“I unfortunately
proved what I set out to prove, and I think the original reason was to prove it
to myself, that the American Dream really is fucked” – Hunter S Thompson, 1970.
OK. Tell me
the first thing that comes to mind when I mention Hunter S Thompson.
(Waits for a moment)
No, not the Olympic-medal-winning English black decathlon athlete with a perm and a porno tash from the 80s, that’s Daley Thompson you’re thinking of. Easy mistake to make, I suppose. No, normally when you ask that question of somebody who knows who the debauched 20th century legendary writer was, they would say drugs, booze, a Johnny Depp film, and going mental in Las Vegas. And they’d be right, to a degree.
But somehow, they always seem to forget about the bloody writing.
This is genuinely something that has always been a bugbear of mine. If you look at HST pages on Facebook these days, they’re full of tiresome Hunter wannabes bragging about their supposedly prestigious chemical and alcohol intake. But the writing simply isn’t there, and so it all means sweet…fuck…all…and…nothing. Thompson has been a big writing/life (not that the two are separable) inspiration of mine for three decades now, ever since I first read his seminal American existential classic, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I was a big fan of drug-and-booze madness of the man’s work in my late teens and early 20s, and I confess it had a somewhat (chuckling) negative effect on my own impressionable brain and wordwork back then.
But even back then, in my more rabid cringey fanman youth, quite aside from the acerbic lysergic craziness, I always respected the man’s free thinking, trenchant sociological analyses, and writing excellence first and foremost. The man was a capital-W Writer, a fact that unfortunately tends now to get lost in the dust kicked up by all the chaos of his personal life. Anybody writing about him now is like the man himself in 1971 at the Mint 400 in Vegas, trying to cover a race and seeing nothing but dustclouds in front of him. Where does it all end, who wins and who loses and who draws what picture? If any 20th century icon’s artistic and literary and journalistic reputation is due for an overhaul, it’s that of Hunter Stockton Thompson.
(Waits for a moment)
No, not the Olympic-medal-winning English black decathlon athlete with a perm and a porno tash from the 80s, that’s Daley Thompson you’re thinking of. Easy mistake to make, I suppose. No, normally when you ask that question of somebody who knows who the debauched 20th century legendary writer was, they would say drugs, booze, a Johnny Depp film, and going mental in Las Vegas. And they’d be right, to a degree.
But somehow, they always seem to forget about the bloody writing.
This is genuinely something that has always been a bugbear of mine. If you look at HST pages on Facebook these days, they’re full of tiresome Hunter wannabes bragging about their supposedly prestigious chemical and alcohol intake. But the writing simply isn’t there, and so it all means sweet…fuck…all…and…nothing. Thompson has been a big writing/life (not that the two are separable) inspiration of mine for three decades now, ever since I first read his seminal American existential classic, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I was a big fan of drug-and-booze madness of the man’s work in my late teens and early 20s, and I confess it had a somewhat (chuckling) negative effect on my own impressionable brain and wordwork back then.
But even back then, in my more rabid cringey fanman youth, quite aside from the acerbic lysergic craziness, I always respected the man’s free thinking, trenchant sociological analyses, and writing excellence first and foremost. The man was a capital-W Writer, a fact that unfortunately tends now to get lost in the dust kicked up by all the chaos of his personal life. Anybody writing about him now is like the man himself in 1971 at the Mint 400 in Vegas, trying to cover a race and seeing nothing but dustclouds in front of him. Where does it all end, who wins and who loses and who draws what picture? If any 20th century icon’s artistic and literary and journalistic reputation is due for an overhaul, it’s that of Hunter Stockton Thompson.
Which is where Freak Kingdom, the new book by American journalist Timothy Denevi, comes in. In an attempt to even out the past somewhat dismissive tone and tenor of public debate on the Gonzo journalist, Denevi has decided to forego the myth and madness and try to peer behind the obscuring wacky drug-and-drink hack-flack to paint a more complex, political-writing-inclusive, incisive picture of the man Jack Nicholson called a “baffling human iceberg.” Juan Thompson, the amiable and approachable son of the writer under discussion dissection, says, in a quote on the back of the book that it “shines a long-overdue light on the powerful idealism that underlies all of my father’s writing…” Which I would agree with.
But does it actually succeed?
Let’s find out.
