Έφυγε ο ποιητής, πεζογράφος και μεταφραστής Αργύρης Χιόνης

December 27th, 2011 § Leave a Comment

Ένας σημαντικός άνθρωπος των γραμμάτων, ο Αργύρης Χιόνης, πέθανε ανήμερα τα Χριστούγεννα, σε ηλικία 68 ετών. Ποιητής, πεζογράφος και μεταφραστής, γεννήθηκε το 1943 στην Αθήνα, αλλά πέρασε μεγάλο μέρος της ζωής του σε χώρες της βορειοδυτικής Ευρώπης.

Σε ηλικία 14 ετών ξεκινάει να γράφει ποιήματα σε έμμετρο και ομοιοκατάληκτο στίχο, επηρεασμένος από τις μαντινάδες και τον «Ερωτόκριτο», που τραγουδούσε η Κρητικιά μητέρα του.

Πρώτη εμφάνισή του στα γράμματα ήταν τα ποιήματα που δημοσιεύονται το 1963 στο περιοδικό «Δωδέκατη Ώρα» και το 1964 στη «Νέα Εστία». Το 1966, σε ηλικία 23 ετών, εκδίδεται η πρώτη ποιητική συλλογή του Απόπειρες φωτός, ενώ το 1967, λίγο μετά τη δικτατορία, μεταβαίνει στο Παρίσι, όπου εργάζεται σκληρά και τα βράδια παρακολουθεί μαθήματα γαλλικών.

Στις αρχές του 1968, ποιήματά του μεταφράζονται και δημοσιεύονται σε λογοτεχνικά περιοδικά της Ολλανδίας, χώρα που γίνεται ο δεύτερος σταθμός του. Στο Άμστερνταμ θα ζήσει τα επόμενα οκτώμισι χρόνια, δουλεύοντας σκληρά και προσπαθώντας να μάθει τη γλώσσα, κόποι που στη συνέχεια του αναγνωρίζονται: Παίρνει υποτροφία από την Εταιρεία Συγγραφέων, γίνεται δεκτός σε λογοτεχνικούς κύκλους, δημοσιεύει σε περιοδικά, εκδίδονται δύο βιβλία του, βραβεύονται δύο θεατρικά έργα του, διορίζεται δάσκαλος ελληνικών στο Λαϊκό Πανεπιστήμιο και, με κρατική υποτροφία, εγγράφεται στη σχολή ιταλικής φιλολογίας του Πανεπιστημίου του Άμστερνταμ.

Επιστρέφει στην Ελλάδα το 1977 και για τα επόμενα πέντε χρόνια θα δουλέψει ως μεταφραστής, θα συγγράψει μια σειρά παιδικών εκπομπών για το ραδιόφωνο και θα εκπροσωπήσει τη χώρα μας στο ετήσιο Διεθνές Συγγραφικό Πρόγραμμα του Πανεπιστημίου της Αϊόβα, στις ΗΠΑ.

Το 1982, έπειτα από διαγωνισμό, προσλαμβάνεται ως μεταφραστής στο Συμβούλιο της Ευρωπαϊκής Ένωσης και εγκαθίσταται στις Βρυξέλλες. Το 1992 παραιτείται και αποσύρεται στο Θροφαρί, ένα μικρό χωριό της ορεινής Κορινθίας, όπου ασχολείται με την ποίηση και τη γεωργία. Ήταν μέλος της Εταιρείας Συγγραφέων.

Για το θάνατό του, ο υπουργός Πολιτισμού και Τουρισμού Παύλος Γερουλάνος δήλωσε τα εξής: «Ο Αργύρης Χιόνης υπήρξε μια πολύ ιδιαίτερη περίπτωση ανθρώπου και δημιουργού. Πολίτης του κόσμου αλλά και άρρηκτα συνδεδεμένος με την Ελλάδα, άνθρωπος πολυπράγμων και συλλέκτης πάσης φύσεως εμπειριών, προσωπικότητα σύνθετη που αναζήτησε την ευτυχία στα απλά και μικρά, παρουσία χαμηλόφωνη αλλά επιδραστική, ο Χιόνης εξέφρασε με το έργο του την απορία του ανθρώπου μπροστά στο παράλογο και μάταιο της ύπαρξής του, αλλά και μια βαθιά αγάπη για τη ζωή και μια ειλικρινή κατάφαση σ’ αυτή. Στους οικείους και τους φίλους του εκφράζω τα ειλικρινή μου συλλυπητήρια».

Έργα και ημέρες

Ο Αργύρης Χιόνης έλαβε το 2007 το βραβείο του περιοδικού «Διαβάζω» για το βιβλίο του Όντα και μη όντα (2006), ενώ το 2009 τιμήθηκε με το Κρατικό βραβείο διηγήματος (εξ ημισείας με τον Τόλη Νικηφόρου) για το βιβλίο του Το οριζόντιο ύψος και άλλες αφύσικες ιστορίες (2008). Ποιήματα και πεζογραφήματά του έχουν μεταφραστεί και δημοσιευτεί στα αγγλικά, γαλλικά, ιταλικά, γερμανικά, ολλανδικά, σερβοκροατικά και ρουμάνικα.

