of his, or even the same chapter, without realizing that you are holding a new text in your hands and haven’t really read it before.

Hitchens can put the boot in when it’s deserved, very amusingly, but his great strength is as an appreciative critic.  “Marvellous” is one of his favourite adjectives, and so is “finely written”. He is good at entering into another writer’s mind and presenting their world view.  Here he is on Mencken:-

Mencken did take the viewpoint of ‘natural selection’ precisely because it validated his own views of Nietzsche and the pitiless battle for mastery. . . It is thus possible to derive all of his finest and most memorable polemics - against the First World War, against Christian fundamentalism, against the Anglophile WASP aristocracy, and against the backwardness and misery of the Dixie states - from an essentially vile and infirm premise that he adopted from the outset.  He opposed the First World War because he thought Wilhemine Germany to be the embodiment of Nietzschean strength and virtue.  He opposed the Christian fundamentalists because they made it easier for him to attack religion itself - the source of all sickly and irrelevant feelings of charity.  Dislike for the Anglophiles and WASPs was a natural corollary for a man who believed in Teutonism, while contempt for the states of the old Confederacy was a merely pleasurable corollary of that, because it offered up the Anglo-Saxon white trash at their trashiest and their Christianity in its most maudlin and twisted form.  No wonder, then ,that in his ill-tempered and misanthropic shape, he has been adopted as a premature foe of ‘PC” by the rancorous crowd of minor swells who put out the American Spectator. . . . . .

But any reductionist analysis of Mencken runs the risk of ignoring a fine mind that engaged itself in some high duties. . . Mencken is fascinating because he often transcended what he freely called his ‘prejudices’.  . (From "Critic of the Booboisie", Unacknowledged Legislation.)

A good literary critic knows the world as well as books and that dig at the libertarian tendency is typical of Hitchens, who likes to view the dead mingling with the living.

Hitchen is sometimes wrong-headed and partisan and the short pieces he has been producing for Slate recently are not his best work but he is irreplaceable. 

So if I was of the praying persuasion here’s my prayer for Hitchens:-

May Christopher Hitchens respond to treatment and recover.  May his doctors be competent and his medical insurance (since he lives in the USA) cover all the costs of state of the art procedures.  May his sanctimonious enemies be confounded.  May he get well and return to writing and lecturing.  May I see him at an Edinburgh Book Festival, have a drink with him and pour a pint over his lap for that idiotic article he wrote about how women are rubbish at being funny.

Amen.

Comments

[Bob]

Rosie, I loved this post. Thank you.

[James Bloodworth]

Indeed, great piece. Been getting tired of some of the babble I've been hearing about Christopher this week. I wish him well - the world of argument would be a whole lot poorer without him.