Arguably: Essays Paperback – September 4, 2012

Christopher Hitchens was a polemicist, anti-deist, political journalist, formidable debater, and writer of powerful, beautiful, incisive essays. He was a uniquely erudite public speaker, and his treatises on culture are the work of a highly articulate thinker. His is one the few voices that must not be missed for a whole understanding of issues he addresses. A heavy smoker and drinker, he died at sixty-two in 2011 of esophageal cancer, the year this collection of essays was published. His best friend, Martin Amis, died of the same affliction in 2023. It is not unfair to say that these two writers together have become the British voice of their generation.The great virtue of a volume of essays is the variety of topics taken up. Short reviews, literary interviews, book introductions, etc., are collected into a presentation, n that can be accessed easily and enjoyed repeatedly. Clive James, Martin Amis, and Christopher Hitchens were friends in life and each has produced several essay collections of great merit. For readers of literature these are timeless and rewarding adventures. Arguably has a full range of subjects that a curious mind would be drawn to. He gives the reader many ironic insights and never shrinks in his response. Reviewing the novel, Terrorist, by John Updike, written shortly after the 9/11 attacks, Hitchens writes, “After I had sent Terrorist windmilling across the room in a spasm of boredom and annoyance, I retrieved it to check my notes in its margins…Updike has produced one of the worst pieces of writing since the events he so unwisely tried to draw upon.” A reader might well disagree that his manner is arch in the extreme, but rebuttal would be a challenge in any case, since Hitchens is usually correct in his literary judgements.“It is cliché, not plagiarism, that is the problem with our stilted, room-temperature political discourse,” Hitchens writes in his essay, “Words Matter.” Disapproving of sloganeering, he wrote of one meant to inspire inspiration: “It’s the sort of thing parents might chant encouragingly to a child slow on the potty-training uptake.” This is how a superior writer assails the limitations of bumper sticker condensations we see in politics, so often nothing pretending to be something, or the reverse.The author himself wrote the introduction six months before the death he knew was coming. This fifth and last collection was published in his lifetime. However, a newly published collection has been released, Hitch in Time, subtitled “Reflections Ready for Reconsideration,” and is now available. Christopher Hitchens made an intellectual journey few will duplicate and made a copious record in video-taped debates and interviews, and essays that make enormously pleasurable reading. Agree or disagree with him (as Martin Amis often did), Hitchens is a writer that every thoughtful reader must endeavor to encounter. And, arguably, Arguably is a perfect place to start.--Tom Casey

A masterful collection. Here is Hitchens as dream dinner party guest, slightly sloshed, louche but animated still, a couple of buttons down on the shirt, perspiring, smiling. His hands move as he makes his point. You have forgotten already about dessert. This Hitchens is still alive and well on the many "Hitch-slapped" compilations put up on YouTube.A large book, to be dipped into when, as Durant said of Nietzsche, you need "a bracing wind across a courtyard after a long and stuffy service in Church". Here is Hitchens on the Kennedy's:"A new volume by Ed Klein, portentously titled "The Kennedy Curse", revealed the brief marriage of John Kennedy Jr. to Carolyn Bessemer to have been a cauldron of low-level misery, infidelity and addiction": JFK: In Sickness and By Stealth, Times Literary Supplement 2003. . It's the "low-level" that twists the knife here.The essay on JFK, a review of JFK: An Unfinished Life ("a title portentous and platitudinous at the same time") by Robert Dallek, is undoubtedly the standout star of Part 1 All American, which slightly bizarrely has Hitchens, an Oxbridge educated English privileged public schoolboy and former champagne socialist, writing on historical American figures such as Jefferson, Franklin and Lincoln.Part 2 has Hitchens on more local ground writing on early and later 20th century English literary figures such as PG Wodehouse, Anthony Powell, Philip Larkin and Evelyn Waugh. Amusingly it's titled "Eclectic", presumably because the editor decided that the American reader might have little idea or care who those people were. The final review here is actually of the final Harry Potter book, where Hitchens, whilst generally kind and acknowledging that these books get young people to read, still skewers Rowling:"The repeated tactic of deus ex machina has a deplorable effect on both plot and dialogue".Part 3 contains perhaps the most controversial (bizarrely) of all the writings "Why women aren't funny", written for an unimaginative, publicity seeking editor of Vanity Fair. Still managing to quote an interesting Kipling poem this disappointing rushed hack piece feels authored by a less talented Hitchens ghostwriter from GQ magazine. Definitely not disappointing in this section is Hitchens on Prince Charles:"A hereditary head of state, as Thomas Paine so crisply phrased it, is as absurd a proposition as a hereditary physician. To this innate absurdity, Prince Charles manages to bring fatuities that are entirely his own".Charles, Prince of Piffle. Slate, June 14, 2010.Part 4 is Offshore Accounts. Disraeli said in Tancred "the East is a career" and Hitchens partly took this to heart, writing extensively on politics, Islamism and Orientalism in the Middle East. It is on religion that Hitchens has shown much of his intellectual rigor and bravery. The reader may find in his review of Orientalism and It's Discontents by Robert Irwin in The Atlantic, March 2007 a description of a certain key religious figure as "a sex-craved brigand whose preachments were either plagiarized or falsified".This reader does not quite share the same fascination with this area of the world but one of the best essays in the book is here, a review of Edward Said's Orientalism, from the Atlantic, September 2003 - a book that was de rigor to be on your bookshelf when I was an MSc student in the late 1990s. Hitchens is quite fair to Said, although still slices him open with his accusation of membership of the "post-Foucault academy".Part 5, Legacies of Totalitarianism, ups the intellectual and moral ante. It is worth remembering that Hitchens was once a committed socialist, as documented in his entertaining memoir Hitch 22. Heavy reviews here include Churchill, Hitler and Unnecessary War by Pat Buchanan - a book I have reviewed on Amazon - Human Smoke by Nicholson Baker, and Klemperer's I Will Bear Witness (Klemperer was a Jew married to an Aryan who survived the war. This is sobering stuff and a reminder of the madness that could be inflicted on the world again by extremism and total war. Hitchens' quote from Sebald on the aftermath of the fire bombings of Dresden by the 'good guys' says it all:"In the altmarket in Dresden, where 6,865 corpses were burned on pyres in February 1945 by an SS detachment which had gained its experience in Treblinka". On the Natural History of Destruction by W.G. Sebald.