Tory Burch's place setting. (image via vanityfair.tumblr.com)

Place settings at the annual Vanity Fair Oscar dinner party included a Zippo lighter engraved with a Christopher Hitchens quotation.

Jacobs.

So Kim Jong Il, Christopher Hitchens and former Czech president Václav Havel walk up to Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates of Heaven …

If you’ve been lost in the static of radio silence this past week, you must be thinking, “What a witty opener for that Upper West Side Christmas party!” Unfortunately, the humor is coarsened by the fact that the North Korean supreme leader, outspoken British-turned-American intellectual and Eastern European politician moonlighting as everything under the literary sun all passed away this weekend. We can’t help but imagine Mr. Hitchens being amused by the inevitable comparisons that one could draw between him and the company he’ll be keeping in the newsworthy obits this week: The pages of which will be filled with terms like “revolutionary,” “tyrannical,” “egomaniacal” and “possibly insane.” (And that’s just for Mr. Hitchens!) It’s dark humor, of course, but did the Vanity Fair contributing editor know any other kind?

So while we take time out for a bittersweet memorial (flip through to A17), we also try to find humor in the morbid absurdities that made up this week’s news cycle. After all, Graydon Carter’s publication wasn’t the only one to lose an employee: Politico’s Ben Smith, a major staple of the political blogosphere, surprised us all by announcing he was leaving for Jonah Peretti’s BuzzFeed. You know, the LOL-aggregation site best known for posting videos of cute seals falling asleep on couches. Yup, that’s the one. The New York Times will also be losing several key players to the company’s buyouts in the wake of the newspaper’s CEO, Janet Robinson, stepping down. Names include Sports of the Times columnist George Vecsey, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist (twice-over) Sam Dillon, Clyde Haberman and Andrea Stevens (to name but a few). Come on guys, Jill Abramson isn’t all that bad, is she?

Another big name walking off the field this week? Rudy Ruettiger, the Notre Dame underdog upon whom the movie Rudy is based. But, this time around, his head wasn’t held quite so high. The SEC (Securities & Exchange Commission), not to be confused with the unabashed oligarchy of college football, has indicted the former champion for a pump-and-dump scheme involving the once-upon-a-time hero’s own energy drink company, which netted profits of $11 million by artificially inflating market demand for its product, then selling off its stake before the stock inevitably took a nose-dive. We doubt the shareholders who were left conned and broke appreciate the irony of the catchphrases from the Rudy sports drink: “Dream Big!” and “Never Quit!”

At least one person is taking that latter statement to heart: Marc Jacobs, who refused to quit working under the Louis Vuitton label to take over the creative director position at Dior. The deal seemed all but done for the designer to move into the anti-Semitic shoes of John Galliano, a vacancy that’s been available since March, but the word on the street said Mr. Jacobs bowed out when Dior didn’t give him the luxury bags full of cash he was asking for. Of course, Marc-y Marc claimed to Vogue that couture made him squeamish and he’d rather focus on making affordable, ready-to-wear items. Of course, this is all relatively speaking, as Marc Jacobs’s long-time relationship with Vuitton isn’t exactly Donatella Versace doing an H&M line.

Which in itself is a joke (though not one we find terribly funny): combining the prices of a haute couture designer with the shoddy craftsmanship, missing buttons, and one-season-before-the-whole-outfit-falls-apart-ness we’ve come to expect from the cheap Swedish retailer. Thank Lisbeth that the store’s new line has a more age and price-appropriate line of punky goth inspired by Rooney Mara’s character in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. We hear multiple facial piercings pair really well with a dark top and years of psychological damage from torture and sexual abuse. Only $29.99 plus tax!

Come to think of it, you might find Vanessa Bryant combing through the racks—although we doubt the soon-to-be-ex-wife of Kobe would ever be seen in H&M—now that she’s finally decided to leave her NBA-playing hubby after catching him in a recent act of infidelity. Ms. Bryant stood by her husband when he was suspected of assaulting a 19-year-old girl in a hotel room, but this? This was just too much. (To be fair, he later apologized and settled out of court.) So whatever this new transgression involved, it was apparently bad enough for Ms. Bryant to decide that she’s through playing the Silda to his Eliot and breaking off their marriage contract to trade him in for a new player—along with what is sure to be a large settlement. It’s probably for the best: one more instance of marital infidelity and we wouldn’t be too surprised if Mr. Bryant found himself in the company of Messrs. Hitchens, Havel and Kim.

Christopher Hitchens, as he once was.

