from The Guardian UK

Amis on Hitchens: ‘He’s one of the most terrifying rhetoricians the world has seen’

Martin Amis hails the peerless intelligence and rhetorical ingenuity of his exceptional friend, Christopher Hitchens

Martin Amis / The Observer

amishitch

Christopher Hitchens, left, on holiday with Martin Amis in Cape Cod, 1985.

Spontaneous eloquence seems to me a miracle,” confessed Vladimir Nabokov in 1962. He took up the point more personally in his foreword to Strong Opinions (1973): “I have never delivered to my audience one scrap of information not prepared in typescript beforehand … My hemmings and hawings over the telephone cause long-distance callers to switch from their native English to pathetic French.

“At parties, if I attempt to entertain people with a good story, I have to go back to every other sentence for oral erasures and inserts … nobody should ask me to submit to an interview … It has been tried at least twice in the old days, and once a recording machine was present, and when the tape was rerun and I had finished laughing, I knew that never in my life would I repeat that sort of performance.”

We sympathise. And most literary types, probably, would hope for inclusion somewhere or other on Nabokov’s sliding scale: “I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.”

Mr Hitchens isn’t like that.

[ click to continue reading at The Guardian ]