Arguably!

Our book today is that fat tome from 2011, Arguably, a big bright collection of the deadline pieces and miscellaneous hackwork of the late Christopher Hitchens, who actually passed the most feared of authorial meridians and became late in the hanging interval between the book’s appearances in hardcover and its re-issue in paperback (it’s maybe out of delicacy over this fact that his publisher issued the hardcover with his puffy face staring out at the reader and the paperback with just a simple yellow background). For the better part of 50 years, Hitchens never stopped writing for longer than four days at a time, so many, many volumes the size of this one could be assembled even beyond the four books of collected occasional prose that preceded this one. Much like with Dumas and Balzac, we may never actually see the Definitive Collected Hitchens.

I’d subscribe to it, if it were ever proposed. There’s no denying the man could write entertaining and thought-provoking prose, and Arguably collects quite a bit of it, harvested from Hitchens’ usual patches in The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, and the London Guardian, among other venues. A great proportion of these pieces began life as book reviews (the best of them, in fact; the more topical and invariably weaker pieces written for Slate, for instance, require more footnoting to be interesting than any author should want), and one of the most vivid things Arguably does is something it has in common with most of the other canonical works of our Ink Chorus: it reminds you just how vastly and indefatigably bookish the author was. A prodigious amount of reading is distilled in these nearly 800 pages. Take as a representative example one luscious paragraph from a 2006 Atlantic review of a Jessica Mitford letter-collection:

For a true appreciation of the character and style of Jessica Mitford, it is necessary to picture Lady Bracknell not only abandoning the practice of arranging marriages for money but also aligning herself with the proletariat, while still managing to remain a character in a Wilde play. The carrying cut-glass voice; the raised eyebrow of disdain that could (like that of P. G. Wodehouse’s forbidding Roderick Spode) “open an oyster at sixty paces”; the stoicism born of stern ancestral discipline yet, withal, a lethal sense of the “ridic,” as Ms. Mitford was fond of putting it.

There are also the familiar Hitchens hobby-horses, of course. By the time he reached 60 Hitchens had what one under-appreciated wit used to refer to as “God on the brain,” and that obsession – which generated a heap of money for the author of God is Not Great – seeps into a large number of these pieces – always entertainingly, yes, but not always exactly on point, as in this 2002 review of a book called Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy:

First, the words of Genesis are unambiguous in placing lesser creatures at our mercy and at our disposal. Second, the crucial verses do not mention the marvelous creation of dinosaurs and pterodactyls, either because the semi-literate scribes who gathered the story together were unaware of these prodigies of design or because (shall I hint?) the Creator was unaware of having made them. The magnificence of the marsupials is likewise omitted. Even more to the point, although “everything creeping that creepeth upon the earth” is cited in general, God does not explicitly seek the credit for rates, flies, cockroaches, and mosquitoes. Most important of all, there is no mention of the mind-warping variety and beauty and complexity of the microorganisms. Again, either the scribes didn’t know about viruses and bacteria, or the Creator didn’t appreciate with how lavish a hand he had unleashed life on the only planet in his solar system that can manage to support it.

And as with any feast of pieces like this, there’s some subtle opinion-shaping going on even beyond the tactical selection of the pieces themselves. Anybody writing as much as Hitchens did can hit a dull patch, a deadline piece that simply won’t cohere – “I just can’t get it to take a shine,” one such deadline-artist used to say on the rare occasions when it happened – and in service to his ego as much as to his readers, Hitchens has quietly excluded some of those dull patches from these pages (although not quite as many as he perhaps should have – the infamously idiotic “Why Women Aren’t Funny” is defiantly reprinted here). And some of the opinion-shaping happens in plain view, as in the piece “Wine Drinkers of the World, Unite” that he blurted out in 30 minutes for Slate back in 2008. The instigation is one we’re all familiar with: the over-solicitous restaurant waiter who interrupts “the feast of reason and the flow of soul that was our chat” in order to re-fill everybody’s wine glasses. The gesture moves Hitchens to high dudgeon: “And what I want to know is this: How did such a barbaric custom get itself established, and why on earth do we put up with it?”:

It completely usurps my prerogative if I am a host. (“Can I refill your glass? Try this wine – I think you may care for it.”) It also tends to undermine me as a guest, since at any moment when I try to sing for my supper I may find an unwanted person lunging carelessly into the middle of my sentence. If this person fills the glasses unasked, he is a boor as described above. If he asks permission of each guest in turn – as he really ought to do, when you think about it – then he might as well pull up a chair and join the party. The nerve of it!

The opinion-shaping is at its least subtle in the peroration’s closing line: “Next time anyone offers to interrupt your conversation and assist in the digestion of your meal and the inflation of your check, be very polite but very firm and say that you would really rather not.” Witnesses at that restaurant that evening won’t, to put it mildly, recall the “very polite” part.

But such instances of venal mirror-adjusting are (surprisingly?) rare in Arguably. In fact, the tone throughout hints at new rhetorical powers Hitchens never got a chance to develop. And there are masterpieces liberally scattered throughout, like his brutally honest long review of his good friend’ Martin Amis’ book Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, or invigorating re-imagining of the Ten Commandments, or his fantastic pieces on Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh, and of course his beloved P. G. Wodehouse. There’s stirring prose about Hitler, Edmund Burke, and even Harry Potter. And there’s a short 2008 piece called “Prisoner of Shelves” that will be instantly familiar to any of Hitchens’ fellow bookworms.

It’s a collection that improves in the estimation as time goes on, not as finished as God is Not Great but not as narrowly ranting either, a great and generous grab-bag of feisty ruminations. It goes on the same shelf as like-minded doorstops such as United States, Enemies of Promise, Nothing if Not Critical, and even, I grudgingly admit, John Updike’s Odd Jobs.