Hunter Thompson was more than just gonzo
I finished up the Gonzo movie awhile ago. As ever reflecting on “the production method” and the life-style of a creator is good for meditation. There’s those argue that Hunter Thompson burned out, submitted to the lust of celebrity, or just let himself slide into becoming the stage character he and his audience had created.
But, this is short sighted, and focuses on just a 10 or 15 year part of his career. Before the Fear and Loathing days, and even before Hells Angela, he’d been working for 20 years, starting in the US Air Force around 1956, 19 years if we peg his decline at 1975.
He still wrote after that, lots of columns, right up to shooting himself. Living that first twenty years of much travel, changing environments, and living on a poor writer’s salary… After that, and with the fame and money: who wouldn’t retire to fun?
The before times
Meanwhile, I finished up Freak Kingdom awhile ago. Judging by the three days it took to read, I liked this book a lot. Hemingway and Faulkner were my first “favorite writer,” and then HST.
As promised, Freak Kingdom is more focused on HST’s writing life on the late 60s and through the early 70s: from Hell’s Angels to Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ‘72. That second one is fun to read if you’re fan, but I imagine the casual, fun-seeking reader would find it intolerably focused on the Watergate era. The analogy to Trump is, of course there.
The book wraps up with a theory that this era was HST’s apex. Between those two books he did Fear and Loathing. And, the apex theory goes on, with all that fame and after an assignment on the drug from Rolling Stone, cocaine addiction finally burned out Hunter Thompson:
…for the next thirty years—he’d use cocaine regularly, substituting this more reactive stimulant for Dexedrine, which no longer seemed to help him function in the way it once had. “From then on,” his editor David Felton would later reflect, “he wouldn’t do a story unless you included cocaine with the payment. And he dried up and couldn’t write. I was there when he had huge fits of screaming because he couldn’t write the next sentence… It was very difficult for him. It turns your brain to cement.”
To ask it again: was the post 70s HST was all downhill? He wrote a lot more after this time. Despite having read everything of his I could find, I don’t remember much of his 80s stuff. Some of the ESPN columns I read in real-time during Bush Jr.: those were good. Some were on football, something I don’t care about. I’m pretty sure if I went a re-read his oeuvre I’d like them all.
I’ve been rereading The Great Shark Hunt: his pre Hells Angel’s articles have a growing unique style, definitely a unique viewpoint. Hopefully I’ll get onto reading the rest of the so called Gonzo Papers, the multi-book collection of HST’s articles over his life. His letters are incredibly interesting. I really loved the books that collect together his letters. There’s a third one that seems to be perpetually unpublished. I long for it.
For those of us who write, and imagine writing more, Freak Kingdom‘s cataloging of the background mechanics of writing and the lifestyle (good and, mostly, bad) needed to write are great. It’s quicker than reading those three books of letters.
I’m lucky that my type of writing (tech industry analysis) has always been well paid.
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Also, I came across a six CD set of HST’s raw recordings, well worth listening to if you’re into deep diving. As you listen to HST’s unique mumbling voice, you can piece together a lot of the content finding and generation process of making gonzo journalism.
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