As Juan notes, his father was, indeed, an idealist. He was also a bone-deep moralist, albeit of an image-twisted kind. He was probably an ideal American patriot, in many ways, believing in absolute freedom for his fellow countrymen just as long as they didn’t hurt anybody else. There was always a nod-and-a-wink element of enlightened self-interest and self-awareness to Thompson’s extremist libertarian instincts. As he wryly noted in a 1978 BBC Omnibus: “Obviously one of the things I have to appreciate about America – and if I didn’t I’d be stupid or insane – is that for good or ill, I can function here. And I don’t think there are many societies or social, political systems, where I could function the way I am now. And perhaps some people would argue that’s the best argument for destroying the system, it gets rid of people like me.”
But quite apart from any personal advantages to being allowed to roam free and crazy (try to imagine somebody like Thompson in the American political and societal blandscape now)(you can stop trying to imagine now, it’s impossible) in a country he loved and feared and loathed, the writer was a natural-born killer of injustices like, for example, the instance where he got a young woman named Lisl Auman out of a life sentence, after he became incensed at the injustice of convicting her of murder when she had her hands handcuffed behind her back in a police car as the murder occurred:
http://www.talkleft.com/story/2006/04/25/292/85574/inmatesandprisons/Hunter-Thompson-Is-Smiling-Today-Lisl-Auman-is-Free
So this anti-authoritarian stuff went far, far deeper with Thompson than just mere 60s- era grandstanding or faux-moral, chestbeating showboating. He meant what he said, and seemed genuinely despondent when America lurched towards the right the older he got. I don’t think it was any mistake that he finally killed himself during the George W Bush era, though, of course, he was in a lot of pain and ill health by then. Fuck knows what the Hell he would make of America today. He probably wouldn’t have been able to stand it; it would have fucked with every living last nerve in his body on a daily basis mourning, doom, and nightmare. It’s probably just as well for him he isn’t around, though I do wonder sometimes what he would have had to say about the entire miserable travelling cavalcade of sunstroked perversities the Western world has become.
Strike that. I know what he would have thought, as does any serious reader of the man’s work.
Timothy Denevi is definitely a serious Thompson reader-cum-worldview-evangelist, but I almost wonder…to what end? To wit, as the inside cover puts it:
“This skillfully told and dramatic story tells how Thompson saw through Richard Nixon’s treacherous populism and embarked on a life-defining campaign to stop it. In his fevered effort to expose institutional injustice, Thompson pushed himself far beyond his natural limits, sustained by drugs, mania, and little else. For ten years, he cast aside his old ambitions, troubled his family, and likely hastened his own decline, along the way producing some of the best political writing in our history.”
Denevi sets out his mandate there: the book takes us from 1962, when Thompson first starts taking the amphetamine Dexedrine to help him stay focused during work, to 1972, just after the publication of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72. But this book really doesn’t come off as described. First off, he talks there about how Thompson ‘likely hastened his own decline,’ but doesn’t really go into that very much during the first 80% of the book. He mentions vaguely here and there HST’s prodigious, excessive drug-and-booze-consumption regime, but there’s no real sense, in the work, of any cumulative effect this is taking on his body or brain or work.
So this anti-authoritarian stuff went far, far deeper with Thompson than just mere 60s- era grandstanding or faux-moral, chestbeating showboating. He meant what he said, and seemed genuinely despondent when America lurched towards the right the older he got. I don’t think it was any mistake that he finally killed himself during the George W Bush era, though, of course, he was in a lot of pain and ill health by then. Fuck knows what the Hell he would make of America today. He probably wouldn’t have been able to stand it; it would have fucked with every living last nerve in his body on a daily basis mourning, doom, and nightmare. It’s probably just as well for him he isn’t around, though I do wonder sometimes what he would have had to say about the entire miserable travelling cavalcade of sunstroked perversities the Western world has become.
Strike that. I know what he would have thought, as does any serious reader of the man’s work.
Timothy Denevi is definitely a serious Thompson reader-cum-worldview-evangelist, but I almost wonder…to what end? To wit, as the inside cover puts it:
“This skillfully told and dramatic story tells how Thompson saw through Richard Nixon’s treacherous populism and embarked on a life-defining campaign to stop it. In his fevered effort to expose institutional injustice, Thompson pushed himself far beyond his natural limits, sustained by drugs, mania, and little else. For ten years, he cast aside his old ambitions, troubled his family, and likely hastened his own decline, along the way producing some of the best political writing in our history.”
Denevi sets out his mandate there: the book takes us from 1962, when Thompson first starts taking the amphetamine Dexedrine to help him stay focused during work, to 1972, just after the publication of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72. But this book really doesn’t come off as described. First off, he talks there about how Thompson ‘likely hastened his own decline,’ but doesn’t really go into that very much during the first 80% of the book. He mentions vaguely here and there HST’s prodigious, excessive drug-and-booze-consumption regime, but there’s no real sense, in the work, of any cumulative effect this is taking on his body or brain or work.