Τα ποιητικά βιβλία του είναι τα Σχήματα απουσίας (εκδ. Αρίων, 1973),Μεταμορφώσεις (εκδ. Μπουκουμάνης, 1974), Τύποι ήλων (εκδ. Εγνατία-Τραμ, 1978), Λεκτικά τοπία (εκδ. Καστανιώτης, 1983), Σαν τον τυφλό μπροστά στον καθρέφτη (εκδ. Υάκινθος, 1986), Εσωτικά τοπία (εκδ. Νεφέλη, 1991), Ο ακίνητος δρομέας (εκδ. Νεφέλη, 1996), Ιδεογράμματα (εκδ. Τα τραμάκια, 1997), Τότε που η σιωπή τραγούδησε (εκδ. Νεφέλη, 2000), Στο υπόγειο (εκδ. Νεφέλη, 2004), Ό,τι περιγράφω με περιγράφει (εκδ. Γαβριηλίδης, 2010).

Από τις εκδόσεις Νεφέλη κυκλοφόρησε το 2006 η συγκεντρωτική έκδοση των δέκα πρώτων ποιητικών του συλλογών, με τίτλο Η φωνή της σιωπής: ποιήματα 1966-2000.

Υπήρξε επίσης μεταφραστής σημαντικών έργων, όπως Τα Ποιήματα του Οκτάβιο Πας (1981), Όταν το ταβάνι κλαίει του Ράσελ Έντσον (1986),Περηφάνια και προκατάληψη της Τζέιν Όστεν (1997), Κατακόρυφη ποίηση του Ρομπέρτο Γιάρος (1997) και Με το αγκίστρι στην καρδιά: Μια επιλογή από το έργο του του Ανρί Μισώ (2003).

Έγραψε, τέλος, αφηγήματα για μικρούς και μεγάλους, όπως Ιστορίες μιας παλιάς εποχής που δεν ήρθε ακόμα (εκδ. Αιγόκερως, 1981), Ο αφανής θρίαμβος της ομορφιάς (εκδ. Πατάκης, 1995), Τρία μαγικά παραμύθια (εκδ. Πατάκης, 1998), Όντα και μη όντα (εκδ. Γαβριηλίδης, 2006), Το οριζόντιο ύψος και άλλες αφύσικες ιστορίες (εκδ. Κίχλη, 2008), ενώ το έργο του Έχων σώας τα φρένας κι άλλες τρελές ιστορίες αναμένεται από τις εκδόσεις Κίχλη.

Η κηδεία του θα γίνει στο Θροφαρί.

Polemicist Who Slashed All, Freely, Dies at 62

December 17th, 2011 § 2 Comments

By 

The New York Times: December 16, 2011

Christopher Hitchens, a slashing polemicist in the tradition of Thomas Paine and George Orwell who trained his sights on targets as various as Henry Kissinger, the British monarchy and Mother Teresa, wrote a best-seller attacking religious belief, and dismayed his former comrades on the left by enthusiastically supporting the American-led war in Iraq, died on Thursday in Houston. He was 62.

Justin Lane for The New York Times

Christopher Hitchens in Washington, D.C., in 1999.

Multimedia
Michael Stravato for The New York Times

Christopher Hitchens a few hours after being released from the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston in October.

The cause was pneumonia, a complication of esophageal cancer, Vanity Fair magazine said inannouncing the death, at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. Mr. Hitchens, who lived in Washington, learned he had cancer while on a publicity tour in 2010 for his memoir,“Hitch-22,” and began writing and, on television, speaking about his illness frequently.

“In whatever kind of a ‘race’ life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist,” Mr. Hitchens wrote in Vanity Fair, for which he was a contributing editor.

He took pains to emphasize that he had not revised his position on atheism, articulated in his best-selling 2007 book, “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” although he did express amused appreciation at the hope, among some concerned Christians, that he might undergo a late-life conversion.

He also professed to have no regrets for a lifetime of heavy smoking and drinking. “Writing is what’s important to me, and anything that helps me do that — or enhances and prolongs and deepens and sometimes intensifies argument and conversation — is worth it to me,” he told Charlie Rose in a television interview in 2010, adding that it was “impossible for me to imagine having my life without going to those parties, without having those late nights, without that second bottle.”

Armed with a quick wit and a keen appetite for combat, Mr. Hitchens was in constant demand as a speaker on television, radio and the debating platform, where he held forth in a sonorous, plummily accented voice that seemed at odds with his disheveled appearance. He was a master of the extended peroration, peppered with literary allusions, and of the bright, off-the-cuff remark.

In 2007, when the interviewer Sean Hannity tried to make the case for an all-seeing God, Mr. Hitchens dismissed the idea with contempt. “It would be like living in North Korea,” he said.

Mr. Hitchens, a British Trotskyite who had lost faith in the Socialist movement, spent much of his life wandering the globe and reporting on the world’s trouble spots for The Nation magazine, the British newsmagazine The New Statesman and other publications.

