-Caveat Lector- http://www.nationalpost.com/ December 23, 2000 Gonzo, where have you gone? A new collection of Hunter S. Thompson's letters recalls his salad days, before his slow, sad decline Robin Gambhir National Post When Richard Nixon died, most commentators went out of their way to say nice things about a man who had abused the trust of the American people and made a mockery of the presidency. Not Hunter S. Thompson, who instead eulogized Nixon as "a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president." This was classic Thompson, a unique writer who came to the fore at the crux of America's cultural breach birth, as sub-cultures and counter-cultures became part of the common culture. With all of the social and cultural chaos that ensued in the years following the murder of President Kennedy, nothing was beyond the pale -- not taking drugs and writing about it, as Thompson did in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, his most well-known book, and not even calling the president a swine (or worse). To get at the truth, Thompson's brand of "Gonzo Journalism" threw objectivity to the dogs. And even though he has now been writing this way for over 30 years, it is still a style uniquely his own. As a style, it doesn't so much defy definition as elude it. Gonzo places Thompson at the centre of the action and usually involves a fantastical tale that mixes satire and caricature to the point where it is difficult to distinguish fact from fiction. Thompson's writing is a lot like the stories guys tell each other over a few beers, except far more outlandish. Like most guys stories, there is an element of self-aggrandizement; unlike these stories there is also moral outrage and a sort of misanthropic social satire. Thompson hates just about everyone to varying degrees and for varying reasons. In "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved," a magazine article that originally appeared in Scanlan's Monthly in 1970 and the first definitive piece of Gonzo Journalism, Thompson paints a horrific picture of the Derby: "'That whole thing,' I said, 'will be jammed with people; fifty thousand or so, and most of them staggering drunk. It's a fantastic scene -- thousands of people fainting, crying, copulating, trampling each other and fighting with broken whiskey bottles . . . By midafternoon they'll be guzzling mint juleps with both hands and vomiting on each other between races. The whole place will be jammed with bodies, shoulder to shoulder. It's hard to move around. The aisles will be slick with vomit; people falling down and grabbing at your legs to keep from being stomped. Drunks pissing on themselves in the betting lines. Dropping handfuls of money and fighting to stoop over and pick it up.'" Thompson's writing was less a product of his time than a reaction to it. For example, Nixon looms large in Thompson's work as an evil monster that represents the death of all that was good and right in America. When Thompson was growing up in the post-war era, the American dream mythology, buoyed by economic expansion, was a strong cultural force. But all of that seemed to spiral downward after Kennedy's assassination and it weighed heavily on both Thompson and his country. The death of the American dream, and all those he associated with it, is at the crux of everything Thompson has written since his first book, Hell's Angels (his account of a year he spent riding with the outlaw motorcycle gang) was published in 1967. If Thompson's writing has an apocalyptic quality to it, it has a lot to do with the time in which he was writing and the people he was writing about. Thompson's gonzo style garnered him fame in all quarters, and he was widely solicited to write for magazines such as Playboy, Scanlan's and later, Rolling Stone. But Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the book that made him truly famous. In the same way that generations of people (usually young men) discover Henry Miller by reading Tropic of Cancer, so too readers often discover Thompson by reading his deranged chronicle of roaming around as Vegas with his "attorney" in a mood that varies from a drug-induced haze to extreme paranoia. The opening of the book sets the tone: "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold . . . And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" If this kind of writing excites you, you are not alone. Imagine reading two hundred pages of it and you will understand why Vegas has remained popular. It has all the attractions of a roller-coaster ride: horror, euphoria, speed and danger. Two years after Vegas appeared, Thompson, now an unlikely celebrity, covered the 1972 presidential election for Rolling Stone. He sent in articles every two weeks for a year as he crossed the country with the candidates. These articles would eventually be published in book form as Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. It stands as one of the best accounts of what it was like to be in the press fraternity (female political correspondents were largely unheard of at that time). Thompson proved an insightful and talented political observer and his coverage was taken just as seriously as any other correspondent. Odd, given the subjects Thompson wrote about before he assumed the national affairs desk for Rolling Stone. Commenting later, George McGovern, the Democrat candidate, said he was told Thompson was "an eccentric, brilliant, perceptive reporter, that he reached a wide and young audience and that he was not to be taken lightly." 