Christopher Hitchens Gets the Last Word in His Posthumous Work, Mortality, a Final Glimpse of an Uncompromising Writer

The late Christopher Hitchens. Photo Credit: Flckr

The background

Mortality is the final work by the much lauded journalist Christopher Hitchens. A posthumous publication, forwarded by his long-time friend and editor of Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter, and with an afterward by his wife of more than 20 years, Carol Blue; it compiles his last thoughts and uncompromising comments on cancer, religion and his own impending death. Critics have responded to Hitchens final work with a second outpouring of grief and fond recollections, following his death, aged 62, in December 2011.

Mortality on mortality

The book is a frank and, as expected, blistering account of dealing with one’s own mortality. It is peppered with the everyday observations of living with terminal cancer: “Ordinary expressions like ‘expiration date’ . . . will I outlive my Amex? My driver’s license? People say — I’m in town on Friday: will you be around? what a question!” It was this expertly crafted and perennially witty commentary on the disease that won him the National Magazine Award for Columns on Cancer in 2011. Many of these award-winning observations are chronicled in Mortality. The New York Times wrote that the book’s first seven chapters are “like virtually everything he wrote over his long, distinguished career, diamond-hard and brilliant” and that the final chapter, compiled of notes made in his final days, is “vivid, heart-wrenching and haunting — messages in a bottle tossed from the deck of a sinking ship as its captain, reeling in agony and fighting through the fog of morphine, struggles to keep his engines going.” It goes on to say, “There is no ‘frank terror of oblivion’ in Mortality but there is keen and great regret at having to leave the party early.”

An ‘atheist to the end’

The Financial Times highlighted Hitchens’ treatment of his atheism whilst facing his own death: “spurred by his rejection of even the thought of a deathbed conversion: why, he asks, would any God, in the all-knowingness commonly ascribed to him, accept such a patently self-serving piece of hypocrisy?” The New York Times also observes that “more than a few of the pages in Mortality are devoted — as it were — to a final, defiant and well-reasoned defense of his non-God-fearingness.” Indeed, Elissa Schappel, in the September issue of Vanity Fair called the writer the “modern master of the polemic, butcher of sacred cows, and atheist to the end.”

Fondly remembered

The posthumous publication of Mortality has proved another opportunity for critics and fellow writers to recall their fondest memories of the late Hitchens. Graydon Carter noted in Vanity Fair, “Christopher had few equals in the sphere of spirited commentary” and The Financial Times’ John Lloyd remembered, “he was just cleverer, always more “on” than the rest of the literary-journalistic-political-media circuit, more ready to explain, recall, jest, correct … he made political writing (and broadcasting, and lecturing, and debating) into an art.” In The Telegraph, Carol Blue offered her thoughts on her late husband, and his work: “At any time I can peruse our library or his notes and rediscover and recover him. When I do, I hear him, and he has the last word. Time after time, Christopher has the last word.”