And Orwell would NEVER have walked into this one, Hitch

From the letters page of the Nation, December 27:

Washington, DC

“Bruce Robbins is entitled to his room-temperature resentment of me ["Prisoner of Love," Dec.6], but he makes a false allegation when he says that I have "repeatedly claimed Orwell's mantle." To the contrary, and leaving aside the fact that I don't believe in "mantles" anyway, I have taken every opportunity to disown this aspiration. My denial doesn't involve me in much immodest effort: Orwell suffered from censorship and hardship all his writing life and took a bullet from a Francoist while narrowly escaping another one in the back from Stalin's agents in Catalonia. My own life has been somewhat easier, and better rewarded. Moreover, Orwell wrote much better than I do and was capable of producing serious fiction, which I am not. Once or twice, critics and reviewers have been good enough to make a comparison between us, which makes me shy but which delights my publishers. As with, say, "Jeffersonian," the term "Orwellian" has only one proper attribution. The coinage "Hitchensian" is unkindly affixed by Robbins to the word "simplifications," but even if it were yoked to a nobler term, I just can't see much of a radiant future for it.”
Christopher Hitchens

ROBBINS REPLIES

New York City

“It's rare for a writer to stand up and say, "I hereby claim the mantle of X." The process of arranging to be seen in the light of some earlier writer's accomplishment is a subtler thing. One writes a book about the desired predecessor, for example, and discovers in her or him virtues one has reason to hope others will then see confirmed in oneself. This leaves no evidence that would hold up in a court of law. I will not dispute, therefore, Christopher Hitchens's statement that he has never sought the authority of George Orwell's example but has merely had that authority thrust upon him. The point of my review was that, whether he wants it or not, he doesn't deserve it. Both write very well. But as one learns from Hitchens's admirable book on Orwell, Orwell had better politics.”
Bruce Robbins