The
personal pathological aspects of Thompson’s drug-and-alcohol-addicted
personality seem almost like abstract afterthoughts to Denevi, whereas they
were clearly fundamental to Thompson’s daily existence and work. Indeed, his
son Juan related (in his excellent 2016 memoir, Stories I Tell
Myself) that his dad said he had made a “career decision” to keep on taking
drugs long past the point where it was good or useful to do so. I get that he
is trying to step away from the whole mad Gonzo druggie cunt myth, but when you
basically state you will be unravelling this strand of the man’s life, and how it
affected his work and health, then don’t follow through on it…you’re missing
your mark by a wide-shot confused country mile. But it’s not the first time
somebody has misfired when writing about Thompson, and it won’t be the last.
To be perfectly honest, I can’t really see exactly why this book exists. It genuinely comes across as being a half-completed college graduation thesis written by a journalist enamoured of his hero’s work, and offers little original or new in its length. It’s not even really that long to begin with – the USA hardcover edition runs to a mere 266 hardly-wordy pages, all told. We then have something I found pretty bizarre, in that Denevi includes another 99(!) pages of notes about the source materials he has drawn on, before finishing off with the index. The notes thing is just plain bizarre. Denevi will provide a lengthy note about some one-line aphorism Thompson has quoted, then he will include another note by, say, Nabokov, relating to the previous note because the Gonzo journalist was a fan of the Russian writer! It’s basically a waste of space and words.
To be perfectly honest, I can’t really see exactly why this book exists. It genuinely comes across as being a half-completed college graduation thesis written by a journalist enamoured of his hero’s work, and offers little original or new in its length. It’s not even really that long to begin with – the USA hardcover edition runs to a mere 266 hardly-wordy pages, all told. We then have something I found pretty bizarre, in that Denevi includes another 99(!) pages of notes about the source materials he has drawn on, before finishing off with the index. The notes thing is just plain bizarre. Denevi will provide a lengthy note about some one-line aphorism Thompson has quoted, then he will include another note by, say, Nabokov, relating to the previous note because the Gonzo journalist was a fan of the Russian writer! It’s basically a waste of space and words.
Or maybe not: maybe what it is is an attempt to pad out a manuscript that isn’t
very long, all told. Denevi can write. But he tends to get oddly self-indulgent
and threads the entire book with his own poetic descriptions (often of weather,
for some reason – looking for a meteorological scribbling gig somewhere?) that
really intrude in the text. Take, for example, this evocation of San Francisco
from P45:
“Through the windows of his apartment on Parnassus there’d be one detail that the fog and rain could never completely obscure: the city’s famous bridge. At all hours the red lights of the twin summits flashed, insinuating the presence of its span against the deep swift channel below, across which the boats progressed endlessly, as if on rails, their horns sounding at the transition from ocean to bay. Each night Thompson took in this view; he sat at his writing desk and looked out into the direction of the Pacific, a black-velvet ampitheater of ocean and unseen hills fluted by the slimmest passageway. In this sense the bridge was the city, its shape: both doorway and exit. And wherever Hunter Thompson drove that spring – in search of predawn work at the docks, or south of Market Street to pass out circulars, or across the Bay itself, to Sausalito and Berkeley and Oakland beyond – the Golden Gate would’ve been there, too, disappearing one moment behind avenues and buildings before materializing the next.”
So there we have 171 words of absolutely no use to the wider text whatsoever. They’re decently poetic, yes, but meaningless in the work’s context, except as padding. The book is full of invasive stuff like this, and there are maybe several pages all told of this that could be safely cut without losing anything at all. I only noticed it because it was so prevalent from start to finish, and I just started skipping over these florid descriptions when I encountered them to save time and teethgrinding. And yes, I know I can be a bit self-indulgent here too, and this piece could use editing. But this is just me gathering a few vagrant cranium-roaming thoughts for a tiny blog, not putting out an ostensibly professional manuscript about a major American literary canon figure to have people pay £20/$28 to buy. Maybe the thought of Thompson’s words being in a book alongside Denevi’s got him all giddy, like a high school girl with her inspired fluttering heart going batter-pitter-patter, soundaliking endorphins internally raining, tripping and blissing her out, turning everything the headspinning oxygenated bloody maroon colour of her artistic crush, making her trancescribe the contours of their commingled sitting-in-a-tree k-i-s-s-i-n-g worldviews onto book pages.
Two can play at that overly poetic game!
I am laughing here.
