The Books: Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays, ‘A Man of Permanent Contradictions’, by Christopher Hitchens

304268

On the essays shelf:

Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

Time to move on from Mark Twain! It is with regret that I say Farewell! But we’re moving into another favorite of mine, Christopher Hitchens, a guy I miss to this day. Some big event goes down and I ACHE to hear from Crankypants McGee, I ache to hear his take on it. And not just his “take”. It’s the writing itself. So magnificent, so confident, and it felt like an unstoppable flow, if you followed him in real time. He was everywhere. The depth and breadth of his knowledge was daunting, he appeared to have quotes from every poem, every short story, everything he had ever read, at his fingertips, to be wielded when he needed them. Even if I disagreed with him, there was nothing quite like the enjoyment of reading his prose. He has left a hole. I re-read his stuff all the time.

Since so much of the stuff collected here is also online, I’ll try to relegate myself to pieces that may be harder to find or not as accessible. He did a lot of book reviews for The Atlantic, and other outlets, and I have Hitchens to thank for finally closing a gap in my education/reading and picking up Evelyn Waugh. I really had no excuse for never reading him before. It was Hitchens’ review of Scoop (the review, in and of itself, made me laugh out lout) that helped me get over myself. CLEARLY I needed to read Evelyn Waugh. I then went on a tear! It was so much fun!

Hitchens was also asked, repeatedly, to write forwards to new editions of classic books. He wrote the foreword to Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, one of the most important books of the 20th century, and certainly one of my favorite books. The book is so enormous that I felt I needed to bite off little chunks at a time, and Hitchens’ beautiful foreword helped put some of it into perspective.

Love, Poverty, and War was published in 2004, a pretty crazy time, as we all will remember. Hitchens was dominating, snarling away in his various corners of the Web, fighting all the time, being obnoxious, all that Hitchens stuff. I followed his various columns, reading them all, and watched him get “let go” from various outlets because, oh shit, we thought he was with us, and now it turns out he’s against us. That was just pouring fuel onto the fire. People were revealed as the shallow party-driven drones that they were. A very obnoxious time, I remember it well.

This collection of essays is pretty huge, and has a large scope of topics. Books, authors, travelogues (I love his piece on Route 66!), and then, of course, politics. He was a regular writer for Slate, and other places. The political stuff is already extremely dated, so much has happened in the intervening 10 years, but it is a great slice-of-time, and brings 2004 back, in all its mess and ugliness.

‘A Man of Permanent Contradictions’ is a review of The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling, by David Gilmour. As with most of Hitchens’ book reviews, he also shows off his knowledge of the topic at hand. There are times when book reviewers do that and you want to say, “Yes, yes, I know you know a lot about so-and-so – but what did you think of the BOOK??” Hitchens does that as well sometimes, but his writing is so superb I never minded. Especially when he was covering a topic that I also have feelings about, like Kipling, for example. I love Kipling, I grew up reading Kipling, and watching the Orson Welles-narrated Rikki Tikki Tavi on television (it’s on Youtube now!) I had no sense that Kipling would not be “approved” of, and I didn’t care. The stories were amazing, gripping.

Kipling has ugly elements, especially if you are trying to shoe-horn him into a modern perspective. But why turn yourself inside out trying to do that? And why try to silence him because some of his views are not “enlightened”? He is THE window into that particular time, he is THE voice of Empire (its glories, its shams), and it is a world now totally dead. Kipling is better than a history book in many ways. Through his stories, you get an entire lost world.

As a British person, Hitchens obviously had some thoughts and feelings about Kipling, the man, the symbol, what he meant to the English, in terms of a collective memory. It seems that Hitchens enjoyed Gilmour’s book, but also felt that Gilmour might have been a little defensive on Kipling’s behalf. Kipling IS a problematic figure (although I really dislike that snotty word, “problematic”) and you cannot iron out some of his more nasty opinions: but why should you? He was a man of his time, a man of his own era, not ours.

Here’s an excerpt from the book review. I LOVE the Borges anecdote.

Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays, ‘A Man of Permanent Contradictions’, by Christopher Hitchens

I paid a call on Jorge Luis Borges in Buenos Aires in late 1977, and fell into a trap from which I had no desire to escape. He was blind and lonely, and said he liked my voice, and asked me if I would stay and read to him for a while. He knew exactly where on the shelf to find the Kipling, and on what page I would find “Harp Song of the Dane Woman.”

She has no house to lay a guest in –
But one chill bed for all to rest in,
That the pale suns and the stray bergs nest in.

“Long sips, please – more slowly,” the old man beseeched as I reached the lines

Yet, when the signs of summer thicken,
And the ice breaks, and the birch-buds quicken,
Yearly you turns from our side, and sicken –
Sicken again for the shouts and the slaughters, –
You steal away to the lapping waters,
And look at your ship in her winter quarters.

I had never read the poem with such attention before. And, though I knew it expressed something profound and eternal about men and women and warfare, I had not noticed until then that it is made up of Old English words. It was a leathery old aficionado of Anglo-Saxon, sitting in a darkened room many leagues below the Equator, who lovingly drew this to my attention.

