Christopher Hitchens, the inimitable atheist, elegant writer, and principled gadfly, among other superlatives, has esophageal cancer. I am not going to pretend as if I know the man, but after reading his delightful and erudite attack on religion, God is Not Great, and watching him excoriate the deceased Jerry Falwell in front of men very sympathetic to Falwell, I can say that hearing of Hitchens' illness brought me uncontrived sadness.
As a critic recently said of Hitchens, "if (he) did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." His writing sets out to shock you and challenge your convictions. He rightly argues that cruel rituals such as genital mutilation and the taking of child brides would scarcely be tolerated if stripped of their religious pretext. And his indictment of religion certainly isn't scant on historical detail or exegesis of scripture. Hitchens has gladly debated scholars of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam in many a public fora.
Mr. Hitchens does not see a contradiction in being at once a freewheeling drinker, a dispenser of insults and also a person of great character. He, like his hero George Orwell, sees the fight against fascism and its present day derivatives as the final test of someone's morality. At the age of 59, he welcomed a beating from a fascist militia in Beirut when he defaced one of its swastika-stamped posters. Hitchens later matter-of-factly told a media outlet, "My attitude to posters with swastikas on them has always been the same. They should be ripped down."
David Brooks sees Hitchens as unique in the field of American journalism in that he underpins his opinions with a literary perspective that values "psychology, context, courage, and virtue - important things that are hard to talk about in policy jargon or journalese." This is precisely why, in a field so sorely in need of resolve, it will be necessary to revive and reinvent Christopher Hitchens as time passes.
Showing posts with label Lit. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lit. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Monday, March 23, 2009
Calling it like It Is
In the foreword to Life is What It is, Patrick French refers to his biography of V.S. Naipaul as perhaps the last of its genre compiled entirely from paper documents (biographies will henceforth be gleaned from Facebook, emails, and other electronic paper trails). He goes on to write an unsparing account of an ingenious writer shadowed by a callous man. French's patchwork is painstaking. Perhaps in realizing that, in his own words, "there can be no doctored truth", Naipaul allowed his biographer unhindered access to his archives and the diaries of his deceased wife. It was a remarkable opening up for a man who, at an obscenely young age, declared friendship superfluous and treated relationships as grist for his ego.
French is right to subtitle his book “the authorized biography of VSN”; Naipaul has garnered a lifetime of snubbed protégés, many of whom have spilt vindictive ink in Sir Vidia’s direction. It pained me to read of Naipaul's dismissal of Paul Theroux, an author whom I greatly admire, as a fatuous travel writer. When Theroux finally realized the extent to which Naipaul had accessorized him, the former wrote an impassioned memoir, Sir Vidia’s Shadow. While Mr. French draws on Theroux’s outtakes from a friendship gone sour, it is the biographer's dispassionate narrative that allows the reader to hand a more damning verdict to Naipaul than Theroux could have hoped for.
The irony of Naipaul's outbursts provides bits of levity in the story. Naipaul had long disavowed the role of his alma mater, Oxford, in his literary achievements; when an editor has the audacity to critique his punctuation, Sir Vidia pistol-whips him with his degree. Another scene that allows the reader to chortle at an otherwise frightening man: upon returning to Buenos Aires, Naipaul runs madly through the airport and hops a fence out of fear of a confrontation with his mistress's husband. The man's idiosyncracies take a slight edge off the most abrasive of personalities.
After pages of ghastly revelations on the private life of the Nobel laureate, I was surprised to read A.N. Wilson’s judgment that Tolstoy was more of a “monster” than Naipaul. Wilson is more qualified than anyone to judge a character contest between the two curmudgeons, but I beg to differ. I can only recall a few of the lurid equivalents to Naipaul’s “monstrosities” in Wilson’s biography of Tolstoy. Yes, both men were unraveled by sexual guilt and both were gallingly ungrateful for their wives’ help in the literary process. Both men drove their spouses to insanity and left them to rot in the mad house. But Naipaul’s narcissism inflicted more damage. He is, by his own admission, guilty of negligent homicide in carrying on a twenty-five year affair and frequenting prostitutes while his wife toiled for his dreams. Pat Naipaul seemed to stomach her husband’s affair until she found out via the newspapers that Vidia was "a great prostitute man". The revelation may have triggered a psychosomatic break and a precipitous descent for her health. Naipaul’s ex post facto remorse is too laden with self-pity to gain any moral capita with the reader. It is a great relief that we can keep the man in one corner and the writer in another, for despite making himself a caricature of insensitivity and prejudice, Naipaul wrote profound and evocative accounts of post-colonial struggle. His societal insight is, according to French, unrivaled.