The last time I saw Christopher Hitchens was on a sunny summer day on Irving Place. I had just had lunch with a friend and was walking leisurely around Gramercy Park. Though we were near the offices of The Nation, where I had met Christopher while an intern, it had been years since he had occasion to visit the magazine. He was, he reported, just strolling to an event at the New School.

“Gallagher,” (he always addressed me by my surname) “You’re looking well for yourself.” I thanked him and made a facetious comment about taking up jogging. “I see you can’t say the same for me,” he observed. Embarrassed at the oversight, I apologized, said he did look quite well and asked how he was.

He replied in the way he always did when one asked after his well-being: “Too soon to tell.” (Reportedly Zhou Enlai’s response when asked about the lasting effects of the French Revolution, though Christopher thought that story apocryphal). And indeed, it was too soon. Days later, he was diagnosed with the cancer that killed him last week.

It would be an exaggeration to say I was close with Christopher, but as I’m sure is the case for many others, he felt important to me. Not only did he help me get my first paying job in magazines, I also adored his writing, and more importantly greatly admired the way he reckoned with the world. (The past tense here seems so paltry.)  As he was with many young writers, particularly interns, Christopher was far more generous with me than he needed to be.

For instance, on the occasion of Barack Obama’s inauguration. I, like the rest of New York City, it seemed, was heading to Washington for the festivities. I emailed Christopher and asked—though I knew he would likely be far too busy—if he would have time for a drink or two. He emailed back and said, “Why don’t you come by ours around 5 on Saturday for a cocktail.”

Lovely, I thought, it will be nice to have a quick, intimate drink. When I arrived at the Wyoming building, where he lived, Bono was in the elevator with me. Bill Keller was already inside, and not far from him was Alice Waters.

When I found Christopher, I asked why he hadn’t warned me. He replied that I was the second smartest Irishman he knew, and that he supposed I would have guessed.  I asked who the first was, and he dodged the question. It later occurred to me that he likely said that to many Irishmen. Nevertheless, I’d never been so charmed by being called second-best.

Another time, at a magazine holiday party, shortly after he’d written his slightly controversial piece arguing that women cannot be funny, we were discussing the delivery of jokes. I told what I then considered my go-to yarn. I thought he would be amused, since it involved some confusion between Catholic nuns and Orthodox Jews. As I unspooled the narrative, embellishing for effect, and even (misguidedly, perhaps) attempting accents, he eyed me with anticipation. When I reached the punchline, the reaction among the partygoers in our particular conversation was decidedly underwhelming.

Christopher took a sip of his Johnny Walker, pursed his lips and said with velveteen deadpan, “What you should do, Gallagher, is make that joke twice as long.” This delighted the rest of the group, particularly the women. I’ve not told the joke since.

Speaking of “Why Women Aren’t Funny” (the piece, not the notion), one of my favorite Hitchens moments was his response to a pedantic letter to the editor in Vanity Fair from a Stanford academic. The man, Allan Reiss, purported to have done a scientific analysis of humor the refutted Christopher’s claim. In response, Christopher conjured a handily deflating riposte—which turned out to say so much about his mind.

“Way to prove my point,” he wrote. “I tried reading Reiss’s letter in the open air and birds fell dead from the clear blue sky,” he wrote.

It was only last year that I found out, when reading his memoir, Hitch 22, that that line, or something very close to it, was how Clive James dismissed Leonid Breznhev’s memoir in the pages of The New Statesman, in the early1970s. It seemed to me, in retrospect, that when Christopher repurposed the orbiter dictum, there must have been, perhaps, four people in the world who got the joke: himself, Clive James, Martin Amis and James Fenton. It was the perfect encapsulation of his intellect: expansive, historically aware, confrontational, playful, esoteric and steeped in the Oxbridge Left of the late 1960s.

Of his political evolution, much has been said—and continues to be said in comment threads under his various obituaries—particularly by those who used his support of the Iraq War to legitimize their own, and by those who were angered and hurt by what they saw as his apostasy.

That he was wrong on Iraq is probably academic by now, but it bears saying that he is surely the only person to have supported the invasion and yet never disavowed Trotskyism. And that is a paradox worth considering when taking stock of his moral motives.

Since Christopher’s death, I’ve heard and read quite a lot to the effect of “they don’t make them like Hitchens anymore.” But in truth, it’s not as if there were once droves of writers and speakers on hand with the genius for language and argument of Christopher Hitchens. They never “made them like Hitchens”; he was a once-in-a-generation writer.

