'Ours is a useful trade'

I'll add this one to the pile of recent Hitchens love letters, which I devour with happiness. David Free reviews Christopher Hitchens' new book, Arguably: Essays. Take note, in particular, of the Twain quote.

Hitchens, especially when his blood is up, is capable of advancing poor arguments along with good ones. But we wouldn't want to be without his readiness to get personally involved. For Hitchens, the life and the work are thoroughly intertwined. His famous essay on waterboarding is here: the one in which he researched that procedure by volunteering to undergo it himself. Believe Me, It's Torture runs the title of his essay. In Vietnam he visits a hospital for victims of Agent Orange and emerges with almost unbearably vivid descriptions of the malformed children inside. "One should not run out of vocabulary to the point where one calls a child a monster," he writes, "but the temptation is there." It's a rare writer who can strike a note like that and also, at the other end of the register, make you laugh out loud. Ripping into waiters who top up your wine while you're trying to talk, Hitchens is brilliant. His famously close-to-the-wind piece Why Women Aren't Funny is here too. "Please do not pretend not to know what I am talking about," he says in that essay: a phrase that would have made an apt title for the whole book, if an unfeasibly long one.

Writing in praise of Karl Marx's journalism, Hitchens compiles a list of the great writer-reporters -- Zola, Dickens, Twain, Orwell -- and wishes that the word " 'journalist' might be made to lose its association with the trivial and the evanescent". Hitchens has helped that to happen, and we can now safely enrol him among those great names. "Ours is a useful trade," Twain wrote in 1888: "With all its lightness and frivolity it has one serious purpose, one aim, one specialty, and it is constant to it -- the deriding of shams, the exposure of pretentious falsities, the laughing of stupid superstitions out of existence . . . Whoso is by instinct engaged in this sort of warfare is the natural enemy of royalties, nobilities, privileges and all kindred swindles, and the natural friend of human rights and human liberties."