His work took him to Northern Ireland, Greece, Cyprus, Portugal, Spain and Argentina in the 1970s, generally to shine a light on the evil practices of entrenched dictators or the imperial machinations of the great powers.

After moving to the United States in 1981, he added American politics to his beat, writing a biweekly Minority Report for The Nation. He wrote a monthly review-essay for The Atlantic and, as a carte-blanche columnist at Vanity Fair, filed essays on topics as various as getting a Brazilian bikini wax and the experience of being waterboarded, a volunteer assignment that he called “very much more frightening though less painful than the bikini wax.” He was also a columnist for the online magazine Slate.

His support for the Iraq war sprang from a growing conviction that radical elements in the Islamic world posed a mortal danger to Western principles of political liberty and freedom of conscience. The first stirrings of that view came in 1989 with the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s fatwah against the novelist Salman Rushdie for his supposedly blasphemous words in “The Satanic Verses.” To Mr. Hitchens, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, confirmed the threat.

In a political shift that shocked many of his friends and readers, he cut his ties to The Nation and became an outspoken advocate of the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and a ferocious critic of what he called “Islamofascism.” Although he denied coining the word, he popularized it.

He remained unapologetic about the war. In 2006 he told the British newspaper The Guardian: “There are a lot of people who will not be happy, it seems to me, until I am compelled to write a letter to these comrades in Iraq and say: ‘Look, guys, it’s been real, but I’m going to have to drop you now. The political cost to me is just too high.’ Do I see myself doing this? No, I do not!”

Christopher Eric Hitchens was born on April 13, 1949, in Portsmouth, England. His father was a career officer in the Royal Navy and later earned a modest living as a bookkeeper.

Though it strained the family budget, Christopher was sent to private schools in Tavistock and Cambridge, at the insistence of his mother. “If there is going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it,” he overheard his mother saying to his father, clinching a spirited argument.

Mark Mahaney for The New York Times

Christopher Hitchens in his home in Washington, D.C., in 2007.

Multimedia
Mark Mahaney for The New York Times

Christopher Hitchens in 2007

He was politically attuned even as a 7-year-old. “I was precocious enough to watch the news and read the papers, and I can remember October 1956, the simultaneous crisis in Hungary and Suez, very well,” he told the magazine The Progressive in 1997. “And getting a sense that the world was dangerous, a sense that the game was up, that the Empire was over.”

Even before arriving at Balliol College, Oxford, Mr. Hitchens had been drawn into left-wing politics, primarily out of opposition to the Vietnam War. After heckling a Maoist speaker at a political meeting, he was invited to join the International Socialists, a Trotskyite party. Thus began a dual career as political agitator and upper-crust sybarite. He arranged a packed schedule of antiwar demonstrations by day and Champagne-flooded parties with Oxford’s elite at night. Spare time was devoted to the study of philosophy, politics and economics.

After graduating from Oxford in 1970, he spent a year traveling across the United States. He then tried his luck as a journalist in London, where he contributed reviews, columns and editorials to The New Statesman, The Daily Express and The Evening Standard.

“I would do my day jobs at various mainstream papers and magazines and TV stations, where my title was ‘Christopher Hitchens,’ ” he wrote in “Hitch-22,” “and then sneak down to the East End, where I was variously features editor of Socialist Worker and book review editor of the theoretical monthly International Socialism.”

He became a staff writer and editor for The New Statesman in the late 1970s and fell in with a literary clique that included Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, James Fenton, Clive James and Ian McEwan. The group liked to play a game in which members came up with the sentence least likely to be uttered by one of their number. Mr. Hitchens’s was “I don’t care how rich you are, I’m not coming to your party.”

After collaborating on a 1976 biography of James Callaghan, the Labour leader, he published his first book, “Cyprus,” in 1984 to commemorate Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus a decade earlier. A longer version was published in 1989 as “Hostage to History: Cyprus From the Ottomans to Kissinger.”

His interest in the region led to another book, “Imperial Spoils: The Curious Case of the Elgin Marbles” (1987), in which he argued that Britain should return the Elgin marbles to Greece.

In 1981 he married a Greek Cypriot, Eleni Meleagrou. The marriage ended in divorce. He is survived by their two children, Alexander and Sophia; his wife, Carol Blue, and their daughter, Antonia; and his brother, Peter.

Mr. Hitchens’s reporting on Greece came through unusual circumstances. He was summoned to Athens in 1973 because his mother, after leaving his father, had committed suicide there with her new partner. After his father’s death in 1987, he learned that his mother was Jewish, a fact she had concealed from her husband and her children.

After moving to the United States, where he eventually became a citizen, Mr. Hitchens became a fixture on television, in print and at the lectern. Many of his essays for The Nation and other magazines were collected in “Prepared for the Worst” (1988).

He also threw himself into the defense of his friend Mr. Rushdie. “It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved,” he wrote in his memoir. “In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual and the defense of free expression.”

To help rally public support, Mr. Hitchens arranged for Mr. Rushdie to be received at the White House by President Bill Clinton, one of Mr. Hitchens’s least favorite politicians and the subject of his book “No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton” (1999).

