Remembering Christopher Hitchens

1949-2011

The essays of Christopher Hitchens, who died today, span four decades and themes as diverse as Leonard Cohen and al-Qaeda. In all of their poetic rigour and flinty contrarianism they are united by a shared quality: the vibrancy of his voice. Even in the final year of his life – which he said he lived ‘dyingly’ – there is a tenacity, verve and wit entirely his own.

In one of his essays for Granta Hitchens is in full fiery flow when taking in the first day after Ceauşescu’s fall in then Austro-Hungary (first published in Spring 1990), which begins:

On Christmas night, stuck in freezing fog at the Austro-Hungarian border, I had telephoned my best Budapest friend and spoken across an insufferable line, fed with near-worthless forint coins cadged from a friendly guard. ‘Have you heard?’ said Ferenc, ‘Ceauşescu has been assassinated.’ The choice of word seemed odd. ‘Murdered’ wouldn't do, of course, in the circumstances. ‘Killed’ would have been banal. ‘Executed’ – too correct. And Ferenc always chooses his terms with meticulous care. No, a baroque dictator who was already a prisoner, and an ex-tyrant, had somehow been ‘assassinated’. I took the first of many resolutions not to resort to Transylvanian imagery. Yes, there had been King Vlad, known as the Impaler, reputed to drink blood as well as spill it. Every writer and subeditor in the trade was going to be dusting him off. Still, I found myself wondering just how Ceauşescu had been ‘assassinated’ after his capture. A stake through the heart? I had read that the chief of Ceauşescu’s ghastly Securitate was named General Julian Vlad, but I was determined to make absolutely nothing of it.

His sensitivity to the way that language shapes the outcome of a conflict or revolution is in evidence in this piece on ‘Nicaragua’ (first published Spring 1985):

Towards the close of Memoirs of a Revolutionary, Victor Serge – faced with a miserable Mexican exile, and oppressed by the spread of totalitarian ideas – offers a number of reflections on the fate of the betrayed Russian revolution and the ‘socialist experiment’:

It is often said that ‘the germ of all Stalinism was in Bolshevism at its beginning’. Well, I have no objection. Only Bolshevism also contained many other germs – a mass of other germs – and those who lived through the enthusiasm of the first years of the first victorious revolution ought not to forget it. To judge the living man by the death germs which the autopsy reveals in a corpse – and which he may have carried in him since his birth – is this very sensible?

I went to Nicaragua, as I had gone to Cuba, Angola, Zimbabwe, Grenada and other such loci, not as a tourist of revolution but as an amateur biochemist. How were the bacilli doing? What germs were emerging as the dominant strain? In other words, would Nicaragua turn into another example of frowsty barracks socialism, replete with compulsory enthusiasm, affirming only the right to agree?

I went to Nicaragua determined not to come away saying things like, ‘You have to remember the specific conditions – the blockade, the sabotage, the CIA . . .’ The Sandinistas make large claims for a revolution in liberty – socialism with a human face – and for a new kind of American state that fuses the best of two opposing world systems. This time, they seemed to say, would be different. It didn't seem patronizing to take them up on it.

Both ‘Nicaragua’ and ‘On the Road to Timişoara’ are available in full to our subscribers in our online archive. ■