Christopher Hitchens’s Handwritten Notes in The Great Gatsby
On the heels of Baz Luhrmann’s heady film adaption, see the jottings of a writer who rivaled Fitzgerald himself, as Hitchens prepared for his May 2000 V.F. column “The Road to West Egg.”
{ link-o-matic }
“Fitzgerald’s work captures the evaporating memory of the American Eden while connecting it to the advent of the New World of smartness and thuggery and corruption. It was his rite of passage; it is our bridge to the time before “dreams” were slogans. He wanted to call it Among the Ashheaps and Millionaires—thank heaven that his editor, Maxwell Perkins, talked him out of it. It was nearly entitled just plain Gatsby. It remains “the great” because it confronts the defeat of youth and beauty and idealism, and finds the defeat unbearable, and then turns to face the defeat unflinchingly. With The Great Gatsby, American letters grew up.”
In an excerpt from his memoir, late contributing editor Christopher Hitchens recalls the first time he met Margaret Thatcher:
Within moments, too, I had turned away and was showing her my buttocks. I suppose that I must give some sort of explanation for this. Almost as soon as we shook hands on immediate introduction, I felt that she knew my name and had perhaps connected it to the socialist weekly that had recently called her rather sexy. While she struggled adorably with this moment of pretty confusion, I felt obliged to seek controversy and picked a fight with her on a detail of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe policy. She took me up on it. I was (as it happened) right on the small point of fact, and she was wrong. But she maintained her wrongness with such adamantine strength that I eventually conceded the point and even bowed slightly to emphasize my acknowledgment. “No,” she said. “Bow lower!” Smiling agreeably, I bent forward a bit farther. “No, no,” she trilled. “Much lower!” By this time, a little group of interested bystanders was gathering. I again bent forward, this time much more self-consciously. Stepping around behind me, she unmasked her batteries and smote me on the rear with the parliamentary order paper that she had been rolling into a cylinder behind her back. I regained the vertical with some awkwardness. As she walked away, she looked over her shoulder and gave an almost imperceptibly slight roll of the hip while mouthing the words “Naughty boy!”
Read more here.
“George Orwell showed how much can be accomplished by an individual who unites the qualities of intellectual honesty and moral courage.”
Christopher Hitchens on his lifelong inspiration.
Illustration by André Carrilho
All five parts of the Christopher Hitchens memorial—including speeches from Graydon Carter, Martin Amis, Stephen Fry, Douglas Brinkley, Christopher Buckley, Olivia Wilde, Salman Rushdie, Sean Penn, and others—are now online at VF.com.
Part One is here, the subsequent videos are in carousel below.
Photograph by John Dempsie/Associated Newspapers/Rex/Rex USA.
Wearing badass shades in Romania:
Happy 63rd birthday, Christopher Hitchens.
Photograph from the collection of Christopher Hitchens.
Without a doubt, this is our favorite freewheeling photograph of the late, great Christopher Hitchens, whose passing we can barely comprehend. So we turn to the words of Graydon Carter, who writes of this image in his touching memoriam:
“I once sent him out on a mission to break the most niggling laws still on the books in New York City. One such decree forbade riding a bicycle with your feet off the pedals. The photograph that ran with the column, of Christopher sailing a small bike through Central Park with his legs in the air, looked like something out of the Moscow Circus.”
Photograph by Christian Witkin.
“Death has this much to be said for it:
You don’t have to get out of bed for it.
Wherever you happen to be
They bring it to you—free.”
You don’t have to get out of bed for it.
Wherever you happen to be
They bring it to you—free.”
Kingsley Amis, quoted by Christopher Hitchens here.
