WHEN HE CONVERTS YOU KNOW HE'LL ASK THE POPE TO PRESIDE:

It’s Been a Lot of Fun: a review of Hitch-22: A Memoir by Christopher Hitchens (David Runciman, 6/17/10, London Review of Books)

What he most resembles, to an almost uncanny degree, is a particular kind of political romantic, as described by Carl Schmitt in his 1919 book Political Romanticism. Schmitt was ostensibly writing about German romanticism at the turn of the 19th century (the intellectual movement that flourished between Rousseau and Hegel) but his real targets were the revolutionary romantics of his own time, including two of Hitchens’s Trotskyite heroes, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. For Schmitt, political romantics are driven not by the quest for pseudo-religious certainty, but by the search for excitement, for the romance of what he calls ‘the occasion’. They want something, anything, to happen, so that they can feel themselves to be at the heart of things. As a result, political romantics often lead complicated double lives, moving between different versions of themselves, experimenting with alternative personae. ‘Reversing one’s position between several realities and playing them off against one another belongs to the nature of the romantic situation,’ Schmitt writes. Political romantics are ostensibly self-sufficient yet also have a desperate need for human comradeship. ‘In every romantic we can find examples of anarchistic self-confidence as well as an excessive need for sociability. He is just as easily moved by altruistic feelings, by pity and sympathy, as by presumptuous snobbery.’ Romantics loathe abuses of power, but invariably end up worshipping power itself, sometimes indiscriminately: ‘The caliph of Baghdad is no less romantic than the patriarch of Jerusalem. Here everything can be substituted for everything else.’ Above all, in place of God they substitute themselves. ‘As long as the romantic believed he was himself the transcendental ego, he did not have to be troubled by the question of the true cause: he was himself the creator of the world in which he lived.’

All of this sounds a lot like Christopher Hitchens. In Hitch-22 he makes much of his ability to move between different worlds, as when an undergraduate at Oxford, where he was sometimes Chris, the socialist agitator on the picket lines, and sometimes Christopher, dinner-jacketed sampler of the high life. In both roles he fitted right in: he was, in his own words, John Bunyan’s ‘Mr Facing-both-ways’. He is intensely, almost insanely sociable. He discovered at an early age that being able to perform as a public speaker meant that ‘you need never dine or sleep alone.’ Early on, he mainly chose to sleep with boys (and throughout his life he seems to have preferred to dine with men). He discovered girls relatively late, while at Oxford, but eventually found one who seemed to fit the bill:

I was actually a bit more confident on the platform than I was in the sack, and I can remember losing my virginity – a bit later than most of my peers, I suspect – with a girl who, inviting me to tea at one of the then-segregated female colleges, allowed me to notice that her walls were covered with photographs taken of me by an unseen cameraman who’d followed my public career. Since apparently I could do no wrong with this young lady …

Losing your virginity to a woman who has already constructed a shrine in your honour: what could be more transcendentally egotistical than that?

Schmitt says that one of the characteristics of political romantics is that they lack a gift for real music, and try instead to develop the rhythms of their life ‘out of historical, philosophical, theological or some other scientific material, an intellectual music for a political programme’. Hitchens makes much of the fact that he is not at all musical, and lacks confidence in his aesthetic judgments (something that attracts him to his great friend Martin Amis is that Amis has no problem telling him what sorts of book he should like). But Hitchens has complete confidence in his political judgments, which are robust, intensely felt and invariably propped up by vast amounts of selective reading. He has been, in his own words, ‘a consistent anti-totalitarian’, though he admits that this means ‘one might have to expose oneself to steadily mounting contradictions.’ He has had to adjust himself, intellectually and geographically, to his growing taste for the United States and his sense of its power to do good in the world. He moved to the US – first to New York, then Washington – in 1981. In 2007 he became an American citizen. In between he has identified himself with a wide variety of causes, in which the common theme has been a desire to take on the evil-doers, from Henry Kissinger to Mother Teresa to Bill Clinton to Saddam Hussein. The United States is a great country for political romantics because there is always something going on. There are almost limitless occasions on which to display yourself.

But what’s wrong with a bit of political romanticism? Schmitt says that the problem is it produces only gesture politics, and that ‘the romantic wants to be productive without being active.’ Hitchens has certainly been productive, generating 1000-plus words of always usable, sometimes sparkling copy every day, no matter how much he might have drunk the night before. He also loves a good gesture. His swearing-in ceremony as a US citizen was specially arranged to suit his sense of its importance, presided over by Michael Chertoff, George W. Bush’s appointee as head of the Department of Homeland Security, and conducted on Jefferson’s birthday at the Jefferson Memorial. ‘There was a very stiff breeze blowing across the Tidal Basin,’ Hitchens recalls, ‘but it served to give a real smack and crackle to the Stars and Stripes that Chertoff’s people had brought along.’ Another flag might have cost him his life in Beirut in the spring of 2009.

Walking along Hamra Street, the still fashionable boulevard of the city, I suddenly saw a swastika poster. This, I needed no telling, was the symbol of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party … I took out my pen to deface the offending display … I managed a four-letter word or so before being grabbed very hard from behind. A weaselly but wiry little tough guy kept hold of my jacket while speed-dialling for backup with his other hand … There were suddenly gaunt-looking creeps everywhere, with wolfish expressions on their faces. I had, without knowing it, disfigured a poster that commemorated one of their ‘martyrs’.

Hitchens got a ‘kicking and a smacking’, but escaped more or less intact. He subsequently discovered that ‘the last man in trouble on this block – a Sunni Arab journalist who had only tried to photograph the swastika flags – was still in hospital after three months’ intensive care.’

Sometimes political gestures exact a heavy toll. But sometimes they make no difference at all. Hitchens establishes his romantic revolutionary credentials early on in the book by remarking that:

Official Britain may have its Valhalla of heroes and statesmen and conquerors and empire-builders, but we know that the highest point ever reached by European civilisation was in the city of Basel in 1912, when the leaders of the socialist parties of all countries met to co-ordinate an opposition to the coming world war. The names of real heroes like Jean Jaurès and Karl Liebknecht make the figures of Asquith and Churchill and Lloyd George seem like pygmies.

This is precisely the kind of romanticism Schmitt was writing about; indeed the Basel conference may have been one of the specific instances he had in mind. To celebrate an event that failed entirely to achieve its objectives, that merely allowed its participants to feel they had done what they could and had cut a good figure on the platform, to say that European civilisation reached its peak at the moment when it exposed its impotence in the face of the coming catastrophe: that is what it means to prefer the occasion to the outcome.