Christopher Hitchens Posthumous Memoir Coming in September

Today in publishing and literature: Christopher Hitchens final memoir will be published simultaneously in the U.K. and U.S., a modest proposal to help authors make more money, and the "Jefferson Bible" will be back in print next month.

The U.K. release date of Christopher Hitchens' final collection of essays, Mortality, which was scheduled for April, has been delayed until the fall. According to Karen Duffy, publicist for Atlantic Books, the new release date of September 1 will allow for "simultaneous publication" in the U.S. and the U.K., and also give editors extra time to pull together new material for the book -- including a new introduction. Hitchens died last month from esophageal cancer. [The Bookseller]

Scottish mystery author Ian Rankin has an interesting idea for making book-writing financially viable in the era of digital publishing and reduced advance money: make the first slice of a writer's annual income exempt from taxes. Obviously, a writer would think that a tax break for writers would be a good idea, but Rankin's notion has some basis in reality. Since 1997, Ireland's tax code had stipulated that the "€40,000 per annum of profits or gains earned by writers, composers, visual artists and sculptors from the sale of their work is exempt from income tax," provided the author/composer/artist/sculptor is an Irish resident. It's an attractive idea to be sure, but one that probably's a non-starter in the United Kingdom and U.S., what with all the age of austerity talk.   [The Guardian]

Here's something self-publishing e-book authors should be concerned about: the average price of a self-published title in the Kindle Store's top 100 best-sellers dipped from $1.99 in January of 2011 to $1.34 in December. At the same time, the share of self-published books selling for 99 cents increased from 54 percent in January to 85 percent in December [TeleRead]

It took 26 years for Hollywood to get around to adapting Douglas Adams's 1979 science fiction novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy for the big screen. Why the delay? Well, the book is very British, the special effects would have prohibitively expensive, and nobody from Disney -- which acquired the rights to the book in 1997 -- seemed to want to talk to Adams, who had adapted his almost-unadaptable book across a variety of mediums. In a 1999 letter to Disney executive David Vogel, Adams gently suggests that a "one-way traffic of written 'notes' interspersed with long, dreadful silences [from the studio]" might not be the best way to get the project off the ground, and offers to fly to Los Angeles to discuss the project. Then, with a flourish fans will undoubtedly recognize, Adams provides Vogel with a very, very long list of ways that he can be contacted. It reads like another case of a writer seeing his life's work put through the Hollywood wringer, but according to correspondence blog Letters of Note, the letter actually did secure Adams his meeting, so maybe he was on the right track. [Letters of Note]

Penguin Imprint Tarcher is going to reprint a facsimile of Thomas Jefferson's personal, heavily edited copy of the Holy Bible next month. The real "Jefferson Bible" (pictured aboved) has belonged to the Smithsonian Institute since 1895 and was first published in 1904, but has been out-of-print since the 1940s. In an attempt to square the holy book with his own world view, Jefferson cut out large portions of the Gospels, as well as all mentions of the Virgin Birth. Update: The University of Virginia bookstore also sells a handsome version of Jefferson's bible. And since it's in the public domain, you can download it, though you won't have Jefferson's exact scissor-marks.

Christopher Hitchens. Funeral and Memorial arrangements

First may I once again thank the many people who visited this site to express condolences on the death of my late brother, Christopher. I was most moved that so many people crossed the divide of opinion to do so.

Second, I felt I should post here two facts that, although they are to be found on the Internet, are still unknown to many.

Some people have asked me when and where my brother’s funeral took place. In fact, as Christopher donated his body to medical science, there has not been and will not be any funeral. He took this decision partly because of his religious (or rather non-religious) opinions, and partly because, much influenced by his friend Jessica Mitford and her book ‘The American Way of Death’, he disliked what he regarded as the excesses of the American funeral industry.

There are many discussions now taking place about various other forms of commemoration. There will certainly be a memorial gathering in New York City during the Spring, most probably in April. I would expect that, later on, there will also be some sort of event in London. I would hope to be able to post details when these are clear.