Twenty-two years later in Hong Kong, as I witnessed the closing moments of the British Empire, a Royal Guards band struck up the perfect hymn: “The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, Is Ended.” Those who do not know this modest yet stirring feature of the Anglican or Episcopalian evensong may also not know the words or the music to “Eternal Father, Strong to Save,” sometimes titled “For Those in Peril on the Sea.” But if by chance you do know the latter anthem, you can hum the opening staves of Rudyard Kipling’s “Recessional.”

God of our fathers, known of old,
Lord of our far-flung battle-line,
Beneath whose awful Hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine –
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget – lest we forget!

When he was living among the whores and shore-leave drunks on the Thames Embankment, by Charing Cross (and writing The Light That Failed), Kipling used to go to music halls and pick up the melodies of the masses. When he was keeping company with regiments overseas, he would attend church parade, and attend to the hymnal. During the Boer War he was made to feel slightly uneasy when Sir Arthur Sullivan (partner of Sir William Gilbert) set one of his patriotic doggerels to music. But his entire success as a bard derived from the ability to shift between Low and High Church, so to speak. He was a hit with the troops and the gallery because of the very vulgarity that Max Beerbohm despised, Oscar Wilde rather envied, and Henry James could only admire. But he was also, because of his capacity for sonority and high-mindedness, the chosen poet of the royal family and the Times. (In my opinion, he declined the laureateship so that he could keep one foot in each camp.)

There is something about twilight that appeals to the English, and that expresses itself in the Beating of the Retreat, the singing of “Abide With Me,” the bugles calling the Last Post, the shades lengthening over cloisters and cricket grounds, and the melancholy “drawing-down of blinds” so perfectly caught by Wilfred Owen’s “Recessional” – the dying music of the evensong choir as it withdraws – has all this netted in one word. To those born or brought up in England after 1914, let alone 1945, the sense of a waning day is part of the assumed historical outcome. It was Kipling’s achievement to have sounded this sad, admonishing note during the imperial midday, and to have conveyed the premonition among his hearers that dusk was nearer than they had thought. David Gilmour’s title is therefore exceptionally well chosen, because between the first chill of realization and the eventual recognition there falls – or fell – a shadow.

Gilmour’s admirable book is written slightly too much on the defensive. He maintains that Kipling was not, as the smug modernists believe, a racist or an imperialist of a sadist or an anti-Semite or a repressed homosexual – and there is sound evidence, in his writing and in his life, to counter any such simplistic interpretations. But there is also much evidence, drawn from the same sources, to suggest that Kipling was all of the above. It is far preferable to approach this author, as Gilmour often does, as a man of permanent contradictions.

This entry was posted in Books and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

5 Responses to The Books: Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays, ‘A Man of Permanent Contradictions’, by Christopher Hitchens

  1. george says:

    // Hitchens’ beautiful foreword helped put some of it into perspective //

    Beautiful forward indeed – and in the manner of Ms West – illuminative – with cultural and historical lessons of his own. There is so much of his stuff to more than just admire – to love. There was his piece on Ms Thatcher, certainly a political opponent – The Iron Lady’s Sex Appeal The root of it had apparently been a debate between him and David Brooks on their differences of opinion and personal fancies on the pulchritude of Left wing v Right wing women. Hitchens defended his admiration for the Right. He emphasized the point with the essay – a brilliant delight.

    BTW, was there ever a more entertaining debater than CH?

    Also to his great credit in my accounting (for whatever that’s worth) was his defense of George Eliot and Daniel Deronda from Edward Said (a personal bête noire of mine). In the author’s and book’s defense the closing summation:
    “This counterpoint—between the rising incense and the dying cadence, the triumphant and the modest, the prophetic and the quotidian—
    is nowhere more boldly confronted than in the chapters of Daniel Deronda, which have already easily outlived the distinctly earthbound, confining objections made to them.”

    ENVY!

    That he was obdurate in his opinions that differed from mine I would not dearly hold against him. I might hold it against him that he was too enamored of playing ‘enfant terrible’ and went too far in that role – seemingly chewing the scenery when it was uncalled for. But then I defer to David Berlinski who wrote of him:

    “No man is obliged to be what he might have been”

    • sheila says:

      Yes – ENVY!!!

      Love that Berlinski quote!

      Sure, some of his pieces were hit or miss – women aren’t funny? Really? – but that’s totally gonna happen when you write as freakin’ much as that guy did. He never stopped. And he also never stopped reading. Amazing mind. And fearless.

      That Thatcher piece was amazing.

  2. Milt says:

    In line with Hitchens spurring you to read Waugh: have you read George Orwell’s novels, other than 1984 and Animal Farm? I recently completed Coming Up For Air, which is absolutely wonderful–a beautifully written, funny yet melancholic satire about the coming of suburbia to England, and its effect on traditional English life. I’m about to start Down and Out In London and Paris and will read his other two novels later. The novels contain a lot of autobiographical material. He was a marvelous writer and deserves to be recognized for much more than two atypical books.

    • sheila says:

      I read Down and Out – but not Coming Up for Air – it sounds wonderful!

      Hitchens’ book on Orwell is awesome.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.