In The Observer Martin Amis has written a delightfully rambling article about his dying friend Christopher Hitchens. Part personal essay, part book review, part literary theory, part theological debate, the article discusses Hitchens youthful sexual habits (“conspicuously pan-affectionate”), his “baffling weakness for pun,” the psychology of his contrarian opinions, and, most of all, his legendary and lethal wit. Amis writes “Lenin used to boast that his objective, in debate, was not rebuttal and then refutation: it was the ‘destruction’ of his interlocutor. This isn’t Christopher’s policy – but it is his practice.” Amis provides four examples of this destructive practice in action. I’ll quote my favorite at length:

The year was 1981. We were in a tiny Italian restaurant in west London, where we would soon be joined by our future first wives. Two elegant young men in waisted suits were unignorably and interminably fussing with the staff about rearranging the tables, to accommodate the large party they expected. It was an intensely class-conscious era (because the class system was dying); Christopher and I were candidly lower-middle bohemian, and the two young men were raffishly minor-gentry (they had the air of those who await, with epic stoicism, the deaths of elderly relatives). At length, one of them approached our table, and sank smoothly to his haunches, seeming to pout out through the fine strands of his fringe. The crouch, the fringe, the pout: these had clearly enjoyed many successes in the matter of bending others to his will. After a flirtatious pause he said, “You’re going to hate us for this.”

And Christopher said, “We hate you already.”

Along the way, Amis explains postulate what it is to be a rebel (“they give no deference or even civility to their supposed superiors [that goes without saying]; they also give no deference or even civility to their demonstrable inferiors”), defines the role of decorum in literature, and even makes an impassioned case for Hitchens to give up his famous atheism in favor of agnosticism. For those complex satisfactions, I direct you towards the full article itself. But for this humble blog post, I leave with these more quotable and immediately pleasurable items, Hitchens’s witticisms:

Ronald Reagan is doing to the country what he can no longer do to his wife.

If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema, he’d be buried in a matchbox.

There is, especially in the American media, a deep belief that insincerity is better than no sincerity at all.

It is only those who hope to transform human beings who end up by burning them, like the waste product of a failed experiment.