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Leamington Letters #9: Renaissance Men

17/12/2011

5 Comments

 

We took the train to London on Thursday to take up our slot at the Leonardo exhibition at the National Gallery.

As we left Leamington, we heard of the death of George Whitman, the founder of Shakespeare & Company, the wonderful bookshop and literary centre on the left bank of the Seine. When we returned, we heard of the death of Christopher Hitchens. In between, we had an underwhelming experience in the company of several hundred strangers, most of whom were wearing National Gallery headphones and were more concerned with following the audio commentary than looking at paintings and drawings by the man whose polymath genius prompted the coining of the term ‘Renaissance Man’.

It was a curiously dispiriting experience. Although admission was limited to half hour slots and the £15 pre-booked tickets were selling for hundreds on e-bay, there were simply too many elephants in the room. It was impossible to view the paintings with any kind of perspective and nor were we able to get sufficiently close to any of the drawings to appreciate them or their subject matter. Those with audio commentary would simply stand in front of the paintings, often with their backs to them, waiting to move on to the next.

There was, however, one brief moment when the crowds parted like the Red Sea, and for about 10 glorious seconds, I had a clear view of The Lady with an Ermine. It is marvellous.

The exhibition is unprecedented. It is the most complete collection of Leonardo’s rare surviving paintings ever assembled. It is, as everyone says, “un-missable”. Well, we didn’t miss it. And we did get a fleeting glimpse of greatness, of Leonardo’s genius.

But I will remember the 15th of December more for the death of Christopher Hitchens, a man about whom I have written before on these pages (30-11-2010), when I first heard of his illness. Whitman died above his bookshop at the age of 98: this is what they used to call a ‘good innings’, and he died surrounded by his books. Hitch, however, was only 62, the same age as I am, and he died in Houston, Texas, which somehow seems inappropriate.

Better writers than I have written his eulogies and his obituary. (There is a particularly fine piece, by his friend Ian McEwan, in today’s Guardian.) Here’s what I will miss, in no particular order:
    o   His wonderfully fluent, seemingly effortless prose;
  o   His commitment to dialectical materialism;
  o   His atheism;
  o   His contrariness;
  o   His posh voice;
  o   His drinking;
  o   His smoking;
  o   His work ethic;
  o   His erudition;
  o   His bravery.

RIP Christopher Hitchens. He will be much missed in this household, and wherever books are read and politics discussed.

5 Comments
Rick link
20/12/2011 04:44:49

Agree re Hitchens. Nor is it appropriate to have caveats, at least publically, about the recently dead.
Caveats: What do you make of his hatred of Clinton? Cosying up to the neo-Cons, to Bush and Blair and the rest?
Support for Iraq War, and implicityl for an aggressive US miltary response to so-called Islamo-Fascism?
Talk about the betrayal of the left?

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Max link
24/12/2011 03:24:23

Thanks Rick. I have many caveats about Hitch; more even than you have listed. I disagree profoundly with his support for the Iraq war, for example, and have said so. I'm not sure that he betrayed the left, though. I think his 'contrariness' prompted us to think through our positions more robustly than we might have done were it not for his voice. (The same, incidentally, for O'Rourke.) But I will miss him, and his prose, and his wit, and his voice. He was a Dreyfusard!

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parn123 link
24/12/2011 15:10:19

Just saw these comments after having marvelled at the continuous stream of Tweets in #hitchens. I have just dipped into a few of his articles and have become fascinated by this guy:
Teenage Trotskyist -> Balliol Bolshevik -> Soixante-huitard -> post-Prague Spring apostasy -> defrocked by the "lefties" -> American Patriot -> Neo-con.
So I've decided to get Hitch-22 as soon as my mother-in-law has finished the book she's reading on my Kindle, to find out more about Hitchens (or Hypocritchens).

But regarding the Iraq war - I came across this quote by him:
"As the Iraq debate became more intense, it became suddenly obvious to me that I couldn’t any longer remain where I was on the political “spectrum”. Huge “anti-war” demonstrations were being organised by forces that actually exemplified what the CIA and others had naively maintained was impossible: a declared alliance between Ba’athist sympathizers and Islamic fundamentalists….
My old friend Nick Cohen wrote scornfully that on a certain date, “about a million liberal-minded people marched through London to oppose the
overthrow of a fascist regime”. But what is “liberal-minded” about the Muslim Brotherhood and its clone-groups, or about the rump of British Stalinism, or about the purulent sect into which my former comrades of the International Socialists had mutated? To them- to the organizers and moving spirits of the march in other words- the very word “liberal” was a term of contempt."

Anyway, I'm going to find out more about what he really thought - if that's possible!
He wrote regularly in Slate, and they have assembled a list of his articles from 2002 to Nov. 2011, which you can access here:
http://www.slate.com/authors.christopher_hitchens.1.html
Just perusing the titles gives one a good idea of what he was interested in over this period. But it also indicates that perhaps as history moves on his stuff will became rather out of date reading for future audiences, unlike the writings of his friends Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, etc.

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Max
16/1/2012 02:37:37

Re: the commentary at exhibitions issue. The New Yorker (16.01) has a cartoon in which a visitor is standing in front of a painting with his earphones on. The caption/commentary? "No.62. Stand still, count to ten, slowly walk toward painting, stop, lean forward, count to ten, step backward twelve paces, cross your arms, stroke your chin, count to fifteen. Put your hands behind your back, step forward five paces, nod your head and smile, and move on to No 63."

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Sean
17/1/2012 04:44:50

Not sure how I have not read this entry before. Most remiss of me. I too already miss all the things you listed about the man. Especially his erudite atheism. A valiant, and valuable, front line soldier has perished. As is the usual course of these events I am now discovering lots of his stuff that I (shamefully) had not read before his death.

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    Max Smith

    European writer, radical, restaurateur and Red Sox fan. 70-something husband, father, step-father, grandfather and son. Resident in Warwick, England.

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