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Let’s Not Get Hitched

Verso Books’ new Counterblast series allows left-wing writers to lay into some substantial opponents – Bernard Henri-Levy, Thomas Friedman and Michael Ignatieff to name but a few. The decision to have Richard Seymour pen the self-proclaimed Trial of Christopher Hitchens is a natural choice, but not a good one. The man is also the author of The Liberal Defence of Murder, a book that identifies Hitchens and his fellow pro-Iraq war allies as an army of ‘useful idiots’ that ushered in a new age of American imperialism. Such rage (perhaps misdirected) has certainly carried over into this very personal attack.

Some of Seymour’s allegations, such as those of gross and repeated plagiarism, are fascinating and offer a genuine glimpse behind the curtain. Others, however, lapse into rank parody of the most sanctimonious kind of leftist criticism. Hitchens, it is argued, was indelibly marked by his father’s Toryism, his mother’s social ambitions, and most of all by the fact that his family were not impoverished (seemingly an unforgivable sin in the opinion of the author). Another unforgivable sin of Hitchens’ (and unshakeable fixation of Seymour’s) is his move to America – to leave Britain behind for the world’s number one imperialist super-power is too much for an ex-SWP member to stomach. Seymour sees red and so too will the reader – but a different kind of red.

It makes very little sense to have a committed Marxist write the book on a man who turned his back on the movement – his rage at having been abandoned by Hitchens blinds him to the possibility that the man may ever have possessed any virtue, or acted sincerely.The very personal nature of the author’s motivation neuters his argument and conclusions. Given Seymour’s treatment of Hitchens, one may be forgiven for wondering if Seymour really approves of or could accept a point made by anyone but himself and his fellow Marxists.

This makes it all the stranger that the writing style employed by Seymour exactly matches that of Hitchens. Florid prose, peppered with many words that would leave even the most intrepid sesquipedalian reach for their
Oxford English Dictionary. It’s almost as if Seymour learnt how to write by copying Hitchens, much as Hunter S Thompson copied F Scott Fitzgerald – an inferior workman copying his mentor.

If there is one thing that Seymour ought to have taken from his study of Hitchens, it is that there is real skill involved in the work of a polemicist. Trying to replace the argument with hand-waving and the criticism with invective is the mark of an inferior writer. Thus it seems that Richard Seymour is biting at his subject’s ankles, rather than his throat.

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