Unhitched. Richard Seymour
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the military, but enjoyed abusing social inferiors – his habit of being rude to waiters, perhaps in emulation of the journalist Pappenhacker in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop.27 Hitchens was known as an exceptionally warm and generous person by some of his friends but could also be callous to the point of cruel if crossed. A gregarious conversationalist who sustained intense friendships with a small coterie of litterateurs, someone who summoned and expected loyalty, he could unflinchingly betray those he declared were among his closest friends.
As a writer whose gratuitous self-display was nonetheless always selective, he could tactfully conceal aspects of himself. Yet by several accounts he could be trusted with no secret divulged by anyone. He hated the oppression of women by religion but was indulgent of other varieties of misogyny, particularly that passing itself off as wit. A professional ironist, he descended at times into low contrarianism or into depths of puce-faced literalism. His intellect was greatly overvalued in his later years, and he was prone to bouts of unimpressive philistinism. As someone who despised the sentimentality in certain quarters of the left, he was a purveyor of finely honed sentiment, devastatingly quick on his feet with emotionally potent oversimplification but also given to nauseating platitude. He was a gifted writer but also rather lazy at times, sometimes appearing to borrow material from others and not always with attribution. And as someone with uncommonly wide reading, he often lacked depth, either unable or unwilling to cope with the sorts of complex ideas that he occasionally attempted to criticise.
Last, he was cosmopolitan with a profoundly chauvinistic streak, an ouvrieriste with a closet sympathy for Thatcherism (particularly its libertarian, free-market wing), and a progressive imperialist in the tradition of Mill, Tocqueville, Roosevelt, and Wilson who fancied that the US military was the last genuine repository of republican virtue in a decaying liberal capitalism.
Perhaps my point is obvious. One cannot begin to describe Hitchens’s personality without adumbrating his public stances; likewise, none of these stances can be detached from the person he was. Insofar as it attempts to assay the Hitchensian idiolect, this book does attempt to be either exhaustively biographical nor encyclopaedic in their analysis. On the contrary, it lives up to its subtitle. ‘The Trial of Christopher Hitchens’ is, yes, a pun, intended to evoke how the author became, to a degree, what he had loathed. But it is also a literal brief: this is unabashedly a prosecution. And if it must be conducted with the subject in absentia, as it were, it will not be carried out with less vim as a result.
ADDENDUM, ON THE COMPLETE AND UTTER WORKS
I have alluded to Hitchens’s propensity for appropriating the ideas and work of others with either oblique or no acknowledgement. In these pages I am evaluating Hitchens’s writing chiefly on its political merits. However, part of the charge I make is that in his journalism, and in his writing more broadly, his standards of evidence and rigour underwent a serious decline as he turned to the right. And this case cannot be made without discussing, at least briefly, the weaknesses in his approach that were already apparent.
It is fair to say that much of Hitchens’s writing consisted of self- plagiarism. There was rarely a good line that did not get more than one airing, while Hitch-22 is made up significantly of anecdotes and arguments published in previous essays. There is no shame in this: he was eminently quotable. The fact is, though, that at least some of what was most laudable in Hitchens’s output was probably not his own work.
One reviewer has already detected plagiarism in the case of large tranches of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, a late book and probably a somewhat opuscular component of the Hitchensian oeuvre.28 The historian Noel Malcolm made a similar allegation about passages in the much earlier The Parthenon Marbles that he said were similar to passages in earlier published work by the much more authoritative William St Clair – although Hitchens rebutted the allegation.29
I argue that a similar problem exists in the Hitchens volume from which I have drawn my subtitle: The Trial of Henry Kissinger. The book was sharp, witty, and devastating for Kissinger, demonstrating to any reasonable person’s satisfaction that he was a war criminal, to say the least of it. Glowingly reviewed, and with an accompanying documentary by Eugene Jarecki, this book was critical to expanding Hitchens’s audience and for a brief time upholding his reputation as a critic of US power even as he swung behind the Bush administration. These are its known credentials.
Among its lesser-known qualities is the way it used its sources. The acknowledgements pages allude delphically to ‘borrowings’ from ‘more original and more courageous work’ by such authors as Lucy Komisar, Mark Hertsgaard, Fred Branfman, Kevin Buckley, and Lawrence Lifschultz. Hitchens also mentioned a general indebtedness to Seymour Hersh, whose work, especially The Price of Power: Kissinger in the White House, does seem to have formed the basis for many of the Hitchens book’s claims. This is not a standard form of citation, but it can be assumed that Hitchens did not expect those sources to object. Moreover, this simply reflected how Hitchens, who never included such apparatuses as footnotes or bibliographies in his texts, did business. As a journalist he circulated among the relevant cohort, listened to their story over a few drinks, and then wrote up, almost word for word, what he had been told. To this extent his habits are perfectly comprehensible. However, at least some borrowing is given not even this much acknowledgement, such as the lifting from Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman’s The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism in Hitchens’s essay ‘Kissinger’s War Crimes in Indochina’.30
A different story obtains with The Missionary Position (1995), which experienced a crescendo of fame as a result of the attention paid to God Is Not Great (2007). The former was an intelligently written, if slight, polemic, released as an accompaniment to a documentary Hitchens had made on Mother Teresa, proving that she was a friend of poverty, not the poor, and an ally and alibi to dictators, the corrupt, wealthy, and reactionary. But an Indian author produced most of the original research for The Missionary Position. The manuscript was judged to need rewriting, and was purchased by Verso with the intention of offering the idea to an Anglophone author. Hitchens, with his acknowledged contempt for religion and propensity for refined iconoclasm, could hardly have been more well suited. What he produced was an intelligently written indictment, but the original hardback made no acknowledgement of the input of several colleagues.31
Subtler forms of unacknowledged appropriation, or borrowing without attribution, occur elsewhere in Hitchens’s oeuvre. For example, a great deal of his work on Bill Clinton’s betrayal on health care was lifted from Sam Husseini’s original journalism.32 A reasonable response to all this might be to stress that Hitchens had himself pinned his colours firmly to the mast by writing ‘In Defence of Plagiarism’. ‘Where would most of our culture be’, he asked, ‘without borrowing, adaptation, and derivatives?’33 Moreover, in most cases of borrowing he was most likely aware that he could rely on the goodwill of his sources towards his project, whether he chose to acknowledge them or not.34 Nor does any of this deny Hitchens’s considerable advantages as a writer and debater – precisely those advantages allowed him to take what others had researched and present it in a perhaps more digestible format.
However, the issue cannot be avoided. First, if Hitchens was used to restating in an accessible form the more courageous and original work of others, if this was in fact how he formed his analyses, what would become of his insight when he had to rely on the cheap foreign policy wisdom of those whom he had once called ‘neoconservative ratbags’?35 Second, such a lax approach in his work cannot be extricated from certain slapdash polemical habits that came to the fore in his later phase. If Hitchens was unaccustomed to normal citation procedures in political writing, and thus did not expect to have his sources queried and checked, the temptation not only to plagiarise but also to, shall we say, overstate certain claims, or overinterpret the claims of others, could be considerable.
This also raises the question of the reliability of his claims. In some of what follows, I demonstrate that Hitchens was untrustworthy, often to the point of travesty, in many of his attributions and imputations. I make this case mainly about his writing after his defection to the right, but I also maintain throughout that none of Hitchens’s obvious flaws in the last ten years of his life could simply have emerged ex nihilo. Whether or not it was true that Hitchens could be a ‘terrific fibber’,