“Through the windows of his apartment on Parnassus there’d be one detail that the fog and rain could never completely obscure: the city’s famous bridge. At all hours the red lights of the twin summits flashed, insinuating the presence of its span against the deep swift channel below, across which the boats progressed endlessly, as if on rails, their horns sounding at the transition from ocean to bay. Each night Thompson took in this view; he sat at his writing desk and looked out into the direction of the Pacific, a black-velvet ampitheater of ocean and unseen hills fluted by the slimmest passageway. In this sense the bridge was the city, its shape: both doorway and exit. And wherever Hunter Thompson drove that spring – in search of predawn work at the docks, or south of Market Street to pass out circulars, or across the Bay itself, to Sausalito and Berkeley and Oakland beyond – the Golden Gate would’ve been there, too, disappearing one moment behind avenues and buildings before materializing the next.”
So there we have 171 words of absolutely no use to the wider text whatsoever. They’re decently poetic, yes, but meaningless in the work’s context, except as padding. The book is full of invasive stuff like this, and there are maybe several pages all told of this that could be safely cut without losing anything at all. I only noticed it because it was so prevalent from start to finish, and I just started skipping over these florid descriptions when I encountered them to save time and teethgrinding. And yes, I know I can be a bit self-indulgent here too, and this piece could use editing. But this is just me gathering a few vagrant cranium-roaming thoughts for a tiny blog, not putting out an ostensibly professional manuscript about a major American literary canon figure to have people pay £20/$28 to buy. Maybe the thought of Thompson’s words being in a book alongside Denevi’s got him all giddy, like a high school girl with her inspired fluttering heart going batter-pitter-patter, soundaliking endorphins internally raining, tripping and blissing her out, turning everything the headspinning oxygenated bloody maroon colour of her artistic crush, making her trancescribe the contours of their commingled sitting-in-a-tree k-i-s-s-i-n-g worldviews onto book pages.
Two can play at that overly poetic game!
I am laughing here.
As for the book in general, well, it’s a funyun. As the extensive notes make
clear, Denevi has read every book and article by and from Thompson known to man
and woman and bisex. So what Freak Kingdom comes off as, bottom line, is somebody
writing their own (per)version of Hunter S Thompson’s life and political
writing over a decade, using information already mined by other people,
presenting nothing really new. It’s like musicians who remix the work of others
to present their own version of an already-existing artistic vision. It’s fun
and all, but it’s nothing really new or satisfying or filling, empty remix
calories for the hungry enquiring mind. I mean, I didn’t buy this book to have info
from every other biography of Thompson rehashed to me: I have read every single
book Thompson ever wrote (except Screwjack) and all those biographies and
articles myself, and don’t need a Cliff Notes version of this stuff. It may be
a good primer on Thompson’s work for earnestly nodding hipsters to jabberjaw
about at anti-social injustice worrier vegan reich parties as they avoid eye
contact with the opposite sex for fear of arrest for thought crimes, but it just
didn’t do too much for me.
I miss and eternally salute Hunter S Thompson, wherever he is now. I am sure this book will not be the last attempted-revisionist tome to come along on his life and work. At least it does pull him back out of contemporary obscurity a bit. But I do hope other volumes to follow tell us something more than what the man himself told us, especially seeing as how a lot of the thoughts and quotes in this book seem to be lifted from the first, excellent volume of his collected letters, The Proud Highway. Cherry-picking ideas and quotes and anecdotes isn’t writing, it’s typing, sampling, and Thompson himself would never have countenanced that for one single solitary second. Writing was in his blood, sweat, tears, fears, and beers. Giving it anything less than 100% would have gained short thrift from the man, as any constant reader of his knows.
Hunter S Thompson’s Life And Work: The Fan Edit doesn’t really accomplish much
ultimately, to me at least. It may introduce a new audience to his work, but
long-term readers of the man’s won’t find much value for money or intellectual
sustenance here. And yes, I get the ‘American fascism is alive and unwell and
Thompson’s writing is more urgent and prophetic and vital and needed than ever’ angle here,
using a dead man’s work to quixotically attack a living orange canker, but I
strongly suspect that Hunter would have intensely disliked both sides of the
modern American political chasm. He would have hated the racist, hateful intonations
from the right wingers, and the free speech sodomy from the left wingers; clowns to the left of him, jokers to the right. You can bet you know what he
would have done: gone and sat on his porch after rattleclatterbattering out
some seminal screed from the forefront of the war on insanity and
injustice, dropped a pill, popped a beertop, taken a slop, sighed, saluted the slowly setting sun, let his mind wander, and smiled knowingly at the eternal sustaining
screeching of the peacocks from just out of dimming Owl Farm eyeline. Res ipsa loquitur indeed.END
Saves me from buying that book then
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