I’m pretty sure of my facts here. And if I could only put my hands on the book, I could be absolutely sure. But is it shelved under U for Utz, or perhaps under C for Chatwin? Or is it in that unsorted pile on top of the radiator? Or the heap of volumes that migrated from the living room to the dining room? I am certain that I didn’t lend it to anyone: I am utterly miserly about letting any of my books out of my sight. Yet my books don’t seem to reciprocate by remaining within view, let alone within easy reach.
I live in a fairly spacious apartment in Washington, D.C. True, the apartment is also my office (though that’s no excuse for piling books on the stove). But for some reason, the available shelf space, which is considerable, continues to be outrun by the appearance of new books. It used to be such a pleasure to get one of those padded envelopes in the mail, containing a brand-new book with the publisher’s compliments. Now, as I collect my daily heap of these packages from my building’s concierge, I receive a pitying look.
It ought to be easy to deal with this excess, at least with the superfluous new arrivals: Give them away to friends or take them to a secondhand bookseller. But the thing is, you never know. Two new histories of the Crusades have appeared in the past year, for instance, and I already have several books on those momentous events. How often, really, do I need to mention the Crusades in a column or a review? Not that often—but then, it suddenly occurs to me, not that seldom either. Best be on the safe side. Should all these books sit on the same shelf? Or should they be indexed by author? (“Index” is good: It suggests that I have a system.) Currently, I pile the Crusades books near titles on the Middle East—an unsatisfactory arrangement, but I have no “History” section as such, because then I would have to decide whether to arrange it chronologically or geographically.
Bibliomania cripples my social life. In order to have a dinner party, I must clear all the so-far-unsorted books off the dining-room table. Either that, or invite half the originally planned number of people and just push the books temporarily down to one end of it. In the spring, my wife and I host the Vanity Fair party that follows the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and this means that I can get professional help with rearranging the furniture and the books. This past year, the magazine’s omnicompetent social organizer, Sara Marks, gave me some ingenious vertical shelf units, allowing me to stack books on their sides. Alas, there wasn’t time before the festivities to sort these useful display units by author or subject, so I’ve only been able to alter the shape of my problem, not solve it.
The units also make it easier to read the titles on the spines and thus to suffer reproach for their randomness. And let’s say I did decide to organize these books: Should I start with A for Kingsley Amis? But wait, here’s a nonfiction work by Amis, on language. Shouldn’t it go on the reference shelf with the lexicons and dictionaries? And what about the new biography, and the correspondence between Kingsley and Philip Larkin?
Some kind friends argue for a cull, to create more space and to provide an incentive to organize. All right, but I can’t throw out a book that has been with me for any length of time and thus acquired sentimental value, or that has been written by a friend, or that has been signed or inscribed by its author. I also can’t part with one that might conceivably come in handy as a work of reference, however obscure. All of which provokes newfound sympathy for poor Kaspar Utz.
(City Journal, Winter 2008)
1. Review of Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers, by Brooke Allen.
2. Review of Jefferson’s Secrets: Death and Desire at Monticello, by Andrew Burstein.
3. Review of Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present, by Michael Oren.
4. Review of Benjamin Franklin Unmasked, by Jerry Weinberger.
5. Review of John Brown, Abolitionist, by David S. Reynolds.
6. Review of Abraham Lincoln: A Life, by Michael Burlingame.
7. Review of The Singular Mark Twain, by Fred Kaplan.
8. Review of The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair.
9. Review of An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963, by Robert Dallek.
10. Review of Saul Bellow’s Novels 1944–1953: Dangling Man, The Victim, The Adventures of Augie March; and Novels 1956–1964: Seize the Day, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog.
11. Review of Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov; and The Annotated Lolita, edited by Alfred Appel, Jr.
12. Review of Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism, by John Updike.
13. Review of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900, by Andrew Roberts.
14. Review of Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy, by Matthew Scully.
15. Review of Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel.
16. Review of Reflections on the Revolution in France, by Edmund Burke, edited by Frank W. Turner.
17. Review of Samuel Johnson: A Biography, by Peter Martin.
18. Review of Bouvard and Pecuchet, by Gustave Flaubert, translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti.
19. Review of Charles Dickens, by Michael Slater.
20. Review of Dispatches for the New York Tribune: Selected Journalism of Karl Marx, edited by James Ledbetter, with a foreword by Francis Wheen.
