LAST year, just before he was diagnosed with advanced oesophageal cancer, Christopher Hitchens published the unexpectedly moving memoir Hitch-22.
"I soon enough realised when young," he revealed in that book, "that I did not have the true 'stuff' for [writing] fiction and poetry. And I was very fortunate indeed to have, as contemporaries, several practitioners of those arts who made it obvious to me, without unduly rubbing in the point, that I would be wasting my time if I tried."
As a journalist, Hitchens has done everything with his time except waste it. He has made himself the key writer of the post-9/11 age. No novelist or poet has registered the texture of the past decade as pungently as Hitchens has in the essay form.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/arts-arc/theres-just-one-hitch/story-e6frg8nf-1226126501899
5 comments:
first article (i've read) about hitchens that was well written itself. nice.
Christopher, on the subject of your last article of 5 September, 'Simply Evil',have you read yesterday's G2 supplement (Guardian 6 September on '9/11 The Survivors'tales)? In particular what Richard Clarke says, Bush's ex top counter-terrorism expert? The article speaks for itself.
Articles tend to do so, being made of words and all.
Very well said:
"If more flexible progressives, such as John le Carre, preferred to discuss the nuances and grey areas of Rushdie's death sentence, we should hesitate to conclude that this made them more enlightened than Hitchens."
-JJ
Hitch, perhaps if you weren't comparing yourself to the best fiction writers in the world then you
could produce some very good fiction. In any case, much of your writing is poetry.
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