Thursday, October 15, 2009

Hunter Thompson, again

I was looking for something to watch on TV while avoiding chores when I stumbled upon HBO on Demand. I browsed through the available movies, most of which I had either ignored in the theaters because they seemed bloated and bland in the previews, or seen already and had no desire to watch again. The typical cable problem: too many channels and nothing interesting. I decided to check out a few more movies and found one that I had missed, Terry Gilliam's adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with Johnny Depp as the late Hunter Thompson and Benicio Del Toro as his sidekick, the drug-crazed Dr. Gonzo. "Crazed" is the right word for the film; Thompson's book of the same name is a hilarious masterpiece of drug-induced paranoia, where his loud and frantic prose worked brilliantly. One could feel the fear and intensity and laugh at the madness.

Gilliam, however, is a heavy-handed director and tries to recreate the frenzy of Thompson's prose with a restless, jittery, and argumentative visual style, words that also describe Depp's portrayal of Thompson. The film failed in its attempt to revive an old sensation, and so did Thompson's body of work, many years of declining returns on his old reputation. Sometimes I'll pick up a book I had read and enjoyed years ago just to see if the writer's prose still has the same effect on me after my taste and expectations have changed, that is to say refined by experience, whether good, bad or neutral. Some writers still have that knockout punch in their old books--Mailer in An American Dream and Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Hemingway with In Our Time , among many others--and some heroes have aged poorly over time, like Lester Bangs, Charles Bukowski. No surprise; in my mid-fifties, I'm drawn to the deeper lyricism in the words that fill a page, the tone that goes beyond the moment of excitement and that continues to resonate as an example of writing that nails its moment perfectly.

A recent re-read of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter Thompson was this kind of book, from its infamous road trip opening to its paranoid adventures at a Las Vegas Narcotics officers convention; for all his death wish and self-centered recklessness--a revolutionary without a plan--Thompson wrote the final word that needed to be written on living on the edge. One wondered, even when young first encountering Thompson and his extreme style, whether he would fall off that edge or if someone would push him. It can't be that surprising that Hunter Thompson ended it the way he did; the only question to ask is why it didn't happen sooner. He was a case of Hemingwayism gone wild on crack cocaine, that one's challenges were one's character, and that the unwritten essence of a personal code was formed by how well one overcame one crisis after another.

It was always about struggle with Thompson, the struggle to meet deadlines before his drugs took effect, the clock ticking before a deadline would come again and he had nothing but a paragraph of drugged nonsense; like Kerouac, who he greatly admired, he came to document less the event he had been assigned than his own chronicles of using his body as a testing ground for new and improved abuses. You might say that he treated his mind as like a car he'd constantly try to rev up, lift up, juice up in hopes of getting the engine and suspension to take a sharp turn faster, meaner, louder, with the thought of eventual breakdown for the moment blocked out by the sheer mania and thrill that such speeds and close calls give you. But his mind fried; he wrote less; he mumbled more in public speeches and talks; he broke bones; his manner was a textbook example of the word "fried". Hells Angels It was as if the synapses that had fired and given **the world** Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas had fused **the ends** of his nerve endings and made it impossible to change style, outlook or interest. Other writers of similar aesthetic--Mailer, Wolfe--found new voices, bigger subjects, subtler ways to put forth their arguments with existence. Thompson was stuck in time, trying to sustain himself on sparking fits of rage and guile, coming up with little that was new, as it must be for an artist to keep a pulse worth beating. The real bummer is that he lived all these years knowing that he didn't have another good book in him. This might have been his biggest pain to endure, and it might have been the one he meant to stop once and for all. I agree that Thompson is an easy target, but then again he rarely missed a chance to make himself one. The curse of being a celebrity writer is that one risks becoming a brand name and finding themself facing audience expectation more than their muse. Thompson became Hunter S. Thompson, Gonzo Journalist , and became something of a clown making faces for a paying crowd. The pity of it all is that he had great talent when he put it to work, the result being a small but strong core of books from his body of work: Hells Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. But the act got old and the body couldn't keep up the paces anymore, and his writing became erratic, cruel, angry; he became a writer eternally dissatisfied without recourse to wit or irony. There was something sadly drastic about Better than Sex, a strange assemblage full of loud declarations and not much coherence; Thompson in his prime could emerge from his comic paranoia and invective and land on an illuminating point. This was all hollow gesturing. The problem, I suppose, was that Thompson never took the time to change his act, his style, to consider a project that would reshape his notion of what constitutes writing. Mailer dropped the third person persona and wrote The Executioner's Song, a fugue-paced saga made of terse sentences, and went on to a later career that still provoked controversy. Tom Wolfe, in turn, became a novelist, a good thing for him, as they mitigate his later essays, a string of missives from a sourpuss. In both cases, to varying degrees, the changes of stylistic venue kept both writers fresh in their old age. Thompson didn't avail himself of the chance.
I don't dismiss him as a drunk and a drug addict; I simply won't discount those things that ruined his talent. We do need to consider him seriously as a representative author of his time, but this needs to be done with it in mind that his biography is a cautionary tale for those who read him, like him, and decide they want to write crazy paragraphs like he did. One would need to emphasize the distinction between trying to write like Hunter Thompson and trying to be Hunter Thompson.

1 comment:

  1. For all of his self-indulgent sins and squandering of his talents, Hunter S. Thompson’s literary merit real and enduring. I would contend that, at his best, he was much more than a mere representative author of his era. Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas is. simply put, great writing –funny, cogent, insightful, filled with moral outrage worthy of Mark Twain or H.L. Mencken. From what I understand, Thompson carefully worked over its prose after getting down his first wave of spewings. F&L on the Campaign Trail ’72, while messy and fitful in spots, is one of the best chronicles of a U.S. presidential race there is, an antidote to the ponderous chronicles of Theodore H. White. Thompson brought back the old fashioned tang and raciness of political journalism as it existed before the “magisterial” era of White, Walter Lippmann, Joseph Alsop and the like. He made it fun to read again. I will not dispute that the quality of Thompson’s writing declined during the latter ‘70s and never recovered; his burned-out rants from the ‘80s through the ‘00s are sad to read, the vestiges of something much better. I wish he could’ve husbanded his mind and heart and survived to excoriate Sarah Palin. But – speaking as someone whose admiration of HST did not extend to imitating his drug use – I would characterize his finest work as much more than “crazy paragraphs.” The craziness might well be what many readers took from his work. But those who go beyond the gonzo surface can still find much more to admire.

    ReplyDelete

Comments are moderated due to spam. But commentaries, opinions and other remarks about the posts are always welcome! I apologize for the inconvenience.