It’s tempting to end on a sentimental note, but I would worry about nothing more than what Christopher himself would think. So, it seems safest to employ his own words, written on the occasion of Susan Sontag’s passing: “Anyway—Death be not proud.”

bgallagher@observer.com

Hitchens. (Christian Witkin)

Christopher Hitchens died yesterday at the age of 62 after a long illness with cancer. The Observer was lucky enough to have his byline grace our pages, including this book review of Michael Isikoff's Uncovering Clinton, (note how he calls Mr. Isikoff's prose "Capitoline" -- “'rising stars' intersecting with 'insiders' all the way") and Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others.

"I never met him, and spoke with him on the phone only rarely, but from our slender contact I can tell you that he was an absolute professional: On time, spot on, and spotless. Every editor's dream," remembered former Observer books editor Adam Begley. "I would have used him constantly if I'd had the budget."

"His writing leaves an enduring and inspiring legacy to readers everywhere," said his book publisher, Cary Goldstein of Twelve, in a statement. "We are proud to have played our part in sharing it with the world.  He will be missed." Twelve is publishing a forthcoming memoir, Mortality.

Vanity Fair has a page with links to stories Hitchens has written in the past year. He wrote so much! But we would also like to link to two VF essays which revealed that even Christopher Hitchens could suffer through self-examination: the first isn't one essay, but rather a series, "On the Limits of Self-Improvement;" the other recalls  a meeting with the family of an Iraq War soldier who was inspired by Hitchens to join the military and who died in combat.

The more innocuous choice of drink would perhaps allow for a gentler Hitch, but by no means does the topic drain him of his standard vitriol. Naturally, Americans manage to screw up everything about the seemingly simple preparation of tea, and with this he is not pleased.

It is already virtually impossible in the United States, unless you undertake the job yourself, to get a cup or pot of tea that tastes remotely as it ought to. It's quite common to be served a cup or a pot of water, well off the boil, with the tea bags lying on an adjacent cold plate. Then comes the ridiculous business of pouring the tepid water, dunking the bag until some change in color occurs, and eventually finding some way of disposing of the resulting and dispiriting tampon surrogate.

If your intent was to get us to back off the brewed leaves then by God, Hitch, that "dispiriting tampon surrogate" line just about did the trick. Not that we would want Christopher Hitchens to follow his tea with sympathy. That just wouldn't be right.

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

As for the people praying for his survival and begging against his death, Hitchens concedes just this much to the AP: "I think it's a nice gesture."

''I'm perfectly sure that there is nothing to be gained from it in point of my health, but perhaps I shouldn't even say that. If it would do something for my morale possibly it would do something for my health. We all know that morale is an element in recovery,'' he said. ''But incantations, I don't think, have any effect on the material world.''

Hitch gets even icier in the first installment of his Vanity Fair series, Topic of Cancer, asking his readers to "Please do not trouble deaf heaven with your bootless cries." This sentiment, however, is rejoined by something of a caveat: "Unless, of course, it makes you feel better." 

So go ahead and pray for Hitch! Especially if your lifestyle bears any resemblance to his "bohemian existence," and you want to delude yourself into thinking that your excessive smoking and drinking won't lead to, well, cancer. Just keep on praying.  

In quotes from his memoir A Journey printed in today's Daily Telegraph, former British PM Tony Blair discusses his somewhat Hitch-esque liquor intake — ''Stiff whisky or G&T before dinner, couple of glasses of wine or even half a bottle with it" — his feelings toward successor Gordon Brown and his country's involvement in the Iraq War. The quotes about the latter subject come in the wake of President Obama's declaration that the seven years of combat in Iraq have come to an end.

I am unable to satisfy the desire even of some of my supporters, who would like me to say: it was a mistake but one made in good faith. Friends opposed to the war think I'm being obstinate; others, less friendly, think I'm delusional. To both I may say: keep an open mind.

A Journey comes on today in the U.K. and tomorrow in the U.S.

Rose, who had a health scare himself fairly recently, asked Hitchens if he would do it all again, in terms of drinking and smoking, knowing that cancer was a distinct possibility for him. Hitchens said that he would, though he also added that he "wouldn't recommend it to others."

I think all the time I've felt that life is a wager, and that I was probably getting more out of leading a bohemian existence, as a writer, than I would have if I didn't. Writing is what's important to me and anything that helps me do that — or enhances and prolongs and deepens and sometimes intensifies argument and conversation — is worth it to me, sure.

Hitchens called the press he's received since announcing news of his cancer "as near as I'll get to reading my obituaries," though his recent outpouring of writing and interviews on the subject of his impending death have certainly provided fodder for the pre-mortems.

   —Christopher Hitchens talks about his cancer diagnosis with Anderson Cooper (via The Business Insider)