Vanity Fair essays of Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens’ essays on his sure-to-be-fatal cancer in the August and September issues of Vanity Fair magazine should probably be regarded as the start of one of the most significant pieces of 21st Century literature. I’ve scratched my head to find any comparisons. Marcel Proust lying on his deathbed contemplating madelines just doesn’t cut the mustard, and I had to reach all the way back to Socrates’ dialogues on taking hemlock to find an adequate comparison. Hitchens expounds on his hemlock too, only it’s called chemotherapy. To my knowledge, there’s never been a literary figure who’s set out to chronicle his own demise this way, and that’s what we can expect in monthly installments until Hitchens, as Roger Ebert says gets, “ closer than most to that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns.”

The coincidence of his cancer is even more poignant given that he only discovered it after he started his book tour for his memoirs entitled Hitch-22. The knowledge that you’re dying a slow death changes everything, even though you’re the same person. Critics have called him a “three bottles of champagne and a brandy chaser Socialist; a political tourist, available to report from any display of Marxist posturing; a fellow-traveler of the hard left who lurched unforgivably right when he supported Bush’s invasion of Iraq; a louche, lecherous lush masquerading as a political sage.” (John Walsh, The Independent)

No doubt Hitchens takes criticism like this as the strongest complements; but even while he continues with his prolific output of political dissection, his mind is elsewhere. I’ll let the man himself explain to you what he’s currently facing:

Myself, I love the imagery of struggle. I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others instead of just being a gravely endangered patient. Allow me to inform you, though, that when you sit in a room with a set of other finalists, and kindly people bring a huge transparent plastic bag of poison and plug it into your arm, and you either read a book or don’t read a book while the venom sack gradually empties itself into your system, the image of ardent soldier or the revolutionary is the very last one that will occur to you. You feel swamped with passivity and impotence dissolving in powerlessness like a lump of sugar in water.

But despite this and other indignities that we will no doubt see in the future, the man is a fighter. Perhaps the most wonderful thing about these essays is that Hitchens wallows in neither lachrymose self-pity or some mythical faith in religion or any other kind of unproven spirituality. The man is a determined, dogged atheist, and this perspective gives his essays even more depth. In his September article, he talks about all the people who are praying both for and against him, and while he no doubt appreciates the attention, he makes it plain that those prayers of both varieties mean far more to the supplicants than they do to him.

Hitchens’ death on the installment plan will no doubt offer new surprises in the future, but from what we’ve seen so far, they provide us the deep insight of a man who knows that he’s singing his swan’s song. And these essays make us question our own mortality, our experiences with death, and the human condition.

And all of this underscores the fact that we’re all headed in the same direction. It’s later than you think.

To be continued…

Karl Eysenbach | Contributor

Karl Eysenbach is a retired government administrator and teacher. He is the author of a novel,The Story of the Century, and he lives in Eugene, Oregon and middle Baja California. Watch for his blogging as old new lefty at open.salon.com.

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