Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson Book

"Night of The Hunter"

Artists, consciously or unconsciously, tend to choose one of two paths after finding, through years of apprenticeship, a signature style: continue pursuing that style, attempting to hone and improve it with each new effort; or make their vocation one of varying, even destroying, that initial means of self-presentation through words, music, paint, or performance, and embark on another fork in the road.

Examples of the latter include Faulkner, Picasso, and Bob Dylan. Examples of the former include Hemingway, Cézanne, and the Rolling Stones. The problem faced by Hemingway--and the Stones, for that matter--was the same faced by Louisville's most notorious native son, the late Hunter S. Thompson. Though he idolized Faulkner as much as he did Hemingway, he found the voice by which he is remembered in FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS and eventually found himself stuck in repetition, self-parody (which wasn't helped by being made into a cartoon strip character by Garry Trudeau, which Thompson called "a nightmare of celebrity coming true"), and then, a long if intermittent creative blockage, during which, at his best, he continued to produce work by which he will be remembered.

Like Hemingway, his problem was compounded by the creation of a persona. "It's a good way to sell books," says his literary executor, historian Douglas Brinkley in GONZO, the solidly edited new oral biography by Jann Wenner and Corey Seymour. Yet, in Thompson's case, that persona, from the start, sprang from a way of life inseparable from the writing itself; and a lifestyle founded on compulsive physical risk, firearms, and alcohol--not to mention nerve-fueled writing marathons--is almost inevitably a fatal one. "Wild Turkey and tobacco are the only drugs I use regularly when I write," he says in the University Presses of Mississippi just-published collection of interviews, CONVERSATIONS WITH HUNtER THOMPSON. "The only drug I really count on is adrenalin. I'm basically an adrenalin junkie."

Adrenalin can be a dangerous drug, however, particularly when it's no longer self-generated. Which is to say that, again like Hemingway, Thompson became a public icon and found himself further trapped by the celebrity he nonetheless craved for the high and the energy it gave him--and despised for the way it kidnapped his soul. "It would be much better if I died," he said on more than one occasion, explaining that the real person could get out of the way and the myth could then take over--and people could make movies. Which, of course, they have.

But it was a combination of the pressures of celebrity during his own life and infirmity that caused his suicide at the age of 68. After a hip replacement, then breaking a leg, Thompson was crippled and confined to a wheelchair. Invited for a New Orleans blow-out when his friend Sean Penn was re-making ALL THE KING'S MEN there, he couldn't make it up to the second floor of one of the Big Easy's illustrious dining rooms without Penn, Johnny Depp, Brinkley and James Carville picking up his wheelchair, a humiliation he found untenable.

If Thompson's premature ageing was aggravated by alcohol and drugs, and if his contribution to American letters was not as substantive and monumental as he had hoped (o that elusive Great America Novel!), did suicide at sixty-eight seem the only choice? The answer is probably. Thompson's son says he always expected his father to kill himself rather than be subjected to a slow death in a hospital gown.

Yet out of what other mode of life could Thompson's writing have come? "Buy the ticket, take the ride," his famous motto as a journalist, seems tragically yet somehow joyously and rebelliously appropriate when applied to his own life, chronicled in recent books like CONVERSATIONS; GONZO; THE KITCHEN READINGS, by longtime Aspen friends Michael Cleverly and Bob Braudis; THE JOKE'S OVER, by Thompson's chief co-conspirator, illustrator Ralph Steadman; and, just off the press and perhaps best--certainly the most comprehensive--of all, William McKeen's OUTLAW JOURNALIST. Each avoids, miraculously, becoming a tiresome string of Thompson's "wild escapades and deadline frenzies," as Wenner puts it, by constantly varying perspective. Yes, Thompson shot things, shocked people (literally and figuratively), drove like a maniac, drank Heinekens and Bloody Marys along with his coffee and large breakfast upon rising, got himself beaten up by the Hell's Angels, managed an hour-long discussion about football with his nemesis-in-chief, Richard Nixon, attended conventions of horse-lovers, presidential candidates, and DAs. Yet these books, in their commentary on Thompson's life and work, allow the voices of interviewers, friends, and colleagues, as Thompson himself did, to intervene between the objective and subjective, between the event and the meaning of it, so that the former is given purpose, if not gravity, and something of Thompson's capacity for great generosity of heart.

