I wrote about Christopher Hitchens today in Tablet Magazine. To call him one of my favorite writers seems both too kind and not kind enough. Better to say he is one of the writers who meant the most to me. My argument about him concerns the centrality of his Jewishness, which he did not even learn about until middle age (his mother was Jewish, which he learned from his grandmother when he was 38), and the way it influenced his political and intellectual development. There’s certainly an element of writing for a specific platform to this—#tabletpitches, anyone?—but I think my argument stands up to some scrutiny. You know, after you allow for all the Ulysses stuff.
And something else was happening, too, outside of the walls of Hitchens’ own psyche: The demise of the Cold War was written on the wall, and the emergence of a new threat revealed itself to him in a strikingly personal way. On Feb. 14, 1989, Grand Ayatollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, issued his famous fatwa calling for the death of Hitchens’ friend Salman Rushdie over the alleged heresy in his novel The Satanic Verses. Hitchens later wrote: “I thought then, and I think now, that this was not just a warning of what was to come. It was the warning. The civil war in the Muslim world, between those who believed in jihad and Shari’a and those who did not, was coming to our streets and cities.” Many years later, for the New Yorker profile, Rushdie himself—who wasn’t exactly undistracted at the time the fatwa was issued—was able to locate the sea change in his friend. “There’s a sense in which all this—Christopher’s move—is partly my fault,” Rushdie said. “The fatwa made Christopher feel that radical Islam was not only trying to kill his friend; it was a huge new threat to the kind of world he wanted to live in. And I have the sense he felt there was a liberal failure to get the point of what was happening.”
Later in 1989, Hitchens met Carol Blue, the woman who became his second wife. He promptly told his wife, Meleagrou, who was the mother of his son and was then pregnant with his daughter, that he and Blue were in love. He split up and remarried: In a sense, his daughter’s birth’s baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage table.
Politically, his course was set. The muddy complexities of the Cold War—which pitted an ostensibly Communist system that was in fact brutal, crude, repressive authoritarianism against an ostensibly free system whose capitalism run rampant and omnipotent national security state nixed the possibility of true democracy—had permitted Hitchens only to call for a pox on both their houses. Now he could truly honor that which he believed good and condemn that which he believed bad. Good is free speech, anti-clericalism, irony, and mercy; bad is conformity, theocracy, fanaticism, and an incredibly misplaced sense of justice. It may have taken a cataclysm of 9/11’s scale to reveal where Hitchens stood. Perhaps 9/11—and specifically, the specter, in its aftermath, of this fervent lefty fervently backing a fervently right-wing president—was merely what made people notice. But an honest reading of Hitchens’ intellectual trajectory would find that his reaction to the terrorist attacks was entirely in keeping with more than a decade of writing and thought, and that if a new path was indeed blazed, it was blazed in 1989.
Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.