Holy Hitch
Christopher Hitchens, the most famous atheist in the world, was a wonderful, generous godfather to
My godfather was once the most famous atheist in the world. Although Richard Dawkins had a rival claim, there was a time when no one did celebrity scepticism better than my godfather, Christopher Hitchens. Strange to say, but I think of him particularly at Christmas.
Funnily enough, he actively lobbied for the job as my spiritual guardian.
It was the late 1980s and although he hadn’t quite wrestled himself into full atheism, he was belligerently agnostic enough for it to come as a surprise to my mother when he petitioned her: ‘I remember he focused me with those dissipated blue eyes, which bulged at moments of great intensity, and said, “Please, Bridge, let me be her godfather. I will be such a good one.” ’
Hitchens’s career as a godfather was a curate’s egg. Ironically enough, he always came good at spiritual milestones.
He bought my presents at Tiffany’s. For my christening, he gave me an engraved silver rattle. For my confirmation, he gave me a beautiful, silver chain necklace, as well as his book, The Missionary Position.
He inscribed his polemic about Mother Teresa with the words, ‘To my dearest goddaughter Alice, I congratulate you on joining the Church and hope, with this tome, to give some context.’
The Hitch had an instinctive mistrust of institutions. This was intensified when he was pulled into a police van for snogging his androgynous girlfriend (later wife) Eleni Meleagrou outside Notting Hill Gate tube station in the ’70s, on the grounds that they were a gay couple.
Still he adored pomp and had a soft spot for ceremony. His memorial service at the Cooper Union in New York in 2012, four months after his death, aged 62, was everything he would have wanted.
Martin Amis eulogised about his campaigning zeal, reminding us of my godfather’s favourite third-person
catchphrase, ‘Enter the Hitch’. Then Stephen Fry praised his erudition.
At the after-party, the actress Olivia Wilde, the daughter of his great friends Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, told me, ‘The last time I saw Christopher, he said he counted his greatest achievement was to be my babysitter.’
I saw my godfather only sporadically over the years, when he came back to London. ‘The Hitch has landed’ was the cry around town. We generally met for a cocktail at the Savoy.
One of the last times I saw him was on a freezing winter night. ‘Brass monkeys,’ he said. This was a Hitchism; not only had his father been a naval officer but Hitchens prided himself on being able to speak exclusively in aphorism or cliché if required. It was a skill honed in ‘The Sock’ – Martin Amis’s squalid flat.
For all the biting cold, the Hitch wore no overcoat – just a white linen suit. It was his habit to buy one a year and wear it pretty much exclusively for 12 months.
‘It is because of the pelt,’ he explained. ‘I am lucky to need neither underclothes nor outer ones, as hair covers most of my body’s surface.’
He was very proud of the pelt, explains his great friend, journalist Emma Soames: ‘Three buttons were always left open on his shirts. He thought it fantastically sexy.’
Emma, who had been a girlfriend of Amis, remembers her loutish brothers, Nicholas, Jeremy and Rupert, flinging poor Hitch into the rush of the mill where her mother Lady Soames lived: ‘He didn’t mind about the white suit but he clutched his breast, crying, “My address book!”’
Hitch was deeply social. A Bollinger Bolshevik, he was also a great one for high society, in the early days, despite his serious Trot friends.
He priggishly dumped Anna Wintour, not because he disagreed with her political opinions but because he said she had none.
My uncle, former Conservative MP David Heathcoat-amory, remembers they used to say the Hitch’s most unlikely remark would be: ‘I don’t care how rich they are. I am not going to their party.’
The last time I spoke to the Hitch was in early 2011, just as the Arab Spring was really kicking off. Though seriously ill, he was in a bustle of excitement, at his most bellicose (those bulging eyes) and controversial.
‘Everything he said was equivocal,’ Martin Amis writes in his new book, Inside Story, much of it about the Hitch. ‘Flippant and heartfelt, ironic and serious, whimsical and steely. Even his self-mythologising was also part of a project of self-deflation.’
Though often capricious and contrarian, the Hitch was not a ditherer. He often nailed his beliefs to the door, only to tear them down, but they were no less devoutly believed for that. And who wouldn’t pray for a godfather with that sort of conviction in times like these?