l i f e o f t h e p e n

Agency for the resources he needed to do his job. Even as he won laurels as a writer, he reacted to even the mildest criticism with ‘fits of rage, distress, or grief bordering on depression’. Domosławski’s exploration of the fear and insecurity that haunted Kapuściński’s success tells us more about what it was really like to be him than any number of tall warzone tales.

The book is a hefty 456 pages, but worth the effort. In one passage Hanna Krall, the first lady of Polish reportage, sums up the riddle of Kapuściński the Chameleon. ‘Every time he came back from a new reporting trip, I never knew who I was talking to,’ she recalled. ‘A Bolivian guerrilla? An Ethiopian revolutionary? A Shi’ite fundamentalist?’ Artur Domosławski unmasks the man behind his many myths. To order this book for £20, see the Literary Review bookshop on page 13

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n i c k c oh e n

Extinction’s Alp ortality By Christopher Hitchens (Atlantic Books 240pp £10.99)

Defending Philip Larkin from his crit- ics, Christopher Hitchens said that readers loved him because he understood everyday suffering. He mapped ‘decaying communities, old people’s homes, housing estates and clinics’ better than most social democrats. While dying is often referred to as ‘going down hill’, Larkin, Hitchens saw, realised that debilitation is not an easy glide to oblivion but an exhausting climb of ‘extinction’s alp’.

Hitchens’s account of his climb to extinction is Larkinesque, and not only because his sentences stay in the mind as firmly as good poetry. Hitchens maps the world of intensive care. Not without regret, he dismisses those who pretend they can soften its horrors, including perhaps his younger self. A heart-breaking final chapter contains quotations from great writers that he scrawled as material for an essay he would never live to write. As the pneumonia brought on by oesophageal cancer overwhelmed him, Hitchens recalled Larkin’s reprimand, in ‘Aubade’, of atheists who believe that stoicism will see them through:

And specious stuff that says No rational being Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing That this is what we fear – no sight, no sound, No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, Nothing to love or link with, The anaesthetic from which none come round.

‘Fair enough in one way,’ Hitchens writes. ‘Atheists ought not to be offering consolation.’ Notice that he did not write ‘false consolation’, as most of us would. Mortality is an argument against comforting cliché, among which the notion that cancer sufferers are ‘fighting’ their tumours outdoes even ‘going down hill’. Hitchens does not feel like a warrior. If only he were like a soldier in battle or a revolutionary on the barricades, he thinks. If only he were suffering for a purpose. But you cannot fight when you are ‘swamped with passivity and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water’. Nor is one surprised to learn that Nietzsche had not experienced chronic illness when he offered his ‘what does not kill me makes me stronger’ for healthy men and women to quote until they learned better. As for purpose: in the best and bleakest line in the book, Hitchens reflects, ‘To the dumb question “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: “Why not”?’

His brio is hard to credit when you imagine Hitch struggling from his bed, his body battered by radiation treatments and chemotherapy, his voice vanishing, his hair going, and his weight collapsing, so that he can write one last time. But write he must, not least because he is now in a position to put Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s theory about five stages of grief to the test. You must know the drill. From ‘denial’ we go to ‘anger’ at our illness, to ‘bargaining’ for a few more years before ‘depression’ sets in. It lasts until we reach the rapture of ‘acceptance’ and repeat Kübler-Ross’s formulation: ‘It’s going to be okay. I can’t fight it, I may as well prepare for it.’ Even when he was in his prime, Hitchens would have bristled at the quasi-religious notion of ‘acceptance’. When he is dying, he notices that KüblerRoss’s tripping across the stages omits the ‘gnawing sense of waste’, the powerlessness, the boredom and the pain.

Hitchens cannot avoid the most popular producer of deathly clichés – nor, given the disputes of his life, does he wish to. Hardline believers in Larkin’s ‘vast motheaten musical brocade/Created to pretend we never die’ took to the Internet to celebrate Hitchens’s cancer as divine punishment for his impiety. More compassionate theologians offered Hitchens sincere sympathy and prayers for his redemption. They cannot have been surprised that they merely provided him with a reason to expand upon the old freethinkers’ point that a believer is an atheist about every

MA in biography

Consistently rated ‘excellent’ by external examiners and inspectors The course is taught by Jane Ridley and will be based in London. Available full-time (12 months) or part-time,

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