The Duke of Gonzo

Courtesy University Press of Mississippi

by Jesse Yancy
August 20, 2008

What author would you like to have over to your house? Vonnegut, Hemingway, Angelou? Thanks to the University Press of Mississippi’s Literary Conversations Series, the question is no longer moot, and you don’t even have to make dinner.

Chances are, the contributors whose articles make up these publications have already asked the same questions that you might and have provided the insights that you would relish. Fortunately, “Conversations with Hunter S. Thompson” (University Press of Mississippi, 2008, $22) is especially rewarding, primarily due to the flamboyant personality of Thompson himself, the man who faced off a hostile band of Hell’s Angels in a Madras plaid jacket puffing on a holder-enconsed Dunhill cigarette before falling off into the gang like some psycho Alice sucked down into a Harley carburetor. The resulting work, “Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs” (1966), established Thompson’s reputation as a writer on the fringe of American culture.

With “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream” in 1972, Thompson established a style of journalism that dominated the counter-cultural scene for more than a decade.

All the sensational aspects of Thompson’s life are covered in this “conversations” book: the boozing; the drugs; the audacious, in-your-face posturing; the harsh assessment of public figures and politicians of his time. The interviews and articles are arranged in chronological order, beginning with a Playboy interview from 1974 and concluding with a Relix article from 2003, two years before Thompson died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

The Playboy interview, conducted by Craig Vetter, sets the tone for what follows. Vetter starts out touching on the most sensational aspects of Thompson’s personality (drugs, alcohol, the Hell’s Angels, his contempt for politicians֖“Hubert Humphrey should be castratedԗand his own ill-fated campaign for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colo.), then examines “gonzo journalism” with the help of the father of the genre.

“[I]t grew out of a story on the Kentucky Derby for Scanlan’s magazine,” Thompson recalled. “It was one of those horrible deadline scrambles and I ran out of time. I was desperate. Ralph Steadman had done the illustrations, the cover was printed and there was this horrible hole in the magazine. So finally I just started jerking pages out of my notebook and numbering them and sending them to the printer. I was sure it was the last article I was ever going to do for anybody.”

The rest, of course, is history.

The Nixon administration also undergoes some brutal analysis in this entry (Playboy: “What part of Watergate were you in?” Thompson: “In the bar.”) The 1977 High Times article that follows echoes these themes, but it’s fun to read, too.

Another significant entry in the collection is the Curtis Wilkie essay, “The Doctor is In,” first published by The Boston Globe in 1977, which is a fine and thorough profile of Thompson at the height of his powers. Geoffrey Stokes and Kevin Simonson’s, “Gonzo’s Last Stand?” examines Thompson’s political difficulties in Aspen. (“In my very limited congress with the local authorities, I was treated like some kind of half-mad cross between a hermit and a wolverine, a thing best let alone as long as possible.”)

“Fear and Loathing in Hollywood” provides a brief look at Thompson’s rocky relationship with the movie industry and Bill Murray’s portrayal of Thompson as well as a brief reminder of Johnny Depp’s turn as Raoul Duke in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” (1998).

Douglas Brinkley’s essay, “The Art of Journalism: An Interview with Hunter S. Thompson,” first published in The Paris Review in 2000, is a first-rate examination of Thompson’s literary influences and his modus operandi, liberally peppered with salty asides and observations.

“I’ve found that the letter form is a good way to get me going. I write letters just to warm up. Some of them are just, ‘F*ck you, I wouldn’t sell that for a thousand dollars,’ or something. ‘Eat sh*t and die,’ and then send it off on the fax. I find the mood or the rhythm through letters, or sometimes either reading something or having something read֖it’s just a matter of getting the music.” Unsurprisingly, this is one of the better entries in the volume.

This book is a wonderful accompaniment to Thompson’s writing, but it is in no way a substitution for the real thing. As Thompson himself observed in a 1980 profile that is not included in this collection; “Somehow the author has become larger than the writing. And it sucks.

 
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