He regarded the response of left-wing intellectuals to Mr. Rushdie’s predicament as feeble, and he soon began to question many of his cherished political assumptions. He had already broken with the International Socialists when, in 1982, he astonished some of his brethren by supporting Britain’s invasion of the Falkland Islands.

The drift was reflected in books devoted to heroes like George Orwell (“Why Orwell Matters,” 2002), Thomas Paine (“Thomas Paine’s ‘Rights of Man’: A Biography,” 2006) and Thomas Jefferson (“Thomas Jefferson: Author of America,” 2005).

His polemical urges found other outlets. In 2001 he excoriated Mr. Kissinger, the secretary of state in the Nixon administration, as a war criminal in the book “The Trial of Henry Kissinger.” He helped write a 2002 documentary film by the same title based on the book.

Mr. Hitchens became a campaigner against religious belief, most notably in his screed against Mother Teresa, “The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice” (1995), and “God Is Not Great.” He regarded Mother Teresa as a proselytizer for a retrograde version of Roman Catholicism rather than as a saintly charity worker.

“I don’t quite see Christopher as a ‘man of action,’ ” the writer Ian Buruma told The New Yorker in 2006, “but he’s always looking for the defining moment — as it were, our Spanish Civil War, where you put yourself on the right side, and stand up to the enemy.”

One stand distressed many of his friends. In 1999, Sidney Blumenthal, an aide to Mr. Clinton and a friend of Mr. Hitchens’s, testified before a grand jury that he was not the source of damaging comments made to reporters about Monica Lewinsky, whose supposed affair with the president was under investigation by the House of Representatives.

Contacted by House investigators, Mr. Hitchens supplied information in an affidavit that, in effect, accused Mr. Blumenthal of perjury and put him in danger of being indicted.

At a lunch in 1998, Mr. Hitchens wrote, Mr. Blumenthal had characterized Ms. Lewinsky as “a stalker” and said the president was the victim of a predatory and unstable woman. Overnight, Mr. Hitchens — now called “Hitch the Snitch” by Blumenthal partisans — became persona non grata in living rooms all over Washington. In a review of “Hitch-22” in The New York Review of Books, Mr. Buruma criticized Mr. Hitchens for making politics personal.

To Mr. Hitchens, he wrote, “politics is essentially a matter of character.”

“Politicians do bad things,” Mr. Buruma continued, “because they are bad men. The idea that good men can do terrible things (even for good reasons), and bad men good things, does not enter into this particular moral universe.” Mr. Hitchens’s latest collection of writings, “Arguably: Essays,” published this year, has been a best-seller and ranked among the top 10 books of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review.

Mr. Hitchens discussed the possibility of a deathbed conversion, insisting that the odds were slim that he would admit the existence of God.

“The entity making such a remark might be a raving, terrified person whose cancer has spread to the brain,” he told The Atlantic in August 2010. “I can’t guarantee that such an entity wouldn’t make such a ridiculous remark, but no one recognizable as myself would ever make such a remark.”

Readers of “Hitch-22” already knew his feelings about the end. “I personally want to ‘do’ death in the active and not the passive,” he wrote, “and to be there to look it in the eye and be doing something when it comes for me.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 17, 2011

Because of an editing error, an obituary in some copies on Friday about the writer Christopher Hitchens referred incorrectly to the circumstances of his death. While he did die at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, he had not entered hospice care there, and he had not stopped treatment. The obituary also misstated the source of a remark by Mr. Hitchens, an avowed atheist, about the possibility of a deathbed conversion. It came from a 2010 interview with The Atlantic, not with The New York Times. And the obituary also misstated the frequency of “Minority Report,” the column Mr. Hitchens wrote for The Nation. It appeared biweekly, not bimonthly.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 17, 2011

Because of an editing error, an obituary in some copies on Friday about the writer Christopher Hitchens referred incorrectly to the circumstances of his death. While he did die at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, he had not entered hospice care there, and he had not stopped treatment. The obituary also misstated the source of a remark by Mr. Hitchens, an avowed atheist, about the possibility of a deathbed conversion. It came from a 2010 interview with The Atlantic, not with The New York Times. And the obituary also misstated the frequency of “Minority Report,” the column Mr. Hitchens wrote for The Nation. It appeared biweekly, not bimonthly.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 17, 2011

Because of an editing error, an obituary in some copies on Friday about the writer Christopher Hitchens referred incorrectly to the circumstances of his death. While he did die at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, he had not entered hospice care there, and he had not stopped treatment. The obituary also misstated the source of a remark by Mr. Hitchens, an avowed atheist, about the possibility of a deathbed conversion. It came from a 2010 interview with The Atlantic, not with The New York Times. And the obituary also misstated the frequency of “Minority Report,” the column Mr. Hitchens wrote for The Nation. It appeared biweekly, not bimonthly.

A version of this article appeared in print on December 17, 2011, on page D8 of the New York edition with the headline: Christopher Hitchens, a Polemicist Who Slashed All With Wit, Is Dead at 62.

