This certainly appears to be a reasonable trade. No well-wisher omits the combative image: You can beat this. Myself, I love the imagery of struggle. I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient. You feel swamped with passivity and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water.
It has caused me to lose about 14 pounds, though without making me feel any lighter. It has cleared up a vicious rash on my shins that no doctor could ever name, let alone cure. Some venom, to get rid of those furious red dots without a struggle. Let it please be this mean and ruthless with the alien and its spreading dead-zone colonies.
But as against that, the death-dealing stuff and life-preserving stuff have also made me strangely neuter.
I was fairly reconciled to the loss of my hair, which began to come out in the shower in the first two weeks of treatment, and which I saved in a plastic bag so that it could help fill a floating dam in the Gulf of Mexico. I feel upsettingly de-natured. In the war against Thanatos, if we must term it a war, the immediate loss of Eros is a huge initial sacrifice. These are my first raw reactions to being stricken. I am quietly resolved to resist bodily as best I can, even if only passively, and to seek the most advanced advice.
Against me is the blind, emotionless alien, cheered on by some who have long wished me ill. But on the side of my continued life is a group of brilliant and selfless physicians plus an astonishing number of prayer groups. On both of these I hope to write next time if—as my father invariably said—I am spared. Weekly Sign up for our essential daily brief and never miss a story. It's on the house. British-born author, literary critic and journalist Christopher Hitchens has died at the age of He died from pneumonia, a complication of the oesophageal cancer he had, at a Texas hospital.
Vanity Fair magazine, which announced his death, said there would "never be another like Christopher". He is survived by his wife, Carol Blue, and their daughter, Antonia, and his children from a previous marriage, Alexander and Sophia. Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter described the writer as someone "of ferocious intellect, who was as vibrant on the page as he was at the bar". Hitchens was born in Portsmouth in and graduated from Oxford in He began his career as a journalist in Britain in the s and later moved to New York, becoming contributing editor to Vanity Fair in November He was diagnosed with cancer in June , and documented his declining health in his Vanity Fair column.
In an August essay for the magazine he wrote: "I love the imagery of struggle. Speaking on the BBC's Newsnight programme, in November that year, he reflected on a life that he knew would be cut short: "It does concentrate the mind, of course, to realise that your life is more rationed than you thought it was.
Radicalised by the s, Hitchens was often arrested at political rallies and was kicked out of the Labour Party over his opposition to the Vietnam War. In later life he moved away from the left. Following the September 11 attacks he argued with Noam Chomsky and others who suggested that US foreign policy had helped cause the tragedy.
It led to him being accused of betrayal: one former friend called him "a lying, opportunistic, cynical contrarian", another critic said he was "a drink-sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay".
But he could dish out scathing critiques himself. The first love of Hitchens's life was his mother, "the cream in the coffee, the gin in the Campari". She insisted at least according to Hitchens he should go to boarding school because "if there is going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it". He was already a Labour supporter at school, organising the party's "campaign" in a mock election, and joining a CND march from Aldermaston.
At Balliol College, Oxford, where he read philosophy, politics, and economics, he "rehearsed", as he put it, for But he led a curiously dualistic life. By day, "Chris" addressed car workers through a bullhorn on an upturned milk crate while by night "Christopher" wore a dinner jacket to address the Oxford Union or dine with the warden of All Souls. He did not, in fact, like being called "Chris" — his mother would not, he explained, wish her firstborn to be addressed "as if he were a taxi-driver or pothole-filler" — and found "Hitch", which most friends used, more acceptable.
While not exactly a social climber, Hitchens wished to be on intimate terms with important people. Equally dualistic was his sex life. He was almost expelled from school for homosexuality and later boasted that at Oxford he slept with two future male Tory cabinet ministers. But also at Oxford, he lost his virginity to a girl who had pictures of him plastered over her bedroom wall and he eventually became a dedicated heterosexual because, he said, his looks deteriorated to the point where no man would have him.
The "double life", as he called it, continued after he left university with a third-class degree — he was too busy with politics to bother much with studying — and found, partly through his Oxford friend James Fenton, a berth at the New Statesman. He supplemented his income by writing for several Fleet Street newspapers, but also contributed gratis to the Socialist Worker. It was while working for the Statesman that he experienced a "howling, lacerating moment in my life": the death of his adored mother in Athens, apparently in a suicide pact with her lover, a lapsed priest.
Only years later did he learn what she never told him or perhaps anyone else: that she came from a family of east European Jews. Though his brother — who first discovered their mother's origins — said this made them only onend Jewish, Hitchens declared himself a Jew according to the custom of matrilineal descent. Later in the s, Hitchens became a familiar Fleet Street figure, disporting himself in bars and restaurants and settling into a literary set that included Fenton, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Clive James and others.
It specialised in long lunches and what to others seemed puerile and frequently obscene word games. But he was hooked on America as a year-old when he visited on a student visa and tried unsuccessfully to get a work permit. In October , on a half-promise of work from the Nation, he left for the US.
It was the making of his career: Americans have always had a weakness for plummy voiced, somewhat raffish Englishmen who pepper their writing and conversation with literary and historical allusions. He became the Nation's Washington correspondent, contributing editor of Vanity Fair from , literary essayist for Atlantic Monthly, a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and a talking head on innumerable cable TV shows.
He authored 11 books, co-authored six more, and had five collections of essays published. The targets included Kissinger, Clinton and Mother Teresa "a thieving fanatical Albanian dwarf" ; his books on Orwell, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine were more positive, and less widely noticed.
His most successful book, which brought him international fame beyond what Susan Sontag called "the small world of those who till the field of ideas", was God Is Not Great, a mocking indictment of religion which put him alongside Richard Dawkins as a leading enemy of the devout. Hitchens was also, to his great pleasure, a liberal studies professor at the New School in New York and, for a time, visiting professor at Berkeley in California, as well as a regular on the public lecture and debate circuit.
Hitchens loved what he called "disputation" — there was little difference between his public and private speaking styles — and America, a more oral culture than Britain's, offered ample opportunity.
When his final break with the left came, it seemed to some as though the pope had announced he was no longer a Catholic. His support for Bush's war in Iraq — which he never retracted — and his vote for the president in , were even bigger shocks, and some suspected a psychological need, as the first male Hitchens never to wear uniform, to prove his manhood. But Hitchens, in many respects a traditionalist, was never a straightforward lefty.
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