For years, it has been easy to take Christopher Hitchens for granted, and now we are losing him. The incomparable British polemicist, contrarian, essayist, bon vivant, and bullhorn of the anti-totalitarian left has advanced throat cancer, and may have won his last motion in the debating hall and blown his last smoke cloud into the face of tyranny. Fortunately for his readers, Hitchens’s voice is not yet silenced. 

 is a massive, engrossing collection of essays produced over the past 10 years. Like his brilliant memoir of 2010, 

Hitchens made himself somewhat tedious from about 2003 to 2007 with his relentless defense of the Iraq War and his apparently spiteful flirtation with conservatism. 

 covers other ground. Those familiar with Hitchens only from his pugnacious television appearances and his Fighting Words column in 

 magazine will benefit from exposure to his literary side, especially his splendid review essays in 

. For those who like a little splatter, he can be just as brutal panning a book as attacking an apologist for fascism. He writes that, in composing the 2006 novel 

, John Updike gives “the impression of someone who has been keeping up with the ‘Inside Radical Islam’ features in something like 

,” producing “one of the worst pieces of writing from any grownup source since the events” of 9/11.

The essays on literature and literary biography are erudite and often very funny. Here is a précis of the poet Philip Larkin’s libido: “Larkin may not have been highly sexed in the conventional sense, but he was a heroic consumer of pornography and amateur composer of sadomasochistic reveries, which he often shared with his worldly friends Robert Conquest and Kingsley Amis.” Perhaps nothing recommends Hitchens more than his taste in literature. He returns again and again to W. H. Auden, Evelyn Waugh, Vladimir Nabokov, and Saul Bellow. If only more of our political writers read such fine stuff between columns.

A master of circumlocution, Hitchens writes with a spontaneous, understated, digressive style, orbiting a target with asides and allusions until it is all but lost from sight. Then, like Muhammad Ali, he suddenly stops dancing and punches with his whole arm. Two pieces in 

 exemplify this pattern: one on Gore Vidal (of the far left) and one on Patrick Buchanan (of the far right). At times all the ironical, wordy sentences and name-dropping can feel like obfuscation, as when Hitchens smirkingly floats this judgment of Hungarian-born writer Arthur Koestler: “It has been plausibly alleged that in his compulsive seductions—of Simone de Beauvoir, for one—he did not always stop quite short of physical coercion.” Well, did he commit rape or not? But more often, Hitchens’s luminous style and his development of an argument thrill. In an age of sound bites delivered to yawning members of mostly empty chambers, he actually persuades his listeners to change their minds.

This is particularly the case at the intersection of literature and politics, Hitchens’s natural home. Two themes preoccupy him: solidarity and totalitarianism. The former he prizes from his early years on the Trotskyite left; it manifests itself in an honor-bound and borderline- violent refusal to unlink arms with old comrades in places such as Kurdistan, Iran, and Cyprus. The loathing of totalitarianism in all forms comes from the right half of the Left—the territory of George Orwell, Hitchens’s well-chosen hero. (Few could have predicted that a writer as verbose as Hitchens would champion the master of the 12-word, comma-less sentence.)

No one writing today beats Hitchens in crushing an argument of moral equivalency between Nazi Germany and Allied Britain, say, or between terrorists who kill as many innocents as possible and American troops who try to avoid civilian casualties. In this regard it must be said that even though his Saddam-loathing case for war in Iraq was not quite persuasive, it was by far the most persuasive case on offer. He waited a lifetime for his Iraq—a chance, as the Spanish Civil War was for Orwell, to stand firmly against the forces of totalitarianism, alone if necessary. Reading Hitchens today, one clearly sees that he would do it the same way again.

At one point he quotes a novelist’s description of a newspaper hack who “possessed that opportune facility for turning out several thousand words on any subject whatever at the shortest possible notice.” Although Hitchens does not generally shy away from boasting, he is too polite to claim this mantle for himself. It is his. Reading him is like riding in a luxurious sedan upholstered in leather and cornering sharply: It does not really matter where we go because we will get there in style. And of course, we’ll let down the window for our host’s cigarette.

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For years, it has been easy to take Christopher Hitchens for granted, and now we are losing him.

A Singular Voice

In a little essay about Mozart that Saul Bellow wrote toward the end of his life, he expressed admiration for the prodigious composer’s facility with melody and harmony, and marveled at the way the music “is given so readily, easily, gratuitously. For it is not a product of effort. What it makes us see is that there are things which must be done easily. Easily or not at all—that is the truth about art.” If we needed reminding that Bellow—who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976, and every other major literary award besides—warrants mention in the same breath as Mozart, we now have it in his collected letters. This volume, well edited and ably introduced by novelist and essayist Benjamin Taylor, who spent years collecting its contents, is at once an autobiographical portrait and a work of literature unto itself.

