The Next Page / A conversation with Christopher Hitchens: How Pittsburgh Made Me

Pitt professor Colin MacCabe talks to his longtime friend about the subtle influences of Pittsburgh over the years

Hitchens in 1997, as a visiting professor in the University of Pittsburgh English Department.





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.'

"Everyone was supposed to understand the joke and then I remember a friend at school in Cambridge telling me that it was the only city in the world where you could wake up in the morning and hear the birds coughing. So I knew the jokes and I also knew some of the history. Particularly the Homestead strike, probably the bitterest class battle this country ever experienced. That's what Eric Hobsbawm calls it in 'Industry and Empire.'

"But I didn't actually visit Pittsburgh until you started teaching there in 1985. And I think it was on my second trip, when I stayed several days that I went out to Homestead and saw what remained of the industrial museum. But on the first trip I remember how beautiful the city center was.

"And I'll never forget my first sight of the Cathedral of Learning and someone patiently explaining to me that it was the tallest university building in the free world because there was apparently a bigger one somewhere in Russia. So now I don't know what the claim is or if they make it!

"I remember flying in once later, on a very calm, sunny Sunday. (I was coming from Miami, I think.) And flying over towards Pittsburgh -- it looked so beautiful from the air -- and you could still see that tiny smokestack a bit down the river.

"But probably my best memory of all is that view you get as you come through the Fort Pitt Tunnel and suddenly you see the whole confluence of the Monongahela and the Allegheny, and the city in front of you.

"I don't know of any American city that has as good an approach as that, unless you come to Manhattan by water. Maybe San Francisco -- I'm not sure -- not by road, anyway, I'm sure. You don't get as good a 'hit' from any like the hit you get as you exit Mount Washington.

"And then Pittsburgh seemed to have this very democratic atmosphere. Another thing about it, in a time when American cities have become rather homogenized, in various ways, Pittsburgh still has neighborhoods. And it may be with you that I went to Max's Allegheny Tavern, and you had the feeling that you were in a definite neighborhood -- German, I think.

"And this sense of region and nationality is confirmed by the Nationality Rooms in the Cathedral that houses everyone from Andy Warhol's Carpatho-Rusyn to Latvia, Poland and Sweden. So it is an example of an extraordinary melting pot -- a real city of diversity."





When I first met Christopher just after we had both left university (he Oxford and I Cambridge), we were feuding members of the left -- he a fierce Trotskyite and member of the International Socialist and me a rather milder Eurocommunist -- much of our talk was about politics. His first talks at Pittsburgh were all political in nature.

I remember the enormous shock I got when he came in 1988 and gave his first version of the argument that became his book "Blood, Class and Nostalgia." This was a deep and learned consideration of the relations between Britain and America.

I remember thinking that close friend as he was, I had underestimated his intellectual reach. It was the first moment that I realized that my friend was a major thinker.

Did he feel that the talk was such a significant development in his intellectual trajectory?

"Yes, I think that's right. I think I'd had the idea and I had written a couple of articles embodying the thought, but I think I was probably trying out my synopsis on an audience for the first time. It was a sort of taste test to see if one could get away with writing a piece -- not just of Anglophilia, say, or the differences between English and American language, or imperialism, or diplomacy and all the aspects of the so-called 'special relationship' which, be it noted, is a term Americans never use. Only English people do, and to a diminishing extent.

"But it was the first book to try and survey all of these things in one go. The sort of cultural underlay of the Anglo-American world relationship and the way that the United States became the successive power to the British Empire, as with some other empires too. Yes, it was my test bed -- my trial launch.

"The book came out in '91. About that time, I came to speak to a rally against the first Gulf War, the Kuwait war. Which was a very excited and intelligent audience, I remember. Pointing out what I still think is true, that there was something bogus about the original pretext for the war -- that probably there had been a carve-out prearranged."





Christopher's answer seemed a little evasive.