Scrittore, giornalista, critico letterario, polemista. Ma soprattutto formidabile oratore. Christopher Hitchens se ne è andato il 15 dicembre 2011, stroncato da un tumore all’esofago e ricoperto dai ricordi, i commenti e gli imbarazzi di gran parte delle pagine culturali, italiane e non. Su di lui, si è scritto e detto di tutto.  Ma, a orazione conclusa, l’impressione generale resta sempre la stessa: un’istantatea fuori fuoco. A poco meno di sette giorni dalla sua morte, proviamo allora a ricordarlo grazie all’aiuto di testimonianze, ritratti e recensioni. Provando a restare fuori dalla nebbia di retorica delle orazioni, e con un imperativo: tentare di raccontarlo in modo secco ed essenziale, come il suo stile impone.

Oratoria. Lo ha ricordato Christian Rocca: era probabilmente la sua dote fondamentale. “Si presentava con abito color crema da flaneur, lenti scure a coprire le occhiaie della notte precedente, bicchiere doppio malto invece del cappuccino, ma appena si accendevano le luci dello studio o il microfono iniziava ad amplificare la voce, Hitchens si trasformava nel più imbattibile oratore dai tempi di Demostene. Amava parlare, molto più che scrivere. Stava a discutere per ore, fino a notte fonda. Con tutti e su tutto, mostrando con orgoglio la sua spilletta del partito dei lavoratori curdi appuntata al bavero della giacca e recitando le liriche di oscuri poeti britannici”.

Libertà. Facile a dirsi, molto più difficile a praticarsi. Specie se il concetto (la libertà, appunto) va declinata con una perve; irregolare e ingombrante come quella di “Hitch”. “Avere la libertà di parola non è abbastanza. Bisogna imparare a parlare liberamente”, aveva detto tempo fa. Si dirà: frase facile. E invece no: più che un corredo, l’intento di Hitchens veniva declinato con il rigore di un dogma, anche a rischio (e il rischio capitava spesso) di essere ostintamente controcorrente.

Iraq. La guerra in Iraq è l’esempio più concreto. Lo scrittore vi si schierò apertamente a favore, squadernando tutti i punti di riferimenti dei suoi amici liberal, e provocando un certo smarrimento negli ambienti contigui. La prova più lampante, in Italia, è arrivata post mortem, in una lettera pubblicata sul Foglioa firma di un lettore. “Repubblica ha dedicato un bel po’ di spazio alla morte del grande Christopher Hitchens con un articolo di Enrico Franceschini, il quale non ha trovato il modo, in non so quante battute, di dire che Hitchens si schierò ferocemente a favore della guerra di George W. Bush in Iraq, contro il ‘fascismo islamico’”.

Ateismo. La parola più immediatamente associabile a Hitchens, che ne fece una battaglia personale, totalizzante. Non solo contro la Chiesa cattolica e le sue missioni (come dimenticare il pamphletLa posizione della missionaria?); ma anche contro tutte le altre religioni, tra cui gli “islamofascisti”. L’ateismo (meglio: il suo ateismo) raggiunse picchi di furore iconoclasta. In esso, Higare tutti i suoi tratti, e non è casuale che le tre parole usate finora per definirlo (oratoria, libertà e Iraq) abbiano finito per fare parte proprio di quella battaglia.

Amicizia. Susan Sontag,  Martin Amis, Gore Vidal. Ne aveva parecchi. E allora forse vale la pena lasciare a uno di loro, Ian Mcewan, le ultime frasi per ricordarlo: “La miracolosa fluidità della sua prosa non lo abbandonava mai, il suo impegno era appassionato. È rimasto sempre fedele al suo mestiere. Uno scrittore consumato, un amico brillante. Come nella celebre frase di Walter Pater, arso ‘in quella dura fiamma, simile a una gemma’. Fino alla fine.”

“I spent most of my life, three decades or more as a convinced socialist. I don’t repudiate that – I’m not ashamed of it – but I don’t find it useful to call myself that any more. Is there now an international working-class movement that has a feasible idea for a better society? No, there isn’t. Will it revive? The answer is clearly no. Is there a socialist critique of the capitalist world order? No. Realizing that, to call myself a socialist would be a sentimental thing.” 



– Quoted in Neil Munro, “Leaving the Left,” National Journal April 5, 2003

“I devoutly believe that words ought to be weapons. That is why I got into this business in the first place. I don’t seek the title of ‘inoffensive,’ which I think is one of the nastiest things that could be said about an individual writer.” 



