Goodbye, Gonzo

I was excited by the appearance of Peter Richardson’s biography of Hunter Thompson, “Savage Journey: Hunter S. Thompson and the Weird Road to Gonzo.” HST’s history and mine ran parallel, albeit at different levels of notoriety, my level being elevation zero. If you came of age after 1960 and was paying attention to and reading about the big issues, you have to read this book. In my case, HST’s story prompts reconsideration of old literary habits. I’m no square. I think I’ve wised up.

I would not say I wanted to be HST. I did act in ways that resembled him, but I was much more aware of people like Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Paul Krassner. We did share some influences.

I began what was then, for me, edgy writing in my high school newspaper. I’d say my chief influences were Art Buchwald and Mad Magazine. In college the models were Norman Mailer, William S. Burroughs, and the Beats. My vehicles were my college daily newspaper, from the perch of Editorial Page Editor, and then an underground newspaper I co-founded called All You Can Eat. For a brief, magical period we were the radical voice of northern New Jersey.

I didn’t appreciate until later than Mailer and Burroughs were terrible people. Now with this book I can confirm that HST was too. A racist, misogynistic, abusive, narcissistic bully. His saving grace: like Burroughs he could write wickedly, hysterically funny sentences.

Although a Burroughs devotee, I was later forced to admit to myself that his books, though studded with brilliant sentences, as books were an incoherent, indigestible mess. By contrast, Mailer’s books were coherent but not good. I suppose the Mailer book that made the biggest impression on me was Armies of the Night, for its glorification of the New Left. Mailer spoke at Rutgers once and uttered the phrase, “Fuck War.” At the time, this was transgressive.

HST owed something to the Beats, who in turn owed something to Henry Miller. Funny thing about Miller, in my high-culture English Department at Rutgers, I don’t recall Miller’s name ever being uttered. I never delved. Years later I thoroughly enjoyed his cameo appearance in Reds, but that wasn’t enough to persuade me to crack any of his books. About a year ago, I thought I might have missed out on something, so I began reading Tropic of Cancer. As tends to happen with me reading something on Kindle, I put it aside and then forgot about it completely, until I read Richardson on HST. I went to sleep on Henry Miller.

The great thing about the underground press, we’re talking roughly 1969-71, was you could say anything you wanted, and in particular there was no restraint on what you might say about Richard Nixon. One of my favorite covers was a cartoon we had stolen, naturally, of Nixon shitting out Spiro Agnew. Who needed HST?

Of course, as Richardson recounts, HST loomed large in Rolling Stone and other commercial outlets. As an underground press pioneer, I stress the words ‘other’ and ‘commercial.’ To us, Rolling Stone was The Man in love beads. In New Jersey there was a local counterpart that we (our collective) regarded with disdain. Our newspaper was given away and financed by a motley array of local merchants, chiefly what were then known as “head shops.”

What is clear is that HST was not of the counterculture. He was performing the counterculture for the bourgeois. He was a geek act, an entertainer. Rolling Stone was his marketer. Like Henry Miller, the idea of HST was more interesting than the actual writing of HST.

Richardson relates that one skill that HST shared with Henry Miller was networking. In a related vein, he reports that Ken Kesey conceived one of his “Merry Prankster” bus expeditions as a device to make a marketable film. Commercialism in this society is inevitable, and everybody has to make a living, but it takes something off the rebel persona. The people who live as true rebels, off the capitalist cultural grid, are people you never hear about. HST was not one of them.

What did HST actually have to say? A recurring theme is the death of ‘the American dream.’ What could that mean? As an economist, I could say it is the shattered expectation of rising standards of living, both within and across generations. But the Baby Boom did just fine economically.

Economic growth is a helluva drug, but HST had little to say about it. On the contrary, we could say his focus was to chronicle depravity, hypocrisy, and other types of personal and social corruption. It reflected a fundamentally child-like disappointment, hardly the makings of incisive social criticism.

As an intellectual, HST was an absolute lightweight. All the brutality, the antics with firearms and explosives, the drug and alcohol abuse, the drama queen acts, were compensations for this basic fact: HST had little to say. People had been making fun of Richard Nixon since 1956 (“I wish I was in the land of Nixon, big deals there were really fixin’ . . . ). A man who can end up supporting Jimmy Carter has no radical edge.

Richardson chronicles HST’s productive period winding down in the early 1970s. After that he mostly dined out on his reputation, not on a continuing literary output. I would put this to my judgement in the preceding paragraph. Having little to say, HST’s act got old. He wanted to be a novelist, but he couldn’t hack it. His own modest efforts were ignored. He was reduced to riffing on current events and awkward situations of his own making. Drug abuse and alcoholism are boring.

Once you lose your purpose, or realize you never had any purpose, the only compensations for life are physical and interpersonal. HST’s body was failing him, his literary output had dried up, and his personal relationships were problematic. The end was logical and should have been unsurprising.