Review by New York Times Review
Christopher Hitchens's introduction to George Orwell's "Diaries," among the last things he wrote before his death, is meant as a tribute to one of the writers he most admired, but it can also be taken as a warning. "Read with care, these diaries . . . can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmitted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics." Read with care? What is Hitchens trying to tell us with that phrase? A few sentences later we have: "This diary is not by any means a 'straight' guide or By Christopher Buckley MORTALITY By Christopher Hitchens. 104 pp. Twelve. $22.99. Christopher Hitchens began his memoir, "Hitch-22," on a note of grim amusement at finding himself described in a British National Portrait Gallery publication as "the late Christopher Hitchens." He wrote, "So there it is in cold print, the plain unadorned phrase that will one day become unarguably true." On June 8, 2010, several days after the memoir was published, he awoke in his New York hotel room "feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse. The whole cave of my chest and thorax seemed to have been hollowed a trove of clues and cross-references." About the creative process that went into constructing one of the novels, Hitchens says Orwell "gives us little or no insight." Most tellingly, he refers to the entries as "meticulous and occasionally laborious jottings." Read with care, Hitchens's introduction alerts Orwell devotees that they should not expect the same pleasures from this book that they get from other of his writings. This collection contains all 11 of the diaries available to us, along with entries from two of Orwell's notebooks. Additional diaries may exist. Peter Davison, who has scrupulously prepared these documents and was the lead editor of Orwell's 20-volume "Complete Works," says that "it is as certain as things can be that a 12th, and possibly a 13th diary" - seized by authorities during the Spanish Civil War - "are secreted away in the N.K.V.D. Archive in Moscow." Orwell may also have kept a journal at the start of his professional life in the 1920s, when he was an imperial official in Burma, but that is almost certainly lost. Much of the material here can be found in other sources. "Hop-Picking Diary," describing Orwell's experiences as a migrant farm laborer in 1931, appeared in the popular four-volume anthology "The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters," The diary from a journey to grimy non hern England in the mid-'30s, with its notes on slag heaps, dirt trains, blackened houses and half-naked miners kneeling at the coal face, was worked up into Orwell's book "The Road to Wigan Pier"; the entry that starts "In the early morning the mill girls clumping down the cobbled street, all in clogs, make a curiously formidable sound" is polished for the book into the attention-grabbing opening line, "The first sound in the mornings was the clumping of the mill-girls' clogs down the cobbled street." The most substantive of Orwell's diaries are two that he kept during the early years of World War II, against a backdrop of momentous events like the Dunkirk retreat, the fall of France and the London blitz (Orwell's apartment building was damaged by a German bomb). Orwell was serving in the Home Guard and working for the BBC, all the while complaining to himself about the disorganization and inefficiencies he had to endure. Yet he describes a people determined to keep to their daily routines despite the German attacks. Almost metaphorically, Orwell's barber continued shaving his customers even in the middle of the air raids, leading a disconcerted Orwell to muse: "One day a bomb will drop near enough to make him jump, and he will slice half somebody's face off." Mainly, Londoners tried to avoid any talk of current events: when he went to his pub one evening, Orwell found the radio silent, because, as the owner told him, "they've got the piano playing in the other bar, and they won't turn it off just for the news." The common-man side of Orwell was encouraged by his countrymen's get-on-with-it imperturbability, the puritanical side of him exasperated. At some point, Orwell hatched a plan to turn his wartime diaries into a book, but his longtime publisher, Victor Gollancz, concerned about giving offense, quashed the idea. Gollancz was right to worry. Though Orwell patriotically writes that he would rather die for England than become a refugee or expatriate, a great many of the entries display what, in another context, he called "my natural hatred of authority." Britain's rulers were treacherous, its generals imbeciles. "If there is a wrong thing to do, it will be done, infallibly." Even Churchill should be removed from the scene, possibly by means of a German torpedo or mine during his travels. This wasn't exactly the kind of stuff to lift people's