1972 was a high watermark for Thompson, one that he has not reached since. In the early 1980s, Thompson's marriage collapsed under the weight of years of drug abuse, alcoholism and beatings. Sandy Thompson, the wife who had worked cleaning motel rooms so her husband could write, had had enough. Under the protection of a sheriff's deputy, she was escorted from their home in Woody Creek, Colorado. Some say that this precipitated the decline in both the quantity and quality of Thompson's writing. The Curse of Lono (1983) was the last sustained effort at writing Thompson made during the 1980s. Here, Thompson returned to his venerable road trip approach to "cover" the Honolulu Marathon. But both the locus and subject matter were a little off for his readership. It was inevitably compared to Vegas and, while it was warmly received, general opinion held that it simply was not as good. Thompson's writing has remained in demand because there is a constituency of readers who will buy anything he publishes, but Thompson has always been a relentless perfectionist and, following the end of his marriage, he felt he had nothing more to say. The need for money and the constant badgering of his publishers, however, led him to cover the 1992 presidential campaign. The result was Better Than Sex. Those who had read his 1972 election coverage were disappointed. Thompson wasn't on the bus for this one, in fact he "covered" it from home. Some of the observations are amusing, even insightful, but in the end the whole book smacks of self-parody. A series of faxes between Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos and Thompson, ostensibly reprinted verbatim, would suggest Thompson was "right in there" for this campaign, but in Stephanopoulos's political memoir All Too Human, he does not mention Thompson once. Most writers, at the end of their creative lives, start publishing old material that often should have stayed manuscripts. In 1999, 40 years after he started it, Thompson published his novel The Rum Diary, a fictional account of a hard-drinking reporter's life in 1950s San Juan. In the context of his later work, the novel is a curiosity that shows little of the gonzo style he is famous for. To publish a collection of letters is the literary equivalent of a death rattle. As Thompson publishes his second collection, Fear & Loathing in America: The Gonzo Letters Vol. 2: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist (Simon & Schuster, 784 pp., $44.50), one wonders if this may be true of his career. It would be a sad end for a man who has been a singular voice in what has become a frequently harmonized American media. Reading letters is usually the province of academics; unless you have a tendency towards literary voyeurism, it is pretty dry stuff. The letters in Fear and Loathing in America are different. Not just because Thompson wrote them, but also because many of the people he was writing to and about were making history at the time. The anthology covers the period from 1968 to 1976, when Thompson would produce his most famous work. It was also a time that witnessed some significant events in recent American history: the Apollo moon landing, Woodstock, the end of the Vietnam war, Watergate and the rise of fall of Richard Nixon. Douglas Brinkley, a professor of history who edited this volume, has done a good job of contextualizing Thompson's letters. Each one is preceded by a short paragraph that explains its relevance to Thompson and as a reflection of the times. Footnotes are provided to explain some of the otherwise obscure references made by Thompson. In one of the more interesting exchanges, a self-proclaimed "bored-to-tears" housewife wrote fawningly to Thompson after he published Hell's Angels. She commented that the Angels sounded "wild and delirious ... I envy you the experience and the fun you must have had with them. You must have had a perpetual ball!" Thompson wrote back congratulating her on her perceptiveness and noted that the whole thing was a "wonderful rat-f--- and, as [she] put it, 'a perpetual ball.'" However, Thompson was alarmed at the notoriety the book had brought. Complaining to his editor, he said "you can't imagine the wild s--- that gets forwarded to me." To dissuade this housewife from writing again, he went on to tell her that two of the Angels had just left his house and were heading out to New York to stay with her. "They'll show you where it's at," he wrote, "and your friends too if they want it." For a reader of Thompson's work, the letters between Thompson and his editors, friends and colleagues make you feel like you are privy to Thompson's private thoughts -- all the thoughts, speculations and musings that assume a much more definitive tone in his published work. They also provide a context for these works. At the same time, the letters' subjects are expansive; everything from missives to presidents about the Vietnam War to one requesting a refund for a parka (Thompson was very particular about the quality of the garments he wore : A fan of L.L. Bean, he frequently found other companies' merchandise subpar). In terms of his much vaunted, stream-of-invective gonzo style, the letters reveal a far more sedate -- even pedantic -- Hunter Thompson. The letters to his son and his mother betray nothing of his wild-man persona. Does the publication of Thompson's early novel and collections of letters mark the end of his career? It would appear that this is the case. His author's note, the only piece of original writing in the book, is meandering and unfocused. It seems his powers may be on the wane, his muse fled. Yet the old letters themselves are wonderful stuff: funny, intriguing and sometimes poignant. They are equally important as part of the historical record as they are to journalism and yes, even literature. Ultimately Fear and Loathing in America is a cultural study of a crucial time in American history -- when both Thompson and his country lost their innocence and their dream. Robin Gambhir lives, works and writes in Toronto. [EMAIL PROTECTED] <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. 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