Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens

Few matters of great political or cultural import have escaped the lacerating gaze of journalist, columnist and author Christopher Hitchens over the past four decades. British-born and Oxford-educated, and now a United States citizen, Hitchens has worked as a foreign correspondent and contributor to publications including The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, Vanity Fair and Slate, in between producing 11 books (on Thomas Jefferson, Mother Teresa and atheism, among other topics).

His turn of phrase is rightly legendary. He once described Mother Teresa as a “thieving tyrannical Albanian dwarf”, and he is no kinder to the objects of his contempt and dislike in his memoir. His account of a meeting with Argentina’s murderous General Videla is one of Hitch-22’s finest passages: “I possess a picture of the encounter that still makes me want to spew: there stands the killer and torturer and rape-profiteer . . . Bony-thin and mediocre in appearance, with a scrubby moustache, he looks for all the world like a cretin impersonating a toothbrush.”

Hitch, as he is called by those who know him, writes lovingly, almost romantically, of his dear friends the writers Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie and Peter Fenton – whole chapters are titled ‘Martin’, ‘Salman’, ‘The Fenton Factor’, and the book is dedicated to Fenton.

Though there is no suggestion that any of the friendships have been more than platonic, Hitchens is frank about the commonplace nature of homosexual encounters in British boarding schools, and his own participation in such adventures, having been dispatched to prep school at the age of eight: “The three great subjects of Beating, Bullying and Buggery are familiar enough to me in their way . . . “, and of the latter, “[t]he unstated excuse was that this was what one did until the so-far unattainable girls became available.” In the end, though, Hitchens concludes that the entire schooling experience was emancipatory, and in fact, the whole book, with one notable exception, is suffused with a sense of his appreciation of life.

Parts of the book are somewhat sluggish – I could have done without quite such an exhaustive recollection of his worthy experiences as a young political activist in Europe and Cuba – and the level of detail in relation to his public life, and his friendships, serves to highlight what is starkly absent from Hitch-22: any account of his relationships with his first wife or his current wife, the writer Carol Blue, or with his three children from the marriages. He explains this away, rather weakly, in a preface, where he notes that he can claim copyright only in himself, so as to imply that he lacks the right to share his family’s stories. But then, he calls it a memoir rather than an autobiography, so fair play.

(In a cogent review in the Guardian, Blake Morrison points out that Hitchens’ objective is intellectual historiography rather than emotional catharsis, which I think is on the money. He has never been one to talk about feelings.)

One aspect of his private life from which he doesn’t flinch is the suicide of his mother, Yvonne, when he was 24 (the aforementioned exception). It occurred as the result of a pact with her lover, with whom she had fled to Greece after the breakdown of her marriage to Hitchens senior, a Royal Navy man referred to by his son as The Commander. In the opening chapter, which bears her name, he movingly describes his last conversation with her and his journey to Athens to deal with the aftermath of her death. Characteristically, this is followed by an intellectual examination: ‘A Coda on Self-Slaughter.’

All beloved Hitchens topics are canvassed – atheism, God, Islam, his conversion from Trotskyism to conservatism, his support for the Iraq War, the Jewish Question – in service of a text that, depending on the depth of your existing knowledge of Hitchens may not greatly enlighten you as to the man, but will certainly leave you more informed than you found it.

4.5 / 5 stars: A rich romp through the mind and memories of one of the intellectual heavyweights of our time.

Note:

There is a sad addendum to the publication of Hitch-22: while on tour in the United States in June to promote the book, Hitchens fell seriously ill and was shortly after diagnosed with oesophageal cancer – the same disease that claimed his father’s life. In subsequent interviews, and in this extraordinary piece on vf.com, Hitchens has indicated his condition is terminal, though he may have up to five years to live. There is no sign that he feels sorry for himself, though; he said in an August interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper that his long-time heavy smoking and drinking – the cover of my copy of Hitch-22 features a close-up photo of the author mid-cigarette – made him a “candidate”. On a lighter note, he instructed Cooper to disbelieve any rumours he might hear of deathbed conversions.

Survival In Auschwitz by Primo Levi

Recognized as one of the seminal books written about life inside a concentration camp, and one of the finest writings of any kind about the monstrosity that was Auschwitz, Primo Levi published If This Is A Man: The Nazi Assault on Humanity (‘Survival in Auschwitz’ was a stupid, pointless alteration made by his US publishers; evidently they felt American readers would fail to appreciate the nuance of the original name, also shared by the poem that opens the book).