spirits, and the British public never did get the chance to react to Orwell's sneers and crotchets. Not then, anyway. But apart from some minor omissions, the wartime diaries have long been available in "The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters," and a few years ago George Packer reprinted a good portion of one of them in his Orwell collection, "Facing Unpleasant Facts." The surprises this new book contains lie elsewhere. What will not be familiar to Orwell readers are the "domestic" diaries, kept largely during a sojourn in Morocco in the 1930s and on the Scottish island of Jura near the end of his life. These constitute about half the book and are surely what caused Hitchens to reach for the adjective "laborious." Orwell once said: "Outside my work the thing I care most about is gardening." It's true. These pages bloom with flowers - dahlias, sunflowers, nasturtiums, marigolds; also vegetables - lettuce, radishes, carrots, spinach, turnips, cabbage. Animals, too, got his attention: goats, donkeys, rabbits, lobsters. Orwell recorded the first lizard he saw in Morocco, and the habits of the geese he kept on Jura (they were "not grazing much"). With his acute eye for detail and What patriotism meant to Orwell was the ordinary things of his life - pubs, cricket, even English cooking. Barry Gewen is an editor at the Book Review. his remarkable reserves of patience, it's clear he would have made an outstanding naturalist. But reading page after page of these undigested observations is rather like watching a star athlete perform two hours of calisthenics: you are impressed with the demonstration of the man's ability, but would prefer to hear about it, not experience it. One subject, apparently, engaged Orwell more than any other. On Oct. 12, 1938, he acquired 12 Moroccan hens and started waiting for them to lay. A week later he was still waiting. On Oct. 27 he reports the first egg, then another, and another. Five consecutive diary entries read in their entirety: "11.16.38: One egg. 11.17.38: One egg. 11.19.38: Two eggs'. 11.21.38: Two eggs. 11.22.38: One egg." Other eggs follow. In Jura it was the same: "4 eggs," "5 eggs," though now with Orwell's running tabulation of the total, and with the ever-attentive Davison on hand to tell us when he added incorrectly. At orwelldiaries .wordpress.com, Davison has launched a pre-emptive strike to protect the diaries and the eggs: "I was very conscious of the opportunity it would give to reviewers of a certain ilk to pour scorn on a major edition. Imagine the headlines! 'A One-Egg Wonder'?" But whatever one's ilk, even in the case of George Orwell sometimes an egg is just an egg. STILL, scorn must not be poured. The eggs may not make for pleasurable reading, but they, and the marigolds and the lobsters, are a window into the way Orwell's mind worked. More than one commentator has observed that he was an empiricist's empiricist, consumed by the thinginess of life. "He taught us what the actual meant," Robert Conquest said. Lionel Trilling applauded "his simple ability to look at things in a downundeceived way." His "pleasure solid objects" as Orwell himself put it, provided the grounding for his poliand morality. No piece of writing better defined Orwell than the first part of his book "The Lion and the Unicorn," entitled "England Your England." Written at the same time as the first wartime diary, it began with the memorable sentence, "As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me." The war represented an intellectual crisis for him. He had been an antimilitary socialist in the late '30s, convinced that only a revolution could set Britain right Now, with those German bombers above, he realized he was a patriot after all. But what kind of patriot? He continued to hate the upper classes and the injustices of capitalism, continued to believe in the necessity of revolution. Insofar as patriotism was equated with God, King and Country or, worse, the preservation of the British Empire, he was against it. What patriotism meant to Orwell was the ordinary things of his English life - heavy coins, stamp collecting, dart games, an irrational spelling system. In the essay "Notes on Nationalism" a companion piece to "England Your England," he said: "By 'patriotism' I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life." It was around this same time that he wrote essays in praise of pubs, cricket, even (outlandishly) English cooking. He would lay down his life not for the granthose abstractions preached by politicians and the clergy but for gardening and warm beer. Orwell was against abstractions of every kind: fascism, Communism, especially nationalism; "Americanism," he once said, was a term that could easily be used for totalitarian ends. His socialism was pragmatic, anti-utopian, perhaps little more than an expression of his hope that the conditions of the poor