He is supposed to have been the originator of something called “gonzo” journalism – a hotly charged style, sordid with self, which required the writer to be drunk or drugged, to have no real story, to leave his scribbled notes in an airport loo, have a nervous breakdown, and end up by writing how he didn’t get the story.
It also helped if you were wearing shades, a bright Hawaiian shirt and had an agonising libido that you could dump on someone and then write into the story.
There were thousands of journalists who practiced gonzo, who spoke gonzo, who wrote gonzo, thought gonzo. There is not an editor in this country who has not come face to typeface with its debilitating style. All over the land there are subs shouting deep into the night, “What the fuck is this guy trying to say?”
Gonzo fires a pistol whip of words, obsessively stalks the adjective, mews and growls with a mad wolf grin that camouflages the creaky joints of a badly crafted piece.
Although this tenderising style with its crack to the frontal lobe was attributed to Hunter S Thompson, in fact I think I am right in believing that it started with Tom Wolf, who, unable to finish a story for Esquire magazine in the days when Esquire published real journalism, just sent in some notes on the agony of not getting it in. For a while it became standard for an editor to say, “Ok, if you can’t do it, just send the notes.”
Or, as an editor of mine used to say: “I don’t want it brilliant, I want it Monday.”
Editors in South Africa sat behind desks sweating into their pantyhose or Jockeyed crotches as they read about Fear and Loathing and lots of drugs at the local drum majorette competition in Benoni. The writing style, with its self conscious heroism, is spammed with high octane amphetamines that bluster in a blizzard of babelas and benzos as the writer attempts to explain his existential angst against a background of Stars and Stripes Forever.
Suddenly, few pieces of writing ended up on an editor’s desk without the writer limbering up on the great plateau of self destruction. Every story, even if it was watching the Southern Rights on a tourist boat, started like this: “So there we were, with two hits of mda, six tabs of acid, about a gram and a half of raw cocaine, four reds and a random handful of speed, and a bag full of pure white amphetamine powder.”
In fact journalism had never been so attractive and, at the same time, so unreadable. It was as if every story came with a free packet of adjectives, some basic instructions and a sample line of snow. Hunter said himself, “I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.”
There were other things that could be copied from the Great White Hunter. He had a special technique with deadlines: he ignored them. This was easy to emulate.
Thompson also said, “There is no such thing as off the record.” Journalists dream of lines like this.
The problem is not with Hunter: never was. Hunter (Hunted, Hunt) himself understood the sublimity of words, knew about the creaseless fit, the golden verbal section that was the grail. Hunter could write like an angel, he understood his quarry so well that they might have been in group therapy together. Hunter just managed to stay up on the wire all the time.
As I said before, the trouble never was with Hunter, it was with all the other writealike Hunters, all the would be gonzos carrying some heavy fishing tackle, casting blindly, marking their territory with the feral scent of wrong adjectives, too many words, overkill, a verbosity that swelled like a corpse in water and was about as enticing.
Anton Harber, professor of journalism at Wits, wrote in Business Day on Hunter’s death, wrote in his very ungonzoish style: “Sitting in Johannesburg, I am struck by how much we need a writer who can capture the mad energy of this place, the contradictions so large and powerful that so far there isn’t anyone who can deliver them to us on paper as Dr Gonzo might.”
With respect professor, writing well about Johannesburg has nothing to do with gonzo, it has to do with imagination, good thinking, an eye for detail, a way of squatting on the truth like a chicken on an egg, incubating the thing and then some: bravery, for example.
It is certainly true that local journalism is slipping into a big burp, but gonzo will simply bedizen the limp daily fare. What we need are writers who know their craft, who write with clarity, imagination and a well tooled ingenuity – and (preferably) not about themselves.
Gonzo appeals to many young black writers who are seeking a way to get to an audience whose references track across the wide hearth of African and American movies, homespun music, bonzo clothes from the highest tech boutiques the world has to offer, and a shack background.
But the first rule of all writing is structure and sense and if a piece does not fit these criteria, despite advanced verbal gymnastics and wordy baton twirling, it fails. Gonzo should not be confused with high octane street rap, a cackle of colour whacked out with jagged prose and a stew of American movie lingo.
Some of the early Drum and Pace writers who used this style, like Vusi Khumalo, were incendiary with language but their writing always made sense.
The thing about Hunter is that he could have been so, so awful, a clichéd bore, if he hadn’t lived beyond his image. If he hadn’t paid the price. There are too many refugees from New Journalism (which has now become Old Journalism) tooling round the town with their laptops who are looking for a quick fix.
If you’re going to be gonzo, you gotta live gonzo. You can’t go home at night to Ovaltine and a house in Meadowridge.
Perhaps it is significant that Vusi Khumalo, like Hunter S Thompson, killed himself. It is tempting to think he died for his art.
As the Russian writer Chekhov famously wrote to a literary friend (a line that is now the source of endless misquotes), “One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.” That was the big difference, Thompson with his fine sense of horror and very cool eye on middle America suffered for his stories. He got nothing free.
In the end he didn’t let his fans down. You want to be gonzo, you got to be ready to die for your art.
Blurb from exclusivebooks.com – Most people would call Lin Sampson a journalist, but as Rian Malan puts it in the foreword to Now You’ve Gone and Killed Me, “…that would largely miss the point. Many are called to, fewer are chosen and almost none emit a light as bright as sister Lin. If she lived in New York or London, Lin would be famous. She would be on TV all the time, uttering scandalous gossip and butchering reputations with scorching one-liners.”