Christopher Hitchens: What He Got Right, How He Went Wrong, and Why He Still Matters

Ben Burgis

Zero Books, £11.99

Review by Jamie Maxwell

Ten years after his death from cancer at the age of 62, the cult of Christopher Hitchens lives on. Writing in The Financial Times in November, the columnist Janan Ganesh characterised Hitchens as an uncompromising free-thinker who conveyed, through his many speeches, articles, and essays, “the only lesson worth teaching to those who care for truth and its dazzling expression. Never, ever join a team”.

In what sense is this true? During the last decade of his life, Hitchens grew rich and famous defending things that weren’t really under threat (secularism, the West) from things that didn’t really exist (Islamo-fascism) or didn’t exist enough to matter (the far left). By 2003, he had become a courtier for the Bush administration and its imperial misadventures in the Middle East. In 2007, he invited Michael Chertoff, a Republican co-author of the Patriot Act, to administer his rites of US citizenship. Hitchens admitted to feeling “exhilarated” when the Twin Towers fell. “Here we are then,” he wrote at the time, “in a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate. Fine. We will win and they will lose.”

Ben Burgis’s new book traces Hitchens’s putative shift from anti-establishment leftist in the 1980s and 1990s to Iraq war enthusiast and professional "anti-theist" post-2001. Christopher Hitchens: What He Got Right, How He Went Wrong, and Why He Still Matters is a short text, at 140 pages, and Burgis is a lively narrator. But too much of the material here feels second-hand and not enough of it sheds light on Hitchens’s underlying political, or monetary-professional, motivations. The fact that Burgis gleans the bulk of his analysis from YouTube videos of debates Hitchens took part in over the years – "capitalism vs socialism", "the abolition of Britain", "does God exist?" – heightens the sense of churn.

The more interesting question is why Burgis chose to write the book in the first place. Burgis is a socialist academic and masthead contributor to Jacobin magazine. In the early 2000s, he marched against the wars Hitchens supported. Yet the day Hitchens died, Burgis was bereft. “The next morning, I’d planned to give my friend a ride to the airport,” he writes. “When I stopped by his apartment, he poured us two glasses of Johnny Walker Black. Neither of us was in the habit of drinking before noon, but we both wanted to toast Hitch. I did the same thing with my brother when I saw him a few days later.”

“Hitch”? Really? There is a hint of male hero-worship in all this sentimental eulogising. For Ganesh, Hitchens was an “artist” and provocateur who “dwarfed his canvas”. For Burgis, he was a raffish intellectual whose embrace of American power signalled a painful loss to leftwing politics. Other interpretations are available. According to Terry Eagleton, Hitchens earned the nickname “Hypocritchens” at Oxford University in the 1960s for his habit of “marching for the poor and dining with the rich”. Richard Seymour, in his book Unhitched, charts the continuity in Hitchens’s thinking: Hitchens quietly declined to vote Labour in 1979 because he secretly wanted Margaret Thatcher to win and backed Britain’s campaign in the South Pacific three years later.

Hitchens certainly made political journalism look glamorous. In the latter stages of his career, he was earning, by his own account, “several hundred thousand dollars” a year in book sales and media appearances. And he thrived in front of deferential American audiences. But in Britain, he was a cliche: an overconfident graduate of the English class system with a soft-spot for empire and the capacity to summon an opinion on any subject at a moment’s notice. Granted, Hitchens could be funny, caustic, and insightful, even when he was wrong, which was often. But radical? Dissenting? Unconventional? That’s a stretch.