LITERARY LEGISLATORS

In Praise Of Partisan Writers

Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere, by Christopher
Hitchens, London: Verso, 358 pages, $25

Christopher Hitchens' recently published indictment of Henry Kissinger
rather too quickly overshadowed his Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in
the Public Sphere, a collection of literary essays produced over the past
eight years.

This was ironic, if only because Hitchens has so often mocked the former
secretary of state's propensity for attracting publicity. Hitchens has
sought, like George Orwell, to turn political writing into an art, his
starting point being "a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice." In
Unacknowledged Legislation, however, his aim is primarily to reveal the
politics in literature.

Three things stand out when reading Hitchens' essays.

The first is his attitude toward public intellectuals, the "unacknowledged
legislators" of Shelley's In Defense of Poetry. Hitchens also invites
reflection on the ecumenism of literature -- good literature -- that seems
to water down the "feeling of partisanship" that so pervades his writings.

There is, finally, something to be said of the Hitchens style, which can be
characterized as relentless provocation -- though within disciplined
boundaries -- and bold willingness to attack others on their own terrain.

For Hitchens' insights into the duties of public intellectuals, turn to a
forum on the subject that ran in the February 12 edition of The Nation.
There Hitchens stated: "I've increasingly become convinced that in order to
be any kind of a public-intellectual commentator or combatant, one has to
be unafraid of the charges of elitism.

One has to have, actually, more and more contempt for public opinion and
for the way in which it's constructed and aggregated, and polled and played
back and manufactured and manipulated."

In an essay on H.L. Mencken titled "Critic of the Booboisie," Hitchens goes
further, arguing: "Populism, which is in the last instance always an
illiberal style, may come tricked out as folkish emancipation." Hitchens
cites Murray Kempton and Gore Vidal as examples of "radical critics," a
more partisan characterization than "public-intellectual commentator or
combatant."

The reference to Vidal, in particular, is revealing.

Hitchens' respect for Vidal runs deep and the two share several
similarities (beyond the fact that they call Washington, D.C., their
"hometown "). Though considered luminaries of the left, both have mostly
classical bearings, and are more comfortable with the game of ideas and the
attractions of style than with the dictates of ideology -- an ideology of
both left and right that tends to exalt "the public." As Unacknowledged
Legislation continually makes clear, Hitchens has a rather quaint notion
that the public intellectual represents a vanguard of sorts. "The sword, as
we have reason to know, is often much mightier than the pen. However, there
are things that pens can do, and swords cannot."

Hitchens is of course right about that. And a good case can be made that
most great literary or artistic works were produced by individuals who were
out of step with their environment. Where Hitchens is less convincing,
however, is in so sternly positing an antagonism between the public
intellectual and public opinion.

The effective intellectual, even the radical, can also be the one who
manages, while daring to be different, to discern and express what the
public's opinion really is. For example, we may assume that in their
moments of greatest relevance, Vaclav Havel, Boris Pasternak, or Richard
Wright, "combatants" all, expressed what their peoples wanted to say but
could not.

Hitchens might not disagree with this, inasmuch as it supposes that the
credible intellectual is especially sensitive to the public's
consciousness. But this raises a second problem: What allows us to accept
that "intellectuals" have any greater feeling for the Truth than anyone
else? Obviously some do and others don't, but what criteria permit the
anointing of an amorphous assemblage of gatekeepers? Hitchens argues that
populism has become the "vernacular for elitism." Perhaps in some circles
it has. However, it is not particularly clear, on the basis of Hitchens'
guidelines, what differentiates "accept-able" intellectual elitism from the
elitism public intellectuals are supposed to combat.

A third problem is that Hitchens, who rightly assumes the public can be
easily gulled, underestimates its aptitude for indifference -- at least
toward public intellectuals. Often there is simply no discord between the
public and intellectuals, faute de combattants . Public intellectuals in
much of the developed world -- including the more luminous members of
Hitchens' literary pantheon -- often seem to interest a relatively small
number of people.

On top of this, much of the public is armed with a technology that allows
it to circumvent gatekeepers when defining taste, style, quality, and
social merit.

It is not so much that public intellectuals are unacknowledged -- which
they are -- but that they are incapable of legislating anymore.

But not to kill the beast too soon: What of the ecumenism of good
literature, which gains its resonance in, and must provoke, contradictory
sensations? Those in search of an answer will find few pens sharper than
Hitchens'. The reason is that he invariably allows art to transcend dogma
in his writings.

That may sound like a cliche, but one apparently not so readily embraced by
Hitchens' political comrades.

Propping up a favorite straw man, former Commentary editor Norman
Podhoretz, Hitchens writes that "Podhoretz is accidentally right, as it
happens, in maintaining that there is...a special ad hominem venom on the
Left, and an extreme willingness to attribute the very lowest motives to
those who transgress its codes." Thus speaks the unmade friend of Sidney
Blumenthal -- Hitchens was famously set upon by the left after he accused
the former Clinton administration strategist of being deceitful on behalf
of the president.

Whether Hitchens is describing T.S. Eliot, Rudyard Kipling, or Mencken, he
is often addressing ideological adversaries. Yet he is receptive enough to
the irony of history to avoid giving the transactions a second thought.

