It was a Monday when I heard news of Hunter Thompson’s suicide. He had ended it, like his hero Hemingway, with a shotgun blast, and so both writers died violently in their isolated mountain retreats. Both made the logical final step in their self-mythologising.
Hunter, like Hemingway, was a life pugilist – an aggressive iconoclast driven to conquer physical and mental rings. And he succeeded, for a while. His self-styled “gonzo” journalism hurtled him to the front of the counter-cultural zeitgeist, from where he manned an unlikely career as renegade journalist. He was obsessed with the smoky world of Washington; it was an obsession that drove Hunter to explosive expressions of misanthropy, tones coloured by drugs.
And the writing was genuinely funny, but some saw the Dorian Grey façade for what it was – a dynamic cartoon-like personality obscuring agonising levels of anxiety and mistrust, common symptoms of an encouraged misanthropy. Kurt Vonnegut noticed, however, and in his review of Thompson’s book Fear & Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72, wrote: “… the disease is fatal. There is no known cure. The most we can do for the poor devil, it seems to me, is to name his disease in his honour. From this moment on, let all who feel Americans can be as easily led to beauty as to ugliness, to truth as to public relations, to joy as to bitterness, be said to be suffering Hunter Thompson’s disease. I don’t have it this morning. It comes and goes. This morning I don’t have Hunter Thompson’s disease”.
Devastatingly portentous, Vonnegut anticipated Thompson’s succumbing to his own disease 33 years later.
Ashamedly, in being spectator to Thompson’s tireless levels of myth-making, I became distracted from the poison in his veins – Thompson, the man, became inseparable from his grotesque and fantastical sketches of the American Condition. He was a super-freak, half-man, half-myth, a famous teller of tall tales about the Death of the American Dream. Now we suspect that the primal screams were real, of course they were real; we discover that the humorous mimicry of insanity wasn’t playacting and his famous gun-play, like Hemingway’s, is now appallingly significant.
In 1964, then writing for the National Observer, a young Thompson set out for Ketchum, Idaho, to see for himself the death place of Hemingway. He wrote: “Perhaps he found what he came here for, but the odds are huge that he didn’t. He was an old, sick and very troubled man, and the illusion of peace and contentment was not enough for him – even when his friends came up from Cuba and played bullfight with him in the Tram. So finally, and for what he must have thought were the best of reasons, he ended it with a shotgun”.
Thompson also wrote: “’Well,’ said Hemingway, ‘there’s just one thing I live by – that’s having the power of conviction and knowing what to leave out.’ He had said the same thing before, but whether he believed it in the winter of his years is another matter. There is good evidence that he was not always sure what to leave out, and very little evidence to show his power of conviction survived the war.”
Thompson wrote his own epithet in this article, with its stresses on the power of conviction, and the trouble with losing it…
Hunter had fed his myth well in the ‘60s, and was symbiotically supported afterwards by a curious press. But it was also during this early period that Hunter was at his peak – writing intelligent reportage on unprecedented cultural marks such as the Black Panthers, the Hells Angels and Haight-Ashbury. Hunter had the correct ratio of photographic eye/intelligence/wit/ and drug-laced adventurism to produce culturally instructive writing. When he was good, he was very, very good, but with a man like Hunter, this delicate ratio was unlikely to last. There’s good evidence that Hunter’s writer’s stock was ruined by growing levels of anxiety and undiminished drug use in later age.
Hunter’s writing faltered and arguably hasn’t asserted any relevance for two decades. His last published piece was a hyper-frenetic and unfunny dialogue with Bill Murray, and his column writing for ESPN’s website were ghastly examples of unintentional self-parody.
I almost cried when I re-read Vonnegut’s review of Thompson. To me it revealed my gullibility in swallowing Hunter’s myth, blurring the human. It was also a myth which, for me, contained some vague sense that he was bullet-proof. Of course, nobody is, especially someone as sensitive as Hunter and so, for what he must have thought the best of reasons, he ended it with a shotgun.
argue all you want, but hunter and i will laugh all the way to the vault of enlightenment. the decades you found lacking of his, were the decades i've enjoyed him, having exhausted vonnegut's once-considerable store. your knowledge of the details of his life and death are exasperatingly deficient to occupy the top slot of this forum
I am a long time friend of Juan we went to the Aspen Community School together I have been using the blogs to try to send a message of love to him and the family but I know he is totally swamped because of the media attention at Owl farm and we need to let him know that we care for Him, Anita and the whole family in this time of tragedy while respecting his privacy
Let's see if we can get the word out ...
He was first the man….
He became the myth and legend
To me he was several people.
He was my best friend’s dad although he always called his dad Hunter
(At Juan’s wedding he said to a friend about me “Look there’s another little bastard I raised that turned out OK”)
He was Hunter S. Thompson retiring shy southerner who loved guns and his freedom
And
He was the Dr. Gonzo who we all know who would be in your face and try to kill you if you attempted to try to take away his guns, drugs, freedom, privacy and the god given right to go into an explosive tirade about it.
To be such a person required him to have a unique emotional support structure. These people now need our support, love and understanding in this time of grief.