«Αμφισβητίας εκ πεποιθήσεως»! Πέθανε ο αρθρογράφος και συγγραφέας Κρίστοφερ Χίτσενς

December 16th, 2011 § Leave a Comment

Ο Βρετανός συγγραφέας και αρθρογράφος Κρίστοφερ Χίτσενς πέθανε από πνευμονία, επιπλοκή του καρκίνου του οισοφάγου από τον οποίο έπασχε, στο Χιούστον. «Ο Κρίστοφερ Χίτσενς, ο δεινός επικριτής και ρήτορας πέθανε σήμερα σε ηλικία 62 ετών» επισημαίνει το αμερικανικό περιοδικό Vanity Fair στην ιστοσελίδα του. Ο Χίτσενς άρχισε τη σταδιοδρομία του ως δημοσιογράφος στη Βρετανία πριν μεταβεί στις αρχές της δεκαετίας του 1980 στις ΗΠΑ. Έγινε ευρύτερα γνωστός ως αρθρογράφος σε διάφορα αμερικανικά και βρετανικά έντυπα πολιτικού περιεχομένου. Ο Κ.Χίτσενς εξέπληξε πολλούς και δέχθηκε επικρίσεις για τη στήριξη του πολέμου στο Ιράκ.
Γεννημένος στη Βρετανία το 1949, εγκατεστημένος στην Αμερική από το 1981, άθεος, αντισυμβατικός, δεν δίστασε να βάλει στο στόχαστρό του τη Μητέρα Τερέζα, τον Χένρι Κίσινγκερ και τον Μπιλ Κλίντον, όντας μια ζωή αμφισβητίας εκ πεποιθήσεως, όπως είναι και ο τίτλος της αυτοβιογραφίας του.Διαγνώστηκε με καρκίνο του οισοφάγου τον Ιούνιο του 2010.Η σχέση του με την ΕλλάδαΟ δημοσιογράφος ασχολήθηκε συχνά με ελληνικά θέματα: έγινε γνωστός για τις θέσεις του υπέρ της επιστροφής των Μαρμάρων του Παρθενώνα (έχει γράψει, μάλιστα, και βιβλίο), ενώ στήριζε τις κυπριακές θέσεις. O Κ.Χίτσενς είχε μια παράξενη σχέση με την Ελλάδα. Εκτός από τα πολλά άρθρα που είχε γράψει για τη χώρα, στην Αθήνα αυτοκτόνησε τον Νοέμβριο του 1973 η μητέρα του μαζί με τον εραστή της, μετά από συμφωνία που είχαν κάνει. Η μητέρα του και ο εραστής της, ένας πρώην κληρικός ονόματι Τίμοθι Μπράιαν έλαβαν υψηλή δόση υπνωτικών, ενώ βρίσκονταν σε διπλανά δωμάτια ξενοδοχείου στην πόλη. Ο Τ.Μπράιαν έκοψε, μάλιστα, τις φλέβες του στην μπανιέρα. Ο Τ.Χίτσενς πέταξε στην Αθήνα μόνος του για να παραλάβει τη σορό της μητέρας του. Ο ίδιος είχε δηλώσει ότι ίσως η μητέρα του αναγκάστηκε να αυτοκτονήσει εξαιτίας του φόβου της ότι ο σύζυγός της θα μάθαινε για την απιστία της. Όσο ήταν στην Ελλάδα έγραψε ένα άρθρο για τη χούντα, το οποίο επρόκειτο να είναι το πρώτο του μεγάλο άρθρο για το περιοδικό New Statesman. [Newsroom ΔΟΛ, με πληροφορίες από ΑΠΕ/Reuters/Γαλλικό]

Christopher Hitchens dies aged 62

Celebrated journalist, writer and unshakeable secularist has died from complications of oesophageal cancer

Christopher Hitchens photographed in November 2010 for the Observer New Review

Christopher Hitchens photographed in November 2010 for the Observer New Review. The writer, critic and journalist has died aged 62 after contracting oesophageal cancer. Photograph: Jamie-James Medina for the Observer

The writer, journalist and contrarian Christopher Hitchens has died at the age of 62 after crossing the border into the “land of malady” on being diagnosed with an oesophageal cancer in June 2010. Vanity Fair, for which he had written since 1992 and was made contributing editor, marked his death in a memorial article posted late on Thursday night.

The reactions to Hitchens’s illness from his intellectual opponents – which ranged from undisguised glee to offers of prayers – testified to his stature as one of the leading voices of secularism since the publication in 2007 of his anti-religious polemic God is Not Great. The reaction from the author himself, who after a lifetime of “burning the candle of both ends” described his illness as “something so predictable and banal that it bores even me”, testified to the sharpness of his wit and the clarity of his thinking under fire, as he dissected the discourse of “struggle” that surrounds cancer, paid tribute to the medical staff who looked after him and resolved to “resist bodily as best I can, even if only passively, and to seek the most advanced advice”.

Born in 1949, Hitchens was sent to boarding school at the age of eight, his mother deciding: “If there is going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it.” This resolution pursued him to his time at Oxford, where he confessed to leading a “double life” as both an “ally of the working class” and as a guest at cocktail parties where he could meet “near-legendary members of the establishment’s firmament on nearly equal terms”.