– “Forbidden Thoughts: A Roundtable on Taboo Research, American Enterprise, January/February 1995

“When I first formed the idea of writing some memoirs, I had the customary reservations about the whole conception being perhaps 'too soon'. Nothing dissolved this fusion of false modesty and natural reticence more swiftly than the blunt realization that the project could become, at any moment, ruled out of the question as having been undertaken too 'late.'” 



– Hitch-22, 2010

“Is there anything apart from global warming that American liberals despise more than a smoker?” 



Across the Great Divide, The Guardian, May 1, 2010

"I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death. But nothing prepared me for the early morning last June when I came to consciousness feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse... any movement, however slight, required forethought and planning.” 



– “Topic of Cancer,” Vanity Fair September 2010

"I became a journalist because one didn't have to specialise. I remember once going to an evening with Umberto Eco talking to Susan Sontag and the definition of the word "polymath" came up. Eco said it was his ambition to be a polymath; Sontag challenged him and said the definition of a polymath is someone who's interested in everything and nothing else. I was encouraged in my training to read widely - to flit and sip, as Bertie [Wooster] puts it - and I think I've got good memory retention. I retain what's interesting to me, but I don't have a lot of strategic depth.” 



From his last interview with Richard Dawkins in The New Statesman, Dec. 16, 2011

"I lay for days on end, trying in vain to postpone the moment when I would have to swallow. Every time I did swallow, a hellish tide of pain would flow up my throat, culminating in what felt like a mule kick in the small of my back. I wondered if things looked as red and inflamed within as they did without. And then I had an unprompted rogue thought: If I had been told about all this in advance, would I have opted for the treatment? There were several moments as I bucked and writhed and gasped and cur and cursed when I seriously doubted it....But mercifully, too, I now can’t summon the memory of how I felt during those lacerating days and nights. And I’ve since had some intervals of relative robustness. So as a rational actor, taking the radiation together with the reaction and the recovery, I have to agree that if I had declined the first stage, thus avoiding the second and the third, I would already be dead. And this has no appeal."



From his final article in Vanity Fair, January 2012 issue.

“What is so striking about the ‘beatification’ of tghe woman who styled herself ‘Mother’ Teresa is the abject surrender, ont he part of the church, to the forces of showbiz, superstition and populism.”



From “Mommie Dearest,” Slate October 20, 2003

“He is that rare and foul beast, a man whose record shows sympathy for communism and fascism. It comes from a natural hatred of the democratic process, which he has done so much to subvert and undermine at home and abroad, and an instinctive affection for totalitarians of all stripes.” 



From Slate Dec. 13, 2010

“You can only have one aim per debate. I had two in debating with Tony Blair. The first one was to get him to admit that it was not done - the stuff we complain of - in only the name of religion. That's a cop-out. The authority is in the text. Second, I wanted to get him to admit, if possible, that giving money to a charity or organising a charity does not vindicate a cause."



From his last interview with Richard Dawkins in The New Statesman, posted online, Dec. 16, 2011

“The unlived life is not worth examining.” 



– “Nixon: Maestro of Resentment.” Dissent, Fall, 1990

The worlds of celebrity, journalism, literature and academia congregated on Twitter this morning to note the passing of author and journalist Christopher Hitchens, who died following a battle with cancer. Hitchens was diagnosed with the illness in 2010 while on a book tour for his memoir, Hitch-22.

Born in Portsmouth, the writer worked for the New Statesman before moving to the United States to work for The Atlantic, Slate and, most notably, Vanity Fair. News of his death in Houston, Texas saw a flood of tributes hit the social network. 

Almost as many words have been written about Christopher Hitchens since hedied as he would write in a typical working week. He was one of very, very few people on earth whom I would have missed just as much had I never had the pleasure and fortune of knowing him. He lit fires in people’s minds. He was an educator. He was polemical only inasmuch as he was naturally disputatious: this is a quality (ironically perhaps) that he might trace to the Talmudic influence of his Jewish genes as much as it being a brisk British parliamentarian style or a Hellenic mode of reasoning through argument. No one I have ever met or witnessed spoke better on the hoof. His writing was immaculate, subtle, crafted, filled with reference, knowledge, and reason. His humanist version of apostasy in turning against Clinton and in favor of the Iraq War enraged or puzzled some of his natural allies, but no honest human could confront his work and output without admiration. Of course there will be deranged people who will rejoice in their weird conviction of his eternal and infernal roasting. If hell has Christopher in it, then I’d like to reserve my place there now. But the joke is on the absurd religionists (who do not represent the majority of quietly devout and faithful people whom neither I nor Christopher wished to offend), for his words have made him immortal.