and the powerless could be improved. Abstractions, he knew, were the enemy of the powerless. They destroyed the diverse particulars of everyday life and necessarily culminated in some type of inhumanity, killing people for the sake of an idea. And because intellectuals were especially susceptible to those "smelly little orthodoxies," Orwell repeatedly disdained the group to which he so evidently belonged. He placed his faith in common people, who went about their lives without the need for Big Ideas, practicing what he saw as the common people's singular virtue - decency. Decency didn't require an idea, let alone an ideology, for validation. It was the morality of the here and now, available to everybody. "One has the right to expect ordinary decency even of a poet," he said. Orwell was a populist of sorts, and like any populist he had his dark side. His occasional rants against homosexuals and feminists are anachronisms today. His caustic remark that "a humanitarian is always a hypocrite" sounds a note too sour. But he was a populist with an abiding commitment to openness, which meant, as he conceded, that sometimes one had to fight against the beliefs one was raised with. His larger point, the one he always held on to, was that morality had to begin from the sense of who one actually was, if only to avoid the abstractions that killed. Orwell knew who he was and he told us again and again. He was a friend of the common man who also had an appreciation of James Joyce. He was a socialist with little hope for real change unless decency could somehow prevail. And he was a man who enjoyed gardening and counting his eggs. out and then refilled with slow-drying cement." And so commenced an 18-month Odyssey through "the land of malady," culminating in his death from esophageal cancer last December, when the plain unadorned phrase that had prompted him to contemplate his own mortality became, unarguably, true. He was 62 years old. "Mortality" is a slender volume - or, to use the mot that he loved to deploy, feuilleton - consisting of the seven dispatches he sent in to Vanity Fair magazine from "Tumorville." The first seven chapters are, like virtually everything he wrote over his long, distinguished career, diamond-hard and brilliant. An eighth and final chapter consists, as the publisher's note informs us, of unfinished "fragmentary jottings" that he wrote in his terminal days in the critical-care unit of the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. They're vivid, heart-wrenching and haunting - messages in a bottle tossed from the deck of a sinking ship as its captain, reeling in agony and fighting through the fog of morphine, struggles to keep his engines going: "My two assets my pen and my voice - and it had to be the esophagus. All along, while burning the candle at both ends, I'd been 'straying into the arena of the unwell' and now 'a vulgar little tumor' was evident. This alien can't want anything; if it kills me it dies but it seems very singleminded and set in its purpose. No real irony here, though. Must take absolute care not to be self-pitying or self-centered." "The alien was burrowing into me even as I wrote the jaunty words about my own prematurely announced death." "If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than that an atheist does." "Ordinary expressions like 'expiration date' . . . will I outlive my Amex? My driver's license? People say - I'm in town on Friday: will you be around? WHAT A QUESTION!" Fans of the movie "Withnail and I" will recognize "arena of the unwell" and "vulgar little tumor." Readers of his 2007 atheist classic, "God Is Not Great," will get the frisky "convert" bit; more than a few of the pages in "Mortality" are devoted - as it were - to a final, defiant and well-reasoned defense of his non-Godfearingness. AS for the "jaunty words," those are of course from Chapter 1 of the memoir whose promotional tour was so dramatically interrupted by the tap-tap-tap of the Reaper. Self-pity? Those of his friends (I was one) who witnessed his pluck and steel throughout his ghastly ordeal will attest that he never succumbed to any of that. "To the dumb question 'Why me?,'" he writes, "the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?" He was valiant to the end, a paragon of British phlegm. He became an American citizen in 2007, but the background music was always "H.M.S. Pinafore": "He remains an English man." (Emphasis mine.) "Mortality" comes with a fine foreword by his longtime Vanity Fair editor and friend Graydon Carter, who writes of Christopher's "saucy fearlessness," "great turbine of a mind" and "his sociable but unpredictable brand of anarchy that seriously touched kids in their 20s and early 30s in much the same way that Hunter S. Thompson had a generation before. ... He did not mind landing outside the cozy cocoon of conventional liberal wisdom." Christopher's