As Blue understood it, Christopher’s chances of ‘cure’ or long remission were between ‘5 to 20 per cent’. But Ian told me that even the lower figure was too high – and about medical science he was never wrong. Oesophageal Cancer, Stage Four. And yet, as Carol Blue wrote in her exemplary afterword to Mortality:
Without ever deceiving himself about his medical condition, and without ever allowing me to entertain illusions about his prospects for survival, he responded to every bit of clinical or statistical good news with a radical, childlike hope.
Blue was right: ‘His will to keep his existence intact, to remain engaged with his preternatural intensity, was spectacular.’ But there was also this, from a piece about Nietzsche’s dictum ‘Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger’, which he showed me that October:
…it seemed absurd to affect the idea that this bluffing on my part was making me stronger, or making other people perform more strongly or cheerfully either. Whatever view one takes of the outcome being affected by morale, it seems certain that the realm of illusion must be escaped before anything else.
‘Nietzsche was perhaps mistaken,’ added Hitch, ‘don’t you think? Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you weaker, and kills you later on.’
‘I do want to die well…But how is it done?’
So says Guy Openshaw, a character in the Iris Murdoch novel Nuns and Soldiers (1980). Guy expires overleaf (and – for clear artistic reasons – offstage), but we are on page 100 by now, and the reader has had time to see what dying well, at least as an aspiration, might be supposed to mean. This is a novel by Iris Murdoch, so everyone is implausibly articulate, and ‘dying well’ is considered above all as a task for the intellect. Guy therefore involves himself in many testing dialogues with his closest male friend – about leavetaking, about non-existence – in an attempt, as Saul had put it in The Dean’s December, to make ‘sober, decent terms with death’ and so move on to ‘the completion of your reality’.
For a long time after it was all over I thought that this was the clearest flaw of my see-no-evil approach to a potentially fatal illness: death could not be talked about. But now I think, Talk about what, exactly? The famous aphorisms about death – Freud’s, Rochefoucauld’s – maintain the intrinsic impossibility of facing up to it. ‘Philosophy’ means ‘love of wisdom’, and philosophers have further defined it, more explicitly, as ‘learning how to die’; but the fruits of this learning have never been passed on to us…Noticing the first marks of age on an ex-lover’s face, Herzog identifies ‘death, the artist, very slow’. Death brims with artistic complexity, but its philosophical content is slight. Death is an artist, not an intellectual.
Death is nothingness. So talk about what, exactly? If you multiply a number, any number, by zero, the result is still zero; the answer is always zero. Christopher and I could have had long talks about nothingness. Would this have helped him? I still wonder. There is a particular photograph (which I’ll duly disclose) that makes me still wonder.
Torture in North Carolina
The historian Timothy Snyder has recently said that African Americans are all experiencing a form of PTSD – post-traumatic stress disorder (an ancient concept with many names). Snyder’s premise will no doubt be challenged, but to me it has the power of ‘a truth goose’ (the phrase is Tim O’Brien’s).
Christopher, in the autumn of 2011, came to think that he now qualified as a sufferer. His episode of traumatic stress didn’t last long and was self-inflicted (also self-regulated). It took place on ‘a gorgeous day’ in May 2008 in North Carolina.
‘You know, I still can’t believe you did that,’ I said at his bedside in Houston. ‘Why’d you let it happen? No, why’d you bring it about? Why’d you seek it?’
‘Curiosity. And there’s the pro bono aspect, Little Keith.’
‘Oh, sure. I fail to understand you, Christopher Hitchens. Jesus Christ, you must fucking love it.’
He couldn’t and wouldn’t claim that he didn’t know what he was getting into. The ‘agreement’ Christopher signed beforehand was quite specific, noting that the experience he was procuring for himself
is a potentially dangerous activity in which the participant can receive serious and permanent (physical, emotional, and psychological) injuries and even death due to the respiratory and neurological systems of the body.
The ‘due to’ clause in that sentence looks woolly and equivocal, but there is no mistaking a later warning: ‘safeguards’ would be in place during the ‘process’, but ‘these measures may fail and even if they work properly they may not prevent Hitchens from experiencing injury or death’.
To book himself in for this, Christopher made a number of calls. The first ‘specialist’ he talked to asked his age (fifty-nine), then ‘laughed out loud and told me to forget it’. Instead of forgetting it, though, instead of deciding not to risk experiencing death, Hitch persevered. Along the way he ‘had to produce a doctor’s certificate assuring them that I did not have asthma’ – ‘but I wondered if I should tell them’, he continues, ‘about the 15,000 cigarettes I had inhaled every year for the last several decades’ (which is more than forty a day). And then he got on a plane and betook himself to a
