Christopher Hitchens (13.04.1949-15.12.2011) se laaste boek, Hitch-22: a Memoir (London: Atlantic Books, 2011, 435p), bied interessante leesstof. Hy het dit geskryf toe hy geweet het dat hy sterwend aan slukdermkanker was: "I suffer from Stage Four esophageal cancer. There is no Stage Five" (p xi). In die boek bly hy getrou aan sy openbare beeld as begaafde, belese opportunis. "I have changed my mind on a number of things" (p 65). Soos Maynard Keynes sê hy: "When the facts change then my opinion changes" (p 281). "I didn’t want a one-dimensional politicized life" (p 105). Van die vernaamste take waarvoor hy te staan gekom het, was om sy progressie van ’n radikaal linkse Trotskyis tot ’n (in sommige opsigte) meer gematigde, selfs regse, politieke kommentator te verduidelik.
Die fatwah wat teen sy vriend, Salman Rushdie, uitgespreek is, het hierin ongetwyfeld ’n groot rol gespeel; dermate dat hy die Amerikaanse inval in Irak ondersteun en vir Margaret Thatcher gestem het. Maar hy het ook gedink dat linksheid verander het; dat "the Left ... discarded its moral advantage" (p 121). "I will have to say this much for the old ’hard’ Left: we earned our claim to speak and intervene by right of experience and sacrifice and work. It would never have done for any of us to stand up and say that our sex or sexuality or pigmentation or disability were qualifications in themselves" (p 121). [Hoe anders is dit nie in die nuwe Suid-Afrika nie.]
"All attempts to imagine one’s own extinction are futile by definition" (p 2). "Nothing reminds one of impending extinction more than the growth of one’s children, for whom room must be made, and who are in fact one’s only hint of even a tincture of a hope of immortality" (p 5). [Ek vertel vir my kleinkinders dat ek, anders as kabouters en feetjies, regtig is, sodat hulle die huidige situasie mettertyd kan kontrasteer met die tyd wanneer ek nie meer sal wees nie.] "Imagine how nauseating life would become ... if we were told that there would be no end to it" (p 7). "If you were offered the chance to live your own life again, would you seize the opportunity? ... ’Only if I did not know that I was doing so’" (p 341-342). Albert Camus: "What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying" (p 30). Maar Saul Bellow het geskryf: "It can never be right to offer to die" (p 31).
In hierdie verband is daar in die boek tersaaklike aanhalings. WH Auden: "Not to be born is the best for man" (p viii, ook p 420). Richard Dawkins: "We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born" (p viii). Pindar: "Do not aspire to immortal life but exhaust the limits of the possible" (p ix). Philip Larkin: "Not to be here, not to be anywhere ... no rational being can fear a thing it will not feel" (p 3). Edwin Schneidman: "Dying is the one thing ... in life that you don’t have to do ... Stick around for long enough and it will be done for you" (p 6-7).
Die plesier van Hitchens se boek lê grootliks in treffende aanhalings en sy vindingryke formulerings. ’n Mens moet hulle verkieslik met aandag lees. Augustinus: "To sing is to pray twice" (p 62). Auden het self erken sy gesig lyk soos "a wedding cake that’s been left out in the rain" (p 74). ’n Ander persoon het glo gelyk soos "a ruined country house" (p 232). Henry James: "It is strange with how uneven a hand nature chooses to distribute her richest favors" (p 97). Sören Kierkegaard oor die lewe: "One is condemned to live it forward and review it backward" (p 107). Leon Trotsky het hierdie dwaasheid kwytgeraak: "The average man will rise to the stature of an Aristotle, a Goethe or a Marx" (p 113). Hitchens spreek Trotsky direk teë: "I had too much English empirical schooling to believe that material circumstances on their own could make people all that much better" (p 113).
Boris Pasternak: "All conceptions are immaculate" (p 159). Hitchens, daarenteen, het teen die bestaan van die staat Israel gekant gebly en verwys na "Israel’s immaculate misconception" (p 384). Kingsley Amis het gedink daar was by Jane Austin die "inclination to take a long time over what is of minor importance and a short time over what is major" (p 163). Kingsley "could tell on what page of the novel Paul Scott had reached for the bottle and thrown caution to the winds" (p 351). Oor Kingsley se latere regse politiek sê Hitchens: "He was confusing the state of the country with the condition of his own liver" (p 170). Mark Boxer: "It’s the height of bad manners to sleep with somebody less than three times" (p 169). Walter Bagehot: "Letting in daylight upon magic" (p 170). Nadat Robert Conquest vir die soveelste maal getrou het, het sy vrou Elisabeth geblyk "a bit more than the ’other half’" te wees: "She is a great scholar in her own person and the anchor of one of the most successful late marriages on record" (p 171).