After he graduated in 1970 with a third-class degree, the doors of Fleet Street opened wide for Hitchens, who followed his friend James Fenton into a job at the New Statesman. He began a lifelong friendship with Martin Amis and quickly gained a reputation as a pugnacious leftwing commentator, excoriating targets such as the Roman Catholic church, the Vietnam war and Henry Kissinger in dazzling essays, news reports and book reviews.

A resolution to spend time at least once a year in “a country less fortunate than [his] own” spurred him to witness the stirrings of revolution in Portugal and Poland, as well as counter-revolution in Argentina. His mother’s death in Athens, killing herself in a suicide pact with her lover, saw him reporting on the overthrow of the Greek junta in 1973.

Expeditions followed to Romania, Nicaragua, Malaysia and beyond. Hitchens travelled to post-war Iraq in 2006, Uganda in 2007 and Venezuela in 2008. A report for the New Statesman from Beirut brought rare praise from his father, a former navy officer who telephoned to say the piece was “very good”, and that he “thought it rather brave … to go there”. This validation was all the sweeter for a son who believed he’d always disappointed his father “by not being good at cricket or rugger”.

New York offered an escape from the contradictions of the British class system that Hitchens grabbed with both hands, when the offer of a job on the left-leaning weekly magazine the Nation came in 1981. Columns for Slate.com and Vanity Fair followed, with Hitchens consummating his love affair with American life when he took US citizenship in 2007.

Meanwhile he maintained an intense rivalry with his younger brother Peter, who followed him into journalism but found his place on the opposite side of the political spectrum, working first for the Daily Express and then the Mail on Sunday. Both downplayed talk of a rift, but Peter confessed in 2009 that they were “not close”. “If we weren’t brothers we wouldn’t know each other,” he said.

One of the many issues that divided the brothers was the 2003 Iraq war, with Peter arguing that the war was “against Britain’s interests”, while Christopher supported a war that he suggested would stop Saddam Hussein using the country as “his own personal torture chamber”.

His advocacy for the Iraq war was only the latest of Hitchens’s positions that many on the left found uncomfortable, and led to a chill in his relations with Gore Vidal, who had once nominated him a “successor, an inheritor, a dauphin or delphino”. But Hitchens’s opposition to what he called “fascism with an Islamic face” began long before 9/11, with the fatwa on his friend Salman Rushdie, imposed by the Ayatollah Khomeini, whom Hitchens accused of “using religion to mount a contract killing”, after the publication of The Satanic Verses.

Religion, or at least a fierce aversion to it, fuelled Hitchens’s ascent towards celebrity, particularly in his adopted homeland, after the publication of God is Not Great in 2007. In it he argued that religion is “violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry”, notching up sales of more than 500,000 copies.

Hitchens gave short shrift to the “insulting” suggestion that cancer might persuade him to change his position where reason had not, arguing that to ditch principles “held for a lifetime, in the hope of gaining favour at the last minute” would be a “hucksterish choice”, and urging those who had taken it upon themselves to pray for him not to “trouble deaf heaven with your bootless cries”.

Writing in his 2010 memoir, Hitch-22, Hitchens said that he hoped and believed his “advancing age has not quite shamed my youth”, disavowing the “‘simple’ ordinary propositions” of his younger days in favour of the maxim that “it is an absolute certainty that there are no certainties”.

“One reason, then, that I would not relive my life,” he continued, “is that one cannot be born knowing such things, but must find them out, even when they then seem bloody obvious, for oneself.”

Christopher Hitchens obituary

Author, journalist and secularist who broke with his leftwing roots over the Iraq war

Hay festival: Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens. Photograph: Felix Clay

For most of his career, Christopher Hitchens, who has died aged 62, was the left’s biggest journalistic star, writing and broadcasting with wit, style and originality in a period when such qualities were in short supply among those of similar political persuasion. Nobody else spoke with such confidence and passion for what Americans called “liberalism” and Hitchens (regarding “liberal” as too “evasive”) called “socialism”.

His targets were the abusers of power, particularly Henry Kissinger (whom he tried to bring to trial for his role in bombing Cambodia and overthrowing the Allende regime in Chile) and Bill Clinton. He was unrelenting in his support for the Palestinian cause and his excoriation of America’s projections of power in Asia and Latin America. He was a polemicist rather than an analyst or political thinker – his headmaster at the Leys School in Cambridge presciently forecast a future as a pamphleteer – and, like all the best polemicists, brought to his work outstanding skills of reporting and observation.

To these, he added wide reading, not always worn lightly, an extraordinary memory – he seemed, his friend Ian McEwan observed, to enjoy “instant neurological recall” of anything he had ever read or heard – and a vigorous, if sometimes pompous writing style, heavily laden with adjectives, elegantly looping sub-clauses and archaic phrases such as “allow me to inform you”.

His socialism was always essentially internationalist, particularly since the English working classes responded sluggishly to literature he handed out at factory gates for the International Socialists, a Trotskyist group he joined from 1966 to 1976. He had little interest in social or economic policy and, in later life, seemed somewhat bemused at questions about his three children being privately educated.

