The career of Hunter Thompson (1937-2005) is probably the one that the largest
number of American scribblers wish they could emulate, or even (in their
more uncritical moments) wish they could themselves have lived. From lofty
Tory eminences such as Tom Wolfe to committed liberal historians like
Douglas Brinkley, there comes a consensus that this was a man like no other
since (and this book cites both comparisons) Mark Twain or HLMencken. The
man making the Twain analogy is Tom Wolfe. Golly.
A bit further down the food chain come the kind of admirers who were dealt
with by Thompson's assistant, Deborah, on the outskirts of the famed Owl
Farm near Aspen, Colorado where Thompson spent most of his later life: “She
helped protect him from all of the needy strangers and fans. Sometimes she
found pilgrims at the Owl Farm gates. One whacked-out fan even made it to
the front door, where she found him shivering after spending a night out in
the cold. ‘There were weirdos who would eat acid and come hang on the
fence,' Deborah said. ‘I was the watchdog. I tried to treat people in a nice
way, but people were so in awe of him. I'd say, “He's not up. Would you like
to leave him a note?” and that took care of most of it.' ”
I don't think that Thompson's high-end or low-end admirers literally wanted to
lead a drug-fuelled and booze-sodden life, interminably quarrelling with
editors and publishers, eventually trailing off into burnout and tedium and
ultimately suicide. But his persistent legend - well caught by William
McKeen in this admirable book - had to do with a mixture of the longing for
the open road (his first important essay was on riding with the Hell's
Angels and meshed well with the Jack Kerouac myth), the nostalgia for the
lost frontier (the Thompsons spread in Colorado, complete with guns and live
ammunition) and, commingled with this, a yearning to be one of those
reporters who brings down a president. Thompson never actually managed that
feat, though he tried his level best to incinerate Richard Nixon in the
1970s by the sheer hatred of his rhetoric. Not many people particularly
remember how he did help contribute to the opposite feat, latching on early
to the campaign of Jimmy Carter and trying to sell him to the readers of
Rolling Stone as a truly “alternative” candidate for the presidency. On a
chance visit to Georgia, Thompson had encountered Carter and discovered that
the peanut-farming governor was some sort of Bob Dylan fan. That was enough
for him and he was sold on the candidate thereafter. Here we have a rare
instance of what might be called the soft side of the Gonzo King. (No less
interestingly, when he met Bill Clinton - touted by Rolling Stone as the
first “Sixties” president - he felt an immediate antipathy. That shows
better taste.)
McKeen takes us deftly through the lows and the highs, from the 1970 article
The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved (Thompson's first stab at the
Gonzo journalism that he invented) to the fiascos and aborted missions. The
tale begins in Louisville, Kentucky, perhaps significantly the home of half
the world's bourbon production. Young Hunter's parents liked to drink and
his father liked, or maybe needed, to beat him. Call-up for national service
on an air-force base did little to dilute the toxic mix of teenage angst and
James Dean-like rebellion fermenting within him. Yet he was a rebel with a
cause, and was able to prove it by showing early proficiency at writing. We
should all thank the instinct that first lured him to the golden state of
California, and also thank the intuition of Carey McWilliams, then a famous
editor of The Nation in New York, who took a chance on Hunter and the
“angels” piece.
That was in 1965. For the rest of his career, he was always planning to
produce a book about the death of the American Dream: you could say that
almost everything he subsequently wrote was an instalment on that
forever-undelivered manuscript. You could most certainly say this about Fear
and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972), the virtuoso, substance-driven tour de
force that profiled one of the country's fantasy capitals and gave the
language of journalism a new catch phrase. How odd to think that, when it
first appeared in Rolling Stone - the generational magazine that was to be
his shop-window - in 1970, it was under the nom de plume of “Raoul Duke”.
That blushful anonymity didn't last long.
It stands out rather conspicuously in retrospect, and I don't think I had
noticed it myself until McKeen drew my attention to it, that Thompson fairly
soon afterwards made a complete balls-up of his one and only attempt to
cover the war in Vietnam. In journalistic terms, this disaster cannot be
counted as a small one. (Briefly, Thompson was offered a chance to cover the
evacuation of Saigon, realised it was a last chance, grabbed it without
thinking, got involved in a terrible fight with Rolling Stone over
life-insurance cover, blew most of the cash on drugs and hookers and booze,
flew off to Hong Kong ostensibly to buy some electronic equipment and was
still there wasting his own time and everybody else's when Saigon actually
fell.)
The retreat to Owl Farm in the 1980s and his resultant rebranding as a rural
revolutionary redneck was an odd fusion of the bucolic with the high-tech,
and McKeen captures it well. With his battery of television screens, faxes
and phones, and a lavish bar within easy reach, Thompson could “surf” the
world without any longer having to travel it. This trick began to offer
diminishing returns, the articles becoming more staccato and the “books”
more repetitive. I wasn't the only one to notice, in a bio-doc called
Breakfast with Hunter (2003), the symptoms of a boredom and weariness that
looked almost literally terminal. The premonitions are well laid out here:
it was as early as the mid-1970s that he told cartoonist and Sancho
Panza-like confidant Ralph Steadman: “I'd feel real trapped in this life if
I didn't know I could commit suicide at any moment.” Many failed to notice
it, but in the author-biography for Thompson on the dust jacket of his 1994
book Better Than Sex appear the words “He will be gone by the year 2000.”
The extra five years were not much fun: decrepitude began to catch up on his
much-ravaged frame, and close friends started to check out early. As
Brinkley phrased it: “The jokes disappeared and never came back.” The work
became a self-parody. He was tremendously fortunate with his wife Anita, and
with a troupe of loyal friends who staved off loneliness but could not beat
despair. More and more, the talk turned to the lavish preparations for a
pyrotechnic Colorado funeral at which his ashes were to be launched into the
stratosphere. And one February day he decided to advance the date of this
long-promised event and put the gun muzzle in his mouth.
According to McKeen's haunting description of the funeral, the ashes exploded
high up in their canister and “drifted, as Hunter must have known they
would, back towards the guests standing in front of the viewing pavilion. As
the guests stood holding their glasses, the ash floated and settled into
their drinks”.
Outlaw Journalist by William McKeen
Aurum £18.99 pp448
I also liked the bio. Glad you featured the importance of the San Francisco scene to HST's achievement: the Hell's Angels assignment, the Scanlan's Monthly piece, and the work for Rolling Stone. Along with Ramparts (another HST favorite), those magazines produced some real fire fireworks.
Peter Richardson, San Anselmo, USA