FEAR AND LOATHING IN AMERICA:
The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist
By Hunter S. Thompson
Simon & Schuster, 756 pages, $30
Since the publication of “Hell’s Angels” in 1966, Hunter S. Thompson has been challenging–perhaps assaulting–the mythos of the objective journalist, creating in its stead the figure of the participatory reporter, publicly exploring the tense and contested space between “the backed-off `journalist’ [and] the totally committed `activist.’ “
His most recent book, “Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist,” continues that work, his acidic prose further dissolving the line between fiction and reportage as he explores the tension between public persona and private self. This second volume of his correspondence brings together selected letters written from 1968 to 1976, and further establishes Thompson as perhaps the most perspicacious, clear-sighted observer of postwar American politics and culture.
Lionized primarily for his brilliant use of an explosive, hypercynical, expressionist idiom, Thompson and his art have become one and the same to his loyal readers. In his hands, gonzo journalism has been more than an alternative form of reportage; it has come to signify a way of life, its hard-drugging, outlaw persona–a.k.a. Raoul Duke–the only interlocutor capable of depicting the nightmarish but hysterical visions of the underside of our political and cultural scene.
Thompson established early on that such toxic truths could only be exposed by a sick society’s most demented and ruthless offspring. During the 1960s and 1970s, Thompson was the most prominent and relevant voice amongst those practicing what Tom Wolfe popularized as New Journalism. But to see him simply as the purveyor of a new journalistic approach, or to confuse Thompson with his drug-addled alter ego, is grossly inadequate. Thankfully, the publication of this second volume of letters provides us with the opportunity to reappraise Thompson’s place in American letters.
While Raoul Duke would strenuously protest being attached to some sort of canon or tradition, Hunter S. Thompson certainly deserves to be understood not as an anomaly, a radical freak, as simply the most visible stress fracture in the crumbling facade of ’60s “detached” reportage. Rather, Thompson’s forebears include Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, H.L. Mencken, Upton Sinclair, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Jack Kerouac. All were writers who broke esthetically from the writing of their periods, a new breed of “journalists” whose objective was to depict the American landscape as it was: tragic, grotesque, absurd, but still evocative and possibly still salvageable. Such a sensibility required a new way of writing, a new, radical method capable of recording the various emergent social realities in America: turn-of-the-century industrialism, jazz-age decadence and postwar alienation. In Thompson’s era, the most troubling phenomenon was the perception of a wide-scale betrayal of the democratic mission–a mission, Thompson contends, best expressed through the ideals of Jeffersonian democracy.
These writers, like Thompson, blurred the line between observer and participant. We might think of this literary tradition as a sort of radical muckraking, a form that reinvents itself as often as the American scene is reinvented. In this sense, Thompson’s work should be read as much more than the creation of a brash, nonconformist outlaw hero, or the journalistic innovator of something called “gonzo.” Like the other radical muckrakers, Thompson was one of the first to understand the limitations of his historical moment’s genres in relating the complex, rapidly shifting social conditions of his period.
In a letter written in 1970 to his editor at Random House, Thompson announces that ” `anything I write is going to be about the death of the American Dream.’ ” It serves as a warning and an invitation to stouthearted readers that his subject matter will reflect not only the ugly truths of the postwar American self in flux, but will project the ugliness of postwar American society in all its hypocrisy and paradoxes. And Thompson has been sending off “savage” missives ever since.
Whether you like or dislike his libertarian-anarchistic worldview, Thompson has always gone after the story with a vengeance and come back with an often perverse, but always unflinching, account of the bizarre machinations of American politics, and pop and corporate culture–views so candid and true to his idiosyncratic vision that they demand from readers a response. This form of journalistic activism is summed up unapologetically by Thompson in an early letter: “In a nut, I want to hold up a mirror and let [them] argue with that, not me.”
No postwar American writer, save perhaps Kerouac and Norman Mailer, has been celebrated and pilloried as energetically as Thompson. But even though he has been the subject of numerous biographies, documentaries, two major motion pictures and countless stories detailing his legal problems, it has been difficult to get a line on who Thompson is and how he came to be the nation’s leading sociopolitical scribe. This latest volume of letters provides the best sort of backdoor autobiography, revealing a Thompson in the midst of creating, and perhaps becoming, his alter ego, Raoul Duke, an out-of-control, drug-addled provocateur born in the streets of the 1968 Democratic National Convention riots.
