Our hyper-connected age means we often feel closer to strangers than to kith and kin. What is it to be involved with someone we have never met in person, or to feel that their existence / non-existence is deeply affecting our life ? Christopher Hitchens railed against the bogus sentimentalism that swept his native country when "The People's Princess" Diana died. And he said so very publicly not long after her pseudo-state funeral. Now we must do his memory the courtesy of avoiding such misplaced sentimentality and hagiography.
For whatever base reasons, when familiar strangers die we feel a jolt. The actor Richard Burton "left the building" in 1984 and though I had not been especially interested in his life, I still felt a degree of shock and concern over his untimely exit. Celebrated for his Shakespearean film roles, I immediately thought of Hamlet's line, "The readiness is all" - readiness for death when life is often nasty, brutish and short. And drink-sodden.
How naive I was, childishly imagining that no-one could die before they had reached some kind of spiritual nirvana. (Mind you, the recent George Harrison documentary showed him feeling much the same way throughout his life). I retained a good deal of that foolishness when the next "stranger" death occurred - that of talk show host Russell Harty in 1988. One minute he was there, babbling to celebrities on TV, and the next he was gone, at the unripe age of 54.
How seemingly random and quixotic of me to give a damn about these particular characters, but that's how it was. As with my lachrymose teenage reaction to the death of a family cat, my emotional response to the high-profile deaths said more about me and my stage of life than it did about the celebs I was apparently mourning.
I've come a long way since then, having years ago lost track of all the unready, unripe deaths. Eventually it dawned on me that none of us is ever "ready", not even those who deny life by obsessing about death. That's just another fetish.
This blog has already recorded two unripe "stranger" deaths - one in the form of 27-year-old Amy Winehouse and another in the passing of 56-year-old Steve Jobs. Now it's time to add my voice to the outpouring for Christopher Hitchens, whose atheistic body has just given up the ghost after 62 years.
Characteristically writing right up to the bitter end, Hitchens had worried that he was unready for the grim reaper. But I would argue he was more ready than most.
Like Burton's, his was a hard-drinking, hard-living life but it was also hard-working and hard-thinking. As his brother Peter wrote in a touching article today, Christopher's life had also been imbued with courage. Not the cliched courage of cancer "battlers" - his iconoclasm didn't allow for such lazy labels - but the courage to, as Steve Jobs might have put it, "think different". Often enough that meant thinking differently from your former self, as well as from others, and killing off your own sacred cows. In Hitchens' case, it also meant living life at full-throttle, travelling relentlessly, taking positions, risks and somehow keeping the bookish, ivory-tower side of himself in check.
I first came across Hitchens in 1988 when working as an intern at Farrar, Strauss & Giroux in New York. Their subsidiary Hill & Wang was publishing his first collection of essays, "Prepared for the worst" (which might have been more apt as the title of his final collection). The last essay in the book described his belated awareness that his mother had been Jewish and so, therefore, was he.
His family had lived for a period in Oxford, where I grew up, and now that I was living in NYC, capital of the non-Israeli Jewish world, I felt particularly intrigued by this writer's revelation. Although aware of my Jewish identity from birth, I was perhaps not so different from him in feeling confused and conflicted as to my "real" identity - English, Jewish, expat, other ? Some years later, in my own belated attempt to square the circle, I tried on an all-out Jewish identity, enticed by a new breed of born-again Jewish groups (or "outreach" as they euphemistically called themselves). As a result, Hitchens and his Jew-lite spiel would for a while become unkosher to my intolerant ears. But not yet. And thankfully not since.
When he became widely known for his anti-theist views via the 2007 book "God is not great", I often wondered what deeper stirrings might lie behind Hitchens' intolerance and anger toward much within Jewish practice. He stated that Jews were proto-secularists: they had managed to reduce a plethora of gods down to just one. They were ahead of the pack in pursuing the holy grail of zero gods but still not quite there yet. At least, not in theory. In reality he saw many fellow travellers among his newfound co-religionists. Not to mention his philosophical and political heroes such as Baruch Spinoza and Leon Trotsky, aka Lev Davidovich Bronstein.
Hitchens reserved an extra dose of bile for the "child-abusing" Jewish practice of circumcision. Here's my cod-psychology theory regarding his personal animus: he was not circumcised by an "exotic", "classy" mother who hid her own Jewishness, as many British Jews did in the wake of the Holocaust. He was not raised Jewish, a religion that is notoriously demanding if you want to be traditionally observant. His mother Yvonne was unhappily married to his "boring" English father, a frustrated ex-navy commander. Yvonne finally ran off with a former vicar before committing joint suicide in Greece. Hitchens was 24 at the time and writes extensively about this trauma in his autobiography, Hitch-22.
Indeed he notes that in his very last phone conversation with his mother, during the Yom Kippur War of 1973, she said she was thinking of moving to Israel. The young Hitchens thought this was just another "quasi-spiritual" idea from someone desperate to reinvent herself. His response on hearing this revelation was to describe Israel as just another war zone and, moreover, land illegally occupied by Jewish squatters. This provoked an unexpectedly strong reaction from Yvonne: "My impatience earned me a short lecture about how the Jews had made the desert bloom and were exerting themselves in a heroic manner."
If he had not been so "mocking and dismissive", the older Hitchens concedes, perhaps his mother would have taken that opportunity to share with him her dark secret about his Jewish roots ? Perhaps she would not have felt so helpless and hopeless as to take her own life ? Hitchens discovered that just before her suicide, she had tried to contact him multiple times. And he believes she even tried to abort the suicide bid once it was underway - but tragically too late. All of which amounts to a pretty heavy mother-son dynamic and one that clearly left him with all sorts of unprocessed emotional baggage.
A personality like Hitchens seems to fit the "forewarned is forearmed" motto. With Judaism he was not forewarned and his foreskin remained firmly in place. To discover at 38 that you are halachically Jewish (that is, fully Jewish according to the law of matrilineal descent) is one thing; but to feel confidently Jewish is quite another. And I wonder if being a Jonah-come-lately to Judaism was a challenge too far for this famous polymath, hence the need to play catch-up only in order to confirm his position as a militantly secular Jew.
Is it too harsh to say of Hitchens' Jewish journey, that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing ? Did he secretly wish to belong rather than bash but uncharacteristically lacked the courage to try ? Much easier at that point simply to champion the uncircumscribed mind and to see it as indivisible from an uncircumcised member.
To be honest, I'm not unduly worried about solving such psychological riddles, even if I did ask Hitchens directly in a rare fan letter I wrote him last year (unanswered). These days I don't feel that I belong much myself. Who does anymore ? We've all been atomised by post-modernity and globalisation. Those who try to take refuge in fundamentalist extremes are just yearning for a "safe" past that never existed. Just ask Matisyahu.
The craving for certainty through rules, the need to obsess about who's in and who's out, inclusion and exclusion, are childish and tiresome. I may have my doubts about Hitchens' subconscious motives but I'd still far rather have spent time with him than with any number of "believers", Jewish or otherwise, who have tried to dismiss him with the wave of a condescending keyboard. For all his shortcomings, Hitchens possessed a quality which these god-fearers eminently lacked: likeability.
To be continued ...
No comments:
Post a Comment