I can’t claim to call him friend with any kind of the depth and meaning that some can, but I can at least claim the privilege of having debated by his side, at Hay-on-Wye and here in London. And I can claim too that I call him “e,” like Stanley Ukridge, or “old crumpet,” like Barney Phipps and Oofy Prosser—for we shared a love and passion for P. G. Wodehouse and such things form a bond. Wodehouse, who adored the Pekingese breed of dog, liked to judge people on whether they were sound on Pekes. Evelyn Waugh, who like the Hitch and myself, revered the Master, judged people on how sound they are on Wodehouse. To paraphrase Lorenzo in The Merchant of Venice, “the man that hath no Wodehouse in him, nor is not moved with concord of sweet phrases, is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils; the motions of his spirit are dull as night, as his affections dark as Erebus. Let no such man be trusted.”

The first thing I want to disabuse you of is the notion that Christopher was all earnest purpose and humorless political and atheistical fervor.

Brooks Kraft / Corbis

I go to this length on Wodehouse, because the first thing I want to disabuse you of is the notion that Christopher was all earnest purpose and humorless political and atheistical fervor. He fought for causes all his life, he stood up against bullies, he outraged those who assumed he was a natural ally, he poured OUT his energies in a thousand ways but always, always with wit, with panache, with a sumptuously exquisite use of language, with a deep understanding that the connection between style and substance is absolute. A true thing badly expressed becomes a lie. As a writer and speaker, his awesome command of English is a part of his greatness, it explains how he came to be something that Britain, or indeed America, can rarely boast of, and usually have little but contempt for—a public intellectual. The phrase makes one go a bit gooey with embarrassment, but Christopher opened up debate and gaves and causes that without his talents would have been less ventilated and less understood.

This is not a personal reminiscence of Christopher Hitchens, whom—particularly after reading the eulogies of his legions of friends—I would give an arm and a leg, and defy the laws of space, time, and generational disassociativeness to have known. My admiration for him is comprehensive, but it is also specific, stemming from the night of June 8, 2010. That evening, Hitchens, promoting his memoir “Hitch 22,” wasinterviewed by Salman Rushdie at the 92nd Street Y. Hitchens was captivating as ever, and casually devastating (“I came from a family of people who were Tories, but had nothing to be Tory about”), but the talk somehow lacked the buoyance I had expected from the man who waxed his “back, sack, and crack,” gleefully defenestrated Mother Teresa, and wrote, unimprovably, that he had been bullied at boarding school by “a thick-necked sportocrat with the unimprovable name of Peter Raper.”

After the talk, Hitchens; Rushdie; Hitchens’s wife, Carol Blue; Hitchens’s agent, Steve Wasserman; and I went to dinner at a nearby restaurant. I was to write about it for the Talk of the Town. Hitchens and Rushdie said amusing things like (about biscotti), ”It’s on my list of things that are more trouble than they’re worth,” and (about knighthood), ”When Vidia’s agent called to congratulate him, he said, ‘People in the village are so happy for one’”; they played a favorite old game in which they substituted “dick” for “heart” in movie titles, coming up with such might-have-beens as “Bravedick.”

But I was slightly and secretly let down by the evening. The banter had seemed forced. Knowing of Hitchens’s legendary appetite for conversation, I had fantasized about talking (or, more accurately, listening) late into the nHitchens, coffee mug in hand, wandering off into the fug.

A few months later, Hitchens announced that he had esophageal cancer. He wrote, in Vanity Fair, “I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death. But nothing prepared me for the early morning last June when I came to consciousness feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse.” The morning, it turned out, had been that of June 8, 2010. Hitchens had spent the day in the hospital, at “the sad border post” of health and sickness. Then he had gone on Jon Stewart, and done the talk at the Y, vomiting before each with “an extraordinary combination of accuracy, neatness, violence, and profusion.” He had never let on. What a professional he was, and what a man.