In one letter, Thompson expresses discomfort with being so closely identified with his literary persona, complaining that people “tend to take my image absolutely seriously.” In a key insight, the letters bear out a dual Thompson: the hard-living, drugging, profane Raoul Duke, clearly an extension of Thompson’s killer instinct, and Thompson the astute, detail-oriented perfectionist who is always on top of his numerous projects, a man committed to perfecting his writing technique, an innovator with serious aesthetic concerns. The Duke of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” demented and aloof, does not appear in the letters often. While much of Thompson’s prose retains its obscenity-laden edge, what the letters reveal is a Thompson who is deeply concerned about local politics, his community and the future of democracy in America.
He is a loyal friend, a dutiful son and brother, and though the letters never give into sentimentality, they reveal a focused visionary, hopeful yet always skeptical. As he writes to a young, disillusioned fan in Minneapolis:
“I’m looking for something in the way of candidates or ideas that might really change the institutionally corrupt nature of politics in this country. So don’t mistake anger for pessimism. I believe the democratic process can work in America. . . .”
The volume depicts a Thompson who spends much of his time covering politics and, becoming disgusted, decides to involve himself directly. His letters refer often to his political activism: orchestrating a mayoral candidacy that sought to organize the “freak vote” as a working example of progressive grassroots politics; his own candidacy for sheriff of Aspen, Colo.; and his organizing of the Elko Conference, a meeting of democratic thinkers and activists in 1974.
But ultimately Thompson’s most effective political activism has been his writing, and in dozens of substantive letters, Thompson wrestles with writing the book on the death of the American Dream. Ultimately, that project would be abandoned as such, but the theme would be manifested brilliantly in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.”
The letters in which Thompson develops his most innovative and jarring narrative are, on their own, worth the price of admission. They show us a revolutionary writer at work, a fine creative mind astir, documenting clearly, although not concisely, the evolution of Thompson’s voice as well as his writing philosophy. Although the process is inimitable, watching the process unfold provides us with a mesmerizing view of the complex, often mysterious, act of writing.
Perhaps such a voice could have been produced only in the ’60s, a time when politics was being fought in the streets while being characterized primarily through the media. The letters bring to life that decade’s energy and idealism. Thompson’s own veneer of objectivity is stripped away as he experiences the “Gestapo tactics” of Mayor Richard J. Daley in 1968. He writes to a friend a few weeks later that he has been forced to choose sides, and newly radicalized, declares publicly that, “I’m one of them.”
As the letters make clear, it was during that week in August that Thompson came face to face with what he described as the crippling complacency of the national press, who, “when they get even a taste of the story, they apologize.” He writes Hughes Rudd, CBS campaign correspondent, that “nothing I read compares to what I saw . . . with nothing but my notes to assure me that it really happened.”
That chasm between what the observer actually sees and what is reported seems to have pressed Thompson into creating a literary alter ego who could close the gap between direct experience–balanced, but acute observation–and its purposeful articulation. More importantly, Thompson set out to do so in the face of stifling corporate and political powers. The letters bear out that this undertaking was incredibly costly and risky for Thompson. During the eight years the book covers, he is constantly in debt, harassed by the Internal Revenue Service and collectors, and is often the victim of news outlets that refuse to publish his stories when they prove to be controversial, or who neuter them to make them more palatable.
Yet Thompson never gives in to the call for a saner, more moderate approach to his subject matter. “Go to any magazine rack and see how many articles you want to read,” he challenges his long-time correspondent, Oscar Acosta. “Nobody is confident enough, these days, to attack anything except cripples . . . all the people without real public leverage.” His sometimes reckless, but always sure-handed, attack on the status quo created a potent mixture of journalism, sociology, political science and fiction, a sometimes putrid mixture calculated to cut through an American complacency that sought to ignore the corrupt and brutal truths of its own imperialist, racist and consumerist practices.
He wrote Ralph Steadman, his collaborator and illustrator, that they should write ” `venomous’ ” reports “about everything that people respect . . . quite systematically and then we could sell it as a book: `Amerikan Dreams. . . .’ ” For Thompson, this was not an act of cynical rebellion but a duty. Thompson’s deepest fear was that the death of the American Dream would not be detected, and would thus go unmourned.
Ultimately, Thompson should be recognized for contributing some of the clearest, most bracing and fearless analysis of the possibilities and failures of American democracy in the past century. Reading through this latest collection of letters, one cannot but agree with him as he proclaims, “I am one of the best writers currently using the English language as both a musical instrument and a political weapon.”
