Maureen Dowd of the NYT called him "Christofer Snitchens" after he said something politically incorect about Clinton's situation. An iconoclast, an original.

HITCHENS

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December 2000/January 2001 Brills

Establishment Radical

By Jonathan Mahler

Christopher Hitchens is one of the most prolific products of what he once dubbed "the vulgar industry of journalism." Rarely does a week pass when his silky prose and sneering charm aren't oozing out of one periodical or another. Every couple of years, these columns are either expanded into mischievously titled books such as The Missionary Position, his screed against Mother Teresa, and No One Left To Lie To, his polemic against the Clintons, or assembled into dense collections, including For the Sake of Argument, a compendium of his political writings, and the new Unacknowledged Legislation (Verso), an assemblage of his literary criticism.

So where to begin? How about with two books that he has not yet written but merely threatened to write: Guilty as Hell: A Short History of the American Left, and the companion volume, Soft on Crime: The American Right from Nixon to North. Whose camp does that leave him in? Well, that's just the point. You could call Hitchens a self-styled Trotskyite with a chronic libertarian twitch. But let's make this easier: Hitchens is, at bottom, a deliberate provocateur, a punditocrat who subscribes to the belief that it's better to be unpredictable than right.

"[I]t is sometimes necessary for a radical critic to be contemptuous of 'public opinion,'" Hitchens wrote a few years back in an essay on H. L. Mencken. "Cynicism, which is most often the affectation of conservatives, can also be part of the armor of those who are prepared to go through life as a minority of one." Hitchens is not merely prepared to go through life that way; he has made it his mission to do so, and thus far he's doing a mighty fine job. He's the perpetually embattled loner, a professional controversialist, the Steve Dunleavy of the highbrow set.

There's a time-honored tradition here; it's the freebooting British radical loosed on Washington. Erik Tarloff, who parodied the genus in his beltway-based novel Face-Time, defined it thus to The Washington Post: "They're usually well educated, usually Oxbridge, from the upper middle class or better but affecting a seedy or raffish quality and fairly cynical about American politics." Assuming that "fairly" was intended ironically, it's not a bad approximation of Hitchens. He's an Oxford man, with raffishness to spare, but there are some critical differences between him and his fellow Fleet Street expatriates. Hitchens's father wasn't upper-crust; he was a Navy man, and Hitch's blood doesn't exactly run blue. In the late 1980s he discovered that his mother was Jewish (her family's original name was...Blumenthal), a discovery that dovetailed rather conveniently with his consistently anti-Israel perspective.

More to the point, Hitchens has achieved a status unknown to his transatlantic peers such as Alexander Cockburn, James Wood, and Anthony Haden-Guest. He is The Beatles to their Dave Clark Five, a phenomenon, an institution. Hitch may make his living playing the role of the radical outsider -- "in Clinton's Washington, it is a positive honor to be despised," he once wrote -- but preaching the poor man's gospel does not prevent him from taking the rich man's money. He is the radical from Condé Nast, and the paradox could not be richer. His two principal outlets are The Nation, the left-of-liberal weekly, and the mother of all glossies, Vanity Fair, whose meat and potatoes is celebrity profiles and high-society crime. It gets better: For several years, Hitch's work for Vanity Fair appeared under the header "Cultural Elite" -- recent subjects include The Great Gatsby, re-enactors of the Civil War, and Dorothy Parker (the last of which provoked an accusation of literary appropriation addressed in this magazine; see "Talk Back," March 2000). His Nation column, a soapbox for his campaign against the death penalty, soft money, and Clinton's mishandling of Kosovo, is called "Minority Report."

Hitchens's penthouse in the swanky Wyoming condominiums on Columbia Road was, until recently, the site of the glamorous Vanity Fair bash following the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner. When asked by Molly Ivins a couple of years back about his participation in a most unusual Nation fund-raiser -- write us a check and sail around the Caribbean with a handful of our writers -- Hitchens replied, "Nothing's too good for the working class." As Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic dryly remarks, "He puts the social back in socialist."