George Orwell het verwys na "something so simultaneously dumb and sinister that only an intellectual could be capable of uttering it" (p 171), asook "the imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity" (p 279). Umberto Eco definieer ’n veelweter ("polymath") as iemand "interested in everything, and in nothing else" (p 256). "Paul Valéry said that poetry is not speech raised to the level of music, but music brought down to the level of speech" (p 275). Van Arthur Koestler is gesê: "His intellectual nerve-endings were so finely tuned that he experienced the onset of fresh ideas like orgasms, and mourned their passing as the end of treasured love-affairs" (p 414). Daar is hierdie treffende Turkse uitdrukking: "When the axe came into the woods, many of the trees said: ’At least the handle is one of us’" (p 402). Daar is ook ’n kostelike Franse uitdrukking: "If your aunt had wheels she still wouldn’t be a bus" (p 408).
Soos sy vriend Martin Amis wou Hitchens afgesaagde uitdrukkings met treffende frases vervang. Martin Amis het oor Hitchens geskryf: "My friendship with the Hitch has always been perfectly cloudless. It is a love whose month is ever May" (p 154). Hitchens het van Martin gesê: "He can blend pub-talk and mid-Atlantic idiom into paragraphs and pages that are also fully aware of Milton and Shakespeare" (p 164). Dit is ’n "combination of the classical with the wised-up and street-smart" (p 165). Martin "still passed the greatest of all tests in being a pleasure to argue with" (p 168). Een keer toe hulle van mekaar afskeid geneem het, Martin "had felt oddly as if waving farewell to a male parent" (p 161). Hulle gemeenskaplike vriend met die swaar ooglede, Salman Rushdie, lyk vir Martin soos "a falcon looking through a Venetian blind" (p 275). Van ’n ander vriend en skrywer, Ian McEwan, sê Hitchens: "He seemed at first to possess some of the same vaguely unsettling qualities as his tales" (p 175).
As ’n gedig onbeholpe voorgedra word, is dit soos "somebody taking an axe to a grand piano" (p 71). Een van Hitchens se helde, Nelson Mandela, het ’n "room-warming smile" (p 101). Hitchens verwys na "creative time-wasting", "my pepper-shaker punctuation" (p 160) en "a paint-stripping hangover" (p 165). Oor die filosoof Louis Althusser, wat sy vrou vermoor het, skryf hy: "Comrade Althusser has been awarded the electric chair in philosophy at the Ecole Abnormale" (p 185). Hitchens skryf ook van "the chief whip of the lunch", "gem-like essays for no-readership magazines" (p 172), "as rare as rocking-horse droppings" (p 215), "fried snowballs" (p 406) en "chaos was official" (p 241). Na ’n toespraak Hitchens "retired (as Lord Rochester once said, as if breaking the rule of a lifetime) ’early, sober and alone’" (p 241).
Noam Chomsky beskou "almost everything since Columbus as having been one continuous succession of genocides and land-thefts" (p 244). (Swart) immigrante word Engeland se "internal colony" genoem (p 263). Kommunistiese Kuba se "chief export was its own citizens" (p 112). "Cuban socialism was too much like a boarding school in one way and too much like a church in another" (p 114). "We had ... been trying to get Clinton to take some kind of intelligibly vertebrate position" (p 277). Oor die Irakkese oorlog: Margaret Thatcher "began to puff out like the ruff of some great cat in her enthusiasm for a fight ... One felt one could see her inserting the lead into the presidential pencil" (p 289-290).
"Then there was Clive James, dressed as usual like someone who had assembled his wardrope in the pitch dark" (p 156). Clive James se "authority with the hyperbolic metaphor is, I think, unchallenged. Arnold Schwarzenegger in Pumping Iron resembled ’a brown condom stuffed with walnuts’. Of an encounter with some bore with famous halitosis Clive announced ’by this time his breath was undoing my tie’" (p 172). Clive James het ’n boekresensie soos volg begin: "Here is a book so dull ... if it were to be read in the open air, birds would fall stunned from the sky" (p 172). "Clive had given up alcohol after a long period of enjoying a master-servant relationship with it" (p 173).
AJ (Freddie) Ayer word ’n "tireless and justly celebrated fornicator" genoem (p 132). Susan Sontag "was a sovereign figure in the small world of those who tilled the field of ideas" (p 235). Exeter College, Oxford, is "a bit on the ’minor’ side: more for the boat club than the cognoscenti" (p 133). "I was very aware that my roadworthiness (Martin prefers the term ’seaworthiness’) in real grown-up company was not to be assumed" (p 156). "Please never forget how useful the obvious can be" (p 117). Tussen Hitchens en Martin Amis "there began an inexhaustible conversation, about womanhood in all its forms and varieties and permutations, that saw us through several episodes of sexual drought as well as through some periods of embarrassment of riches" (p 157).
Vervolg.
Johannes Comestor