He travelled widely as a young man, often at his own expense, visiting, for example, Poland, Portugal, Czechoslovakia and Argentina at crucial moments in their anti-totalitarian struggles, offering fraternal solidarity and parcels of blue jeans. Later, he rarely wrote at length about any country without visiting it, sometimes at risk of arrest or physical attack. His loathing of tyranny was consistent: unlike many of the 1960s generation, he never harboured illusions about Mao or Castro. His concerns grew about the left’s selective tolerance for totalitarian regimes – as early as 1983, he ruffled “comrades” by supporting Margaret Thatcher’s war against General Galtieri’s Argentina – but they did not initially threaten a rupture in his political loyalties.

After the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in 2001, however, he announced he was no longer “on the left” – while denying he had become “any kind of conservative” – and “swore a sort of oath to remain coldly furious” until “fascism with an Islamic face” was “brought to a most strict and merciless account”.

To the horror of former allies, he accepted invitations to the George W Bush White House; embraced the deputy defence secretary and Iraq war hawk Paul Wolfowitz as a friend (“they were finishing each other’s sentences,” was one account of an early meeting); and resigned from the Nation, America’s foremost leftwing weekly. In 2007, after living in the US for more than 25 years, he took out American citizenship in a ceremony presided over by Bush’s head of homeland security. Long friendships with the aristocracy of the Anglo-American left – Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Alexander Cockburn, Edward Said – ended in harsh exchanges. Gore Vidal once named Hitchens as his inheritor or dauphin. The relevant quotation appeared on the dustjacket of Hitch-22, Hitchens’s memoir published in 2010, but was overlain by a red cross with “no, CH” inscribed beside it.

Hitchens was born in Portsmouth to parents of humble origins who progressed to the fringes of what George Orwell (a Hitchens role-model) would have termed the lower-upper-middle-classes. His father was a naval commander of “flinty and adamant” Tory views who became a school bursar. Father and son were never close, nor were Christopher and his younger brother Peter. The first love of Hitchens’s life was his mother, “the cream in the coffee, the gin in the campari”. She insisted (at least according to Hitchens) he should go to private boarding school because “if there is going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it”.

He was already a Labour supporter at school, organising the party’s “campaign” in a mock election, and joining a CND march from Aldermaston. At Balliol College, Oxford, where he read PPE, he “rehearsed”, as he put it, for 1968. But he led a curiously dualistic life. By day, “Chris” addressed car workers through a bullhorn on an upturned milk crate while by night “Christopher” wore a dinner jacket to address the Oxford Union or dine with the Warden of All Souls. (He did not, in fact, like being called “Chris” – his mother would not, he explained, wish her firstborn to be addressed “as if he were a taxi-driver or pothole-filler” – and found “Hitch”, which most friends used, more acceptable.) While not exactly a social climber, Hitchens wished to be on intimate terms with important people.

Equally dualistic was his sex life. He was almost expelled from school for homosexuality and later boasted that at Oxford he slept with two future (male) Tory cabinet ministers. But also at Oxford, he lost his virginity to a girl who had pictures of him plastered over her bedroom wall and he eventually became a dedicated heterosexual because, he said, his looks deteriorated to the point where no man would have him.

The “double life”, as he called it, continued after he left university with a third-class degree – he was too busy with politics to bother much with studying – and found, partly through his Oxford friend James Fenton, a berth at the New Statesman. He supplemented his income by writing for several Fleet Street papers, but also contributed gratis to the Socialist Worker.

It was while working for the Statesman that he experienced a “howling, lacerating moment in my life”: the death of his adored mother in Athens, apparently in a suicide pact with her lover, a lapsed priest. Only years later did he learn what she never told him or perhaps anyone else: that she came from a family of east European Jews. Though his brother – who first discovered their mother’s origins – said this made them only one-32nd Jewish, Hitchens declared himself a Jew according to the custom of matrilineal descent.

Later in the 1970s, he became a familiar Fleet Street figure, disporting himself in bars and restaurants and settling into a literary set that included Fenton, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Clive James and others. It specialised in long lunches and what (to others) seemed puerile and frequently obscene word games. But he was hooked on America as a 21-year-old when he visited on a student visa and tried unsuccessfully to get a work permit. In October 1981, on a half-promise of work from the Nation, he left for the US. It was the making of his career: Americans have always had a weakness for plummy voiced, somewhat raffish Englishmen who pepper their writing and conversation with literary and historical allusions.

He became the Nation’s Washington correspondent, contributing editor of Vanity Fair from 1982, literary essayist for Atlantic Monthly, a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and a talking head on innumerable cable TV shows. He authored 11 books, co-authored six more, and had five collections of essays published. The targets included Kissinger, Clinton and Mother Teresa (“a thieving fanatical Albanian dwarf”); his books on Orwell, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine were more positive, and less widely noticed. His most successful book, which brought him international fame beyond what Susan Sontag called “the small world of those who till the field of ideas”, was God Is Not Great, a mocking indictment of religion which put him alongside Richard Dawkins as a leading enemy of the devout.

