I got a copy of Christopher Hitchens's Arguably from the library, who now want it back after a 3 week loan. It's a fat book, made fatter by large, wide spaced print. I don't think it's as good as Unacknowledged Legislators. The sense I had was that of Hitchens not at the very top of his game - however I'd rather read him in that mode than others at their best, so I'll buy a copy when I'm less skint.
He most reveals his political self in the essay on Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. There are some passages where you can guess he is seeing with a small jolt of recognition his own stance post September 2001
He says of Rebecca West's guide and friend "Constantine" who is "supposed to speak for all those who have resisted the long, rival tyrannies of Austria-Hungary and Turkey, and who are now trying to teach the discordant peoples of Yugoslavia to speak with one voice. . .When dealing with an incensed young Bosnian who accused him of being a government stooge, he responds with some gravity by saying: "Yes. For the sake of my country, and perhaps a little for the sake of my soul, I have given up the deep peace of being in opposition." This is one of the more profoundly mature, and also among the most tragic, of the signals that West's ear was attuned to pick up."
So Hitchens preferred to speak to Paul Wolfowitz than to the readers of The Nation, since Wolfowitz had some power of action.
Hitchens has often been accused of trying to re-live the 1930s, seeing in the excuse making for political Islam from the left a re-run of the Nazi-Soviet pact. You can guess he hears a familiar chime in these words of Rebecca West, about her own disillusionment with ineffective progressive and pacifistic circles:-
"She reflects on the "anti-war" meetings that she has attended back home. . .
"The speakers use all accents of sincerity and sweetness, and they continuously praise virtue, but they never speak as if power would be theirs tomorrow and they would use it for virtuous action. . .They want to be right, not do right. ."
He also says that George Orwell was "a great admirer of Rebecca West". Is that wishful thinking? I can remember one passing reference to her in his work and she's not in the index of the four volume Collected Essays. However, I don't have the complete works, so I may have missed something.
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