Hitch-22: A Memoir by Christopher Hitchens

Blake Morrison is fascinated by the many contradictions in the life of Christopher Hitchens

It was at Oxford that he began to lead a double life. On the one hand he was Christopher, hanging out with the gilded Brideshead set, drinking fine wine and eating at posh restaurants. On the other, he was Chris, picketing factories with his Trotskyist comrades and forever being arrested for anti-war protests. Combining dinner jackets and donkey jackets sometimes proved tricky. Addressing an angry crowd one day, he was embarrassed by the warden of All Souls, John Sparrow, who slyly reminded him, so everyone could hear, of his promise "to look in after dinner tonight". But over time Chris and Christopher formed an alliance, joining forces to become not Christ (perish the thought) but Hitch, one of contemporary culture's great one-offs.

This book tells the story of how that happened. It's sometimes said that the author's doppelganger is his brother, Peter. But in reality the doubleness is all his own. Doubleness but not duplicity. "I contain multitudes," Walt Whitman wrote, and so does Hitchens. England/America, left/right, gay/straight, literature/politics, Jewish/atheist/C of E: he's engagingly frank in owning up to all the schisms.

Frank, but not confessional. Intellectual history rather than emotional catharsis is the rule here. Hitch-22 sets out to trace the growth of his mind, and certain aspects of his life are deemed irrelevant to that. Lovers and wives retain their privacy. His brother is referred to only in passing. His children are present simply to prompt a mea culpa that he wasn't, when they were small. By contrast, generous space is given to the many writers, politicians and teachers he has befriended or done battle with over the years. But only if they come up to scratch. George Galloway doesn't even rate a footnote.

Hitchens grew up on the fringes of the navy. Brave, stern, laconic, conservative, his father – the Commander, as he calls him – had had a good war, but was shabbily treated in peacetime. His mother – Yvonne – was disappointed, too: lively and exotic (with a Jewish background that she kept secret even from her husband), she needed bright lights and the metropolis, not the tedium of wifedom in the sticks. "It is a terrible thing to feel sorry for one's mother or indeed father," Hitchens writes, but there was much to pity. When her sons grew up, Yvonne ran off with an ex-reverend and was found dead in an Athens hotel room – murder was the first thought, but it turned out they'd made a suicide pact. Afterwards, the Commander couldn't bear to mention her.

Hitchens began to leave home almost from infancy. A precocious child, whose first words came out as complete sentences ("Let's all go and have a drink at the club" was one of them, allegedly), he was packed off to boarding school at eight – a strain on the family budget, but if there was going to be an upper class, Yvonne wanted her son to be part of it. By 10 he knew all there was to know about dictatorships. But though beaten and bullied, he was never buggered. And there were books, starting with War and Peace and moving on to Wilfred Owen and George Orwell. When a housemaster warned him that he was in danger of "ending up a pamphleteer", he felt encouraged.

For adolescent sexual release, he'd no choice but to look to other boys. Mostly relations were perfunctory ("mutual relief without a word being spoken, even without eye contact"), but he had one serious pash, on a strawberry blond, and, when the two were discovered canoodling, expulsion might have followed, had Hitch not been bound for Oxford. The boy isn't named. Nor are the two young men Hitchens slept with at Oxford who later became members of Mrs Thatcher's government – mildly enjoyable relapses, he says, since by this point he'd moved on to girls.

1968 was a heady year to be a student. He appeared on University Challenge, spoke at the Oxford Union and dined with government ministers. But he also held forth from upturned milk crates, organized sit-ins and was charged with incitement to riot. The spirit of the times was intoxicating but there were limits: sex and rock'n'roll were fine, but not long hair (an affront to one's working-class comrades) or drugs (a "weak-minded escapism almost as contemptible as religion").

At Oxford he met his first Americans, including Bill Clinton, who took his dope in the form of cookies rather than inhaling. Clinton aside, Hitchens admired these Americans, and he began to have a recurrent dream of finding himself in Manhattan and feeling freer for it. "Life in Britain had seemed like one long antechamber to a room that had too many barriers to entry," he writes. In truth, every door in London seemed to open to him. But the contradictions of his journalistic career were troubling ("with half of myself I was supposed to be building up the Labour movement and then with another half of myself subverting and infiltrating it from the ultra-left"), and perhaps that's what attracted him to the US, to which he flew on a one-way ticket in 1981 – here was a chance to quit the British class struggle and be wholly himself.

It was to be 26 more years before the transformation was complete and he became an American citizen. But the shape of the book suggests that this is where he was always heading – and that, given his commitment to freedom and democracy, it's perfectly explicable, even inevitable, that he also supported US foreign policy after 9/11. Watching the twin towers come down, he "felt a rush of protectiveness, as if something vulnerable required my succor" (the book's patriotic sentiment comes with American spelling). Cold fury followed – against the "mirthless, medieval, death-obsessed barbarism" of Islamist fundamentalism. He began to spend time with Paul Wolfowitz and to push for regime change in Iraq.

But his opposition to "fascism with an Islamic face" began long before 9/11, with the Satanic Verses affair and his friendship with Salman Rushdie. He also knew Iraq, having visited it from the 1970s onwards. Nor was Iraq in 2003, or even Bosnia in the 1990s, the first time he'd favoured military intervention; knowing what he did of Argentina, he also supported Mrs Thatcher over the Falklands. It's simple enough, in his view: unless you're gutless or a moral imbecile, you fight to defend what you believe in.

Those who share his views on 9/11, the Rushdie affair and the brutality of Saddam's regime might nevertheless argue that invading Iraq was a terrible mistake. Even he concedes that misery was inflicted on the Iraqi people, that the Bush administration was impeachably incompetent and that (as Orwell knew) decent causes are often hijacked by goons and thugs. But that's as much as he will concede. On the question of weapons of mass destruction, for instance, he believes that Saddam probably had them (Hans Blix's were "very feeble 'inspections'") but that if he didn't "this made it the perfect time to hit him ruthlessly".

There's a lot to argue with here. But to take issue with Hitchens you will need to be formidably prepared (as widely read, widely travelled and rhetorically astute as he is) and to forget the idea that he "only does it to annoy", out of contrariness rather than conviction. You'll have to sharpen your invective, too. Humour is one of his deadliest weapons and there's plenty on display, some of it gently directed at himself but most of it, insultingly, at others – that "bogus windbag" the Maharishi, the "pious born-again creep Jimmy Carter", "senile, lizard-like" Ronald Reagan, "oleaginous" Hugh Grant and so on.

Not all the jokes recalled from boozy meals translate to the page; as he concedes, you had to be there. But his doting accounts of friends and mentors make you wonder how deep his bellicosity goes. Even some he parted company with over politics (Susan Sontag and Edward Said) are recalled with affection. The great test is whether people can laugh at themselves. Only the humourless deal in absolute certainty. And to him the only certainty is that there are no certainties.

Towards the end he considers whether, given a second life, he'd come back as himself. No, he decides, he wouldn't be Hitch again, whatever the inducement. Once is enough, especially when there are two of you. Or more than two. As this voluminous, witty memoir shows, he seems to have lived several lives already.

Christopher Hitchens is at the Guardian Hay festival tomorrow. Blake Morrison's The Last Weekend is published by Chatto & Windus.