GONZO IS DEAD
long live gonzo
He shot himself at his home in the Rockies, sitting at his Selectric, a working writer to the end. Like Hemingway before him, Hunter S. Thompson, the iconoclast who made the words fear and loathing a standard in the American lexicon, took his life with a pull of the trigger.
Hemingway was one of Thompson’s heroes. As an aspiring young writer he used to re-type Papa’s sentences as a way to capture the older man’s style and cadence — a kind of autodidact’s apprenticeship. Read Thompson carefully and you can hear the echoes.
Not that he was a slavish imitator. Far from it. Where Hemingway famously distrusted modifiers (putting aside the handful he overused, like good and true and strong), Thompson made them his trademark: weird, frenzied, depraved, lunatic, savage, vicious — the razor-wire adjectives were a signature element of the gonzo imprint, and he scattered them across every page.
The modifier that came to define him was not his own, however. It was his fellow journalist, Bill Cardoso, who dubbed Thompson’s schtick “pure gonzo.” While the etymology of the term has remained elusive, Cardoso himself said it was Boston Irish for the last man standing after a hard night drinking. In most dictionaries now it is defined as an exaggerated, highly subjective style of participatory journalism. If we really need a definition, it’s probably best framed as tautology: Gonzo was what Hunter Thompson did; what Hunter Thompson did was Gonzo.
According to the generally accepted version of events, Gonzo was born of writer’s block. The story goes like this: Under severe deadline pressure, holed up in a cheap hotel and unable to produce, Thompson surrendered his notes in desperation to the editors of Scanlan’s Monthly, a short-lived political journal that had assigned him to cover the Kentucky Derby. Far from being disappointed, the magazine took the mad scribblings and ran with them. The result was “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved,” a wild romp, which rather than showing the readers any iniquity at the track gave them a tour through the dark corridors and twisted alleyways in the mind of the narrator. The year was 1970.
Whether or not the Derby story was really torn straight from Thompson’s notebook (and there’s reason to think it wasn’t all that simple), many of the hallmarks of the gonzo style were found in Thompson’s writing as far back as the early 60s and can be traced to his time as a roving South American correspondent for the National Observer, a long-defunct magazine owned by the publisher of the Wall Street Journal. The job, strictly freelance, was Thompson’s breakthrough gig as a writer.
According to his ex-wife Sandy, he took the little money he got when his grandmother died and bought a camera and a one-way ticket south. For their part, the editors at the Observer promised to pay him per usable article. A photo from that time shows him standing on a tarmac, ready to embark on the adventure. He looks like a man auditioning for the part of foreign correspondent in a movie script—a portable typewriter in one hand, a notebook in the other, a pipe tucked into the belt of his Bermuda shorts. It was the Summer of 1962. He was 26.
One of the first stories he filed was datelined Puerto Estrella, Colombia, on the wild, sere Guajira Peninsula. Beyond the reach of fact-checkers and with little idea where he was, Thompson improvised. The result was a far cry from anything that could be called straight reporting. It was also a hell of a lot more fun to read.
He wrote:
In Aruba, the Guajiro Indians are described as fierce and crazy and drunk all day on coconut whiskey. Also in Aruba you will hear that the men wear nothing but neckties, knotted just below the waist. That sort of information can make a man uneasy, and as I climbed the steep path, staggering under the weight of my luggage, I decided that at the first sign of unpleasantness I would begin handing out neckties like Santa Claus — three fine paisleys to the most menacing of the bunch, then start ripping up shirts.
Subsequently collected in The Great Shark Hunt, the piece is called “A Footloose American in a Smuggler’s Den.” It could just as easily have been called “Fear and Loathing in La Guajira.” It was, if not pure gonzo, then at least gonzo in the rough. Discounting the contraband Scotch, the only thing missing was drugs.
Thompson would spend roughly a year tramping around South America, eventually publishing sixteen pieces in the National Observer — from Aruba, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Brazil. The reporting was impressionistic; keenly observed but rarely penetrating the culture. An old friend told a biographer the dispatches “read like Hemingway writing from inside a tour bus.” What made the work stand out was not the reporting, but the prose. His headlines alone (assuming he wrote them) are classics: “The Inca of the Andes: He Haunts the Ruins of His Once-Great Empire”; “Democracy Dies in Peru, but Few Seem to Mourn Its Passing”; “Why Anti-Gringo Winds Often Blow South of the Border.”