21. Review of Ezra Pound: Poet, Vol. I, 1885–1920, by A. David Moody.
22. Review of Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford, edited by Peter Y. Sussman.
23. Review of Somerset Maugham: A Life, by Jeffrey Meyers.
24. Review of Wodehouse: A Life, by Robert McCrum.
25. Review of To Keep the Ball Rolling: The Memoirs of Anthony Powell.
26. Review of John Buchan: The Presbyterian Cavalier, by Andrew Lownie.
27. Review of The Life of Graham Greene, Vol. II 1955–1991, by Norman Sherry.
28. Review of Letters to Monica, by Philip Larkin, edited by Anthony Thwaite.
29. Review of Stephen Spender: The Authorized Biography, by John Sutherland.
30. Review of C. L. R. James: Cricket, the Caribbean and the World Revolution, by Farrukh Dhondy.
31. Review of The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard.
32. Review of The Unbearable Saki, by Sandie Byrne.
33. Review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J. K. Rowling.
34. Review of A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962, by Alistair Horne.
35. Review of Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents, by Robert Irwin.
36. Review of Orientalism, by Edward Said.
37. Review of Freedom’s Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention, by Gary J. Bass.
38. Review of The Case of Comrade Tulayev and Memoirs of a Revolutionary, by Victor Serge.
39. Review of Malraux: A Life, by Olivier Todd.
40. Review of Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic, by Michael Scammell.
41. Review of Strange Times, My Dear: The PEN Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature, edited by Nahid Mozaffari.
42. Review of Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, by Martin Amis.
43. Review of Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris, by Ian Kershaw.
44. Review of The Lesser Evil: Diaries 1945–1959, by Victor Klemperer.
45. Review of Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War, by Pat Buchanan.
46. Review of Human Smoke, by Nicholson Baker.
47. Review of On the Natural History of Destruction, by W. G. Sebald.
Acknowledgments
The thanking of friends and colleagues and co-conspirators ought to be the most enjoyable part of the completion of any work. However, the accumulation of decades of debt now forces a choice between the invidious and the ingratiating. To give their proper due to all whom I owe would now be impossible, resulting in one of those catalogs, so redolent of the name-drop and the back-scratch, that burden so many books these days. I am therefore restricting myself to those with whom work and life have become seamless: the close comrades who have be
come co-workers and vice versa.
In more than three decades of knowing Steve Wasserman, he has been my editor for publishing houses and for magazines, my closest reader, and now my agent. To have a literary intellect as my man of business is a privilege: Our work together has constituted truly unalienated labor.
It is twenty years since Graydon Carter asked me to join his enterprise at Vanity Fair, on the promise that I would try to find all topics interesting and, in return for much travel and instruction and variety, would agree to take on any subject. Managing only to exempt competitive sports, I have tried to be true to this. Every time an essay of mine has reached the office, it has passed through the meticulous care of Aimee Bell, Walter Owen, and Peter Devine, who conceive their task as putting the highest possible finish on my drafts. (In Aimee’s case, I have to call the attention “loving,” in the hope that she will notice, and perhaps blush.)
At the Atlantic, David Bradley, Benjamin Schwarz, and James Bennett give me the unique chance to take regular notice of serious new books, and a wide latitude in which to operate my choices. Again, and with further thanks to Yvonne Rolzhausen, there follows an effort to make the printed result the superior in tone of the original version.
It was a fair day that brought me close to Jake Weisberg, David Plotz, and June Thomas at Slate magazine, who suggested that the need to unburden a weekly polemic or feuilleton could be painlessly met by a column called “Fighting Words.” Can there be any writer in America who has had three regular outlets as perfectly synchronous and complementary as these?
This book is the third of mine to be brought to you by Twelve: a house that exists to disprove rumors and alarms about the continued combination of serious publishing with flair and panache. The devoted individual attention received by each author and text is rightly the subject of widespread admiration and envy. Cary Goldstein, Colin Shepherd, and Bob Castillo have wrought invisible but palpable improvements in everything I have ever brought them.
Over a rather grueling past twelve months, those mentioned above have also been invaluable in helping me to stay alive, and to give me—it’s not too much to say—persuasive reasons for doing so. This increases the bond, and makes it indissoluble. In that connection, while I cannot begin to thank everybody, I must mention Dr. Fred Smith of Bethesda, Maryland, Drs. James Cox and Jaffer Ajani of the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston (home of the world’s most emancipating form of radiation); and Dr. Francis Collins of the National Institutes of Health. Without the persuasive powers of my exceptional wife, Carol Blue, I might well not have had the fortitude or the patience to enter some of these treatments, or to persist with them. That recognition and acknowledgment lies somewhere beyond gratitude: Any surrender to fatalism or despair would have been as rank a betrayal of what I hope to stand for as any capitulation to magical or wishful schemes would have been. Then not lastly but at last to my tough, smart, brave, humorous children—Alexander, Sophia, and Antonia—who are a living marvel in themselves but who also represent all I can ever hope to claim by way of futurity.
About the Author
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS was born in 1949 in England and is a graduate of Balliol College at Oxford University. He is the father of three children and the author of more than twenty books and pamphlets, including collections of essays, criticism, and reportage. His book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award and an international bestseller. His bestselling memoir, Hitch-22, was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. A visiting professor of liberal studies at the New School in New York City, he has also been the I.F. Stone professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been a columnist, literary critic, and contributing editor at Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, Slate, Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, New Statesman, World Affairs, Free Inquiry, among other publications.
Also available from
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Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens Page 83
