Attackerman

I didn’t know Christopher Hitchens. Met him a handful of times, most of which occurred when I was one of those left-wingers he loved to horrify with his support for the Iraq war. I knew him as a fan — yes, even during his embrace of the 9/11 Era — and a reader. If you love reading the English language, it was hard not to love Christopher Hitchens. By God, I tried.

When I was a younger man working at a different magazine, I was approached by a briefly famous writer to help him research a hit piece on Hitchens. (The amazing thing was, at the time, both the magazine and the writer shared Hitchens’ politics.) The guy wanted to get even with Hitchens for a 15-year old slight, and so he asked me to dig through Hitchens’ Nation column to unearth long-forgotten evidence of Hitchens reversing this-or-that position. Yes, that was going to be the payoff: Christopher Hitchens Has Changed His Mind About Things. The piece never ran.

But it was one of the assignments I loved the most back then. Not because of what the payoff would be, but because of what the process would be: going to the Brooklyn Public Library at Grand Army Plaza, which will always be the people’s Alexandria to me, and spending hours reading old Hitchens essays on microfilm. (At that point in time, not much of the Nation was retrievable through Nexis.) No one did high dudgeon better, especially for low stakes. And when the stakes were high? I remember the magazine running pieces bashing Susan Sontag for her introspective look on the western left’s accommodations to communism (as well as Sontag’s piece itself, it should be said) and Hitchens rushing to her defense.

If you ever spent hours arguing with your friends about who was the best, Biggie, Jay-Z or Nas, you had to love Christopher Hitchens. You didn’t have to agree with what he wrote, or with his obnoxious trope of gratuitously punching down, any more than you have to agree with the substance of the first two verses of “Me & My Bitch.” But if you care about language and about argument and about the craftsmanship that goes into discussing weighty matters, you have to recognize virtuosity. So he wrote a shitty, tossed-off column for Slate; Jay made Kingdom Come. The body of work makes a man great.

When a sage dies, all are his kin. Go easy, step lightly, stay free. You gave us enough to keep reading you forever.

Update: Ta-Nehisi Coates says it better. Christopher Buckley is beside himself and summons forth an exquisite essay. John Podhoretz gets gross and classless, calling Hitchens an antisemite. (“[H]is problem was not with the notion of a homeland for the dispossessed Jewish tribe so much as it was with the continued existence of the tribe itself.”)