Perhaps what stunned me most were Levi’s revelations about the politics of life in the camp, and the clear-eyed, almost dispassionate way he writes about his German captors. This novel was published in 1947, an eye-blink from the time of the atrocities, yet not a note of anger or bitterness is detectable.

He writes of the “funereal science” of the numbers at Auschwitz, tattooed on the forearms of each new entrant, “which epitomize the stages of destruction of European Judaism . . . the numbers told everything: the period of entry into the camp, the convoy of which one formed a part, and consequently the nationality. Everyone will treat with respect the numbers from 30,000 to 80,000: there are only a few hundred left and they represented the few survivals from the Polish ghettos.”

Lest the reader become overwhelmed with pity, he reminds us that human nature persists in the Lager: “It is as well to watch out in commercial dealings with a 116,000 or 117,000: they now number only about forty, but they represent the Greeks of Salonica, so take care they do not pull the wool over your eyes.”

In the final chapter, ‘The Story of Ten Days’, Levi recounts the approach, in January 1945, of the Russian army and the flight of the Germans from Auschwitz. Entranced by the prospect of escape, the healthier inmates undertake an ill-advised mass march from the camp, leaving the sick and weak to scrounge for food and warmth. There are only potatoes left to eat, and no one with the strength to stoke the massive furnaces. The horror still is not over. Some SS men penetrate the nearly empty camp and find that 18 Frenchmen have settled in the old SS-Waffe hall. “They killed them all methodically, with a shot in the nape of the neck, lining up their twisted bodies in the snow on the road,” Levi writes, noting that the corpses remained exposed until the arrival of the Russians: no one had the strength to bury them.

As Roth says, he fell ill only once and it was at the perfect time – those in the sick bay were forgotten and abandoned, and escaped being caught up in the forced evacuation that would surely have killed them. Of the 650 Italian Jews in his shipment to Auschwitz, Levi was one of only 20 who left the camp alive.

My edition, found at an Auckland second-hand bookshop, features an afterword, a conversation between Levi and the American novelist Philip Roth. From this I learned that apart from his year at Auschwitz and a brief period afterwards in which he circuitously journeyed home to Italy via Bielorussia, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Austria and Germany (he wrote about this experience in The Reawakening, the sequel to If This Is A Man), he spent the remainder of his life as a chemist and writer in his hometown of Turin, dying in a fall in his home in 1987, aged 67.

I considered excerpting a piece of the poem, to give the flavour, but to reduce it to two lines would be pointless. Like all great poems, it’s a work of art in itself. If it moves you at all, read the book.

If This Is A Man

You who live safe
In your warm houses,
You who find, returning in the evening,
Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider if this is a man
Who works in the mud
Who does not know peace
Who fights for a scrap of bread
Who dies because of a yes or a no.
Consider if this is a woman,
Without hair and without name
With no more strength to remember,
Her eyes empty and her womb cold
Like a frog in winter.
Meditate that this came about:
I commend these words to you.
Carve them in your hearts
At home, in the street.
Going to bed, rising;
Repeat them to your children,
Or may your house fall apart,
May illness impede you,
May your children turn their faces from you.

5 / 5 stars: A masterpiece.

The First Stone and Joe Cinque’s Consolation by Helen Garner

For me, one of the delights of reading is the chance of encountering a writer with whose works I fall instantly in love. Whether it’s how they approach their subject matter, a way with words that has me re-reading sentences with mouth agape, or a view of the world that accords with mine, discovering a writer that makes you sit up and smile is thrilling.

Two of my happiest findings of 2009 were the Indian-American short-story writer and novelist Jhumpa Lahiri and the French crime-thriller writer Fred Vargas, but Helen Garner, an Australian writer of many talents who began publishing in the late 1970s, struck the deepest chord with me.

Garner has so far produced four novels, three screenplays (including one for Jane Campion), three short-story collections and four books of non-fiction.

The First Stone and Joe Cinque’s Consolation both fall into the latter category; published in 1995, The First Stone (subtitle: Some questions about sex and power) is Garner’s first non-fiction work, focusing on a sexual harassment scandal that emerged in 1992 at Ormond College, one of the residential colleges of the University of Melbourne, when two young female students accused the Ormond College head of indecently assaulting them at a party. The story captured wide public attention and caused a schism in the cloistered environment of the university: Garner set out to report on the ensuing court case and establish what had happened between the head, Dr Colin Shepherd, and the two complainants – a naïve objective, as it turned out.

