It is difficult to write about Christopher Hitchens without the piece becoming ad hominem. His bloated frame weighs on every word, his sneering personality is infused in every thought, and his drink-soaked belligerence adds sparkle to every column he writes.
Yesterday I stumbled across this series of articles by Hitchens describing the lengths his Vantiy Fair colleagues have gone to in order to keep him alive. Celebrated for his capacity to drink whilst staying productive, Hitchens has become a caricature drunkard in a country full of people obsessed with living forever. He has found his niche in opposition to such Americans and seems very happy there … well, except for the wheezing, the burst capillaries, and the obesity.
Hitchens has set his stall out as a contrarian and won’t be moved. Whatever it is, he’s against it. Think invading Iraq was a mistake, he doesn’t. Think smoking is bad for you, he thinks it’s great. Think going for a run gives you a burst of serotonin, well fuck you Hitchens is getting a taxi to the bar and is ordering pre-dinner cocktails. It must be pretty unsustainable in the long run, which is why, bankrolled by Condé Nast, he has quietly submitted to the full Hollywood rejuvenation treatment.
The actual treatments he undergoes are quite banal — detoxing in a Santa Barbara spa, near-death yoga, stopping smoking, lazy exercise on some new contraption, lots of manicures and facials — yet despite his contrarian instincts he comes to enjoy feeling healthy. This brings on all manner of anxieties about his own mortality, as he mourns for his cigarettes and realizes that he is no longer young.
Throughout all this Hitchens writes very well indeed. His prose is clear but venerable; it has punch and elegance. There is a beauty to his reflections on his porpoise-like body that elevates it above most magazine fodder. I wonder to what extent a lived life is reflected in prose. How much do you need to experience before you can write like that? Or would Hitchens have been as good if he had spent his life eating quinoa and drinking spinach juice? (The answer to that question by the way is no, the proof being his clean living brother and right-wing fanatic Peter Hitchens).
As someone who is intrigued by the subject of self-improvement, I think there is a lot you can learn from Christopher Hitchens. He shows that if you want to write about it, you are far better off in the first person than the third. Can you imagine what the article would be like if he had taken all the stuff out about his resistance to change? It would have been a small list of platitudes: eat well, don’t smoke, exercise etc. He demonstrates that being a full-time contrarian is very limiting and that, long term, it isn’t advisable to be imprisoned inside a caricature of yourself.
Ah, first person is a tricky issue. I love it but you have to earn it otherwise most readers’ natural response is, “who the hell are you?”
Even the column I write as Tom Townshend for MSN gets a lot of personal directed responses, even though I never use first person singular within the articles. And most of those responses are “Tom Townshend is an idiot”. So sometimes I long for the animosity of 4music where we employ the Smash Hits device of talking in first person as a singular organism called 4music. People tend to throw less stones because they’re not sure how big you are (though clearly we’re not as big as Hitchens – but are going back to the gym tomorrow anyway).
You’re right about having to earn the first person. I didn’t realize that wrote a column like that, does it make a big difference to write it under a pseudonym?
Weird. I find that such writing – specifically on the topic of your personal experience and musings on your own comportment/self-image lose almost all valuable tract within their chosen scope if robbed of the first person.
And I don’t just mean that, of course, you have the potential to write a more powerful piece if you can credibly use the first person to express such things. The third person not only makes these themes banal, it makes the writing pompous in its presumption that there is ultimately any kind of real reflective – let alone revelatory – value to be drawn from the matter.
@Barney But isn’t the problem that we used to be able to use the 3rd person as a universal whereas now we use bloody statistics.
You might be on to something – if you’re talking about a silent conspiratorial paradigm shift in the reading of abstract personal relatives. And by ‘you’, I mean ‘one’.
Crikey I like this, even the comments are good! Well done Hitchens Watch for the link.
Pardon me I’m going to browse..
Thanks for commenting, did you find anything else good?