“He was old, sick and a very troubled man, and the illusion of peace and contentment was not enough for him … So finally, and for what he must have thought the best of reasons, he ended it with a shotgun.”
Hunter S Thompson, the firebrand author and journalist, wrote these words about Ernest Hemingway more than 40 years ago, but he nearly penned the opening to his own obituary. A self-confessed gun freak, Thompson shot himself in the head this past February with one of his own beloved guns. He was somewhere between 65 (according to initial reports from the New York Times) and 67 (if you believe the Washington Post and others). He might have enjoyed that Big Media didn’t get their facts straight the first time around.
“There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge,” he once wrote, but to me, there is nothing more helpless, irresponsible and depraved than a man on the verge of suicide. Suicide terrifies me, in the hopelessness it represents, the agony, the oppression, and the loneliness that must lead up to that final, irreversible act. It awakens all those terrible sensations, the tiny doubts, the momentary falterings in self-confidence, the guilt, the fear and the loathing within, and they all creep closer to the surface — all the more so when it’s someone close to you. And I had just been getting to know Hunter.
I should say, I never actually met the man, nor even heard his voice. He was something of a mythic figure through college, but his reputation among my friends was as a prolific drug user rather than a prolific and polemic writer. It was only when I began studying his work, his journalism, that I found the real (and well-deserved) source of his fame.
Along with Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer, he was one of the giants of New Journalism, which brought so much of the richness, the depth, the storytelling and character development of fiction to the ‘straight’ news. More famously, he was the inventor and pioneer of ‘Gonzo’ journalism, in which the reporter himself is a central and unmistakable part of the story. Objectivity is impossible; the path to truth (or the closest approximation thereof) leads through personal experience and selective filtering, and contains a healthy bit of imagination. “The only way to write honestly about the scene is to be a part of it,” he wrote. That for him being a part of it involved massive amounts of drugs, alcohol, wit and scathing political insight made it all the more enjoyable.
Hunter was always looking for the American Dream, although he suspected it died sometime in the run-up to Nixon’s first presidential election. His research was all-encompassing; visits to Los Angeles barrios, NRA meetings, police chief conventions, gatherings of New York intelligentsia, and the disastrous Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968. The material he gathered — first hand, authentic reportage, in the ‘Gonzo’ style he conceived, christened, reared and now orphaned — morphed into numerous magazine articles and, eventually, his best-known work, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
It was a thinly disguised autobiographical account of a drug-fuelled journalistic odyssey into the very heart of the American Dream: Las Vegas, a man-made oasis in the middle of the desert. Thompson could not have picked a better metaphor than that tacky, commercial, sex-stained city.
The essential backdrop to this masterpiece is a collection of his personal and business letters, Fear and Loathing In America: The Brutal Odyssey of An Outlaw Journalist, 1968-1974. It’s a professionally compiled and edited bunch of his correspondences, but it still feels so personal, so voyeuristic, like skulking through someone’s email or scrolling through a lover’s mobile in search of incriminating evidence. It’s the only way to be a part of the scene.
Inside are fragments of a mind-map, bits and pieces in shreds that, if properly put together and supplemented with countless other lost scraps, would delineate the thoughts of this tortured genius. The letters chronicle his personal and professional struggles, scrambling to make rent and desperately trying to understand just what was happening in America during those tumultuous times.
The Great Shark Hunt is another fantastic collection of his contemporaneous writings, published across a spectrum of magazines and newspapers from Playboy to The New York Times. Raw in a different way from his personal letters, this collection above all others shows why Thompson still lives on today, as he has for nearly 30 years as Uncle Duke in the Doonesbury comic strip.
Some of his finest excerpts are here, from the atavistic ‘The Kentucky Derby is decadent and depraved’, which many consider the first example of ‘Gonzo’, to his thoughtful dispatches on South American life while a National Observer correspondent, from his cruel dissection of the American institution that is the Super Bowl in Rolling Stone, to his ominous musings about what drove Ernest Hemingway to suicide in Idaho.
The legacy of a man who defended the Second Amendment (guaranteeing the right to keep and bear arms) as vigorously as the First Amendment (guaranteeing free speech and a free press) will necessarily be slightly out of focus. Hemingway’s influence, and the strange parallels of their lives, now seems a bad joke and a contrived ending. His too-famous ‘fear and loathing’ tag probably hides a bit too much behind a catch-phrase. He certainly loved living, but there was always The Fear.
What scares me is… what terrified him? He was no stranger to good and evil; he saw human nature for what it was, and encountered many of the best and worst examples in his travels. Nor was he a stranger to nightmares from bad drugs, and despite his past indulgences, probably had as firm a grasp of the cold, hard facts of reality as anyone. What did he know?
In a moment of sobriety and perspective towards the end of Las Vegas, he writes about social progress in the late ’60s, and delivers one of the most beautiful and insightful pieces of literature in the 20th century:
We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
Things were changing fast then, to anyone who cared to look. Things are certainly changing again now, but no one has the pulse and perspective to know where it is going. If anyone could have, Hunter S Thompson would be one, but I hope he didn’t. I hope he was driven to suicide by something on a smaller scale, an internal scale, because if he couldn’t live in these times, after surviving what he went through, we all will need serious help. And the Doctor has left the building. Selah.