Bellow (1915–2005) was one of the brilliant English-prose stylists of the 20th century, rivaled perhaps only by James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov. (The former he admired, the latter he scorned as “one of the great wrong-way rubbers of all time.”) He was born in Canada, but when he was nine his family moved to Chicago, where the tasseled dons of Hyde Park strolled past pool halls and loan sharks. Capturing this juxtaposition of things high and low became his unique literary mission. Breathing in the sooty air of the American city, Bellow exhaled hurricanes. He was never anything but a writer, except perhaps a scoundrel; his correspondents were mistresses, wives, editors, lawyers collecting alimony, fans, combatants, and fellow novelists, to whom he was uncommonly generous.

Early in the collection, Bellow provides a sort of mission statement: “A novel, like a letter, should be loose, cover much ground, run swiftly, take risk of mortality and decay.” He was responding to a criticism of 

 (1953), the autobiographical novel that was his breakout masterpiece. He later cringed at its busyness, and it is true that his mature works, especially 

 (1975), are more disciplined and refined. But alone among his novels, 

displays Bellow’s full, flexed musculature: He is like a prizefighter who swings in all directions and somehow lands punches every time. Beginning with that brassy, counterfactual declaration of independence in the book’s opening sentence—“I am an American, Chicago born”—the energy and vitality of Bellow’s prose is astonishing. Chicago is the city of broad shoulders, but also the place of giant strides, and after a few pages of 

, you are sure Bellow could tilt his hat, gather his papers, and walk the Magnificent Mile in just three or four.

The letters display the same extraordinary facility with language that characterizes Bellow’s fiction. In 1949, he complained of the kind of mail that had been arriving: “Junk, madness, haughtiness, injury. Enough to provoke a man to abjure all intimacy and withdraw to a tent as far as possible from sea-level, whence life came, and live on snow and hawkshit.” After gall bladder surgery, he observed, “The only prominent scar goes through my navel. Out of some sheer primitive magical conviction, I felt the navel to be inviolable.” Bellow frequently paused in letters to paint characters in his Dickensian way. Here he is on a university colleague:

He’s the archetype of the learned idiot. He’s a Harvard Ph.D., conservative to the flap of his long underwear, collects pornographic poetry, has a pistol range in his basement, knows how to mend a dog sled in driving snow and is an Admiral Peary manqué, is president of the burial society of Minneapolis, and takes vitamin B1 all summer long on the belief that mosquitoes will not bite a man whose perspiration is saturated with it.

A running theme is Bellow’s complaint to friends that he did not find writing easy: He may have blared Così Fan Tutte from the speakers as the words came, but he was no Mozart. The perplexed reader spends the entire volume evaluating this claim. Bellow was forever apologizing for being an irregular correspondent, and, according to his biographer, James Atlas, he tossed out pages of outstanding fiction because they weren't perfect. He disciplined himself to spend each morning writing, and finishing a book exhausted him. It humanizes Bellow to see him strain. On the other hand, the letters show that casual brilliance seems to have poured out of his pen. Imagine being a young Philip Roth and receiving these words in 1969: “I knew when I hit Chicago (was it 12 years ago?) and read your stories that you were the real thing. When I was a little kid, there were still blacksmiths around, and I’ve never forgotten the ring of a real hammer on a real anvil.” Whether or not Bellow found making art easy, he certainly made it look easy.

Atlas’s definitive 2000 biography, Bellow, is excellent but harsh, and Bellow will redeem himself for some readers here, in his own words. The letters bear full witness to his rakish nature: A serial philanderer, he married five times, and usually divorced badly. His expression in the cover photo of the collected letters seems to say, “Darling, be reasonable. It’s not as though I actually told you I love you.” But the letters also reveal his poignant longing for acceptance from his streetwise father and brothers, his tenderness toward his children, and a fierce love of his friends. It’s hard to stay angry with someone who composes lines like this: “My sister’s husband has had a stroke again, and this time is partly paralyzed. He lies in the hospital, all the sweetness of his character showing in the new softness of his face. Forgiving everyone.”

His letters to and about other writers are among the most fascinating in the collection. He upbraided William Faulkner for seeking to rehabilitate the Hitler sympathizer Ezra Pound. He maintained a workaday chumminess with Ralph Ellison, with whom he once shared lodgings. Evelyn Waugh he denounced as a snob, and Graham Greene as an anti-Semite. George Orwell gets some of the highest praise: “You hardly realize how deep Orwell goes because he is so clear about what he’s doing.”

Bellow famously wrote people from his own life directly into his fiction, sometimes infuriating them. He was an observer, not an imaginer, and the letters show that the price of his fiction was not borne easily by those around him. In one of the most remarkable letters in the collection, he defends this practice as the artist’s prerogative. Bellow placated his childhood friend David Peltz, who protested the appearance of a scene from his own life in Humboldt’s Gift, by saying, “I should think it would touch you that I was moved to put a hand on your shoulder and wanted to remember you as I took off for the moon. . . . You are welcome to all my facts. You know them, I give them to you. If you have the strength to pick them up, take them with my blessing. Touch them with your imagination and I will kiss your hands.” If you have the strength—that’s a big “if,” coming from a muscleman.

