The Next Page / A conversation with Christopher Hitchens: How Pittsburgh Made Me
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In April of last year I drove down to stay with my old friend Christopher Hitchens in Washington. He had just received press copies of his memoir "Hitch-22" and I stayed up all night reading it. The next morning I told him that the first two chapters on his mother and father were among the most affecting prose that I had ever read in English. However I couldn't resist adding that there was a terrible omission from the book.
"And what's that?" said Christopher with what one can only call a menacing tone.
"You don't talk about Pittsburgh," I protested.
Those who have followed Christopher Hitchens' career as one of the most controversial and polemical writers of our time will know that utterances like I was wrong or even You've got a point there are fundamentally alien to his nature.
But he immediately said, "Yes, that is a mistake."
For over a decade -- from 1985 when he first came to speak in the English Department to 1997 when the department made him the Visiting Mellon Professor of English, his first academic appointment -- Christopher was a regular visitor to Pittsburgh and, in effect, an honorary member of the University of Pittsburgh. I knew in what affection he held both the city and university and was delighted when he said that he would soon make good his error.
Sadly it was only weeks later that he was diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus. But when I went to visit him a few weeks ago, he insisted that we reminisce about the Steel City.
Ill as he is, Christopher maintains a punishing writing schedule, composing a weekly column for Slate and writing regularly for both The Atlantic and Vanity Fair.
It was while he was correcting the proofs of a Vanity Fair column on Egypt that he talked of his first memories of Pittsburgh:
"Well, they're pre-living in America because when I was a kid, I would say everyone my age had heard about Pittsburgh, because it was still a staple of comedy. I remember Bob Hope doing one of his routines, and he lit a cigar or something. He was batting away the fumes, and he said: 'Jesus, this is like living in Pittsburgh --if you call that living.'
First Published February 27, 2011 12:00 am
