Christopher Hitchens: One Last Eulogy from his Wife

I knew Christopher when he was still married to Eleni Meliagrou, a Cypriot hothead who matched Melina Mercouri for meteoric highs & lows, often just moments apart. I'd met Christopher through my wife, Marilyn, who was friends with Eleni's good friend Marina Papadapoulos, whose husband Nikos worked at the Greek Embassy in Washington. They had just moved over from the UK in search of journalism that would pay, an exodus that started with Margaret Thatcher's ascendancy to the Prime Minister's position. Christopher wrote for The New Statesman, a venerable Labour rag and for The Nation, a venerable Democrat rag stateside. When I met him in '82, he was doing piecework and living in a cramped walk-up apt. on Capitol Hill, a very uncomfortable existence.

We became friends and he and I shared ideas and books---just recently I found a copy of Orwell's Homage to Catalonia with one of his photos attached with a paper clip---he was a rabid Orwell fan. Anyhow, Christopher used to have lunches from time to time and we'd exchange political anecdotes of our existences---I had just finished about ten years overseas as an FSO in four different countries & spoke and read Arabic, so we talked a lot about Iran and Israel---he was ardently pro-Palestinian before he discovered his Polish grandmother was Jewish. I would pay for the drinks & he would be his witty, charming self. The range of his knowledge was awesome and his anecdotes laced with hilarious observations on the irony or sheer silliness of the subject matter. I could recount our Christmas dinners with this giant personality and public intellectual, and the visits to our home where he admired our gorgeous Abyssinian cat ["The most beautiful creature I have ever seen" after he once peered at Rosalita through a boozy haze for 5 minutes] and demolished our Dewar's. Suffice it to say, I missed him after our paths parted and I won't be meeting his like again.

I only met Eleni a few times before she & Christopher became estranged. When he remarried Ms. Blue and moved to LA, it seems he graduated from a very difficult person to a much more supportive one & his career bloomed accordingly. The article in The Telegraph conveys very much of his wit, though when I knew him, his joie de vivre was very much lacking because of his marital discord. De mortuis nil nisi bonum.