Like the poet James Fenton and the novelist Julian Barnes, Hitchens made his name writing for the New Statesman in 1970s London. He came to America in the 1980s, and with the help of Ronald Reagan, an ideal foil for his dismissive snort, he hit the ground running as a pundit. Another Hitchens soon emerged as well in the pages of The New York Times Book Review and The New York Review of Books, one who was considerably more nuanced and insightful. With a few exceptions, the snideness that courses through his purely political writing is largely absent from his new collection: Reading the introduction to Unacknowledged Legislation, you can hardly believe that it was clacked out on the same word processor that produces his over-heated political ruminations: "I read and re-read the writers who have allowed me to phrase these imperfect critiques and appreciations, and am grateful for the role they have let themselves play in my own inner life. Perhaps, with effort, we could begin to transcend the pessimistic definition of poetry that describes it as the element lost in translation."

Hitchens writes inspiringly of Oscar Wilde -- "May he ever encourage us to think that the bores and the bullies and the literal minds need not always win" -- and of one of my heroes, Murray Kempton. Nearly all of the essays are implicitly political (the title is taken from a Percy Bysshe Shelley quote describing poets as the world's "unacknowledged legislators"), and Hitchens's disdain for American populism shines through in a pair of particularly nasty attacks on the two Toms -- Wolfe and Clancy. But for the most part, Hitch heeds his own warning: "[H]esitate once, hesitate twice, hesitate a hundred times before employing political standards as a device for the analysis and appreciation of poetry."

Such generosity is all the more surprising when you recall Hitchens's rabid pursuit of his favorite bęte noir, Bill Clinton. Week after week, Hitch hammered away at the American president, accusing him of being a crook, a coward, a conservative...a rapist. Think of any left-wing critique of Clinton -- the hiring of Dick Morris, the firing of Joycelyn Elders, the abandonment of Lani Guinier, the execution of Rickey Ray Rector -- and Hitch leveled it. Then came the impeachment fight. When most of the president's critics, from both right and left, stepped back and acknowledged the constitutional problems with the office of the independent counsel, Hitchens stepped up his attacks, turning his vendetta against Clinton into an indictment of American liberalism and the democratic process that elevated him to office. "The essence of American politics consists of the manipulation of populism by elitism," he wrote. (Hitchens had so much fun with this trope that he's deploying it again in 2000: "Some things may be true even if Pat Buchanan says them, and the inescapable fact is that the 2000 presidential election has so far been a rigged affair, bearing more resemblance to a plebiscite in some banana republic than to anything recognizable as a democratic contest.")

For sheer shock value, though, not even Hitch's most hyperbolic words could compare with a single deed -- the infamous affidavit in which he and an "associate" (his wife) swore that White House aide Sidney Blumenthal had, over a social lunch, called Monica Lewinsky a stalker. Talk about a minority of one. Even Hitch's old friend Alexander Cockburn wrote a column denouncing him as "a Judas."

How did Hitchens justify this betrayal? The answer is illuminating. Hitch was no snitch -- he was an ideological martyr, the proud progeny of two of his intellectual heroes, Whittaker Chambers and George Orwell. It's tempting to laugh off the comparison. When they pointed their respective fingers, Chambers and Orwell weren't manifesting a compulsive need to provoke; they had in their crosshairs one of the greatest threats to liberty of the 20th century, which is not easily confused with adulterous fellatio.

Still, there was something charmingly anachronistic about Hitch's stab at martyrdom. Historian and author Todd Gitlin once described Hitchens as a "man who affects revolutionary virtue, marooned in the 90s," and he is nothing if not a throwback to an age when writers and thinkers saw the world as a place of clashing ideas and ideologies. So it's no surprise that Hitchens understands the greatness of men like Orwell and Chambers. Trouble is, to be an ideological hero, you need to have an ideology.

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), January 22, 2001