I pressed him again as to whether "Blood, Class and Nostalgia" really marked a change of intellectual gear:

"I didn't want to write another book that was purely political and/or polemical, which is what I suppose I was best known for up until then. I wanted to write about the discrepant Anglo-American literatures, showing that one does indeed stem from another, but that it is proper to speak of a separate American canon.

"Obviously it has a big political dimension, because the CIA is cloned originally from the British Secret Service, and in many ways bears that kind of impress, and there was a kind of cousinhood of class. But the book wasn't either political or polemical, but was an anatomy of this hybrid animal --the Anglo-American. The hybrid I know best, I suppose.

"It also shows something that people, because of the predominance of Anglo-Saxon influence, have a tremendous tendency to forget. How strong the influence that Germany -- more accurate to say, Germans -- were in early years of the republic and how many people of German descent there are in the U.S.

"It was even considered at one point that German would be one of the official languages of the colonies. And you wouldn't know that now. It's a fascinating thing."





I reminded Christopher that Bismarck, the most famous of German politicians, said that the most important fact of the 19th century was that Americans spoke English rather than German:

"He was very prescient in saying that. To this day, when the Census is taken, there is a space if people want to fill it in to say what country, what ancestry --motherland, perhaps, whatever the word is -- they believe themselves to have. The largest single group is still German. It's something like 50 million. English is more like 43 million. But a lot of people put Wales or Scotland, and that puts it over the top. And if you add Ireland, of course, it's a lot more from British Isles.

"But still. I notice it mainly when I'm meeting American soldiers. They have to wear their names on their uniforms. The number of German names you come across.

"Another of my favorite memories of Pittsburgh is the keynote lecture I gave at the opening of the Warhol Museum in 1994.

"As I had luckily spent a lot of time haunting Pittsburgh and thinking about Warhol as well, I think I came up with quite a clever synthesis. Which is:

"Warhol himself is born to parents who don't speak English. I believe it's true that his mother never learned it, reliably. Was a boy of few words and rather protected. Possibly slightly dyslexic and autistic anyway. Famously nonverbal all his life, monosyllabic.

"And is taken all the time by his mother to watch -- to watch ... I suppose it's to attend -- the Byzantine Catholic Mass practiced by the Carpatho-Rusyns. Who, though they live in a generally Christian Orthodox area, would be into the Roman ritual.

"And looking therefore, clutching mommy's hand, all the time at the gorgeous and ornate icons. And brooding on that, and the inference there is very strong, I don't think I'm originally pointing that out.

"But marrying it to Pittsburgh's very special contribution to civilization: mass production, of icons.

"I think that must be the correct surmise, don't you?"





Finally Christopher talked of the term that he taught as the Andrew W. Mellon Professor at Pitt:

"It was the first time I had ever seen a class through a whole semester, with a reading list, and a curriculum, and so forth.

"I had one graduate class and one undergraduate one -- the impressive thing about the undergraduate one being how many of the students were part-time, because of the outreach (I suppose I have to use the word) to the city. There were a lot of people who were coming from work for an evening class, which was interesting.

"Then, for a while, I didn't live in the city full-time when I was teaching, but as you remember, I did live part-time, and would commute to Washington and lived in Shadyside.

"So I got familiar with the buses, and the rhythms of the working day of the city as well. And its many taverns and restaurants -- including one that I still have a great fondness for, which is the Grand Concourse.

"So, probably of all the American major cities, it's the one that I've spent the most productive time in without living in it for more than a brief period.

"And it's been too long, I might add."

Colin MacCabe is Distinguished Professor of English and Film at the University of Pittsburgh, where he has taught since 1985 ( Maria Sholtis for her help with this article. He is co-editor of "True to the Spirit: Film Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity," just published by Oxford University Press. is Distinguished Professor of English and Film at the University of Pittsburgh, where he has taught since 1985 ( maccabe@pitt.edu ). He thanksfor her help with this article. He is co-editor of "True to the Spirit: Film Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity," just published by Oxford University Press. The Next Page is different every week: John Allison, jallison@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1915.

First published on February 27, 2011 at 12:00 am