Rambling Thoughts on Hunter Thompson
Posted on February 11, 2009 - Filed Under American Politics | Leave a Comment
Having just finished watching Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, it’s hard not to think pretty badly of Thompson. He was certainly a talented writer, but after achieving a measure of literary success and, more damagingly, fame, he seems to have completely lost his zeal and creativity. The hedonism of his post-1972 years might appeal to some people, but it’s no way for a serious writer to live.
Many creative people churn out great stuff while simultaneously taking lots of drugs and generally behaving recklessly, and it’s quite possible that some kind of frantic, spastic artistry emerges under certain conditions of vice. Thompson rode this chaotic creativity to its limits in work like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and in the consistently over-deadline missives to Rolling Stone that he knocked out and instantly forwarded onto editors while hopped up on speed. Some of his writing during this time is fantastic and some of it isn’t, but for a few years he was a generally functional writer operating at the height of his powers, despite the insane amounts of drugs he was taking.
To say that Thompson succeeded in these years in spite of his drug habits is somewhat debatable, since the whole story of Las Vegas revolves around how fucked up he and his attorney were at the time. It’s certainly not the kind of book you could write about a sober trip to Las Vegas, or even a trip where you got very drunk. At the same time, Thompson admitted to making up a lot of that book, so it’s debatable just how many of the drug-fueled antics recounted in it actually happened. Still, rip out drug abuse from Las Vegas and there’s not really any kind of story left.
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 is in many respects a better book, even though it’s basically a lot of Rolling Stone articles lashed together. Thompson’s binges during this period seem more restrained, and for the most part he just appears to have drunk his beloved Wild Turkey while covering George McGovern’s doomed bid for the White House. Here his energy and flare derives almost solely from outrage and a deep-seated, visceral contempt for Richard Nixon, and he’s all the better for it.
Indeed it seems like Nixon was the only constant muse in Thompson’s life. Even after the shambles of his notorious non-article on the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ (Thompson got drunk in his hotel swimming pool in Zaire while Ali and Foreman duked it out, with the result that no article was ever forthcoming) and the ensuing decades of sloth, Nixon was still capable of bringing out the best in Thompson, even though he had by this stage degenerated into a drug-addled old coot. On the occasion of his death in 1994, Thompson wrote of Nixon that:
If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.
Before going on to aver that:
You don’t even have to know who Richard Nixon was to be a victim of his ugly, Nazi spirit.
Unfortunately, such amusing bursts of spleen were so rare in Thompson’s later years that when he finally died in 2005 he had essentially spent most of his life financially coasting on his early successes, as he whiled away his time on his Colorado ranch where he could shoot his prodigious collection of firearms whenever he pleased. It’s ironic that the life of such a strong proponent of drug use stands as one of the better examples of why drugs are generally, all right-on liberal/libertarian sentiment aside, such a bad idea.
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