FOREWORD BY
GRAYDON CARTER
At a dinner in Los Angeles this spring, a young actor named Emile Hirsch came up to me in a state of somewhat high excitement. He knew I had worked with Christopher Hitchens for many years, and he just wanted to talk about Christopher with someone who knew him. He’d read Hitch-22 and was well into the Kissinger book, and he said that Christopher’s writing had affected him in a way that almost no one else’s had. In the months following Christopher’s death, I had similar encounters with young people who felt compelled to talk about how his writing had touched them. It’s no exaggeration to say that Christopher had few equals in the sphere of spirited commentary. But there was something in his saucy fearlessness, in his great turbine of a mind, and in his sociable but unpredictable brand of anarchy that seriously touched kids in their twenties and early thirties in much the same way that Hunter S. Thompson had a generation before. Young Emile asked if there was going to be a memorial service, and I told him that there would be one in New York and that we were bookmarking April 20th as a tentative date.
The memorial was indeed held on the 20th, in the Great Hall at Cooper Union in Greenwich Village. My Vanity Fair colleagues Aimée Bell (Christopher’s longtime editor at the magazine) and Sara Marks organized the readings—all of them from Christopher’s own work. We wanted to produce a program that would be cozy and loving, but in no way sentimental or mawkish. And the great and the good of English letters turned up to pay tribute—and to console his widow, Carol, and his three children. Martin Amis, Tom Stoppard, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, and James Fenton were there and they all spoke. Editors such as Anna Wintour, David Remnick, Jim Kelly, and Rick Stengel came; so did Christopher’s brother Peter, Andrew Sullivan, Christopher Buckley, Andrew and Leslie Cockburn and their daughter the fine actress Olivia Wilde, and Andrew’s brother Patrick. The Bush administration was represented by former deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz—a remnant of the curious right turn Christopher took in the lead-up to the Iraq War. Hollywood was represented by Sean Penn—and, as I was pleased to see, by young Mr. Hirsch.
After the memorial, the participants retired to the Waverly Inn nearby and drank and smoked in the sunshine and reminisced about Christopher. Although the day was bathed in sorrow, there was a magical quality to the afternoon as it spilled into the evening and through to midnight, when there were still a dozen or more mourners. For those who were there, Christopher’s memorial was, as we used to say in the 1960s, a happening, and a day we will not soon forget.
For the fact is that Christopher was one of life’s singular characters—a wit, a charmer, a trouble-maker, and a dear and devoted friend. He was a man of insatiable appetites—for cigarettes, for scotch, for company, for great writing, and, above all, for conversation. That he had an output to equal what he took in was the miracle in the man. You’d be hard-pressed to find a writer who could match the outpouring of exquisitely crafted columns, essays, articles, and books he produced over the past four decades. He wrote often—constantly, in fact, and right up to the end—the words in this moving volume being among his last. And Christopher wrote fast, frequently without the benefit of a second draft or even corrections. Perhaps in the back of his mind he knew that his time on the stage would end in the second act, and he was racing to get it all in, and to get it all out. I can recall a lunch in 1991, when I was editing the New York Observer, and he and Aimée and I got together for a quick bite at a restaurant on Madison, no longer there. Christopher’s copy was due early that afternoon. Pre-lunch tumblers of scotch were followed by a couple of glasses of wine during the meal and then a couple of post-meal
GRAYDON CARTER
At a dinner in Los Angeles this spring, a young actor named Emile Hirsch came up to me in a state of somewhat high excitement. He knew I had worked with Christopher Hitchens for many years, and he just wanted to talk about Christopher with someone who knew him. He’d read Hitch-22 and was well into the Kissinger book, and he said that Christopher’s writing had affected him in a way that almost no one else’s had. In the months following Christopher’s death, I had similar encounters with young people who felt compelled to talk about how his writing had touched them. It’s no exaggeration to say that Christopher had few equals in the sphere of spirited commentary. But there was something in his saucy fearlessness, in his great turbine of a mind, and in his sociable but unpredictable brand of anarchy that seriously touched kids in their twenties and early thirties in much the same way that Hunter S. Thompson had a generation before. Young Emile asked if there was going to be a memorial service, and I told him that there would be one in New York and that we were bookmarking April 20th as a tentative date.
The memorial was indeed held on the 20th, in the Great Hall at Cooper Union in Greenwich Village. My Vanity Fair colleagues Aimée Bell (Christopher’s longtime editor at the magazine) and Sara Marks organized the readings—all of them from Christopher’s own work. We wanted to produce a program that would be cozy and loving, but in no way sentimental or mawkish. And the great and the good of English letters turned up to pay tribute—and to console his widow, Carol, and his three children. Martin Amis, Tom Stoppard, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, and James Fenton were there and they all spoke. Editors such as Anna Wintour, David Remnick, Jim Kelly, and Rick Stengel came; so did Christopher’s brother Peter, Andrew Sullivan, Christopher Buckley, Andrew and Leslie Cockburn and their daughter the fine actress Olivia Wilde, and Andrew’s brother Patrick. The Bush administration was represented by former deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz—a remnant of the curious right turn Christopher took in the lead-up to the Iraq War. Hollywood was represented by Sean Penn—and, as I was pleased to see, by young Mr. Hirsch.
After the memorial, the participants retired to the Waverly Inn nearby and drank and smoked in the sunshine and reminisced about Christopher. Although the day was bathed in sorrow, there was a magical quality to the afternoon as it spilled into the evening and through to midnight, when there were still a dozen or more mourners. For those who were there, Christopher’s memorial was, as we used to say in the 1960s, a happening, and a day we will not soon forget.
For the fact is that Christopher was one of life’s singular characters—a wit, a charmer, a trouble-maker, and a dear and devoted friend. He was a man of insatiable appetites—for cigarettes, for scotch, for company, for great writing, and, above all, for conversation. That he had an output to equal what he took in was the miracle in the man. You’d be hard-pressed to find a writer who could match the outpouring of exquisitely crafted columns, essays, articles, and books he produced over the past four decades. He wrote often—constantly, in fact, and right up to the end—the words in this moving volume being among his last. And Christopher wrote fast, frequently without the benefit of a second draft or even corrections. Perhaps in the back of his mind he knew that his time on the stage would end in the second act, and he was racing to get it all in, and to get it all out. I can recall a lunch in 1991, when I was editing the New York Observer, and he and Aimée and I got together for a quick bite at a restaurant on Madison, no longer there. Christopher’s copy was due early that afternoon. Pre-lunch tumblers of scotch were followed by a couple of glasses of wine during the meal and then a couple of post-meal
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