Though outspoken in his admiration for aforementioned predecessors, Thompson sometimes said he wanted to be the Mark Twain of the twentieth century. Inwardly, however, the writer he seems most closely to resemble--and the one he most idolized--is F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose name he gave his only child, Juan Fitzgerald Thompson. "All his writing was about the loss of some mythic world that he may once have inhabited," says James Silberman in Gonzo. "It was no accident that," despite his admiration to and similarities with Hemingway, "Gatsby was his favorite book. I said to him at one point, 'You're really writing one lifelong book called The Death of the American Dream. And that stuck."

As well it should have. For while one of Thompson's greatest admirers is fellow Southerner Tom Wolfe, who helped introduce him to the world in his groundbreaking anthology, The New Journalism, another is the author of IRONWEED, the prolific, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist William Kennedy, who turned down Thompson for one of his earliest newspaper jobs but whom he later befriended. "He liked the idea of being part of the New Journalism ... but he wanted to transcend it, and he did. He wanted to be singular, and he was."

How did he get to be that way? Tim Crouse, a writer for ROLLING STONE in the 1970s and author of the political classic THE BOYS ON THE BUS, gives us a fascinating look into Thompson's writing process. After his customary breakfast, he would sit at a card table with his signature red IBM Selectric, "his elbows out to the sides, his back very straight, and he would get this sort of electric jolt and blast out a sentence. Then he'd wait again with his arms out, and he'd get another jolt and type another sentence. Watching him, I began to realize that he was trying to bypass learned attitudes, received ideas, clichés of every kind, and tap into something that had more to do with his unconscious, his intuitive take on things. He wanted to get the sentence out before any preconception could corrupt it." After Thompson's suicide, his widow's first act was to box the Selectric and send it to Bob Dylan, knowing her husband believed that Dylan had amassed a greater body of work--and one possessed of more integrity--than anyone of their era. Which is our era too.

If you're not a writer, such descriptions of process and aesthetic assessment probably aren't as interesting as hearing about the propane tanks Thompson liked to shoot at as a means of blowing off steam, but if you are, or if you have aspirations of becoming one, Crouse's observations are worth continuing to read: "One of Hunter's methods of composition was to write a bunch of ledes and then somehow fit them together. By lede, I mean the opening portion of a story, which is ordinarily designed to pack more of a virtuosic wallop than the sections that follow. Early on, I remember, Hunter showed me a stack of ledes he'd accumulated, as if he were fanning a whole deck of aces. On a tight deadline, my job would be to stitch together the lede-like chunks that Hunter had generated. Ideally, the story would function like an internal-combustion engine, with a constant flow of explosions of more or less intensity all the way through."

As great as he was, Thompson will not be remembered as the equal of his literary heroes, however. Both his first wife, Sandy Conklin, and his longtime agent, Lyn Nesbit, put their finger on the reason why. That magnanimity of heart, commented on in all of these books by every single person Thompson knew, no matter how much of a jerk they were aware he could also be, in the end proved to be something he could not bring fully and completely into his work. "He couldn't deal with that part of himself consistently," Nesbit says, "and that led to so many kinds of abuse--self-abuse and abuse of others." (Thompson was rarely able even to mention the three children he lost with Conklin, much less pick her up at the hospital after their deaths, not out of cruelty, but out of what McKeen calls the native, and at times crippling, emotional repression of the Southern male.) With Nesbit, and apparently with certain other women, he could talk about life and love, not just personally but in an "abstract," "more interesting" way, but he could not open himself to putting that largeness of spirit into what remains essentially a satirist's prose.

But what prose it is, and how one wishes Thompson could have survived to the moment where a black man and a woman have just finished vying for the Democratic nomination for president, the African-American triumphing with his message of change and hope. Barack Obama's message, like his time, is an entirely different one than the message of fear, anti-intellectualism, and implicit greed generated in the Nixon and Bush eras. Had Thompson lived in this moment, his own message, in the end, might have changed, and his writing taken an unexpected, and more expansive, change of direction. Or would Thompson continue to feel, watching Obama (now wearing a flag pin) tack suddenly, subtly toward the center, that the only candidates who make it to the White House are those willing to compromise--or corrupt--themselves sufficiently to get there?

GONZO: BUY THE TICKET, TAKE THE RIDE, director Alex Gibney's feature-length documentary, opens, appropriately enough, nationwide on July 4th. Buy the ticket, take the ride, and think about what the Good Doctor might be cogitating this very moment with his spirits in the sky.