First anniversary of the death of HST

international | arts and media | news report Tuesday February 21, 2006 14:43 by Paul Baynes

Obituary of HST

Hunter Thompson

Today is the anniversary of the death of US writer Hunter Stockton Thompson. Last year, at the age of 67, Thompson “took his life with a gunshot to the head”, according to Bob Braudis, local County Sheriff and friend of Thompson. He died in his home of Owl Farm, a fortified compound in Woody Creek, near Aspen, Colorado, leaving behind an adult son Juan and his second wife, Anita. The cause of death of Ernest Hemmingway, one of his heroes, was similarly described on the police record in four words: “self inflicted gunshot wound”.

Hunter S Thompson began and ended his career as a sportswriter. He also published political journalism, including books documenting Nixon’s successful 1972 campaign (Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72) and Clinton’s successful 1992 campaign (Better Than Sex). He is credited with the invention of ‘gonzo journalism’. This elusive term refers to first person journalism that is intensely personal, where the writer himself can take centre stage, and where what is written may be wildly exaggerated and possibly fictional.

Thompson is best known for his 1971 novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It was originally intended as a 300 word magazine account of a race in Las Vegas. Thompson later expanded the concept into the story of how one man and his Samoan attorney wreak havoc in Las Vegas, after setting off with a car boot filled with “two bags of grass, 75 pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers… and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls”. There follows a 200 page account of unbridled lunacy, but the heart of Thompson’s story is an allegory of the inevitable breakdown of the American dream. A film version was released in 1998 starring Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro.

Thompson’s real dream was to be a novelist in the order of his heroes, F Scott Fitzgerald (after whom his son, Juan Fitzgerald Thompson, is named), William Faulkner and Ernest Hemmingway. To prepare himself to emulate his heroes and write the great American novel, Thompson copied out pages of their works, including Fitzgerald‘s The Great Gatsby in its entirety. His first novel, written in 1959 but not published until 1998, The Rum Diary, is an account of a journalist’s life in a Caribbean dystopia. However, though his goal was fiction, the young Thompson found himself working more and more as a journalist out of necessity. From an early age he had an admirable and total clarity about his aspiration to become a writer. He was born in Kentucky in 1937 to alcoholic parents. At age ten he was writing local sports reviews and hustling for contributions for a two page newspaper; at age twelve, he was writing letters to the Louisville Courier-Journal. In high school he was inducted into the literary society, and afterwards, having enlisted in the United States Air Force, Thompson wrote for and sub-edited his base’s newspaper. From then on he never sold out by getting a day job, but relentlessly followed his dream to make it as a writer.

Success did not come easy. For much of his early years, Thompson struggled to have enough money to eat. He wrestled with whether to pawn his typewriter or his car. He was constantly in debt to his friends, and received rejection letters and debtors’ letters in equal amounts. In response to one form rejection letter, he declared to the signatory his “intention to make you rue the day you wrote that letter”. Another letter he called a “pompous and moronic rejection of my work”, continuing, “when I see you, I intend to cave in your face and scatter your teeth all over Fifth Avenue”, signing off “cordially, Hunter S Thompson“. To stave off debtors, he designed a letter in response to their requests of payment, which was full of religious mania, and referenced “atomic fallout” and the debtor‘s “howling and moaning about some idiotic debts”. Apparently it worked about half the time. It may be that these years of living from hand to mouth gave Thompson a lack of respect for money; in later years, when he worked for Jann Wenner’s Rolling Stone as national correspondent, Wenner and Thompson apparently had huge fights over Thompson’s liberal use of expense accounts for stories which failed to materialise.

In 1966, Thompson published his first book, Hell’s Angels. The book is an account of a year Thompson spent on the road with the motorcycle gang. The book takes as its starting point the infamous ‘Monterey Rape’ of 1964, where two girls, aged 14 and 15, were gang raped by a gang of Hell’s Angels. Thompson then remains in the company of a group of ‘Angels’ for a full year. They become familiar enough with Thompson, himself a motorcycle aficionado, to trust him somewhat and talk to him, but at one point he is “stomped” by them. The Hell’s Angels do not come out of the book well: Thompson is matter of fact about their extreme violence, misogyny and general anti-social effect. However, what is interesting about the book is his dissection of the reactionary nature of the establishment’s attempts to deal with the problem of the Angels. Thompson relates one instance where he is shown a five page legal document which was issued to members of the Angels at a roadblock. To the Angel’s “vast amusement“, Thompson “couldn’t explain the document”, and, several weeks later, neither could “a San Francisco lawyer who tried to interpret it for me”. The intent of the document was clear however: “at the first sign of trouble everybody on a motorcycle would be clapped in jail and denied bond”.

