An argument for Christopher Hitchens

ESSAYS: JOHN BANVILLEreviews ArguablyBy Christopher Hitchens Atlantic Books, 789pp. £30

IN THE INTRODUCTION to this stout collection of journalistic essays written over the past decade or so, Christopher Hitchens declares that “the people who must never have power are the humourless. To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity.” It may not be the most profound observation to be found in these many pages, but it is certainly one of the wisest. Reading it, one knows one is in safe hands.

Hitchens was born in 1949 in Portsmouth, to a father who served in the British navy and a mother, the glamorous and ever dissatisfied Yvonne, who, as her son was to find out only after her death, was Jewish. This means that her son also is Jewish, a fact that pleases him – in his autobiography, Hitch-22,he reports his friend Martin Amis confessing himself envious of this late discovery of a racial if not religious identity.

At Oxford in the 1960s Hitchens joined the Trotskyite International Socialists and became an active opponent of the American involvement in Vietnam and of the Soviet Union’s brutal interventions in Eastern bloc countries, especially Czechoslovakia. On the side, he found time to investigate the colonels’ foul regime in Greece and to have himself administered, on a working holiday in Cuba, a disenchanting dose of Castroism. Not a man, then, easily taken in, even in the hazy days of youth.

And what days they were. Hitchens had no intention of allowing his political activism to interfere with social affairs, and glided with graceful ease between the grunge and happy squalor of the undergraduate milieu and the sequestered corridors of academic power, where he found himself strolling in the company of the likes of Maurice Bowra and Isaiah Berlin. He was also a sexual activist, and took on all-comers, so to speak, including a great many girls but also, as he cheerfully admitted, a number of young men, two of whom would later become members of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet. There is inclusiveness for you.

Hitchens's views have modulated markedly since those heady college days of political certainty. Although he is loathed by many of his former comrades on the left, it is not the case that he has moved to the right. Indeed, he occupies a unique ideological, or anti-ideological, position, maintaining his Marxist faith in the principles of the old British labour movement and, as he wrote in Hitch-22,his unshakeable admiration for those " 'warriors of the working day', who had survived mass unemployment and slum housing and bitter exploitation, stuck together to resist fascism at home and abroad, rebuilt the country after 1945, fought for independence for the colonies, and striven to remove the terrible fear – of illness and penury and a Dickensian old age – that had hagridden the British working class". Yet he also championed the second Iraq war and for a time at least seemed to have thrown in his lot with the so-called neocons who ran the Bush presidency, and ran it into the ground, the ground in this case being the sands of Arabia.

He is still fiercely anti-Islamist, and in this regard he does not mince his words. In his autobiography he wrote of “the three now- distinctive elements of the new and grievance-privileged Islamist mentality, self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-hatred”. In the pieces in Arguably he hammers away repeatedly at the mealy-mouthedness and cant that allow so many western commentators to pussyfoot around issues that are perfectly straightforward and should be treated as such. In a piece for Slate, the online magazine, Hitchens poses the question “What Happened to the Suicide Bombers of Jerusalem?” A number of liberals, including Cherie Blair, had said that the tactic was prompted by despair among Palestinians suffering under Israeli occupation. But if that is the case, Hitchens asks, why did the bombings stop? Has Palestinian despair evaporated? It is worth quoting Hitchens’s reply to his own questions:

Nasty, vicious, fanatical old men, not human emotions, were making the decisions and deciding the days and the hours of death. And the hysterical ululating street celebrations when such a mission was successful did not signify despair at all but a creepy form of religious exaltation in which relatives were encouraged to make a feast out of the death of their own children as well as those of other people. To have added the promise of paradise to this pogrom is to have made spiritual and mental sickness complete; to have made it a sexual paradise is obscene into the bargain.

Is it not invigorating to hear the breath of fresh air blowing through such a passage?

Nor is Hitchens any more sparing of western delusions and hypocrisy. As is well known, he is a crusading atheist, and while one might wish him to loosen his crusader's sword belt now and then – fundamentalism is not reserved exclusively for the God squad – one has to admire the relentlessness with which he wields his whip against the whited sepulchres in our midst. It is with palpable delight that he presents before us, in the opening section of his book, "All American", evidence of the anti-Christian convictions of the Founding Fathers. Here, for instance, from Hitchens's essay Gods of Our Fathers, is a typical quotation from John Adams, who, having remarked what a mercy it is that religious enthusiasts among the settlers "cannot whip and crop, and pillory and roast, as yet in the US", goes on grimly to observe: "There is a germ of religion in human nature so strong that whenever an order of men can persuade the people by flattery or terror that they have salvation at their disposal, there can be no end to fraud, violence, or usurpation." Tea Party fundamentalists and constitutional literalists should take note of such warnings but will not, of course.

Not all is politics here. In the section "Eclectic Affinities" Hitchens shows himself to be a shrewd and stylish literary critic. Considering writers as diverse as Gustave Flaubert, Rebecca West and George MacDonald Fraser, author of the Flashman series, he provides a remarkably comprehensive overview of the art of fiction, while Edmund Burke: Reactionary Prophetis one of the finest short considerations of this bafflingly self-contradictory thinker. This piece in particular is dazzlingly well written, and is scattered with some splendid apercus. Consider this, for instance, in a defence of Burke against an accusation of mercenariness made against him by Thomas Jefferson: "It is a frequent vice of radical polemic to assert, and even to believe, that once you have found the lowest motive for an antagonist, you have identified the correct one." Bullseye!

A year ago Hitchens was diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus, and was told he might have no more than a year to live. "In consequence," he writes in the introduction here, "some of these articles were written with the full consciousness that they might be my very last. Sobering in one way and exhilarating in another, this practice can obviously never become perfected." And at the close, in acknowledging the help and encouragement of family and friends over "a rather gruelling past 12 months", he takes a courageous stand: "Any surrender to fatalism or despair would have been as rank a betrayal of what I hope to stand for as any capitulation to magical or wishful schemes would have been." Arguablyis his fifth collection of essays, reviews and polemics; we look forward eagerly to the sixth.

John Banville is this year's recipient of the 2011 Franz Kafka Prize. His most recent novel, A Death in Summer, written under the pen name Benjamin Black, came out earlier this year