A Glass Raised to Christopher Hitchens

It is cold and damp here, last night freezing fog, whited air and a feeling of stillness about the town even on a Friday night. An uncelebratory end of week, people hurrying to the downtown bars with their heads down, dutiful, headed toward expected inebriation but secretly already huddling beneath blankets in bed. I was similarly uncommitted-- a few hours out with a bunch of writers at a bar I never frequent, a couple games of bar pool back in the familiar digs downtown, no real competition, shots taken casually, no need for concentration and so no moment when the game itself began to come to me in a way that exceeded my own talent. Nothing to play for. And finally the blur of late-night television and my own warm bed.

Out with the writers last night, who are all imminently bound to their actual homes and families, all transplants who came here for the MFA and are soon enough bound back or elsewhere, we spoke of the smallness and provinciality of the town, its comfort and its embrace of mediocrity. I am not sure that such criticism is fair, though I am often the first to level such charges; this is a college town, but not a bad place to live, beautiful in the summers, comfortable and easy and cheap. That it is a poor place to be thirty-one and single and perhaps a bit more cosmopolitan than most is not the fault of the town, but of the fellow who stayed here too long. If there is too little to sustain a life and you stay, starving slowly of spirit, whose fault is that? I have been waiting for something or someone to save me, but there is nothing from which to be saved. There are choices ahead, and I will need to find a path, or make one.

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A couple years ago, I saw Christopher Hitchens speak at the Arlene Schnitzer in Portland. I had won a fellowship from Oregon Literary Arts, and they were honoring us before Hitchens read. The Heathman is across the street, and I had fond memories of the place-- years and years before I stayed there with my longtime college girlfriend for a night, and we ate dinner there in the restaurant and then had cocktails at the bar, and though I can remember little except the warmth of liquor and the happiness of the night, our future lives before us and the adultness of a fine restaurant and hotel exciting and easy, free of any intimations of the greater burdens of responsibility and disillusionment that lay ahead. We were in fact rarely happy, trying to maintain a long distance relationship at different colleges, our actual chemistry poor, all that was between us a mutual respect which finally was not enough to last. That night we forgot the struggle for the fineness of luxury and comfort.

And so with an hour to kill before Hitchens, I wandered into the Heathman, which was still nicely appointed, if less grand than in my memory, and sat by myself a table and ordered a scotch well beyond my means and looked about the restaurant and bar for-- well, myself, or who I had been. I was not there, nor could I find any couple like I had been, but I did spot Hitchens in a smart three-piece suit, his tie loosened and a little askew, his voice carrying to me, unresolvable except in the strident tone of conviction and confidence with which he was holding forth in speaking to a woman who leaned toward him, rapt and worshipful of his brilliance or fame or both. He was a little red in the face, and as he spoke, he lifted his glass to drive home his point, nearly sloshing his drink from the delicate glass, and watching him, a little paunchy, his hair gone to salted gray, almost absurd but also unapologetically-- alive?-- there at the bar, punch-drunk and chasing skirt only minutes before he was due to speak to a sold-out hall on what would be his final tour, it seemed to me that there was a lesson to observe, and I watched him there until he finally left fifteen minutes before he was due to perform and then followed him into my front row seats. He spoke, without notes, for an hour and a half, and was delightfully uncompromisingly polemic, and when I left that night, I had changed my mind about him. Hitchens was bully for war, explicitly misogynist, irreligious to the point of prejudice, and also, in the rigor of his rhetoric and the cleverness of his invective, among our most interesting writers. He did not bore, and he did not go softly; there is nothing faint-hearted or simpering in Hitchens. His death this week, from hard living that he never regretted and said he would not take back, is a loss indeed.

I do not write like Christopher Hitchens-- my interest in politics is personal, and as for my artistic aspirations, I do not wish to make arguments. But in the vigor of his pursuit and his embrace of life, Hitchens provides an example one could only-- pray-- to match.