Literary Legislators.

• Author: Young, Michael

In praise of partisan writers

Christopher Hitchens' recently published indictment of Henry Kissinger rather too quickly overshadowed his Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere, a collection of literary essays produced over the past eight years. This was ironic, if only because Hitchens has so often mocked the former secretary of state's propensity for attracting publicity. Hitchens has sought, like George Orwell, to turn political writing into an art, his starting point being "a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice." In Unacknowledged Legislation, however, his aim is primarily to reveal the politics in literature.

Three things stand out when reading Hitchens' essays. The first is his attitude toward public intellectuals, the "unacknowledged legislators" of Shelley's In Defense of Poetry. Hitchens also invites reflection on the ecumenism of literature--good literature--that seems to water down the "feeling of partisanship" that so pervades his writings. There is, finally, something to be said of the Hitchens style, which can be characterized as relentless provocationthough within disciplined boundariesand bold willingness to attack others on their own terrain.

For Hitchens' insights into the duties of public intellectuals, turn to a forum on the subject that ran in the February 12 edition of The Nation. There Hitchens stated: "I've increasingly become convinced that in order to be any kind of a public-intellectual commentator or combatant, one has to be unafraid of the charges of elitism. One has to have, actually, more and more contempt for public opinion and for the way in which it's constructed and aggregated, and polled and played back and manufactured and manipulated."

In an essay on H.L. Mencken titled "Critic of the Booboisie," Hitchens goes further, arguing: "Populism, which is in the last instance always an illiberal style, may come tricked out as folkish emancipation." Hitchens cites Murray Kempton and Gore Vidal as examples of "radical critics," a more partisan characterization than "public-intellectual commentator or combatant."

The reference to Vidal, in particular, is revealing. Hitchens' respect for Vidal runs deep and the two share several similarities (beyond the fact that they call Washington, D.C., their "hometown "). Though considered luminaries of the left, both have mostly classical bearings, and are more comfortable with the game of ideas and the attractions of style than with the dictates of ideology-an...