But though beaten and bullied, he was never buggered. By 10 he knew all there was to know about dictatorships. A precocious child, whose first words came out as complete sentences ('Let's all go and have a drink at the club' was one of them, allegedly), he was packed off to boarding school at eight – a strain on the family budget, but if there was going to be an upper class, Yvonne wanted her son to be part of it. Hitchens began to leave home almost from infancy. Afterwards, the Commander couldn't bear to mention her. When her sons grew up, Yvonne ran off with an ex-reverend and was found dead in an Athens hotel room – murder was the first thought, but it turned out they'd made a suicide pact.

'It is a terrible thing to feel sorry for one's mother or indeed father,' Hitchens writes, but there was much to pity. His mother – Yvonne – was disappointed, too: lively and exotic (with a Jewish background that she kept secret even from her husband), she needed bright lights and the metropolis, not the tedium of wifedom in the sticks. Brave, stern, laconic, conservative, his father – the Commander, as he calls him – had had a good war, but was shabbily treated in peacetime. Hitchens grew up on the fringes of the navy. George Galloway doesn't even rate a footnote. By contrast, generous space is given to the many writers, politicians and teachers he has befriended or done battle with over the years. His children are present simply to prompt a mea culpa that he wasn't, when they were small. His brother is referred to only in passing. Hitch-22 sets out to trace the growth of his mind, and certain aspects of his life are deemed irrelevant to that. Intellectual history rather than emotional catharsis is the rule here. England/America, left/right, gay/straight, literature/politics, Jewish/atheist/C of E: he's engagingly frank in owning up to all the schisms.įrank, but not confessional. 'I contain multitudes,' Walt Whitman wrote, and so does Hitchens. But in reality the doubleness is all his own. It's sometimes said that the author's doppelganger is his brother, Peter. This book tells the story of how that happened. But over time Chris and Christopher formed an alliance, joining forces to become not Christ (perish the thought) but Hitch, one of contemporary culture's great one-offs. Addressing an angry crowd one day, he was embarrassed by the warden of All Souls, John Sparrow, who slyly reminded him, so everyone could hear, of his promise 'to look in after dinner tonight'. Combining dinner jackets and donkey jackets sometimes proved tricky. On the other, he was Chris, picketing factories with his Trotskyist comrades and forever being arrested for anti-war protests. On the one hand he was Christopher, hanging out with the gilded Brideshead set, drinking fine wine and eating at posh restaurants. I t was at Oxford that he began to lead a double life.

Hitch 22 a memoir