The entries toward the volume’s end are the most affecting. In his later years, Bellow was called upon to deliver many eulogies as his old comrades gave way, one by one. “It wears out your heart,” he wrote after his lifelong friend Oscar Tarcov died. As he grew physically frail, he tried to reassure his correspondents: “I do go out of doors and rinse my brains in God’s icy air without knowing whether the tears in my eyes come from the cold wind or gratitude to my Creator.” At the same time he stepped in as a paternal figure after the English novelist Martin Amis’s father, Kingsley, died. Martin Amis has written movingly about his connection to Bellow; now we see Bellow’s equally poignant side of this improbable literary relationship as he “willingly take[s] up the slack as a sort of adoptive father.”

In 1981, Bellow sent his close friend John Cheever, who was dying, a letter full of admiration:

"You were engaged, as a writer should be, in transforming yourself. When I read your collected stories I was moved to see the transformation taking place on the printed page. There’s nothing that counts really except this transforming action of the soul. I loved you for this. I loved you anyway, but for this especially."

The same might be said of Bellow himself. Brittle and brilliant as crystal—as prone to slice those who handled him as to dazzle those who gazed on from afar—Bellow attains that rare stature in which all that really matters is what is on the printed page. We no longer have him, but we will always have that.

 Edited by Benjamin Taylor, Viking, 2010. 

Cover photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

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Breathing in the sooty air of the American city, Bellow exhaled hurricanes. 

Hurricane Man

George Orwell (1903–50), the moral compass of the 20th century, had his own true north: farming and fishing in peace. He spent the last years of his life on the rural island of Jura, off Scotland, fighting tuberculosis and writing his sixth and final novel, 

 (1949)—one of the great books of our time.

In his diaries, Orwell (born Eric Arthur Blair) does not discuss his novels directly, but the terse, factual entries recording weather and the number of eggs given by the hens each day do offer a sense of his ideal working conditions. It is hard to say whether he craved distraction or merely kept his priorities straight when one reads entries like this: “Diary not kept up for several days owing to pen being mislaid.”

Orwell’s diaries were first published in 1998 as part of the 20-volume 

. The diaries are now available in a single volume for the first time in the United States. Written from 1931 to 1949, they remind us that most of Orwell’s life was not so pastoral. Instead, it was filled with dramatic adventures that fueled his writing and shaped his politics. The journalist George Packer has called Orwell an “empirical absolutist,” meaning that he hated to write about a thing he had not personally experienced.

The early entries cover Orwell’s days as a tramp, a period that provided material for 

 (1933), and his subsequent investigation of poverty in the industrial north of England, from which he drew for 

 (1937). This volume’s lacuna is Orwell’s experience fighting the fascists during the Spanish Civil War. Plainclothes policemen in Barcelona seized the one or two diaries that recorded those events, and delivered the work to the Soviets. Though the writings likely remain in the archives of the former KGB, Orwell transformed them into literature as well, with the extraordinary memoir 

Of greatest interest are entries from the periods of Orwell’s life that he did not turn directly into books. His World War II diaries are the highlight. Although all of the entries feature Orwell’s direct prose style, there are occasional hints of the novelist at work: “Characteristic war-time sound, in winter: the musical tinkle of raindrops on your tin hat.” And there are ominous passages that reveal his unusually clear view of the awful century unfolding, such as this one from June 1940 that prefigured his 1945 novel 

“Where I feel that people like us understand the situation better than so-called experts is not in any power to foretell specific events, but in the power to grasp what kind of world we are living in. At any rate I have known since about 1931 … that the future must be catastrophic. I could not say exactly what wars and revolutions would happen, but they never surprised me when they came. Since 1934 I have known war between England and Germany was coming, and since 1936 I have known it with complete certainty. … Similarly such horrors as the Russian purges never surprised me, because I had always felt that—not exactly that, but something like that — was implicit in Bolshevik rule. I could feel it in their literature.”

Orwell volunteered for military service days after Germany invaded Poland, but was turned away because of poor health. His frustration comes through in entries despairing of the uselessness of writing at such a time. Determined to contribute somehow, he eventually became a sergeant in the Home Guard and produced war propaganda for the BBC. This was a sharp irony, for he had lashed out in the past against propagandists who worked safely away from the frontlines. Recalling just such a passage from 

, Orwell spotted the hypocrisy and ruefully chastised himself: “I suppose sooner or later we all write our own epitaphs.” As the late Christopher Hitchens nicely puts it in this volume’s introduction, when Orwell discovers one of his own contradictions, “he tries his best to be aware of the fact and to profit from it.”

Yet self-awareness could not overcome an admirable, scrapping pluck: an unsuppressed, hackles-up reaction to events of the 1930s and ’40s that cast right and wrong into sharp relief. It was a time for standing up and taking sides. Thus, if Germany invaded England, Orwell vowed privately to himself, “there is nothing for it but to die fighting, but one must above all die fighting and have the satisfaction of killing somebody else first.” For a man who died battling totalitarianism with his typewriter, these words are a fitting epitaph.

 is a lawyer in Chicago. His writing has appeared in The Nation, The Washington Monthly, and The Los Angeles Times.

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When Orwell discovers one of his own contradictions, wrote Christopher Hitchens, “he tries his best to be aware of the fact and to profit from it.”

Michael O'Donnell