The Way We Die Now by Seamus O'Mahony

Author:Seamus O'Mahony [O’Mahony, Seamus]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784974251
Publisher: Head of Zeus

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS:

‘A RADICAL, CHILDLIKE HOPE’

Christopher Hitchens had been a prolific journalist and public intellectual for more than three decades when he finally achieved the global fame he so richly deserved following the publication of God Is Not Great in 2007. ‘Hitch’ had been a swaggering figure in literary and political circles for many years before this. He was a provocative polemicist who savaged the reputations of Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton and Mother Teresa. A brilliant speaker and debater, he had the gift of the immediate and apposite retort. (Simon Hoggart had advised him, early in his career, to ‘write more like you talk’.) He moved to the US in the 1980s. After the success of God Is Not Great, Hitchens joined the premier league of celebrity atheist intellectuals. While Richard Dawkins was perceived as arrogant, humourless and hectoring, even his opponents admired Hitchens’s wit, his preternatural fluency and his cheek. Although wildly inconsistent and self-contradictory, he never confessed to a moment’s doubt.

When Hitchens was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer, it came as no great surprise, the major risk factors for the condition being smoking and heavy drinking, both of which he cheerfully admitted to: ‘Knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light... I have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me.’ His ‘rackety, bohemian life’ finally caught up with him in June 2010 when, during a tour to promote his memoir, Hitch-22, he was taken acutely ill in his hotel bedroom (‘feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse’), whisked off to the nearest emergency room and diagnosed with stage IV oesophageal cancer (‘the thing about Stage Four is that there is no such thing as Stage Five’): the cancer had spread, or metastasized, to his lungs and the lymph nodes in his neck. Following this diagnosis, Hitchens wrote a series of articles about his illness for Vanity Fair, to which he had been a contributor for many years. These articles were collected, edited and book-ended by moving tributes from his wife Carol Blue and his editor Graydon Carter. This little book is simply called Mortality.

Hitchens’s beliefs about his advanced cancer and its treatment were, for a man whose fame rested on his scepticism, uncharacteristically optimistic. While he admitted that he would be very lucky to survive, he steadfastly hoped, right to the end, that his particular case of advanced cancer might lie on the right side of the bell-shaped curve of survival statistics. He famously mocked religious folk for their faith in supernatural entities and survival of the soul after bodily death, yet the views expressed in Mortality are just as wishful. ‘The oncology bargain’, wrote Hitchens, ‘is that in return for at least the chance of a few more useful years, you agree to submit to chemotherapy and then, if you are lucky with that, to radiation or even surgery.’ Over the years, I have diagnosed many patients with oesophageal cancer. ‘Years’

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