Christopher Hitchens, the author, essayist and polemicist who waged verbal and occasional physical battle on behalf of causes on the left and right and wrote the provocative best-seller God is Not Great, has died after a long battle with cancer. He was 62.
Hitchens' death was announced in a statement from Conde Nast, publisher of Vanity Fair magazine. The statement says he died on Thursday night at MD Anderson Cancer Centre in Houston of pneumonia, a complication of his oesophageal cancer.
A most-engaged, prolific and public intellectual who enjoyed his drink (enough to 'to kill or stun the average mule') and cigarettes, he announced in June 2010 that he was being treated for cancer of the oesophagus and cancelled a tour for his memoir Hitch-22.
Hitchens, a frequent television commentator and a contributor to Vanity Fair, Slate and other publications, had become a popular author in 2007 thanks to God is Not Great, a manifesto for atheists that defied a recent trend of religious works. Cancer humbled, but did not mellow him. Even after his diagnosis, his columns appeared weekly, savaging the royal family or revelling in the death of Osama bin Laden.
Hitchens was an old-fashioned sensualist who abstained from clean living as if it were just another kind of church. In 2005, he would recall a trip to Aspen, Colorado, and a brief encounter after stepping off a ski lift.
'I was met by immaculate specimens of young American womanhood, holding silver trays and flashing perfect dentition,' he wrote. 'What would I like? I thought a gin and tonic would meet the case. 'Sir, that would be inappropriate.' In what respect? 'At this altitude gin would be very much more toxic than at ground level.' In that case, I said, make it a double.'
An emphatic ally and inspired foe, he stood by friends in trouble (Satanic Verses novelist Salman Rushdie) and against enemies in power (Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini). His heroes included George Orwell, Thomas Paine and Gore Vidal (pre-September 11, 2001). Among those on the Hitchens list of shame: Michael Moore, Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Il, Sarah Palin, Gore Vidal (post September 11) and Prince Charles.
'We have known for a long time that Prince Charles' empty sails are so rigged as to be swelled by any passing waft or breeze of crankiness and cant,' Hitchens wrote in 2010 after the heir to the British throne gave a speech criticising Galileo for the scientist's focus on 'the material aspect of reality'.
'He fell for the fake anthropologist Laurens van der Post. He was bowled over by the charms of homeopathic medicine. He has been believably reported as saying that plants do better if you talk to them in a soothing and encouraging way. But this latest departure promotes him from an advocate of harmless nonsense to positively sinister nonsense.'
Hitchens was born in Portsmouth, England, in 1949. His father, Eric, was a 'purse-lipped' Navy veteran known as 'The Commander'; his mother, Yvonne, a romantic who later killed herself during an extramarital rendezvous in Greece. Young Christopher would have rather read a book. He was a 'a mere weed and weakling and kick-bag' who discovered that 'words could function as weapons' and so stockpiled them.
At Oxford, he met such longtime friends as authors Martin Amis and Ian McEwan and claimed to be nearby when visiting Rhodes scholar Bill Clinton did or did not inhale marijuana. Radicalised by the 1960s, Hitchens was often arrested at political rallies, was kicked out of Britain's Labour Party over his opposition to the Vietnam War and became a correspondent for the radical magazine International Socialism. His reputation broadened in the 1970s through his writings for the New Statesman.
Wavy-haired and brooding and aflame with wit and righteous anger, he was a star of the left on paper and on camera, a popular television guest and a columnist for one of the world's oldest liberal publications, The Nation. In friendlier times, Vidal was quoted as citing Hitchens as a worthy heir to his satirical throne.
But Hitchens never could simply nod his head. He feuded with fellow Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn, broke with Vidal and angered liberals by stating that the child's life begins at conception. An essay for Vanity Fair was titled Why Women Aren't Funny, and Hitchens wasn't kidding.
He had long been unhappy with the left's reluctance to confront enemies or friends. He would note his strong disappointment that Arthur Miller and other leading liberals shied from making public appearances on behalf of Rushdie after the Ayatollah Khomeini called for his death. He advocated intervention in Bosnia and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, completed his exit from the left. He fought with Vidal, Noam Chomsky and others who either suggested that US foreign policy had helped caused the tragedy or that the Bush administration had advance knowledge. He supported the Iraq war, quit The Nation, backed Bush for re-election in 2004 and repeatedly chastised those whom he believed worried unduly about the feelings of Muslims.
