Journalism, sadly, can count few geniuses among its ranks. But if our sorry trade can be said to include the likes of Twain and Mencken then we can count Christopher Hitchens among our number, and surely then he ranks as the most brilliant journalist of his generation, and perhaps of our time.
Hitchens' life, and death from cancer, have been faithfully recorded elsewhere, so I won't repeat the details. Suffice it to say he was a scribe's scribe who wrote in the best way: Fast and frequently. Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter recalls how he once observed Hitchens, after a typically boozy lunch, bang out a near-perfect 1,000-word column in under half an hour.
Hitchens was the master of a facund, hyper-articulate writing style that has gone out of fashion in most circles, but his copy was never florid. His words were powerful and precise, as in this passage from The Nation about Osama bin Laden:
He doesn't only oppose the entire Jewish presence in Palestine; he opposes the Jewish presence in America. He is the spoiled-brat son of one of our preferred despotisms and the proud beneficiary of the export of violence.
Or this one from Slate, where he defended the right of Danish cartoonists to portray Mohammed:
I am not asking for the right to slaughter a pig in a synagogue or mosque or to relieve myself on a "holy" book. But I will not be told I can't eat pork, and I will not respect those who burn books on a regular basis. I, too, have strong convictions and beliefs and value the Enlightenment above any priesthood or any sacred fetish-object...
But Hitchens was never one for style over substance. His prose flowed from his immense knowledge of history, politics, literature and his bete noire, religion. Indeed, when Hitchens debated clerics as he toured the country for his anti-religous polemic "God is not Great," he often evinced a greater knowledge of Christianity than the Christians themselves. Hitchens did for journalism what Czech author Milan Kundera did for fiction: He poured everything he knew into everything he wrote, and, as is the case with Kundera, I always felt I learned something when I read his work.
As with most great writers, Hitchens also had courage, and the courage of his convictions. When Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa on Salman Rushdie for "The Satanic Verses," forcing Rushdie to go into hiding, Hitchens not only came to old friend's defense, he welcomed him into his home. His reporting jaunts into hairy combat zones were the stuff of legend. And as the debate raged over whether waterboarding was torture, Hitchens, in one of his most famous pieces for Vanity Fair, had himself subjected to the practice - and promptly declared that yes, it was.
Hitchens was bravest at the very end. Even as he was dying of esophageal cancer, he continued to write, as lucidly as ever. Indeed, he did some of his best work as he chronicled his illness and contemplated his own mortality, often with a touch of humor.
And in one of his final pieces for Vanity Fair, Hitchens, ever the craftsman, offered some sound advice to aspiring writers:
Avoid stock expressions (like the plague, as William Safire used to say) and repetitions. Don't say that as a boy your grandmother used to read to you, unless at that stage of her life she really was a boy, in which case you have probably thrown away a better intro. If something is worth hearing or listening to, it's very probably worth reading. So, this above all: Find your own voice.
