We've all read the book. Now lets see the film. Thanks to an online dude going by the name of MuggedByReality we now have an hour of young (well, 43-ish) Christopher at his most cherubic being interviewed on CSPAN by Brian Lamb on October 17, 1993.
In this first segment, he talks about his former editor, the historian Mad Paul "Spanker" Johnson, and the conversation is very convivial. The bit that struck me as prophetic in view of Hitch's own Road to Damascus moment (or was he visited by too many spirits one Christmas Eve?) is where he says this:
He's a cult on the American right. He used to be my editor at a British leftist liberal magazine called the New Statesman, once a very famous weekly review where we both worked. And he's probably the classic instance of the guy who having lost his faith believes that he's found his reason. In other words, a defector.
Did Christopher have any faith of his own in those days? And could that faith perchance have been Trotskyism? The question is interesting because today not only does he deny having any faith of his own, he also denies that faith has any positive aspects at all. In other words, an infidel.
Hitchens goes on to justify his lampooning Johnson's private life in his essay "The Life of Johnson" by explaining that he didn't like Johnson's lampooning of the private lives of the intellectuals he mocked in his book Intellectuals. This, I think was a bit of richly deserved tit for tat for Johnson, a bullying of the bully, which Christopher underlines by quoting that well known motto of English schoolboy fairness: "Tackle the ball, not the man."
Also in this interview, Christopher explains where that photo from the cover of For the Sake of Argument comes from, and he enthusiastically recommends everybody, but everybody to read P.G. Wodehouse.
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
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