In the end Hitchens knows that what remains is that which we want to
remember. If it is any good, we will look beyond the more sordid trimmings.

This is what allows Hitchens, and many of us, to overlook Kipling's
imperialism, Mencken's martial Germanophilia, and Eliot's anti-Semitism in
favor of their achievements as artists or stylists.

As Hitchens notes in the essay "Something About the Poems": "In looking for
creative dissonance, we should attend to the long rhythms and traditional
echoes.

This essentially radical and critical task is made no easier by those who
prefer a philistine display of the appropriate credentials."

In Gore Vidal, again, Hitchens finds creative dissonances that provide much
pleasure. It has always been exotic that a favored line of attack against
Vidal has been to brand him "anti-American." Hitchens, who has actually
read Vidal's books, does a service in stating the obvious: "Yet it is
essential, in the understanding of Vidal, to know how conservative as well
as how radical he can be." The same thought comes to mind when rereading
Hitchens' account in an earlier book of his encounter in 1986 with Jorge
Luis Borges. Borges asked that compliments be sent on to Gen. Pinochet,
before offering Hitchens a gift in the form of a Dante Gabriel Rossetti
sonnet on man's inability to concurrently consider the real and the ideal.

Not surprisingly, Hitchens finds far less interesting those public
intellectuals who aspire to neutrality -- a bland canceling out of
extremes. At the end of a long and often scathing essay on Isaiah Berlin,
he writes: "It is also fair to add that he never broke any really original
ground in the field of ideas.

He was a skilled ventriloquist for other thinkers." Where the extremes are
bared, however, there is often a problem of quality.

In a lapidary review of Tom Clancy's Executive Orders -- elitism or not,
Hitchens reads both high and low -- he writes: "Clancy has become the junk
supplier of surrogate testosterone."

Hitchens' public style is suffused with well-honed paradoxes.

One suspects he enjoys the aesthetics of playing the erudite hack, the
classically trained essayist with nostalgie de la boue , the roaring
drinker who can cite volumes of poetry.

Yet a more significant, if not as entertaining, facet of Hitchens' approach
is that, though ferocious in his writing, he is even more so in his reading.

Rare are those sentences in Hitchens' assigned texts that are left
unturned, the passages that are not cross-referenced, the contradictions
that are not outed.

Half of understanding literature is reading it through the right person.

The cross-references Hitchens provides are always useful.

Eliot, some of us learn, based "a grave moment" from Murder in the
Cathedral on a doggerel from the early Sherlock Holmes story "The Musgrave
Ritual." Eleanor Roosevelt's reluctance to commune with the dead ("It's
rather a waste of time chatting with all of them before we get there") is
deftly linked to Hillary Clinton's revelation that she "channeled" Mrs.
Roosevelt in the private quarters at the White House. Tom Wolfe's two
novels, A Man in Full and The Bonfire of the Vanities, are compared, and
their similarities revealed as so striking that Hitchens accuses Wolfe of
running on empty.

Hitchens, the astute reader, is also a stylist, ever intolerant of the poor
prose served up by others.

Bruno Bettelheim is employed to make a point about Roald Dahl, but Hitchens
cannot resist slipping in that Bettelheim's style is both dogged and pedantic.

Why not? There is no reason why a public figure such as Bettelheim, even if
he was a psychoanalyst, should be let off the hook when it comes to
transparency of expression. Hitchens himself is usually transparent. A
terse comment on the aging Arthur Conan Doyle says more than a paragraph
could hope to on mental decline: "Once the reserves of scientific doubt
were gone, his sails would swell at the last zephyr of anything fraudulent
or inane."

There is occasional excess, but Hitchens rarely sins through
understatement. One can disagree, for example, that The Great Gatsby was "a
declaration of independence by American writing." What happened to Mark
Twain? And surely Herman Melville or Sherwood Anderson developed the
"noticeably native style" that Hitchens attributes first to Fitzgerald. In
an article on the novelist Michael Frayn titled "The Real Thing," Hitchens
goes overboard in associated references, writing: "The great secret about
the English rural idyll -- an idyll most harshly dissipated in Sam
Peckinpah's Straw Dogs -- is that the bucolic scene is very often one of
cruelty, surliness, and resentment...." He adds later that one of Frayn's
characters would best ponder Kierkegaard's view that, "The whole problem
with existence is that it has to be lived forwards and can only be reviewed
or evaluated, so to say, backwards." Does Hitchens really need to reach for
Peckinpah in that context?

Or for Kierkegaard, to arrive at the most banal formula about 20/20 hindsight?

These infrequent missteps nevertheless underscore the atypical journalist
Hitchens is. Competent polyvalence is a rarity in current American
journalism, as is, incidentally, trustworthy specialization. Hitchens is
among the few who can blend both, while sounding original.

In several of the publications to which he contributes, Hitchens stands out
against his colleagues. His articles in The Nation are islands of irony and
derision in a sea of Old Left earnestness. In Vanity Fair, Hitchens is a
priest to highbrow culture amid paeans to social shallowness.

There is daring here, and the fact that Hitchens has become one of
America's more illustrious journalists since descending on Washington,
D.C., two decades ago shows that the public, whatever its myriad failings,
has more than acknowledged him.