Why are so many who love the English language and human freedom in mourning for Christopher Hitchens? His full-length books never showed his talents to the full – not even God is not Great, his atheist bestseller. With typical modesty – and he was always self-critical, despite appearances to the contrary – he thought that only his literary essays would be read after his death. The dominance of theory-spouting obscurantists in university English departments meant he had that field pretty much to himself, and his writing on Larkin, Powell, Rushdie, Bellow and, above all, Orwell is indeed "imperishable," to use his favourite word.

But if I may break the news to belle-lettristes as gently as I can, any aspiring author who tells publishers that he or she can make them rich with collections of essays will be shown the door, rather than a contract. Christopher Hitchens could do much, but he couldn't sway the minds of hundreds of thousands of readers by literary criticism alone.

In conversation he was the most intellectually generous man I have ever met. More writers than readers like to imagine are fretful and suspicious. They bite their tongues and hide their thoughts in case rival authors "steal their ideas". Hitchens was too much of an enthusiast for life and debate to waste time being pinched and cautious; too engaged in the battle of ideas to worry about others taking his.

When you had an argument you needed to work through or a book you had to deliver, he would sit you down, fill your glass to the brim and pour out ideas, references, people you needed to talk to and writers you had to read. You would try, and fail, to keep up and hope that you could remember a quarter of what he had said by the time the inevitable hangover had worn off the morning after.

Glorious conversation survives merely in memory of the listener, r, and there is the booze question that has to be addressed as well. The BBC's obituary was delivered by its media correspondent, Nick Higham, a ferrety cultural bureaucrat who has never written a sentence anyone has remembered. He assured the nation that Hitchens was an "alcoholic". Hitchens could certainly knock it back. But he and everyone who knew him understood his distinction between a drinker and a drunk. If he were a true alcoholic he could never have written so much, so fast and at such a high standard. Nor would he have been loved, for addicts are too selfish to love. Something else the BBC broadcast inadvertently explained was why the world feels a more welcoming place for the tyrannical and the censorious without him. Hitchens broke with the left, it reminded us, over the 9/11 atrocities and the second Iraq war. Leftists accused him of "betrayal," it continued, and quoted one who had described him as a "drink-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay". The BBC could not bring itself to add that the "leftist" in question was George Galloway, who saluted the "courage" of the secular fascist Saddam Hussein, went on to apologise for the regimes and movements of Sunni and Shia clerical fascism, and – lest we forget – led millions in demonstrations against the war to overthrow Iraqi Ba'athism without the supposedly moderate and respectable voices of liberal England uttering a word of protest against his presence.

More than any other modern intellectual, Hitchens revolted against the sinister absurdity of a time when feminists, democrats and liberals in the poor world and immigrant communities were more likely to find their reactionary enemies indulged and excused by the left rather than the right.

To paraphrase Wilde, whom Hitchens adored, "on an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to betray the left. It becomes a pleasure." I won't give you anyf about the left leaving Hitchens rather than Hitchens leaving the left. He walked out and slammed the door with barely one regretful glance over his shoulder. He remained a friend of and inspiration to many leftish writers, but for the "anti-imperialist left" that embraced life-denying, women-hating, gay-killing Islamists, he had nothing but contempt. Its indulgence of religious reaction had ruined it beyond redemption.

For all the finality of his farewell, to divide his thought into the pre- and post-9/11 Hitchens is to miss the consistency of his writing and the true source of his enormous appeal. Hitchens's Marxism was of the romantic Trotskyist variety. He had no interest in economics – a strange omission for a Marxist, but there you are. He was, instead, enchanted by the bravery and prescience of Victor Serge, George Orwell and the other left oppositionists of the early 20th century who opposed communism and capitalism equally. Ex-Trotskyists are now among the most dishonest people in politics, but their predecessors in the 1960s still had the integrity to teach him an invaluable lesson. Leftwing dictatorships were "Stalinist" in their theology, and a true Trotskyist should have no qualms about fighting them as fiercely as he or she fought the racist and repressive regimes and ideas of the right.