devoted tigress wife, Carol Blue, contributes a - I've already used up my "heart-wrenching" quota - deeply moving afterword, in which she recalls the "eight-hour dinners" they hosted at their apartment in Washington, when after consuming enough booze to render the entire population of the nation's capital insensible, Christopher would rise and deliver flawless 20-minute recitals of poetry, polemics and jokes, capping it off saying, "How good it is to be us." The truth of that declaration was evident to all who had the good fortune to be present at those dazzling recreChristopher Buckley's latest novel is "They Eat Puppies, Don't They?" ations. Bliss it was in those wee hours to be alive and in his company, though the next mornings were usually a bit less blissful. "For me," he writes in "Mortality," "to remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off: the ones that made the sacrifice of the following day a trivial one." In support of this, he adduces several staves of William Cory's translation of the poem by Callimachus about his beloved friend Heraclitus: They told me, Heraclitus; they told me you were dead. They brought me bitter news lo hear. and bitter tears to shed. I wept when I remembered how often you and I Had tired the sun with talking, and sent him down the sky. He was a man of abundant gifts, Christopher: erudition, wit, argument, prose style, to say nothing of a titanium constitution that, until it betrayed him in the end, allowed him to write word-perfect essays while the rest of us were groaning from epic hangovers and reaching for the ibuprofen. But his greatest gift of all may have been the gift of friendship. At his memorial service in New York City, 31 people, virtually all of them boldface names, rose to speak in his memory. One selection was from the introduction Christopher wrote for the paperback reissue of "Hitch-22" while gravely ill: "Another element of my memoir - the stupendous importance of love, friendship and solidarity - has been made immensely more vivid to me by recent experience. I can't hope to convey the full effect of the embraces and avowals, but I can perhaps offer a crumb of counsel. If there is anybody known to you who might benefit from a letter or a visit, do not on any account postpone the writing or the making of it. The difference made will almost certainly be more than you have calculated." One of the "fragmentary jottings" in the last chapter of "Mortality" is a brush stroke on Philip Larkin's chilling death poem, "Aubade": "Larkin good on fear in 'Aubade,' with implied reproof to Hume and Lucretius for their stoicism. Fair enough in one way: atheists ought not to be offering consolation either." For a fuller version of that terminal pensée, turn to his essay on Larkin in his collection "Arguably": "Without that synthesis of gloom and angst we could never have had his 'Aubade,' a waking meditation on extinction that unstrenuously contrives a tense, brilliant counterpoise between the stoic philosophy of Lucretius and David Hume, and his own frank terror of oblivion." The essay ends with two lines from another Larkin poem that could serve as Christopher's own epitaph: Our almost-instinct almost true: What will survive of us is love. What discrepant parts were in him : the fierce tongue, the tender heart. There is no "frank terror of oblivion" in "Mortality," but there is keen and great regret at having to leave the party early. But even as he stared into the abyss, his mordant wit did not desert him: "The novelty of a diagnosis of malignant cancer has a tendency to wear off. The thing begins to pall, even to become banal. One can become quite used to the specter of the eternal Footman, like some lethal old bore lurking in the hallway at the end of the evening, hoping for the chance to have a word. And I don't so much object to his holding my coat in that marked manner, as if mutely reminding me that it's time to be on my way. No, it's the snickering that gets me down." IN his first collection of essays. "Prepared for the Worst" (1988), he quoted Nadine Gordimer to the effect that "a serious person should try to write posthumously. By that I took her to mean that one should compose as if the usual constraints - of fashion, commerce, self-censorship, public and perhaps especially intellectual opinion - did not operate." He refers back to that in "Arguably," the introduction to which he wrote in June 2011, deep in the heart of Tumorville. He was still going at it mano a mano with the Footman, but by then he was at least realistic about the odds and knew that the words he was writing might very well be published posthumously. As it turned out, he lived just long enough to see "Arguably" hailed for what it is - inarguably, stunning. What a coda. What a life. He noted there that some of the essays had been written in "the full consciousness that they might be my very last. Sobering in one way and exhilarating in another, this practice can obviously never become perfected." Being in Christopher's company was rarely sobering, but always exhilarating. It is, however, sobering and griefinducing to read this brave and harrowing account of his "year of living dyingly" in the grip of the alien that succeeded where none of his debate opponents had in bringing him down. In her afterword, Carol relates an anecdote about their daughter, then 2 years old, one day coming across a dead bumblebee on the ground. She frantically begged her parents to "make it start." On reaching the end of her father's valedictory feuilleton, the reader is likely to be acutely conscious of Antonia's terrible feeling of loss.