Q&A Special: Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011

When he was diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus, Christopher Hitchens carried on talking. He gave a number of riveting interviews – with Lynn Barber in The Sunday Times, Andrew Anthony in The Observer, Mick Brown in The Telegraph – as he prepared himself for a journey which, for the author of the bestselling God Is Not Great, would not involve meeting any sort of maker. I had my own encounter with the essayist, polemicist, self-styled contrarian, Bush-supporting apostate, drinker and smoker in 2005 as he made his annual pilgrimage - if that's not too devotional a word - to the Hay Festival.

His latest publication was about to drop off the conveyor belt. Love, Poverty and War, an anthology of almost everything he had written for his many and various outlets since 11 September, 2001, was a full three-course meal - unlike a lot of the slenderer pamphlets in which he set out to demolish Clinton or Mother Teresa, or call for the return of the Elgin Marbles - and a deeply replenishing one. It also remains a perfect Hitchens primer. There is, of course, the pleasure to be had from the cocksure prose, all mane flicks and chest puffs. But it also reveals something which is shrouded from many of the British readers who mainly got to read him on the War on Terror and the tentacular reach of intellectual poverty: Hitchens was not just an attack dog who trained himself to snarl at the likes of Michael Moore and George Galloway (“a fucking guttersnipe,” he told me, “and thug and liar and ponce for fascism”). As a literary critic, he was actually an enthusiast: he ranted about politics in Washington and lectured about literature in New York.

I don’t envy or much respect people who are completely politicised. Nor do I think much of those who think that literature is a thing only of itself

An interview with Hitchens is (was) unlike any other. Ping him any question and from his mouth would flow torrents of glinting, sifted prose. How does one convey the exhilaration of an encounter with such a mind? He roamed from the awe he felt for George Eliot to his dissident take on Marilyn Monroe, from his surprisingly religious education to his membership of the New Statesman's gilded generation of co-workers including Amis fils, Fenton, Barnes, Boyd and McEwan. Best just to pass on a portion of our conversation.

'I can meet Shakespeare any time': Christopher Hitchens

JASPER REES: Do you lead an intellectual double life?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: It depends who you think of as the Gold Standard in this kind of writing. People like, say, Arthur Koestler or Trilling or inevitably the name Orwell come up. Their lives as critics were successful precisely because they weren’t just politicised. They thought of themselves as defending a wider, more ample idea of humanism. And that’s essential. I don’t envy or much respect people who are completely politicised. Nor do I think much of those who think that literature is a thing only of itself and isn’t part of the struggle of our language and certain truths that have to be affirmed. If it is a double life I wouldn’t necessarily think of that as a criticism. No, I think it’s two halves of the same ass… coin, sorry. Also it’s very useful to teach people to whom a lot of this is new because you are forced to go over texts that to you are familiar and have worn a bit smooth. It’s very rare with the good stuff that you won’t notice things that you haven’t noticed before. And that’s enormously helpful to me. I would do it for nothing if need be. It’s just part of what I should be doing to keep up my own crumbling faculties.

Who are the authors in your pack?

The pack would be George Eliot – I don’t know why I say that first – Auden certainly, Kipling, I shouldn’t leave out Buchan. Before I read Fleming I’d read most of Buchan and I still find it pretty amazing. Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment in particular. Koestler. I’m afraid most of these are English or American. George Eliot was central to my argument that literature can depose religion as an ethical resource. Her books are not full of ethical considerations. You wonder how she knew so much about the human soul in a way that I don’t think anyone else knew about motives and actions except Shakespeare. It’s absolutely astonishing to me.