Hitchens memoir

It was cruel irony for Christopher Hitchens to be diagnosed with what would ultimately be terminal cancer while on tour promoting his memoir. Or maybe it was dumb luck that he happened to pen his autobiography just barely before his premature and unforeseeable death. I am taking it as the latter, a random and wonderful gift.

Most of the biographies or autobiographies I've read are by or about modern politicians--usually presidents or wannabe presidents. And these aren't all that good. The plot is already well known, and any surprises are discussed right away in the media. My fascination with the subject personalities only happened to far outweighed the shortcomings of the genre.

Hitchens' memoir, on the other hand, is a treat. I didn't know much about his life, so his story is fresh to me. If this were the memoir of a high profile politician, these spoilers might be covered pre-release on the evening news:

• Hitchens was bisexual, even if he never identified as such. His first romance, involving exchange of poetry and almost sex, was with a classmate at his all-male boarding school. He went on to sleep with a number of men up through at least young adulthood. He notes that later on, his looks declined so much that only women would sleep with him.
• His mother's early death was part of a bizarre double suicide. After Hitchens and his brother grew up and moved out, his mother left his father and took a lover. Eventually mother and lover killed themselves together. Hitchens never knew precisely why they did this.
• He didn't discover he was Jewish until his late 30s. His mother kept it secret from the family, in part so that she could raise her firstborn to be a proper Englishman.

But these are barely a page of tidbits from a lengthy autobiography. The theme I experience is the recollections and self-reflection of a great mind. He looks at the complex world of paradoxical people, himself included (hence the title), and makes some sense of it. Quite telling is his explanation of his first visit to America as a young man. He was a radical socialist at the time and the Vietnam war was raging. Yet he fell in love with America, with all its vastness and diversity. He appreciated the philosophy stated in the founding documents and was later impressed that the free press and the rule of law brought Nixon down.

Hitchens' positions on a couple big issues seemed to define him in his final years. One, through which I was introduced to him, is his very public atheism. However, he writes only briefly about this in his bio. He instead dedicates a lengthy chapter to Iraq and his unfashionable support for the American invasion. Perhaps his atheism doesn't need much of an explanation. Serious people tend to be familiar with the case for it and are often sympathetic to it. But the Iraq stance may have caught people by surprise. A British-born intellectual with a lifelong history as a radical socialist wasn't expected to support the invasion. Heck, he had even opposed the first Iraq war. It only makes sense then that his final chapter address how one changes their mind. He ultimately became an advocate of democracy and pluralism with less, if any, remaining concern for socialism.

His tales of lifelong friendships are moving. He writes of deep and enduring intellectual and emotional intimacy with a small circle of writers. His children and two wives, oddly, get barely a mention. Perhaps this is not the part of his life he thinks will interest people. On the other hand, he reports over many pages the results of his deep search through his newfound Jewish ancestry.

I have some lingering questions: I'd like to know more about his immediate family life. I don't feel that he ever adequately explains why he had to become a radical socialist. And I don't think his explanation of his position on Iraq is adequate. But I am damn thankful he wrote his memoir just in the nick of time.