THIS WEEK’S BOOK
“Mortality” by Christopher Hitchens (Twelve, 104 pages, $22.99)
On June 8, 2010, Christopher Hitchens should have been on top of the world. He was starting the book tour for his memoir “Hitch-22.” It was an instant best-seller. He had awakened feeling unwell:
He wrote: “I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death. But nothing prepared me for the early morning in June when I came to consciousness feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse.”
These are the opening lines of “Mortality.” This pithy book was assembled from columns Hitchens wrote for the magazine Vanity Fair. He chose to announce and document his struggles with cancer in those columns.
The book was just published posthumously. Hitchens fought his cancer for 19 months. He never stopped writing and he tried to continue speaking despite his illness. In “Mortality” he describes his feelings about it and the treatments he was enduring to try to get well.
He had made many good friends over the years. He also made enemies. Hitch thrived in the spotlight and he seemed to relish controversy. You never knew which side of an issue he might choose. He selected targets as varied as Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton and Mother Theresa.
When he wrote about his atheism in a book called “god is not Great” he cemented his reputation as an iconoclast. In “Mortality” he describes some of the hateful things that were said after his cancer diagnosis became public.
He writes: “you haven’t lived, if I can put it like this, until you have read contributions such as this on the websites of the faithful:
“Who else feels that Christopher Hitchens getting terminal throat cancer [sic] was God’s revenge for him using his voice to blaspheme him? Atheists like to ignore FACTS. They like to act like everything is a “coincidence.” Really? It’s just a “coincidence” [that] out of any part of his body, Christopher Hitchens got cancer in the one part of his body he used for blasphemy?”
His father had died from the same type of cancer. He responds to this particular attack with his trademark blend of intellect and sarcasm. He inquires: “why not a thunderbolt for yours truly, or something similarly awe-inspiring? The vengeful deity has a sadly depleted arsenal if all he can think of is exactly the cancer that my age and former “lifestyle” would suggest that I got.”
Hitch was an avid smoker and a prodigious drinker. In his forward to the book Graydon Carter describes how “pre-lunch tumblers of scotch were followed by a couple of glasses of wine during the meal and then a couple of post-meal cognacs. That was his intake.” Then Hitchens returned to the newspaper office and “produced a 1,000-word column of near perfection in under half an hour.”
His twin passions were writing and speaking. During his cancer treatments he observed “I often grandly say that writing is not just my living and my livelihood but my very life, it’s true.”
Hitchens wrote with brilliance and potency right up until the end. He died on Dec. 15, 2011.
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