"I think every writer writes out of some schism in their personality, and I do think Hunter was underneath quite lonely, and the drugs and the alcohol helped mask that. Hunter is also the one writer I know of where everything he wrote would be more or less true but he would pretend it wasn't, whereas others would try to say it was true when it wasn't. he threw caution to the winds early on, and that became part of his persona, and he thought he had to keep doing it. He had to live out who he was."--Lynn Nesbit
“Being around Hunter, I stuck to the same approach as when I was with animals and children: I don’t approach them and stick my head in their faces.”--Anna Steadman
For many young writers, Hunter S. Thompson exists moreso in the domain of myth, a character sprung from the reality of a character. We tell ourselves, "Oh yeah, he's the guy from 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,'" and leave it at that, figuring that he's a larger than a life epic unto himself, that half the stories must be false, that there's no way someone could live that level of existence.
So when I came across "Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson," I had to educate myself. Billed as an oral biography by Thompson's long-time friend and
Rolling Stones collaborator Jann S. Wenner and Corey Seymour, the book was comprised of an eclectic mix of interviews. Could any one person really strike up memorable and meaningful relationships with people as diverse as Sandy Berger, Sonny Barger, Ed Bradley, Pat Buchanan, Jimmy Buffett, Jimmy Carter, James Carville, Anjelica Huston, Don Johnson, Margot Kidder, Norman Mailer, Marilyn Manson, George McGovern, Jack Nicholson and Sean Penn?
With a foreword by Johnny Depp, who formed a close late-life friendship with Thompson, the book examines Thompson's life and times, ranging from his days in South America to his time with the Hell's Angels to his on-again, off-again
Rolling Stones career to his stint as a
Sports Illustrated sportswriter. It also features a tremendous series of pictures in the middle, which provide insight into Thompson's growth and eventual degeneration. The images seemed to bolster the idea of Thompson as very childlike and immature in many ways, prone to tantrums and rage-filled outbursts, a persona that wasn't helped by his operation as a "a perpetual-motion machine, a perpetual intoxicating device," as one friend described him.
Since the book was made up solely of quotes from those who lived in Thompson's world, it was so eminently quotable that I don't know how to make this any shorter—the quotes were so good and insightful and entertaining that I found myself wanting to capture everything. The enigma wrapped inside a riddle that was Hunter S. Thompson doesn't lend itself to brevity or encapsulation; it is naturally huge and voluminous, echoing and mirroring his personality.
Sometimes, I rely on the Word program to capitalize certain words and the first words of sentences for me, and for reasons I can’t explain, I kept just writing ‘hunter’ lower-cased, expecting Word to capitalize it for me. It was as if Word should have known that for this larger-than-life person, there was no other way you could utter his name out into the world with anything less than at least a capital ‘H’ … and somehow, I think Dr. Thompson would have liked that.
Here are just a handful of the many quotes and memories that spoke to me …
On Thompson's writing style and tone:
“All his writing was about the loss of some mythic world that he may once have inhabited. It was no accident that Gatsby was his favorite book. I said to him at one point, ‘You’re really writing one lifelong book called "The Death of the American Dream."’ And that stuck.”
--James Silberman
“I think Hunter had an intuitive understanding of the brand of ‘Hunter Thompson.’ He knew to wear the same kinds of things when he went out. He was aware of things like entrances and exits.
“How much of Hunter was spontaneous and how much was arranged was always one of those questions that people would kick around. I found that he was like jazz. The piece was arranged. It was disciplined. But within that, he was the free instrument and he would go off. Nobody else went off because we were just trying to get through the piece, but he would go off. I always found his writing to be a lot like that. He needed a story. He needed a surprising amount of structure in his head, but within that structure he would go crazy.”
--Curtis Robinson
On Thompson, in the words of his contemporaries:
"For me, he's as big as Hemingway. I said to him once, 'You know, you really are pretty good.' And he said, 'You know what? Sometimes I can be the best.'"
--Tom Benton
"Hunter is going to be read and read and read, and in that sense he is never going to go away. His books will be a part of people's lives; his voice is so unique and powerful and funny. Just rip any page out of any Hunter book and read it and you will immediately know that it's Hunter. There is nothing he did that didn't have his own stamp on it. The hardest part of creative writing is finding your own voice—an authentic, original voice that can translate into the culture. Only a handful of writers in a generation can pull that off, and Hunter, in that regard, transcended his competition. Gonzo is now in the dictionaries. There are a lot of people who write beautiful New Yorker essays and craft elegant novels, but they don't have an authentic voice. Hunter's voice is going to echo the longest of any writer of his generation."
--Doug Brinkley
"Instead of saying, 'Let's put this thing up against the wall,' Hunter would say, 'Let's just go through the wall.' He was just brilliant—there are very few writers who could top him. I can't think of any humorist in the whole century who could touch him."
