Putting the Gone in Gonzo

Scott Dickensheets on the suicide of an icon, whose book on Las Vegas defined the city for many people

Scott Dickensheets

Hunter S. Thompson killed himself on my birthday. But there I go, making this about me—it's one of the bad habits you can pick up from misreading too much Thompson. There's a lot of that going around; derivative gonzo is part of the feng shui of alternative media now. Whenever a 24-year-old hothead refers to President Bush a "shit stain" and thinks he's said something important, Thompson will be there. Whenever a blogger decides that three hostile adjectives are better than an hour of actual reporting, Thompson will be there. He should in no way be held accountable for that nonsense, of course (except when he was guilty of it himself, which in recent years was almost always).


Me, I loved the guy. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas got me into journalism, which distinguishes me from hardly anyone in this biz. We were all gaga for gonzo. And while I urped my share of faux Thompson into the public domain, I never lost sight of what made him great: not the druggy antics, but rather his ability to meld a moral vision, a hillbilly anger and (his underrated virtue) strong reporting into precision-tooled sentences. You really should look them over again. The sentences in Fear and Loathing are marvels of readability, hardly a clunker in the book. They solidly anchor the craziness they describe.


Well, that was three decades ago. By the end, his reputation exceeded him. The nerve-tingle of his best work—Hell's Angels, the Vegas book—gave way to writing that played up the crowd-pleasing excesses of his prose while gradually emptying it of content; he was all vacant style, a Hunter Thompson Phrase-O-Matic. If I had to guess, I would blame the drugs and alcohol almost as much as laziness and the perks of fame (when editors will buy any trifle you type). He was happy to let the stories come to him instead of going out to wrestle them on their turf. For a writer animated by a visceral engagement with the times, that's a sure way to lose your mojo.


Or maybe it's just that the rest of us caught up with him—when a North Carolina daily issues a help-wanted ad soliciting "edgy feature writers," it can be hard for a guy whose main shtick is edge to hold down the first chair. We're all edgy now.


His partisans will argue that he was vital to the end, his anger and invective still intact. But in the old days, anger was a tool, not the point, which is what his imitators (and Thompson) lost sight of.


At his best, he "opened glittering veins of savage wit and searing indignation to journalists sensible enough to benefit from his example without trying to copy his style," wrote Timothy Ferris in the introduction to Thompson's Kingdom of Fear. Style, when you get down to it, is more than arranging words. It's a writer's way of relating to the world. Thompson's, for all its overkill, was hard-edged, sharp and pissed-off; that made it not only an instrument of provocation, but of interrogation. Compare it to the writing we have now: the twee stylings of the McSweeney's crowd; the generically chipper prose of mainstream mags; the gray objectivity of dailies. I would say now is a time we need Thompson to write with all his horsepower, but I've been saying it since 1985.


Pity, that. Remember what Thompson wrote about Hemingway: "The strength of his youth became rigidity as he grew older." For whatever reason, Thompson couldn't take his own hint.

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