http://www.ireland.com/dublin/entertainment/books/bookarchive/hitchens.htm
"Gore Should Be So Lucky" The Irish Times Review of Christopher Hitchens's _Unacknowledged Legislation:
Writers in the Public Sphere_ by John Banville [John Banville is Associate Literary Editor and Chief Literary Critic of The Irish Times]
One of the more dispiriting spectacles to which we are subjected in this curiously weightless-seeming commencement de siècle is that of the apostate left-wing radical taking revenge on his former self or selves.
Everywhere about us we see young wrinklies in their 50s who a mere few decades ago were burning flags and burning bras but who now burn nothing more than the occasional Montecristo in celebration of the latest sewn-up software deal or stitched-up soft-hearted rival.
Almost as depressing as the trahison des clercs is the all too evident relief with which so many of what by now we may call the old left - as distinct from the old, old left of the Thirties and Forties - sink back upon the deceptively comfy sofa of reaction.
How thrilling it must be to be able suddenly to express all those dark thoughts kept bottled up for so long; how it must seem like a second chance at being young and fearless and forthright. There is a Punch cartoon that appeared at the time when the New Man was being proclaimed, in which a nerdy type in a woolly jumper is standing with clenched fists, telling himself over and over, "I must not think of suspenders, I must not think of suspenders!" For the reformed and re-styled old-leftist, an entire Ann Summers shop window may be summoned up without a qualm of guilt or regret for the good old days on the barricades.
Christopher Hitchens, known to his friends as The Hitch, and, come to think of it, probably to his enemies also, has kept the socialist faith with conviction, energy and high style. He is, as he tells us, "mainly English", the son of a navy family based in Portsmouth, but he has lived for a long time now in America, where he is, unlikely as it may sound, Professor of Liberal Studies in the Graduate School at the New School, New York.
He also writes for a broad spectrum of journals, ranging from the somewhat louche and bumptiously masculinist Vanity Fair to the austerely intellectual New York Review of Books. He is a fierce but never less than elegant polemicist, who puts the question to himself, "Is nothing sacred?" and answers, Of course not. His targets include the predictable ones such as Ronald Reagan and Henry Kissinger, but also the two Toms - Wolfe and Clancy - and, splendidly, Mother Teresa, dubbed by Hitchens as "the Pope's National Security Adviser".
The essays in Unacknowledged Legislation were all, Hitchens tells us, written in the last decade of the 20th century. He has taken his title, he writes, from Shelley's "In Defence of Poetry" (sic, and tut tut), in which the poet ringingly declared that "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world". It would be a brave man that would defend such a claim in these prosaic times, but Hitchens is a brave man.
In a dust-jacket blurb, Gore Vidal says he has been asked if he wishes to nominate a successor, "a dauphin or delfino", and names Hitchens. It's a wise choice, no doubt, but is it appropriate? Hitchens is far warmer, far more ruggedly alive, than the Doge of Ravello, who, as he enters what he once wittily called the "springtime of his senescence" - he was speaking of Ronald Reagan, the "acting President" - has taken to repeating himself with wearying regularity, in many forums, and often in exactly the same words, as if in his aristocratic jadedness he believed that no one nowadays reads more than one newspaper or journal or listens to more than one radio or television talk show.
No, the ancestor Hitchens most closely resembles is, of course, Orwell. Indeed, in his foreword to this collection, Hitchens states his ambition by quoting Orwell's desire to "make political writing into an art". His chosen ground is sited at what Lionel Trilling identified as "the bloody crossroads" where literature and politics intersect, a phrase annexed for a book title, Hitchens recalls, by "the dire Norman Podhoretz (who is to Trilling as a satyr is to Hyperion)", Podhoretz being a particularly egregious example of those apostates referred to at the opening of this review, once an old, old leftist and now one of the rightest of the new right.
That crossroads is a dangerous one, as Hitchens well knows. One of the first writers he quotes in his foreword is W.H. Auden, who famously and flatly declared that "Poetry makes nothing happen". Hitchens acknowledges the poet's "mild and sane claim", but sees it soundly rebutted by the Great War poetry of Wilfred Owen. Against current critical theory, most of which he finds "superficial and ephemeral and sometimes sinister", not to mention "languid and onanistic", he believes that literature and politics can mix without one or the other suffering fatal dilution.
. . . [P]roperly understood and appreciated, literature need never collide with, or recoil from, the agora. It need not be, as Stendhal has it in Le Rouge et Le Noir, that "politics is a stone tied to the neck of literature" and that politics in the novel is "a pistol shot in the middle of a concert". [Stendhal obviously didn't know what was going to happen to music] . . . [I]n the work of Tolstoy, Dickens, Nabokov, even Proust, we find them occupied with the political condition as naturally as if they were breathing.
Perhaps so: but it depends what you mean by politics. Sometimes, even with a writer as subtle to nuance as Christopher Hitchens, it would seem that there is nothing that is not politics, but if that is to be the case, heaven help politicians, and heaven help poets even more.
Hitchens's subjects are an eclectic bunch of bedfellows: who would have expected to encounter Kipling here, or Arthur Conan Doyle, or P.G. Wodehouse, a particular Hitchens favourite, or, for that matter, Oscar Wilde - two essays, and a third on the unspeakable "Bosie" - or Anthony Powell, or Philip Larkin?
On the last-named, Hitchens is refreshingly fair and unblinkered. When Andrew Motion's biography of Larkin appeared some years after the poet's death, and, a few months afterwards, the Selected Letters were published, revealing political and racial views strong enough to strip the barnacles off Blighty's submerged bottom, all of liberal, literate England went slightly barmy.
Even those commentators who managed to hang on to their sanity took to harrumphing about the necessity to reassess the poems in the light of this wholly unacceptable gibber gibber gibber (a favourite Larkin ellipsis). Here is Hitchens, however, writing in 1993, in the very eye of the storm:
The place [Larkin] occupies in popular affection - which he won for himself long before the publication of his fouler private thoughts - is the place that he earned, paradoxically, by an attention to ordinariness, to quotidian suffering and to demotic humour. Decaying communities, old people's homes, housing estates, clinics . . . he mapped these much better than most social democrats, and he found words for experience.
Irish readers will perhaps find a special interest in two essays here, one from 1998 on the North and its sorrows, and the other on Conor Cruise O'Brien, who also long ago situated himself at Trilling's bloody crossroads. Hitchens's essay, "The Cruiser", a review from the London Review of Books in 1996 of O'Brien's sourly misanthropic On the Eve of the Millennium: The Future of Democracy Through an Age of Unreason, is an astonishing savaging - carried out more in sorrow than anger, Hitchens says, though you could have fooled this reader - of the work of a man whom Hitchens once greatly admired, and whom, indeed, he may admire still, despite all. He closes with a "modest proposal": "The Cruiser should be made to read this book, which would quite possibly be for the first time. Then he should be asked to eat it."
Unacknowledged Legislation is a big, handsome book - lightly peppered with editorial solecisms, however - containing some of the best, most polished and wittiest writing you are likely to encounter this or any other year. Even if you disagree with the author's views, you will surely delight in his expression of them. Gore Vidal should be so lucky to have this boy for an heir.