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 2, 2012]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* For his millions of fans, Hitchens was like a valued dinner guest who never outstayed his welcome. His books, magazine columns, and verbal sparring rounds with the God-fearing best and brightest will stand as hymns to reason, and their smartly barbed rationality will never become tired or trite. Unfortunately, Hitchens has prematurely vacated his place at the table, leaving us wanting more. And here is more. Spare as it is and culled from several of his final Vanity Fair columns, this pamphlet-like tome resurrects great wit and insight from his final year of living dyingly. It would not be classic Hitchens unless he tackled prayer head-on. He does so brilliantly, quoting Ambrose Bierce and following prayer's logic to its circular conclusion. He addresses proper cancer etiquette and the best way to offer advice (don't). With a foreword by Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter and an afterword by Hitchens' widow, Carol Blue, this offers a final course, a dessert, if you will, from the crusty yet tenderhearted atheist to be read and relished.--Chavez, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In June 2010, journalist and author Christopher Hitchens was touring the U.S. to promote his memoir Hitch-22 when he suffered from the first symptoms of what would ultimately be diagnosed as esophageal cancer. Until his death in December 2011, Hitchens would continue to write about politics, culture, and his terminal illness. Adapted from a series of Vanity Fair columns, the author's last book turns his acidic insights toward his own emotions as he copes with inevitability: "Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read-if not indeed to write-the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?" Narrator Simon Prebble turns in a fine performance. Yet, it's incongruous to hear Hitchens's incisive words without the authenticity and strength of his voice. As a speaker, Hitchens was magnetic and it's doubtful that any performer, no matter how strong, could truly capture the force of his presence. Perhaps appropriately, this audio edition, written but not read by Hitchens, simply feels incomplete. A Twelve hardcover. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A jovially combative riposte to anyone who thought that death would silence master controversialist Hitchens (Hitch-22, 2010, etc.). Even as he lay--or sat or paced--dying in the unfamiliar confines of a hospital last year, the author had plenty to say about matters of life and death. Here, in pieces published in Vanity Fair to which are added rough notes and apothegms left behind in manuscript, Hitchens gives the strongest possible sense of his exhausting battle against the aggressive cancer spreading through his body. He waged that battle with customary sardonic good humor, calling the medical-industrial world into which he had been thrust "Tumortown." More arrestingly, Hitchens conceived of the move from life to death as a sudden relocation, even a deportation, into another land: "The country has a language of its own--a lingua franca that manages to be both dull and difficult and that contains names like ondansetron, for anti-nausea medication--as well as some unsettling gestures that require a bit of getting used to." One such gesture was the physician's plunging of fingers into the neck to gauge whether a cancer had spread into the lymph nodes, but others were more subtle, including the hushed tones and reverences that came with the business. Hitchens, famously an atheist, visited the question of whether he should take Pascal's wager and bet on God, concluding in the negative even as good God-fearing citizens filled his inbox with assurances that God was punishing him for his blasphemies with throat cancer. A reasonable thought, Hitchens concludes, though since he's a writer, wouldn't such a God have afflicted his hands first? Certainly, Hitchens died too soon. May this moving little visit to his hospital room not be the last word from him.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