--Tom Wolfe
On the movie version of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas":
“I was in New York, I think for the twenty-fifth-anniversary party for Fear and Loathing, and I cornered Hunter and asked him if he really wanted me, if he really felt I was the guy to do that, because I knew he had other friends who were actors, and I would have been more than happy to back out. It was Hunter’s book, and if it was going to be me, I needed to have his blessing. And he said, ‘No, of course, you’re wanted. You have my blessing.’ I said, ‘If I do a remotely decent job of portraying you, you know there’s a very good chance you’ll hate me for the rest of your life,’ and he said, ‘Well then, let’s hope for your sake that I don’t, ho, ho.’
“After he’d seen the film, I got him on the phone, ‘cause I had to know. I said, ‘Okay, do you hate me? Was I right?’ And he said, ‘Oh, fuck no, man. Christ—it was like an eerie trumpet call over a lost battlefield.’ Those words just came out of his mouth. I thought, ‘Well, okay. We’re solid.’”
--Johnny Depp
On Thompson's process:
“After that, he got down to work. He was very open with me about his process as a writer. I was with him in the room upstairs where he had his IBM Selectric set up on a card table. He would sit with his elbows out to the sides, his back very straight, and he would get this sort of electric jolt and blast out a sentence. Then he’d wait again with his arms out, and he’d get another jolt and type another sentence.
“Watching him, I began to realize that he was trying to bypass learned attitudes, received ideas, clichés of every kind, and tap into something that had more to do with unconscious, his intuitive take on things. He wanted to get the sentence out before any preconception could corrupt it.
“One of Hunter’s methods of composition was to write a bunch of ledes and then somehow fit them together. By lede, I mean the opening portion of a story, which is ordinarily designed to pack more of a virtuosic wallop than the sections that follow. Early on, I remember, Hunter showed me a stack of ledes he’d accumulated, as if he were fanning a whole deck of aces. On a tight deadline, my job would sometimes be to stitch together the lede-like chunks that Hunter had generated. Ideally, the story would function like an internal-combusion engine, with a constant flow of explosions of more or less equal intensity all the way through.”
--Tim Crouse
“When he would get cranked up, he would get that look and start laughing while he was writing. ‘Hot damn—I have it now!’ Sometimes he’d take hundred-dollar bills and put them around the typewriter because he just liked to have money around. He’d get into it, and you’d see the look of a small child on his face. It was euphoric. He looked like the Dalai Lama when he was like that. Then the phone could ring, or a GM commercial would come on and he’d just start talking about ’66 Chevy Impalas. You’d be thinking, ‘You were so close. So close.’”
--Curtis Robinson
On Thompson's way of life:
“Hunter was going to be Hunter. If you’re the moth coming into the flame, and you get burned by the flame, and then you complain, ‘Oh my God, I got burned’—well, what did you expect? He’s an inferno. Did you think you were special?”
--Doug Brinkley
“‘The best spies build a mythology about themselves. The worst spies come to believe it, and they have to be destroyed.’ That’s exactly what Hunter did—he almost would ask himself, ‘What would Hunter do?’ He was driven by that.”
--Terry Sabonis-Chaffee, quoting John le Carre in “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”
“And Hunter did something that none of us had the guts to do—he led the kind of life that secretly all of us would like to have had the guts to lead. To hell with the whole thing, just stay drunk and high and smoke and hang out and write outrageous things. He’d never lived his life on anybody else’s terms.”
--James Carville
“Around this time I was tussling around with my son Theo, and I sort of absentmindedly said to him, ‘How did I get such a crazy kid?’ and he said, ‘Well, you know, I’m not as crazy as Uncle Hunter.’ I said, ‘Really, Theo? What do you think it is that we do with Uncle Hunter?’ He said, ‘I think you stay up late, you eat fire, and you Bedazzle all night.’ And I looked at Theo and I said, ‘Yeah, that’s about right.’ Hunter loved that.”
--Jane Wenner
“He was the number one gunslinger. He was Billy the Kid with a brilliant mind and an incredible intuitive genius. He was a criminal by nature who essentially cased every room he walked into and saw things that nobody else saw.”
--Doug Brinkley
"Most people start out on the first floor and take drugs to take them to the second floor. He started out in the basement and took drugs to take him back up to the first floor."
-- Rich Cohen
"He must have had the heart and liver and kidneys of a master race. Who could have survived what he put his body through for as many years as he lived?"
--Lynn Nesbit
“I think Hunter preferred drugs to women, actually. And he liked women who understood that.”
--Jack Thibeau
And finally … Hunter himself to Doug Brinkley, on the concept of suicide near the end of his life:
"'Of course it's a fucking option of mine. Who the fuck do you think I am? Do you think I'm gonna go in to live with goddam Nurse Ratched in the hospital and be put through some detox thing? Fuck that.'"
Exactly, Dr. Thompson. Exactly.