The book begins with an intriguing preface which reveals that we are about to embark on a very different text than the one Garner intended to write. She envisaged, she says, an extended piece of reportage – but soon “encountered obstacles to my research which forced me, ultimately, to write a broader, less ‘objective’, more personal book.” Personal it is, forcing Garner to confront her own feminist notions as she questions who is telling the truth and whether, if the women’s allegations are true, this is a matter worthy of the police and the courts.

Joe Cinque’s Consolation (published in 2004 and subtitled A true story of death, grief and the law) makes for more harrowing reading, and here Garner’s talent for uncovering the pathos in ordinary lives comes into full bloom. From the back cover: “In October 1997 a clever young law student at the Australian National University made a bizarre plan to murder her boyfriend after a dinner party at their house. Some of the dinner guests – most of them university students – had heard rumours of the plan. Nobody warned Joe Cinque. He died one Sunday, in his own bed, of a massive dose of Rohypnol and heroin. His girlfriend and her best friend were charged with her murder.”

The book is the outcome of the several years Garner spent following the Cinque case, a period in which she spoke with nearly every key player, except the two accused women whose trials she attended. She examines the life of Joe Cinque and the nature of his relationship with the woman who took it. Her descriptions of her conversations with Joe Cinque’s Italian-immigrant parents, and of their stricken, dignified bearing through the trials, wrench the heart. It is one of the finest accounts of grief I have read (another of the best is The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, with whom Garner has much in common).

Aspects of both books reminded me of some of Dominick Dunne’s legendary journalism in Vanity Fair magazine, for which he covered some of the most high-profile American and European court cases of the past two decades, including the murder trials of OJ Simpson and the Menendez brothers.

Like Dunne (who began writing about court cases after sitting through the trial of the man who murdered Dunne’s daughter Dominique), Garner’s books throb with the author’s passion for social justice and strong sense of rightness. Also like Dunne, Garner breaches conventional journalistic boundaries by forming personal relationships When a writer cares like hell about their subject matter, and is profoundly gifted in the wrangling of words (the final line of Joe Cinque’s Consolation brought me to tears), it is a privilege to read the product of their labours.

Open by Andre Agassi

Preceding Open’s publication was a classic media frenzy, stemming from the revelation that the text contained an admission by Agassi, one of tennis’ most beloved practitioners, that he used pure methamphetamine for a period during his career. Everyone from Roger Federer to Boris Becker to Martina Navratilova weighed in with personal opinion, most of it harsh.

In interviews Agassi gave at the time, he said something shocking to many – that he always hated tennis. Born to an Iranian immigrant father, a former Olympic boxer with whom Agassi had a complex, fearful relationship, the future superstar lay in a crib overhung with tennis balls, to improve his hand-eye coordination, and was put on the court at the age of three.

His talent was such that he was given a scholarship to the prestigious Nick Bollettieri Academy in Florida as a young teen, landing in a pressure-cooker environment which only made him loathe the sport more. He describes telling person after person, from his trainer and father figure Gil Reyes to his wives Brooke Shields and Steffi Graf, of his feelings about the game. His memory of the various responses is one of the treats of the book.

Open reads so well in part because it’s written in the present tense (by J R Moehringer, based on extensive interviews and conversations with Agassi). It’s a brave choice, because it risks tinting the narrative with artifice, but it works brilliantly for a sports biography, adding a breathless intensity to Agassi’s account of some of the key matches in his career. Even if you’re not a tennis fan, his recollections of the 1995 ‘Summer of Revenge’ against Boris Becker (whom he detested), of how he deliberately lost the 1996 Australian Open semifinal to Michael Chang, and of the many extraordinary encounters with his nemesis Pete Sampras are mesmerizing.

This is not simply a story about a self-loathing, uncommonly gifted boy from Las Vegas who became a sporting legend. It’s also a lesson in the art of branding – how lucrative endorsements stemmed from the selling of Agassi as a brash, rebellious punk, which, he writes, was not how he ever intended to be perceived. When he starts to lose his hair at 20, forcing him to wear a hairpiece on the court, he describes his terror at the prospect of damage to the Agassi image.

Many commentators have called this the best sports autobiography they have read. I would go so far as to say is one of the best autobiographies ever produced. Most memoirs are a waste of everyone’s time – they are flawed most commonly by a mixture of self-aggrandizement, dishonesty and score-settling. (I still haven’t recovered from Bill Clinton’s devoting barely any space to Monica Lewinsky in his 957-page memoir My Life, instead choosing to exhaustively excoriate Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel whose investigations prompted Clinton’s impeachment.)

Real self-reflection and a willingness to turn a torch to dark corners are the hallmarks of a great autobiography, and Open has them in spades.