I interviewed Christopher Hitchens just a few days before he was told he had cancer. That cancer killed him this past Thursday. When Hitchens wrote about the diagnosis and subsequent treatment in his regular column for Vanity Fair, he mentioned that he was given the terminal news just after he’d done a booksigning event in New Haven.
I don’t have any illusions that I was one of the last interviews that Mr. Hitchens ever gave. He was at a large New York book industry conference when we spoke, and he probably gave dozens that very day. Mine, in fact, came in the middle of an interview he was giving to the New York Times. I’d been calling the number I’d been given for his hotel room, under the impression that our interview time had been confirmed. When I was finally informed by the hotel that Hitchens hadn’t even checked in yet, I somehow got his cell number.
Hitchens couldn’t have been more gracious, more unflappable and, as a fellow journalist, more understanding. I heard him ask the Time reporter he was with whether he could borrow her desk for a few minutes—which became 40 minutes, I think, as we bantered on. I’d been an admirer of his for years, the typical Hitchens fan who couldn’t agree with absolutely everything he said but certainly was taken by the way in which he said it. More than that, Christopher Hitchens reminded me of my father: also British, also Oxford-educated, also quick with opinions, also impossibly articulate, able to discuss and argue anything at a moment’s notice. (As it happens, they also both died of cancer—my father 21 years ago now.)
I’d loved Hitchens’ autobiography Hitch-22, just then published and the reason for his New Haven visit, because he treated the book not as a recap of his greatest hits and wildest controversies, but as its own opportunity to come to terms with the twists and turns of his life. He told me he had no desire to spend a lot of room defending his atheistic impulses, for instance—he’d done that. Instead he mapped out his life from young revolutionary to middle-aged political insider to settled columnist-at-large.

Hitchens struck a lot of his critics as inconsistent, but I’ve always felt that he carried no greater or fewer contradictions than any other human being, and in fact he was very good at explaining the precise reasons why he, for instance, could defend some foreign wars (enraging kneejerk liberals) while condemning the barbarity of waterboarding (enraging the kneejerk conservatives who thought they’d wrestled him from the liberals). I remember some ridiculous, simple-minded reactions to the news of his illness—a radio announcer barking “Should we pray for Christopher Hitchens if he doesn’t believe in God?,” for instance—when he seldom dabbled in such either-or ironic ripostes himself, his responses generally being shaded and qualified and deepened. I’m already wondering what he might have thought of news events occurring days after his death—the pulling out of troops from Iraq, the deaths of Vaclav Havel and Kim Jong-Il, the resurgence of Newt Gingrich… You just know he’d have entertaining insights nobody else could think up.

I found him to be as quick-witted, curious, gracious and thoughtful in my interview with him as I find him to be in his many books and countless magazine articles. He treated me as an equal, and listened attentively when I could add facts to some of his conjectures. We were equal in another way—we’re both Christopher who used our entire first name in our bylines. Hitchens writes in Hitch-22 how Christophers should never back down from their birth name, not shorten it or nickname it. I hadn’t really considered this as an activist mission before, but now in Christopher Hitchens’ absence I can carry on his crusade.