Ian Penman Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist 1968-76
by Hunter S Thompson, edited by Douglas Brinkley (Bloomsbury)
As a writer bin all that “cultural icon” stuff, all the cartoon strips and cocaine blizzards and Colorado screamin’ it is hard to see Hunter S Thompson as much more than a footnote, a minor stylist, a figure very much of his era who became stranded when times moved on and he refused to budge.
There is one admittedly self-contained work Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, not so much his Gtterdmmerung as his Huckleberry Finn and two valuable collections of on-the-hoof journalism, in which Thompson combines moral seriousness with delirious invective, amphetamine urgency and trickster humour. Watergate was like something this Thompson dreamt into existence, coming down one morning from a barking LSD high. But in the quarter of a century since that clammy apotheosis, Thompson has increasingly traded on his totemic reputation.
So how did such a relatively minor figure become the recipient of such monumental reams of hagiography? The answer is that like other “iconic” figures Jackson Pollock, John Lennon, Jack Kerouac so much hip faith was invested in his countercultural status that the market could not stand an overhaul: to take away the myth became at some point unthinkable. And unthought is precisely what the HST myth continues to be.
The work of some of Thompson’s quieter peers the neurasthenic Joan Didion, say can safely be returned to: it has a rich afterlife, because it is good writing which does not depend for 65 percent of its charge on the writer’s “legendary” status, as though he were a race horse or a tornado rather than some poor schlub who sits at a keyboard all day. Thompson has become a writer for non-readers the lad writer par excellence just as Oliver Reed is the actor for people who distrust actors and George Best is the footballer for people easily bored by football.
This is someone who is celebrated for all the extracurricular fuzz; as if everything (baldly self-parodic work, creeping misogyny, gun worship) might be forgiven celebrated, even! because Hunter is a “survivor”. Like people who limp away from terrorist bombings, say?
All that Thompson has “survived” and that barely is his determination to wreck a talent that was never sturdy in the first place. Even the myth Iron John with a hot fax, a white-line Unabomber with columns instead of bombs doesn’t stand up to much analysis. The action man is a couch potato. The yippie is a Magnum-toting reactionary. (This is all he has ever done, in essence: react.) The adrenaline junkie is a sorry, stranded addict. And the writer … well, the writer has been off form for so long that the myth can only be sustained by desperate ploys such as this vastly outsized volume of letters.
Fear and Loathing in America is a great doorstop of a book which rises higher than the keyboard I’m currently typing on; fatter than a political fixer’s kickback, it kicks off with a surreally respectful foreword by David Halberstam (who you suspect really does know better); a solemn nine-page editor’s note; and finally an author’s note (the note is single, and high, and desperate) by HST himself. There’s already been one big spring-clean volume of correspondence, and there’s an overweening absurdity at work here like one of those 20-CD box sets by a forgotten 1970s prog-rock band made all the more absurd by the po-faced faux-academic treatment.
Hiding behind the rocky mountain shadow of these 750 pages is something that might have been edited into a more urgent narrative; but unless you’re very interested in the minutiae of Seventies American politics or the backroom politics of American publishing it is a gargantuan slog endless “re: expenses” and in-house gossip. (Freelancers, though, will find a familiar story here of financial despondency, made comforting by the fact that even a superstar like HST has lived a life measured out in overdue and underwhelming cheques.)
It’s hard not to conclude that this Big Treatment is designed to disguise the fact that it is a very long time since Thompson wrote anything of interest or value. In the place of actual writing, the HST myth has been farmed out to uncritical biographers, letter-hoarders, editors; we’ve had the film, the “rescued” neophyte novel (The Rum Diary, correctly considered substandard at the time) and the now-annual harvest of ass-kiss profiles by other hacks flown out to Woody Creek to “do” the ritual and ritually identical profile of the Great Man. Look at the freak! He shoot gun! He snort drug! He mumble word! He fail deadline! The word “freak” once Thompson’s proud self-description (he ran for local office on a “Freak Power” ticket) now has a sad ring; and the HST of 1969 would surely be disgusted by the freak show that the HST of today has let himself become.
If his only legacy is an unfortunate one of facile me-columnism, there are frustrating hints of the writer he might have worked to become if he hadn’t settled for the softcore life. He could have followed a career trajectory like Tom Wolfe’s or Thomas McGaune’s, except that he was far more obsessed with the idea of writing great books than he was acquainted with the dismal diurnal reality of actually writing them. His solution was the shortcut chemistry of regular amphetamine (and mescaline and dope and whisky) intake, and the recurring epistolary tone here is one in which he decides he MUST WRITE NOW and write VERY IMPORTANT STUFF and A LOT of it.
This was the conveniently handy “point” of gonzo style no rewrites, just straight synaptic pinball and is bound up with the crucial self-image of that justifiably paranoid hellion, the “Outlaw Journalist”. But beyond a certain point Thompson seems to go blind to the possibility that just maybe things look increasingly “strange” and “crazy” and “brutal” because what he is doing to his bloodstream, and his brain, is strange and crazy and brutal.
There is an interminable exchange of letters with his editor about a proposed (and never written) book on the “death of the American dream”. Thompson decides in advance that the dream is indeed dead and despoiled: everything is ugly, corrupt, sick (all the key HST codewords). It is now just a question of filling in the inconvenient blank of the due text, harvesting (or bending) the “facts” to fit his comedown vision. It seems no coincidence that most of these proposals/letters are written as the dawn is coming on and the speed is wearing off, the writer confusing his own imminent comedown for a de facto worldview that is writhingly alive and claustrophobic and up-close pore-magnified UGLY. A worldview in which the writer is so carried away with the chemistry of his own limited rhetoric or the rhetoric of his freefall chemistry that any putative subject is lost in a chemico-rhetorical spin in which the flex of action is valued over any reflective weight; where trips taken are valued far more than texts produced.
Thompson has joined the select company of other American authors (Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Kerouac) for whom the critical corpus now far outstrips the published work. Can you spot the crucial difference? That’s right: Thompson has got posthumous fame while still alive, and this book has the fitting air of an RIP testament, a retrospective trawl, presented as though Thompson were gone, dead, disparu. Which, in a sense, he is.