Christopher Hitchens has written a review of SAIS Professor Patrick McCarthy’s latest book, Language, Politics, and Writing: Stolentelling in Western Europe, and it is an embarrassment to the genre. It reads superficially as the verbal (and by now proverbial) skewering one expects of Hitchens, but in this particular case it is his critique, not the book, that ought to be shooed off the stage peremptorilyNot having read this particular book of McCarthy’s, I am not in a position to judge it; I can only judge Hitchens’s methodology in attempting to review it. On the basis of past exposure to McCarthy’s ideas and the typical clarity of his exposition, however, I would be very surprised to find this book not up to par..

Hitchens’s modus operandi, alas, is to elevate several grammatical misdemeanors by McCarthy — such as his use of “hopefully” instead of “it is to be hoped” — to the level of such offense that we are meant to mistrust the arguments they frame. It’s not quite an ad hominem attack, but it constitutes a logical fallacy nonetheless; let’s call it an ad eminem attack (in honor of someone truly grammatically challenged who nevertheless has something relevant to say). Elsewere, Hitchens attacks McCarthy’s spelling as a proxy for his ideas — we’ll call this an ad homonym attack.

But what is truly gratifying is to see Hitchens commit the very same types of errors for which he reproaches McCarthy. For example, he casts the first stone when he writes that

… it’s not undue nitpicking to notice the repeated misspelling of important names—Salman Rushdie, Jesse Owens, and Brian Friel—even though some of these must be blamed on cretinous copyediting.

In which case it is not undue nitpicking to notice Hitchens referring to Francois Mitterand, not Mitterrand, and Sartre’s Les Tempes Modernes, instead of Les Temps Modernes. For such a short piece of writing, that’s a far worse batting average than McCarthy’s. If such errors are meant to be an indictment of the quality of one’s arguments, so be it. If they are not, Hitchens’s broadsides are pointless filler; a waste of my time, were I not having so much fun penning this riposte.

To see where such an approach to criticism can lead you, we can apply Hitchens’s stringent criteria for intelligibility to his own writing:

I was once as happy as anyone to sit with McCarthy and to discuss Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks or the ambiguities of Sartre’s Les Tempes Modernes. I still enjoy these pursuits, though they occasionally strike me now as comparable to well-conducted tours of Atlantis. Perhaps that’s why the cultivated guides have such a marked tendency to gurgle, as they make their appointed rounds.

So which is it — is he or is he not happy to discuss Gramsci and Sartre? The defensive word “occasionally” must have been inserted in a moment of unease, as Hitchens would say. The last sentence of this passage hovers on the verge of gibberish — why on earth would a guide to Sartre and Gramsci gurgle? Actually, there is one way in which this sentence can make sense, but it would confirm that Hitchens has the emotional intelligence of a drunk. Lawyers: Clearly, when I say Hitchens has the emotional intelligence of a drunk, I am not implying that he is a drunk, merely that he has the emotional intelligence of one. Similarly, If I were to say that Hitchens has the sense of humor of a Mormon, I would not be implying that he is a Mormon.If you’ve met McCarthy, you’ll know he has a heavy speech impediment, the result of a motor neuron disease. Hitchens seems to find in this suitable material for a cheap joke. If I am wrong, then he is far more careless in his choice of words than we give him credit for. I wonder which fault Hitchens would rather own up to.

Actually, I don’t.

In fact, I am left wondering whether there isn’t something pathological to Hitchens’s motivations. He himself clearly thinks he acts out of an allegiance to honesty and intellectual rigor for which he will gladly sacrifice friendships. But in this review, he merely comes across as someone in desperate need to be cleverer than thou. This is not so easy with McCarthy, who is probably the cleverest man I’ve met. This must have rankled Hitchens.

The result is that Hitchens raises so many pointless quibbles, all so easily refuted, that the refutations themselves run the risk of boring you. Here are just a few:

Wouldn’t now — with Umberto Bossi in political alignment with Silvio Berlusconi — be the ideal moment to revisit Gramsci’s concept of Italy as two nations, southern and northern? McCarthy repeatedly passes up such cross-references, and one can’t but suspect that this is because they might interfere with a settled attitude.

No. The ideal moment to revisit Gramsci on such matters was in 1994, when Bossi and Berlusconi first entered into political alignment. And McCarthy covered it then. Trust me, I was there. Then there is this remarkable passage:

[W]hile discussing the divorce scandal that ruined the career of Charles Stuart Parnell, so stirred James Joyce, and so greatly retarded the cause of Irish nationalism, [McCarthy] calls it “arguably Ireland’s Dreyfus case.” This assertion is plainly ridiculous, as well as anachronistic. Parnell was dead before the Dreyfus case occurred and was never tried for anything himself. The only possible analogy is the lamentable fact that in both “cases” (in my opinion as well as that of McCarthy), the Roman Catholic hierarchy committed itself on the wrong side. The defensive word “arguably” must have been inserted in a moment of unease.

So he agrees with McCarthy, then; he just took a lot longer to reach the same conclusion, and had to think aloud to get there. Hitchens really needs to find himself an easier target; may I suggest some recent speeches by George Bush?