By an alchemy that worked its magic on hardly any of his comrades, Hitchens developed this unexceptional thought into a loathing of party-line thinking in whatever form it took. He would no more condemn Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell and Philip Larkin just because they were conservatives than he would make excuses for Raymond Williams and John Berger just because they were socialists. He no more approved of Israeli oppression of the Palestinians when he was "rightwing" than he approved of Fidel Castro's oppression of the Cubans when he was "leftwing".

I cannot overemphasise how much he loathed people o stuck to a party line and tried to tell me, you or especially him what we must think; how every kind of bureaucrat, archbishop, rabbi, ayatollah, commissar and inquisitor roused in him the urge to fight.

He died too young when he had too much left to say. Those who read him knew that when we had something to say on our own account that our bosses, friends, family and colleagues would deplore, we at least had the comfort that Christopher Hitchens was on our side. If we equivocated, we would hear a laconic voice from the English upper middle class, putting our arguments better than we could, and urging us to square our shoulders and speak our minds. Read him, read anything you can get your hands on, and you will hear it still.

“Where liberty dwells, there is my country”,

Ben Franklin once said. Tom Paine had replied,

“Where liberty dwells not, there is my country”

È morto Christopher Hitchens. Era il migliore.

È morto per un cancro, di quelli che non puoi uscirne. Non sono mai stato così male per la malattia di una persona che non conoscevo in faccia. Quando lo prese, quello sconcio tumore all’esofago, scrissi alcune parole sull’immensità di quest’uomo, per provare a spiegare a chi non lo conoscesse il dolore nel saperlo prossimo alla morte, per far capire a tutti quale gigantesca mancanza piangiamo oggi: le riporto qui per ricordarlo, aggiungendone alcune.

Hitchens era il più acuto e sagace giornalista che ci fosse in giro. Era impossibile leggerlo o ascoltarlo senza imparare qualcosa. Le sue opinioni non erano, mai, prodotte da riflessi condizionati, di partigianeria o tic mentali. C’era sempre una vigorosa e competente tensione verso la verità, che teneva i suoi ragionamenti sempre fuor di pregiudizio, come si può dire davvero di poche persone. Proprio per questo, per l’incredibile intelligenza del suo eclettismo, era impossibile capire a priori come la pensasse quando scriveva su un argomento nuovo. Eppure, ogni volta, dopo averlo letto pensavi: «cavolo, era ovvio che la pensasse così». E aveva sempre più ragione di quanto t’aspettassi.

Per questo motivo era sempre stato molto difficile identificarne la matrice politica: Hitchens era un progressista, nel senso più pieno del termine. La sua unica ideologia era l’estirpazione delle sofferenze delle persone. E lo era nella maniera più scanzonata e divertente, assieme dotata dell’arroganza dei fatti, e dell’umiltà del voler cambiare idea di fronte al torto. Se c’è una persona le cui opinioni di leggere, è questa qui.

Feroce critico di qualunque conservatorismo, annichiliva – con la forza dei proprî argomenti – chiunque fosse contrario ai matrimonî gay o ai diritti delle donne sulla scorta di dogmi risalenti all’età della pietra. Era perciò un grande oppositore del Vaticano, dove fu convocato come advocatus diaboli nel processo di santificazione per Madre Teresa di Calcutta (rispose più o meno: «gratis?!?»). Per la medesima ragione Hitchens fu uno dei pochissimi a riconoscere i pericoli dell’islamismo senza che questo lo portasse al retrivo accartocciamento su di sé, del considerare occidentali – né tantomeno giudaico-cristiani – le idee di libertà (d’opinione, sessuale, di governo), per le quali qualunque persona che voglia marcare un segno su questa Terra deve combattere.

La frase in epigrafe al post è la più hitchensiana ch’io abbia letto: «”dove c’è libertà, quello è il mio Paese”, aveva detto Franklin; “dove non c’è libertà, quello è il mio Paese” aveva risposto Paine – di cui Hitchens era grande estimatore e biografo. Era il primo nemico di qualunque dittatura al mondo. Si fece picchiare da una squadraccia fascista, per l’irrefrenabile impulso di cancellare una svastica su un muro di Beirut – «quando vedo quel simbolo non posso fare a meno di volerlo cancellare», disse. Acceso sostenitore della democrazia e del governo del popolo, è sempre stato un grande critico al vetriolo della politica estera realista, come nel caso della complicità coi varî regimi dittatoriali delle varie amministraziedda. Ha scritto Processo a Kissinger in cui enuncia le ragioni per cui l’ex segretario di Stato americano – e teorizzatore della dottrina realista della connivenza con le dittature – dovrebbe essere incriminato per crimini di guerra e reati contro l’umanità.

