The Tenth Man

By the time Christopher Hitchens died last week at the age of 62, the arc of his intellectual career was so notorious, ingrained, and agreed-upon that the many, many tributes tended to skip it and instead move straight on to relating the man’s personal kindnesses, biting polemical barbs, and prodigious feats of alcohol consumption. The contours of that broadly accepted arc are as follows: Hitchens, born in England, became known as a talented radical while at Oxford; then, first at the New Statesman and later, upon his move to the United States, for more than two decades at The Nation, he was the English-speaking world’s most prominent left-wing journalist and intellectual; then came 9/11, which inspired a strange conversion—all of a sudden Hitchens was chastising his former ally Noam Chomsky, unceasingly polemicizing against the outrages of Islamic fundamentalism or, as he frequently preferred, “Islamofascism,” and tacitly endorsing the re-election of George W. Bush (only four years after he supported Ralph Nader!). By 2006, when he received the New Yorker treatment, his profile’s subtitle articulated the confusion felt by the political class: “How a former socialist,” it promised, “became the Iraq war’s fiercest defender.” It’s a classic story of a radical’s life, with a bizarre and unexpected epilogue that took up his final decade.

While I derived as much pleasure from the mystery surrounding Hitchens’ curious right-wing turn as the next aficionado of intellectual skywriting did—this stuff is like Dancing With the Stars to some of us—the main enjoyment I took from him was the elegance and wit of his prose and the suppleness of his takes on literature and culture. And the essay that got me hooked on Hitch was not about the tyrant Saddam or the feckless left or the stooge Michael Moore or the anti-Semitic grotesquerie of Mel Gibson—was not, in other words, any of the polemics dedicated to tipping every unsacred cow in the meadow of his dreams—but rather the one about James Joyce’s Ulysses. I read it in 2004, in the upstairs café of the Barnes & Noble across the street from the movie theater where I worked that summer. It was pegged to the centennial of Bloomsday—June 16, 1904, on which the novel is set—and in part devoted to explaining why Joyce chose that day as his novel’s peg. In fact the word “peg” is all too appropriate, for that day was, as Hitchens puts it, “the very first time the great James Joyce received a handjob from a woman who was not a prostitute.”

But the sentence in the essay that struck me most was this: “In some intuitive manner, Joyce seems to have had the premonition that the Jewish question would be crucial to the 20th century.” There are many possible explanations for why Joyce made his Odysseus, the advertising salesman Leopold Bloom, Jewish. Among them: Joyce’s pacifism led him to identify with the persecuted Jewish people; Odysseus was the ancient wanderer par excellence, and therefore his modern iteration must be the modern wanderer par excellence—a Jew; the novelist Italo Svevo (né Aron Ettore Schmitz), whom Joyce knew in Trieste, was the real-life model for Bloom; etc. But Hitchens’ argument was more challenging and perplexing: Ulysses, he asserted, is urgent political writing disguised as escapism, and Bloom is Jewish because the Jewish question was, for Joyce, politically paramount. Joyce perceived that the Great War had not resolved all the contradictions that modernity had thrust upon an unwilling, antiquated civilization, and that chief among these was how it would deal with the Jews—emancipated yet unalterably different, and who, due to their unique history of influence over Europe and Christianity, were not merely a prominent question that had yet to be answered but the question that had yet to be answered. This was the most logically rigorous case for Jewish exceptionalism I had ever encountered.

Which is partly why a year later—on June 17, 2005, to be exact—while again home from college, I attended a reading of his at a store in Arlington, Va. It was the only time we ever spoke. As I got my book signed, I noted that Bloomsday had been the day before and asked Hitchens which his favorite chapter of Ulysses was. Hitchens paused several seconds, leaned back in his chair, and replied, “Probably the Shakespeare chapter. At the library.” As I turned to go, he called after me: “Happy Bloomsday.”

In Chapter 9 of Ulysses—the chapter Hitchens was referring to—the university drop-out Stephen Dedalus says, “A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.” Stephen is referring to Shakespeare, and Shakespeare Hitchens was not; “man of genius,” too, seems a stretch. Nonetheless, this Chapter 9—this was a portal of discovery. Hitchens wasn’t merely tossing something off for an anonymous book-buyer. He was telling me something about himself. Hitchens always insisted that 9/11 did not precipitate or mark a break with his past thinking, though most people never quite bought this. But in citing Chapter 9, he actually explained exactly how this could be, and he explained something more, too: that any alterations he made to his thinking did not come from fear or loathing of terrorism or Islam. Nor did they come from Marxism, neoconservatism, penchant for dramatic conversions, hedonism, Englishness, Americanness, Anglo-Americanness, iconoclasm, or even atheism. They came not in 2001 but more than a decade earlier, and they came from his Jewishness, which in turn came, as Jewishness does under Jewish law, from his mother. I don’t mean here to claim Hitchens religiously; he clearly lived and died an atheist. But if you are one of those people searching for the ever-elusive Unified Theory of Hitch, the only one that stands up to scrutiny—believe it or not—has to do with his being Jewish. And with being Stephen Dedalus.

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What made Hitchens different from all the other middle-class English young men? “I do know a little of how I came to be of two minds,” he relates on the first page of the first chapter of his 2010 memoir, Hitch-22. His father, a stern but not cruel Navy man whom Hitchens always refers to unironically as “The Commander,” is straight out of postwar British central casting, interchangeable with characters from the Master and Commander novels by Patrick O’Brian that Hitchens loved. But his mother? She “was the exotic and the sunlit when I could easily have had a boyhood of stern and dutiful English gray,” he gushed, in that first chapter, titled “Yvonne.” “She was the cream in the coffee, the gin in the Campari, the offer of wine or champagne instead of beer, the laugh in the face of bores and purse-mouths and skinflints, the insurance against bigots and prudes.”

Continue reading: The Tenth Man

Marc Tracy edits Tablet Magazine’s daily blog, The Scroll. He tweets @marcatracy.