Thompson was impossible to pin down. It is safest to merely describe him as a writer, for he clearly loved to write. He had a taste for it; the urgency of his prose suggests that he needed to do it; he clearly revelled in it as he unscrupulously mythologised his own life. The first volume of his collected letters, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman 1955-1967, runs to 700 pages, and according to the editor‘s introduction, “for every letter included, fifteen were cut“ - and there follows a further two published volumes of letters! While in the Air Force, Thompson wrote to a girlfriend of his “need to write“, saying that he wrote so many letters “because it’s the only way - outside of actually getting to work and writing fiction - I can look at life objectively“. And what a life he led. Despite an outstanding body of work, it may be that he will be remembered largely for the life he led, which at times matched the outrageousness of his fiction. Indeed, the life Thompson led often got in the way of his writing. For example, one of his most famous articles, The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved, was actually not finished in time for the deadline. What was actually submitted by Thompson was a set of disorganised notes. Nonetheless, the resultant article received a huge positive public response.

In his latter days, Thompson lived in his compound, whose gates were festooned with signs reading “Keep Out” and “Guns in Constant Use”. His pastimes included drinking whiskey and shooting out the windows of his house. His schedule was to rise from his bed in the early evening, have a ‘breakfast’ of orange juice, whiskey, marijuana and cocaine, and write into the early hours. Many of his editors relate how Thompson would wake them at 4am to pitch them a story. Indeed, his last published article for the online ESPN magazine, ‘Page 2’, is in the form of a 4am conversation with actor Bill Murray, in which he proposes a new sport whereby participants try to shoot golf balls out of the air at a driving range, and asks that Murray give his views as a “consultant”.

In 1970 Thompson ran for public office. He was running for sheriff of Pitkin County on a Freak ticket, attempting to mobilise what he referred to as the “Freak Vote”. He was surprised to come close to winning: he missed being elected by less than 500 votes. During the campaign, he shaved his hair so that he would be able to refer to the incumbent, who had a crew cut, as “my long haired opponent”. His campaign promises included replacing highways with lawns and changing Aspen’s name to ‘Fat City’.

As a young man from 1962 to 1963, Thompson travelled through Latin America with no budget, attempting to write freelance articles for publication in the US press back home. Rather than stay in the capitals by the hotel pool regurgitating the government press releases, Thompson attempted to actually get around and see the country, and form a proper analysis of the situation in the continent. Needless to say, this was not a financially successful operation, but it demonstrated the man’s desire for truth. He had nothing but contempt for those ‘journalists’ who he saw as “$100 a day types who fly in and out without the faintest idea of who the president is or what it means”. He eventually began to sell some photographs and have a few pieces published by the New York-based National Observer, who finally made him their South American correspondent.

Despite the outlandish style of his writing, Thompson was deadly serious about his views. A letter written after hearing of the death of JFK betrays a sensitivity belied by his macho posturing and venting of spleen. He called the murder “the end of reason, the dirtiest hour in our time”. In another letter written the same day, he wrote “there is no sense crying for lost hope… If you see any hope, send word. I am, at the moment, as low as I’ve ever been“. He was frequently disillusioned about his abilities as a novelist, and became distraught at the unrewarding realities of trying to “beat on, boats against the current”, to quote the image from one of Thompson’s favourite books, The Great Gatsby. Thompson once proclaimed to his friend, the illustrator Ralph Steadman, “I would feel real trapped in this life if I didn’t know I could commit suicide at any time”.

Thompson’s work and life were characterised by a fearlessness, and an anger at the prevailing orthodoxies of the day. In 2003 Paul Theroux wrote that Thompson remained relevant because “he has displayed an utter contempt for power - political power, financial power, even showbiz juice”. He felt let down by the failure of journalism to stand up to the consensus of the time. He felt that the media had failed during the time of Nixon - a man Thompson wrote had “no soul, no inner convictions… [and] the integrity of a hyena” - and that the media are failing again during the current reign of President George W Bush. In a Rolling Stone obituary on the death of Nixon, he refused to revise his views on Nixon, suggesting that the former US president’s body should be abandoned in a dumpster. His most recent book was Hey Rube: Blood Sport, The Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness.

Thompson was a genius as a writer. His flow of thought was a flow of hyperbolic, purple beauty. His use of words made one re-evaluate the vocabulary of the English language, for he brought it to new places. He could decry with the most slanderous and extravagant description, and express joy in the utmost degeneracy and luridity. Hunter S Thompson was a giant of a literature - a modern day Mark Twain. His life was a refutation of the lazy presumptions of American stupidity and a lack of authentic American art forms. His passing leaves a void of revolutionary railing against the establishment. Pity he’s not around to day as an indymedia contributor.

Hunter S Thompson