Dopo l’Undici Settembre, quando George W. Bush passò dalla piattaforma realista di isolazionismo con cui era stato eletto a farsi campione dell’esportazione della democrazia, l’indipendenza di bandiera e l’eclettismo dell’intelligenza impedirono a Hitchens di fare il salto opposto, come invece tanti altri: fu inizialmente a favore della guerra in Iraq, nonostante Cheney e Rumsfeld. Pur condividendone la pulsione ideale – umanitaria e libertaria – dell’intervento, conservò rilevanti scrupoli su come l’amministrazione Bush la stava portando avanti: sperimentò in prima persona il waterboarding per dimostrare che si trattava di una vera e propria tortura e chiedere che fosse bandito come tecnica d’interrogatorio.

In un recente dibattito contro Tony Blair, in cui Blair difendeva la posizione che la religione portasse del bene nel mondo, disse la memorabile frase: «Sapevo che avreste tirato fuori la carità e la beneficienza. Ma noi, signori e signore, sappiamo – e siamo la prima generazione che ha la fortuna di saperlo davvero – qual è il vero rimedio alla povertà. A lungo abbiamo ignorato questa cosa, ma ora la si sa. Il rimedio per la povertà ha un nome, infatti. Si chiama empowerment of women, dare potere alle donne. E dovunque si guardi nle catene – dell’ignoranza, delle malattie, della stupidità – alle donne è invariabilmente un qualche clero a mettere i bastoni fra le ruote».

In uno degli articoli più emotivamente densi che abbia mai letto, raccontò la storia di Mark Daily, un ragazzo arruolatosi nell’esercito americano. Si augurava di poter fare qualcosa per il mondo in cui viveva, e la rimozione di uno dei regimi più sanguinarî del ’900 gli era parsa una delle migliori cause: fu persuaso da alcuni degli articoli a favore dell’intervento scritti dallo stesso Hitchens, e partì come volontario per l’Iraq. Lì morì. Hitchens si mise in contatto con la famiglia del ragazzo, e fu al suo funerale. Dall’Iraq aveva scritto questa cosa alla moglie – credo che sia impossibile trovare parole più belle e ricche che una persona possa rivolgere a un’altra persona:

Una cosa che ho imparato su di me, da quando sono qui fuori, è che tutto quello che ti ho professato a proposito di ciò che desidero per il mondo, e ciò che ho voglia di fare per ottenerlo, era vero.

Il mio desiderio di “salvare il mondo” è, in realtà, solamente un’estensione del tentativo di costruire un mondo adatto a te.

Qualche tempo fa molte persone che avevano imparato qualcosa da Hitchens registrarono un video per ringraziarlo di com’egli avesse cambiato la loro vita. Nelle parole di uno di questi ragazzi: «grazie per avermi insegnato come pensare, non cosa pensare». Lo fecero nel modo più scanzonato, quello che sarebbe piaciuto a lui, con un bicchiere in mano, poche parole, e un brindisi a questo grande uomo che avrei tanto voluto avere come insegnante, come fratello, come vicino di casa, come barista, come compagno di bevute, ma più di tutti come amico.

È per quelli come te, Christopher, che mi dispiace tanto che tu avessi ragione – anche su quella cosa, come su tutte le altre – che Dio non c’è, e neppure una vita dopo la morte. Mi piacerebbe per tante ragioni, ma più di tutto perché chissà che discussioni ora. Come sempre le vinceresti tu, naturalmente.

On 7 October, I recorded a long conversation with Christopher Hitchens in Houston, Texas, for the Christmas edition of New Statesman which I was guest-editing.