The last began:
One of my most vivid memories of South America is that of a man with a golf club — a five-iron, if memory serves, driving golf balls off a penthouse terrace in Cali, Colombia. He was a tall Britisher, and he had what the British call “a stylish pot” instead of a waistline. Beside him on a small patio table was a long gin-and-tonic, which he refilled from time to time at the nearby bar. He had a good swing, and each of his shots carried low and long out over the city. Where they fell, neither he nor I nor anyone else on the terrace that day had the vaguest idea.
When Thompson returned to the states, an editor at the Observer asked him privately whether he’d actually witnessed the events he reported. Had he, for example, actually been there when the pot-bellied Englishman rained Titelists down on the heads of innocent caleños? According to biographer Paul Perry, Thompson responded, “A good journalist hears a lot of things. Maybe I heard some of these stories and didn’t see them. But they sure as hell happened.”
He was often evasive about the factual truth of his stories. Gonzo, Thompson once wrote, “is a style of ‘reporting’ based on William Faulkner’s idea that the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism.” Years later, writing in the foreword to The Proud Highway, a collection of Thompson’s letters, his friend, the longtime newspaperman and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist William Kennedy, called bullshit. “That Hunter has continued to be called a journalist is one of the great underrated bunco exploits of our age,” Kennedy wrote. “Journals and book publishers have ever since been foisting his work on the gullible public as journalism when in truth it is nothing but a pack of lies, which is, of course, a classic definition of fiction.”
Yet despite his aspirations to be a great novelist, Thompson never distinguished himself with his ‘pure’ fiction. The Rum Diary, his Puerto Rico novel, languished in the drawer for four decades. When it finally saw publication in 1998, it was met by lackluster reviews and poor sales. Next to the liveliness of the gonzo stuff and even his letters, readers found his fiction flat and unrewarding. (The movie, starring his Hollywood channeler, Johnny Depp, was no better.) Meanwhile Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas — an exemplar of the so-called New Journalism and Thompson’s tour de force— was inducted into the Modern Library, placed on the shelf alongside Tolstoy and Turgenev.
By all accounts, Thompson was miserable traveling in South America. In letters to friends he complained bitterly of celibacy, boredom and periodic “drink stoppages” — a state of affairs some think may have led him to experiment with the stimulants and other narcotics that would further ornament the gonzo mystique. In May 1963, worn down by dysentary and a perpetual shortage of funds, he returned home to the States.
The stint had paid off. The National Observer stories, often running on the front page, had been widely noticed, and editors came calling. Among them was Carey McWilliams from The Nation, who subsequently commissioned Thompson to write a piece about the infamous biker gang, the Hell’s Angels. That article would grow to become Thompson’s first book (also now part of the Modern Library) and send the young writer on his way to living-legend-dom as a fully fledged literary persona: Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, the Mad Professor of Owl Creek.
In time, as with Hemingway, the persona seemed to subsume the man, like a strangler fig rising up from the jungle floor to encircle a kapok tree, slowly choking off the host and leaving only a hollow space where the trunk once grew. In the case of both men, their prose styles—once so distinctive and refreshing, even revolutionary—descended into something like self-parody.
Thompson stopped writing for the National Observer after a falling out with the editors, but not before spending another year roving the U.S., doing the same kind of thing stateside that he had done in South America. The best of these stories was filed from Idaho in the spring of 1964. It was called “What lured Hemingway to Ketchum?”
Musing on his idol’s suicide, the 28-year-old Thompson saw in Hemingway’s demise a crisis of conviction brought on by radically changing times. He wrote that the “strength of his youth became rigidity as he grew older” and ended with a sentence which, read in the wake of Thompson’s own suicide, carries the eerie ring of foretelling. “So finally, and for what he must have thought the best of reasons, he ended it with a shotgun.” Without knowing it, he had written his own epitaph.
Hunter Thompson was found dead on February 22, 2005. He was 67 years old. In a suicide note, he said it was 17 more than he needed.
— Pat Joseph
