Hitch, by Cock

I can’t count the times, down the years, that after some new outrage friends would call me and ask, “What happened to Christopher Hitchens?” – the inquiry premised on some supposed change in Hitchens, often presumed to have started in the period he tried to put his close friend Blumenthal behind bars for imputed perjury. My answer was that Christopher had been pretty much the same package since the beginning — always allowing for the ravages of entropy as the years passed.

There is nothing like a death in the family to bring out the nastiest in people, and so it is with the passing of Christopher Hitchens. Whilst others mourn, Alexander Cockburn seethes. Hitchens was a traitor, the man who changed his mind, the man who broke the circle. He also was a much better writer than Cockburn, which probably lies behind the resentment of the survivor. "As a writer his prose was limited in range," mutters Cockburn. Perhaps he is dimly aware that Hitchens would never write a sentence so deadened as that one, a sentence reminiscent of school reports or annotated bibliographies, typed and spiral-bound. Note also the clumsy and sub-claused sentences with which Cockburn began his  dirge. By contrast, here is how Hitchens began his last essay:

When it came to it, and old Kingsley suffered from a demoralizing and disorienting fall, he did take to his bed and eventually turned his face to the wall. It wasn’t all reclining and waiting for hospital room service after that—“Kill me, you fucking fool!” he once alarmingly exclaimed to his son Philip—but essentially he waited passively for the end. It duly came, without much fuss and with no charge.

Spot the difference. Yes, you see it: Hitchens wrote; Cockburn lectures.


 Here is an instructional video: