Buckle Up for a Ride Inside Hunter Thompson’s Mind

As an apprentice reporter on the presidential trail in 1976, I remember reading about the previous campaign and the big dogs of political journalism. The book was Tim Crouse’s “The Boys on the Bus.” Toward the end, Crouse observed in passing that when reporters went home, their spouses would have to ask, “What was it really like?”

This dangling question struck me as an awful thing to reveal about journalism, and it haunts me still.

There was an exception back then, of course. Hunter S. Thompson’s 1972 campaign dispatches for Rolling Stone conveyed the energy, the isolation, the mood swings, the tension and the emotional wear of politics in a fashion that made him the most distinctive and entertaining writer in the country.

Nobody who read these teeth-jarring accounts had the slightest doubt what it was like in the eye of the campaign storm or, for that matter, what Thompson was like. And frankly, politics has never been as interesting since.

His reign as the outlaw king of American journalism was too brief. His book “Hell’s Angels,” published in 1966, foreshadowed his two classics: “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” a madcap collision of the drug culture and the American dream, and his collected campaign coverage, “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72.”

More recently, though, he has put his name to three collections of journalism, plus an account of a failed fishing trip to Hawaii, another volume he called an “outburst,” as well as a novel--books that left his fans progressively referring to those famous initials, HST, in the past tense.

Even as Thompson auctioned his reputation, shooting bullet holes in signs and selling them as mementos, there was the promise of something in the works, something big and worthy. In the end, we may have to settle for his letters--and not such a bad thing, as it turns out.

In 1997, correspondence from his formative years as a writer, 1955-1967, was published under the title “The Proud Highway.” As a young writer, Thompson had yet to take his leave from everyday norms, and these letters were interesting mostly because we knew what a true oddball would blossom on the end of that stalk.

Now comes the correspondence from those Wild Turkey-and-mescaline years of 1968-1976, when Thompson turned up the volume and took the rock ‘n’ roll generation for one of the great flings of print journalism. His humor, hyperbole, hope, insight, ego, angst, aggression and action--all pumped up to manic excess--defined an elastic style of reportage called Gonzo. No one has successfully imitated it. It was--is?--the style of one man alone.

Thompson wrote letters to warm up. He tested ideas and tone: a brilliant expressionist with a frantic mind nursing a powerful determination for success while maintaining a child’s energy for mischief and a dead certainty that social convention is a foil that a man can have some fun with.

The zany tangents that characterize his best works are displayed here in everyday dealings with his editors, agent, friends and family. He scrimped none of his talent in his struggles over expense accounts and deadlines, exploring vocabulary and word-rhythms that bite down on nerve endings. He analyzes the demands of his craft with cunning, suggesting, for instance, that the opening of a story must act as a fuse. He repeatedly dead ends as work fizzles and is rejected, including a time-consuming attempt to write about the oil shale boom for this newspaper. Out of the blue, he writes to editor Jim Silberman at Random House that he’s “slipping more and more into the role of my pseudonymonous (?) foil, Raoul Duke, who no longer understands what his journalism is all about.”

In a 1971 letter to Oscar Acosta, the activist L.A. lawyer who was transformed into Thompson’s 300-pound Samoan sidekick in “Las Vegas,” the writer delivers a personal critique about his technique:

“Gonzo Journalism--like quadrophonic 4-dimension sound--exists on many levels: It is not so much ‘written’ as performed--and because of this, the end result must be experienced. Instead of merely ‘read.’ ”

In the same letter, he provides instructions for undertaking the experience, beginning with a 10-inch syringe. “Fill this full of rum, tequila or Wild Turkey & shoot the entire contents straight into the stomach, thru the navel. This will induce a fantastic rush--much like a 1/4 hour amyl high--plenty of time to read the whole saga.”

Through these creative years, Thompson reveals the strange pathways of his success. He proposes rather ordinary ideas, such as a book that would profile the joint chiefs of staff. Yet he relentlessly refuses to execute this work in any fashion that would meet an editor’s expectations. He is salvaged by a few in the business, like magazine executives Warren Hinkle and Jann Wenner, who understand the unique bent of his talents. He pursues their ideas into realms never imagined, such as his boozy narrative for Scanlan’s magazine on the Kentucky Derby, which brought Thompson into loony association with British caricaturist Ralph Steadman.

I’ve never met Thompson, and from accounts I’ve read, it’s just as well. Any number of devotees have wandered up to Thompson’s Rocky Mountain redoubt for a feast of the spirit and returned with their heads spinning, trying to rationalize, ha, ha, why the great chef insisted on blowing his nose into their soup. But he was, through the personality of his work, an essential companion during the 1960s and 1970s--a time when baby boomers were us and the greedheads were them.

This volume is a reunion with an American original. He hit the high notes out on the ragged edge, and thousands of us heard him above the canned din of the safe center. His war dances around the “truth” mocked and exalted an era that was almost, but not quite, transformative.

“Fear and Loathing in America” reveals not everything, but plenty, about what it was like to be Hunter S. Thompson in the age of the White Rabbit.