He was also, to his great pleasure, a liberal studies professor at the New School in New York and, for a time, visiting professor at Berkeley in California, as well as a regular on the public lecture and debate circuit. Hitchens loved what he called “disputation” – there was little difference between his public and private speaking styles – and America, a more oral culture than Britain’s, offered ample opportunity. When his final break with the left came, it seemed to some as though the Pope had announced he was no longer a Catholic. His support for Bush’s war in Iraq – which he never retracted – and his vote for the president in 2004, were even bigger shocks, and some suspected a psychological need, as the first male Hitchens never to wear uniform, to prove his manhood. But Hitchens, in many respects a traditionalist, was never a straightforward lefty. He abstained in the UK’s 1979 election, admitting he secretly favoured Thatcher and hoped for an end to “mediocrity and torpor”.

The Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa, issued in 1989 against his friend Salman Rushdie, was, in Hitchens’s mind, as important in exposing the left’s “bad faith” as 9/11. He supported, albeit belatedly, the first Gulf war, demanded Nato intervention in Bosnia, and refused to sign petitions against sanctions on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Hitchens, though, did not deny he had changed. He became, if truth be told, a bit of a blimp and ruefully remarked – with the quiet self-irony that often underlay his bombastic style – that he sometimes felt he should carry “some sort of rectal thermometer, with which to test the rate at which I am becoming an old fart”.

But, he insisted, he wasn’t making a complete about-turn. Though no longer a socialist, he was still a Marxist, and an admirer of Lenin, Trotsky and Che Guevera; capitalism, the transforming powers of which Marx recognised, had proved the more revolutionary economic system and, politically, the American revolution was the only one left in town. He remained committed to civil liberties. After voluntarily undergoing waterboarding, he denounced it as torture, and he was a plaintiff in a lawsuit against Bush’s domestic spying programme. He never let up in his “cold, steady hatred … as sustaining to me as any love” of all religions.

Other things were unchanging. Hitchens’s life was full of feuds with old friends. He broke with the Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal who, before a congressional committee, denied spreading calumnies about Monica Lewinsky. Hitchens, earning himself the sobriquet “Snitchens”, signed affidavits testifying that Blumenthal had, in his hearing, indeed smeared the president’s lover. His rightwing brother Peter, also a journalist, was put on non-speakers for several years after revealing a pro-red joke that Christopher once made in private. But his friendship with Amis never wavered. “Martin … means everything to me,” he once said, while “more or less” acquitting himself of carnal desire. Amis, in turn, spoke of “a love whose month is ever May” and described his friend as a rhetorician of such distinction that “in debate, no matter what the motion, I would back him against Cicero, against Demosthenes”.

Hitchens’s love affairs with alcohol and tobacco were equally constant. He smoked heavily, even on public occasions and even on TV, long after the habit – for everyone else – became unacceptable. Despite reports in 2008 that he had given up, a reporter found him getting through two cigarette packets in a morning in May 2010. As for alcohol, he drank daily, on his own admission, enough “to kill or stun the average mule”. Technically, he was probably an alcoholic but, he pointed out, he never missed deadlines or appointments. Regardless of condition, he wrote fast and fluently, if with erratic punctuation. Only rarely did alcohol make him a bore, blunt his wit or cloud his arguments: the journalist Lynn Barber rated him “one of the greatest conversationalists of our age”. Inebriated or sober, he could charm almost anybody; he could also, with what the New Yorker’s Ian Parker called “the sudden, cutthroat withdrawal of charm”, wound deeply and unnecessarily.

In the summer of 2010, during a promotional tour for Hitch-22, he was diagnosed with terminal oesophageal cancer, a disease that had killed his father at a much more advanced age. He inhabited “Tumourville”, as he called it, with rueful wit and little self-pity. “In whatever kind of a ‘race’ life may be,” he wrote, “I have abruptly become a finalist.” In the same Vanity Fair article, he observed that “I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me”. But he never repented of his convivial lifestyle – on the contrary, he continued to take his beloved whisky, having received no medical instructions to the contrary – and nor did he turn his rhetorical skills to persuading others to eschew his example, confining himself, in a TV interview, to the observation that “if you can hold it down on the smokes and cocktails, you may be well advised to do so”.

He continued, as well as giving valedictory newspaper and magazine interviews, to write, broadcast and participate in public debates with no discernible diminution of vigour or passion. He confronted the Catholic convert Tony Blair before an audience of 2,700 in Toronto and, by general consent, won with ease. He gave early notice that there would be no deathbed conversion to religion; if we ever heard of such a thing, he advised, we should attribute it to sickness, dementia or drugs. When believers prayed for him, he politely declared himself touched, but resolute in his atheism. He was as severe with the conventional cliches of terminal illness as he was, throughout his life, with any other form of convention.

“To the dumb question ‘Why me?’,” he wrote, “the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, ‘Why not?’” All the same, his many friends and admirers, who do not, as one of them put it, “relish a world without Hitchens”, will be asking “why him?” today.

Hitchens was married, first, to Eleni Meleagrou, a Greek Cypriot, and then, after they divorced, to Carol Blue, an American screenwriter. Both survive him as do one son and two daughters.

Where Am I?

You are currently viewing the archives for December, 2011 at Κ.ΛΠ..

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.