1 more for HST

[Harry Edwards]

'Gonzo' behavior made him an icon, but check Thompson's writing
  - David Kipen
  Wednesday, February 23, 2005


There's a great scene early on in Hunter S. Thompson's "Fear and 
Loathing in Las Vegas" where Dr. Gonzo, the author's corpulent Samoan 
attorney, loses a salt shaker full of cocaine to the slipstream rushing 
around their red Shark convertible. "Oh, jesus!," the good doctor 
exclaims, "Did you see what God just did to us?" To which the 
semi-autobiographical narrator, Raoul Duke, shouts back, "God didn't do 
that! You did it ..."

  When I read "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," must be 20 years ago, I 
underlined the question "Did you see what God just did to us?" in blue 
ink. Don't know why, really. I just must have liked it. In retrospect, 
it's still a great line, shot through with that signature Thompson 
speedball of grandiosity, paranoia and pure poetry.

  Thompson had had a rough time of it before his suicide Sunday night, 
but speculation in such matters is always reckless, and usually vile. 
For what it's worth, he'd lost his friend Warren Zevon to lung cancer, 
and some of his mobility to a broken leg. Who knows but what he felt he 
was losing his country too?

  He'd lost America at least once before, to his nemesis Nixon, about 
whom he always wrote with an invigorating Thompsonian lack of 
gentility. In these times of servile journalism -- when "The NewsHour 
With Jim Lehrer" can devote a whole segment to bloggers' takedown of a 
CNN executive for suggesting that journalists might be getting fragged 
overseas, and not even bother asking whether the suggestion might be, 
you know, true -- small wonder if Thompson had lately forsaken 
political reportage for an underrated sports column at ESPN.com.

  What worries me is that Thompson's suicide may now make it easier for 
the forces of reaction to dismiss his achievement. See what you get, 
they'll say, for taking drugs, for mocking authority, for making 
yourself part of the story? It took Hemingway's reputation years to 
recover from his suicide, and he's still not all the way back. Death is 
only a good career move for the romantic and the obscure. For the 
hard-living, or the already famous, somebody's always ready to spin 
suicide into a cautionary tale. To get a clearer perspective on 
Thompson's true legacy, ring up writer Marc Weingarten, who's finishing 
up a history of New Journalism tentatively called "Based on a True 
Story."

  "Without question," Weingarten allowed Monday morning, "Hunter is a 
giant of 20th century journalism. I would put him up there with 
Halberstam, Ernie Pyle, those guys. I don't think there's ever been 
another journalist who combined high moral purpose with sublime humor 
so brilliantly. I find it tragic that his fame as an icon overshadowed 
the work itself, because this was a man who cared a great deal about 
the craft of writing, the way sentences are constructed. He was 
painstaking about it."

  It's too easy to forget what a literary man Thompson was. He quoted 
Melville on Hawthorne in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas": "Genius 
'round the world stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs 
the whole circle 'round." So what if he puckishly attributed the line 
to Art Linkletter? (He got it right in his final ESPN column, just last 
week.)

  And in "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72" -- the 
blisteringly funny book whose intro begins with Thompson strung out at 
the Seal Rock Inn, "the final chapter still unwritten and the presses 
scheduled to start rolling in twenty four hours" -- he reprints the 
poem "Be Angry At The Sun," by his fellow contemplator of Pacific 
views, Robinson Jeffers. It's the one that starts out:

  That men publish falsehoods

  Is nothing new. That America must accept

  Like the historical republics corruption and empire

  Has been known for years.

  Be angry at the sun for setting

  If these things anger you...

  To paraphrase Joe Hill, don't mourn, read. Pick up "Hell's Angels," or 
either of Thompson's "Fear and Loathing" books -- though watch out for 
a ripoff by some guy named Kirkegaard. And in case you catch anybody 
from Fox News or the Cato Institute this week, going on about how 
Thompson's end only proves what a hack he always was, just remember 
that Cato himself fell on his sword rather than live in a world ruled 
by Caesar, and that after his friends found him and bandaged him up, 
Cato finished the job by ripping out his own intestines. Does all that 
unwrite a single word he wrote?

  In the end, only Hunter Thompson knows why he did himself in. 
Speculation consoles nobody. All that's left is to keep reading those 
angry, funny, deeply patriotic books of his. That, and to ask, "Did you 
see what God just did to us?"

  E-mail David Kipen at dkipen at sfchronicle.com.