|
He wasn’t for everybody, but who is. He was one of those writers that flew under the radar, or in his case above it. That is unless you were lucky enough to be reading Rolling Stone Magazine in the early 70’s and got on board for what would be one wild ride. A ride that sadly came to an end Sunday February 20, 2005.
 Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, the father of Gonzo journalism, took his own life at his compound in Woody Creek, Colorado. His choice of departure was a single gunshot wound to the head. While this saddened me, like many others, I was not surprised. Thompson himself had once said that he wanted to enjoy life knowing that he could commit suicide when he wanted.
If you were one of those people who was a reader of his work this statement would not come as a surprise. After all, we are talking about a writer whose entire career was based on developing a larger than life persona. He was an illegal drug crazed, hard drinking, gun aficionado who was hell bent on his own destruction. While that description many not sound funny, it truly was in his stories. As he once was quoted as saying, “I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.”
He would take us where no other writer would or could, the dark underbelly of America. He once described his “reporter’s beat” as the death of the American Dream. The journeys that he led us on in his writings could sometimes be frightening and sometimes humorous. Whether you agreed with him or not didn’t matter it was how you got there is what made the journey worth taking and him worth reading.
He was definitely not for the faint of heart or those with thin skin. He was going to show you the picture that was in his drugged out vision, warts and all. His flamboyant style of writing not only makes him interesting to read; it redefined writing, as we knew it at the time. More times than not he wrote in the first person making himself both subject and writer. By doing so he blurred the line between fiction and non-fiction leaving us to wonder how much of his crazed behavior on the page was real. Unfortunately we will never be able to ask that question again.
He left us clues along the way. One time making the statement “fiction is based on reality unless you are a fairy tale artist, you have to get your knowledge from somewhere. You have to know the material you’re writing about before you alter it.” And alter it he would. When you were reading a story by The Doctor you found the tale becoming more and more absurd as you got deeper in until you couldn’t tell where the reality ended and the fiction began. All the time though you never lost sight of the point he was trying to make. A nifty trick that made him one of a kind.
That “one of a kind” status is what compelled me to write this little ditty today because true to fashion of the current news media the day following his death the television talking heads painted an incomplete picture. To watch any of those reports, and never having read or known anything about him, you would have wondered why they were reporting his death at all.
They chose to dwell on the journalist’s eccentricities instead of his accomplishments. Granted his life off the pages could be, well to put it diplomatically, colorful. But not to mention that he was responsible for changing journalism, or the fact that he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for his book “Generation of Swine” makes those news reporters part of that generation in my opinion.
They also failed to mention that despite his “underground celebrity” that he had his life portrayed twice on screen. First in 1980 with the film “Where The Buffalo Roam” where he was portrayed by Bill Murray and second in the screen adaptation of his seminal work “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” where Johnny Depp played him. There is also a third film that is currently in production based on his first novel “The Rum Diaries” with Depp set to star.
They did mention briefly that he was the inspiration for the character Uncle Duke in the “Doonesbury” cartoon strip by Garry Trudeau, a fact I’m sure The Doctor would have preferred they left out considering his dislike for being included in the strip.
He was also widely respected by many of those in the literary community. Contemporaries like Pulitzer winner William Kennedy and novelists Tom Wolfe and the late Edward Abbey. Abbey respected him so much that he wrote the following:
“Among journalists I have but one hero, and that is Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. I honor him because he reports the simple facts, in plain language, of what he sees around him. His style is mistaken for fantastic, drug-crazed exaggeration, but that was to be expected. As always in this country, they only laugh at you when you tell the truth. Dr. Thompson’s problem is how to equal, without merely imitating, the scholarly precision of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He is really much more than a journalist. Not a journalist at all, but one who sees-a seer.” Well-said Ed.
He may have been considered weird, but at the time, back in 1971 when I first read him in Rolling Stone, weird is what I was looking for. As he said more than once “It never got weird enough for me.” That is a mantra that I wear like a medal every day of my life and I thank him for it.
After his chronicling of the last three decades of this country it is sad to think that after “stomping on the terra” for 67 years he felt that it was time to depart this earthly plain. He, just like Lenny Bruce, is one of those necessities in any society, a madman. As Bruce said “you have to have that madman around to tell you when you’re screwing up.”
Wherever he is I hope he continues to “stomp the terra” and write about it, so I can read it when I get there.
|