Perhaps A.N. Wilson’s impartiality should be questioned. When Naipaul was caught driving drunk in 1993, Wilson groveled that the famous writer should be tucked into bed rather than brought to court. And in Wilson’s review of Life is What it Is, he avoids moral accountability for Naipaul. Titling your review “Master and Monster" obliges you to be as brutally honest as French was in writing the biography. And what if Tolstoy were alive? Might Wilson’s verdict read differently?
If there was a point to this post I've strayed from it. Naipaul forged his literary persona by freeing himself from the inconveniences of reciprocal relationships and camping out as a displaced observer among the displaced peoples of the 20th century. The collateral damage from the molding of an artist was a necessary sacrifice in Naipaul's eyes, one dutifully accepted by his first wife. It is fascinating to learn of the creative destruction that infuses a writer's work, even if the reader is among the urchins swallowed by the tide of the writer's gaze.
French is right to subtitle his book “the authorized biography of VSN”; Naipaul has garnered a lifetime of snubbed protégés, many of whom have spilt vindictive ink in Sir Vidia’s direction. It pained me to read of Naipaul's dismissal of Paul Theroux, an author whom I greatly admire, as a fatuous travel writer. When Theroux finally realized the extent to which Naipaul had accessorized him, the former wrote an impassioned memoir, Sir Vidia’s Shadow. While Mr. French draws on Theroux’s outtakes from a friendship gone sour, it is the biographer's dispassionate narrative that allows the reader to hand a more damning verdict to Naipaul than Theroux could have hoped for.
The irony of Naipaul's outbursts provides bits of levity in the story. Naipaul had long disavowed the role of his alma mater, Oxford, in his literary achievements; when an editor has the audacity to critique his punctuation, Sir Vidia pistol-whips him with his degree. Another scene that allows the reader to chortle at an otherwise frightening man: upon returning to Buenos Aires, Naipaul runs madly through the airport and hops a fence out of fear of a confrontation with his mistress's husband. The man's idiosyncracies take a slight edge off the most abrasive of personalities.
After pages of ghastly revelations on the private life of the Nobel laureate, I was surprised to read A.N. Wilson’s judgment that Tolstoy was more of a “monster” than Naipaul. Wilson is more qualified than anyone to judge a character contest between the two curmudgeons, but I beg to differ. I can only recall a few of the lurid equivalents to Naipaul’s “monstrosities” in Wilson’s biography of Tolstoy. Yes, both men were unraveled by sexual guilt and both were gallingly ungrateful for their wives’ help in the literary process. Both men drove their spouses to insanity and left them to rot in the mad house. But Naipaul’s narcissism inflicted more damage. He is, by his own admission, guilty of negligent homicide in carrying on a twenty-five year affair and frequenting prostitutes while his wife toiled for his dreams. Pat Naipaul seemed to stomach her husband’s affair until she found out via the newspapers that Vidia was "a great prostitute man". The revelation may have triggered a psychosomatic break and a precipitous descent for her health. Naipaul’s ex post facto remorse is too laden with self-pity to gain any moral capita with the reader. It is a great relief that we can keep the man in one corner and the writer in another, for despite making himself a caricature of insensitivity and prejudice, Naipaul wrote profound and evocative accounts of post-colonial struggle. His societal insight is, according to French, unrivaled.
Perhaps A.N. Wilson’s impartiality should be questioned. When Naipaul was caught driving drunk in 1993, Wilson groveled that the famous writer should be tucked into bed rather than brought to court. And in Wilson’s review of Life is What it Is, he avoids moral accountability for Naipaul. Titling your review “Master and Monster" obliges you to be as brutally honest as French was in writing the biography. And what if Tolstoy were alive? Might Wilson’s verdict read differently?
If there was a point to this post I've strayed from it. Naipaul forged his literary persona by freeing himself from the inconveniences of reciprocal relationships and camping out as a displaced observer among the displaced peoples of the 20th century. The collateral damage from the molding of an artist was a necessary sacrifice in Naipaul's eyes, one dutifully accepted by his first wife. It is fascinating to learn of the creative destruction that infuses a writer's work, even if the reader is among the urchins swallowed by the tide of the writer's gaze.
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