He looked frail, and his voice was no longer the familiar Richard Burton boom; but, though his body had clearly been diminished by the brutality of cancer, his mind and spirit had not. Just two months before his death, he was still shining his relentless light on uncomfortable truths, still speaking the unspeakable ("The way I put it is this: if you're writing about the history of the 1930s and the rise of totalitarianism, you can take out the word 'fascist', if you want, for Italy, Portugal, Spain, Czechoslovakia and Austria and replace it with 'extreme-right Catholic party'"), still leading the charge for human freedom and dignity ("The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy – the one that's absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes. And the origins of that are theocratic, obviously. The beginning of that is the idea that there is a supreme leader, or infallible pope, or a chief rabbi, or whatever, who can ventriloquise the divine and tell us what to do") and still encouraging others to stand up fearlessly for truth and reason ("Stridency is the least you should muster ... It's the shame of your colleagues that they don't form ranks and say, 'Listen, we're going to defend our colleagues from these appalling and obfuscating elements'.").

The following day, I presented him with an award in my name at the Atheist Alliance International convention, and I can today derive a little comfort from having been able to tell him during the presentation that day how much he meant to those of us who shared his goals.

I told him that he was a man whose name would be joined, in the history of the atheist/secular movement, with those of Bertrand Russell, Robert gersoll, Thomas Paine, David Hume. What follows is based on my speech, now sadly turned into the past tense.

Christopher Hitchens was a writer and an orator with a matchless style, commanding a vocabulary and a range of literary and historical allusion far wider than anybody I know. He was a reader whose breadth of reading was simultaneously so deep and comprehensive as to deserve the slightly stuffy word "learned" – except that Christopher was the least stuffy learned person you could ever meet.

He was a debater who would kick the stuffing out of a hapless victim, yet did it with a grace that disarmed his opponent while simultaneously eviscerating him. He was emphatically not of the school that thinks the winner of a debate is he who shouts loudest. His opponents might have shouted and shrieked. Indeed they did. But Hitch didn't need to shout, for he could rely instead on his words, his polymathic store of facts and allusions, his commanding generalship of the field of discourse, and the forked lightning of his wit.

Christopher Hitchens was known as a man of the left. But he was too complex a thinker to be placed on a single left-right dimension. He was a one-off: unclassifiable. He might be described as a contrarian except that he specifically and correctly disavowed the title. He was uniquely placed in his own multidimensional space. You never knew what he would say about anything until you heard him say it, and when he did, he would say it so well, and back it up so fully, that if you wanted to argue against him you had better be on your guard.

He was recognised throughout the world as a leading public intellectual of our time. He wrote many books and countless articles. He was an intrepid traveller and a war reporter of signal valour. But he had a special place in the affections of atheists and secularists as the leading intellect and scholar of our movement. A formidable adversary to the pretentious,

the woolly-mied or the intellectually dishonest, he was a gently encouraging friend to the young, the diffident, and those tentatively feeling their way into the life of the freethinker and not certain where it would take them.

He inspired, energised and encouraged us. He had us cheering him on almost daily. He even begat a new word – the hitchslap. It wasn't just his intellect we admired: it was also his pugnacity, his spirit, his refusal to countenance ignoble compromise, his forthrightness, his indomitable spirit, his brutal honesty.

And in the very way he looked his illness in the eye, he embodied one part of the case against religion. Leave it to the religious to mewl and whimper at the feet of an imaginary deity in their fear of death; leave it to them to spend their lives in denial of its reality. Hitch looked it squarely in the eye: not denying it, not giving in to it, but facing up to it squarely and honestly and with a courage that inspires us all.

Before his illness, it was as an erudite author, essayist and sparkling, devastating speaker that this valiant horseman led the charge against the follies and lies of religion. During his illness he added another weapon to his armoury and ours – perhaps the most formidable and powerful weapon of all: his very character became an outstanding and unmistakable symbol of the honesty and dignity of atheism, as well as of the worth and dignity of the human being when not debased by the infantile babblings of religion.

Every day of his declining life he demonstrated the falsehood of that most squalid of Christian lies: that there are no atheists in foxholes. Hitch was in a foxhole, and he dealt with it with a courage, an honesty and a dignity that any of us would be, and should be, proud to be able to muster. And in the process, he showed himself to be even more deserving of our admiration, respect, and love.

Farewell, great voice. Great voice of reason, of humanity, of humour. Great voice aga cant, against hypocrisy, against obscurantism and pretension, against all tyrants including God.