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On the Rise and Fall of Hunter S. Thompson

By Mark Grueter

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Click here for Part One of this essay.

Part II

In discussing Thompson’s effectiveness it is essential to highlight his inventive invective. Thompson took the art of invective to a whole new raw and outrageous level. Here’s just one of hundreds of examples. On Richard Nixon in 1968, Thompson wrote:

For years I’ve regarded his very existence as a monument to all the rancid genes and broken chromosomes that corrupt the possibilities of the American Dream; he was a foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad. The Nixon I remembered was absolutely humorless; I couldn’t imagine him laughing at anything except maybe a paraplegic who wanted to vote Democratic but couldn’t quite reach the lever on the voting machine (Hunt, 213).

As evidenced in this passage, Thompson routinely ridicules the conventional wisdom and the establishment “press wizards” in this vein.

Thompson’s invective, despite the extreme language, does not typically feel overly vindictive or mean-spirited. The playing up of all the drinking and drug use, the all-nighters, the crashing of events, etc. throughout the narrative somehow softens the tone of his rhetoric. He orders three beers from a waitress in one breath and then calls for Hubert Humphrey to be “castrated” in the next, and its all just good fun. He’s like an alcoholic uncle, but a wonderfully articulate and sardonic one. We forgive his libelous epithets because he’s a lovable, fucked-up character. Correct that: we are enamored by his libelous epithets because he’s so damn creative with them.

There is also a certain moral righteousness to Thompson’s journalism. After publishing his breakthrough diary on the Hell’s Angels, Thompson began to take an interest in politics. This interest became a passion after he attended the notorious ’68 Democratic convention and witnessed the ruthless mayhem of cops kicking the shit out of innocent bystanders, like himself. But despite the insane lifestyle and commitment to Left politics, Thompson was no anarchist, nihilist or Weatherman. His political philosophy materialized when he ran for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado in 1970. A moral code prevails in Thompson’s mind; it is one that targets “dishonesty” at all levels. During his campaign he railed against shady real estate developers who, he felt, were ruining Aspen by destroying the natural beauty and peculiarities of the place. But he also intended to prosecute drug dealers who charged too much or sold a sub-par product (he would have attempted to decriminalize all drugs in his county). He held some seemingly outlandish views – like tearing up the streets of downtown Aspen and turning them into bike paths - but wrote and spoke of them with an unparalleled level of certainty and self-confidence. Part of Thompson’s appeal stemmed from his insistence that people who lead traditionally dissolute and reckless lifestyles can still create a moral code for themselves, and thereby expose the real moral outrages that are being committed in our society, primarily by the powerful.

The ’72 campaign served as the perfect venue for Thompson to vent his moral indignation. He took advantage of his relatively unknown status and he gave us an authentic outsider’s view of D.C. and the political world. He covered the campaign with a vulgar, conversational tone. He was a part of the story, but not the only part. His incredible tolerance for large quantities of drugs and alcohol allowed him to harness the effects of those substances to work in his favor. He sought to capture the frantic pace of a presidential campaign; writing about it on speed and booze seemed to help him achieve this (Drugs would, of course, later get the best of him). In his introduction to Campaign Trail ’72 Thompson revealed his goal: “What I would like to preserve here is a kind of high speed cinematic reel-record of what the campaign was like at the time, not what the whole thing boiled down to or how it fits into history." Few would argue that he failed, and most would argue that he created much more than that, namely, a comic masterpiece and a journalistic tour de force. This was New Journalism at its very best.

What goes up, as the saying goes, must come down. As Thompson became a superstar and as his career moved on, actual reporting and analysis fell by the way side, and most of his antics could not stand on their own because the writer himself seemed to be losing his keen wit and his work ethic. Today, he’s still writing books and he still actually writes a column, published regularly somewhere on www.espn.com; his most recent one illustrates just how much his “journalism” has deteriorated over the years. These are the concluding remarks from apiece, presumably about the Honolulu Marathon:

I am entered in the Marathon again this year, and Sean Penn is not. He was replaced at the last moment by the younger and speedier Josh Hartnett, who is my new racing partner and Anita's secret favorite all along. Penn was mildly upset with the decision, but said he would go to Hawaii anyway, for reasons of his own. That is fine with me. Now that I have my new spinal implant, things have changed. I have become so addicted to my physical therapy regime that I am turning into a full-bore Body Nazi. My new book titled Dr. Thompson's Guide to Physical Fitness will be published in the Spring (“Running Wild”).

Regardless of where one places the level of seriousness here, this is pointless and frivolous writing. It is rumored to be true that Thompson has given up drugs and booze and taken up exercise as a substitute. Hunter Thompson, teetotaler? He himself might have written that this was a sign of the coming apocalypse.

Today, his columns serve little purpose other than to name-drop and to give readers – assuming there are any left - his sports predictions. But I am not just picking on an old man. As I will demonstrate, Thompson stopped pretending to cover events during the late 70’s, when his writing first began its descent. His present-day ineffectual writing is the result of old age, years of substance abuse, a lack of current substance abuse and a progressively isolated existence. From the late 70’s till now he would write only a few pieces that are of the caliber of his ’72 election coverage, though much of it is still quite entertaining. It is not necessary to prove that the quality of Thompson’s work decreased over time, as it is taken for granted by critics and most readers. It is far more interesting speculate as to the reason for this decline, especially because it occurred so suddenly after his great achievements.

Not long after the enormous successes of Vegas and Campaign Trail ’72, the editors at Rolling Stone began complaining that Thompson’s pieces were becoming “screed without substance." Writer/editor Paul Perry, who first commissioned Thompson to cover the Honolulu Marathon in 1980, believes that it was primarily cocaine that ruined the famous gonzo journalist. After becoming a star, Thompson became a “prisoner of his own image.” His drug and alcohol abuse worsened. Out on the college lecture circuit in 1974, Thompson was booed off the stage at Duke University for drunkenly calling the school’s president a “worthless pig-fucker." Did Thompson really live as precariously as his writing suggested? No, he lived much more dangerously. He became at times, in his own words to describe Nixon, “a foul caricature of himself.” The work had almost become a weak parody of its former self.

Anger and paranoia, no doubt vital fuels for his groundbreaking work, got the best of him in the end. When returning from a $30,000 trip to Africa after failing to cover the Ali-Foreman bout because he didn’t care to watch a “couple of niggers beat the shit out of each other” (he laid on a float in the hotel’s swimming pool instead), Thompson tried to smuggle elephant tusks through customs. His well-known collaborator/illustrator Ralph Steadman described how he was convinced that the authorities would try to take the tusks away from him, so Thompson ran wild through JFK airport, hiding in spots, to avoid the evil bastards. He got away, but as Steadman pointed out, all they wanted was 27 dollars – they had no plans to confiscate the tusks.

Here’s an even better example. Sometime in the late ‘70’s, editor/friend David Hacker visited Thompson’s house in Colorado. It was 3 o’clock in the afternoon and the star journalist was just getting out of bed (in those days he slept from 7 in the morning until 3p.m.). Thompson started yelling at his wife Sandy because she hadn’t, in his mind, made his daily sandwich fast enough, and then, as he walked past his pet parrot’s cage, the bird muttered: “You dumb son of a bitch.” The animal had turned the tables on Thompson, who had obviously taught the thing well. The journalist fell into a fit of blind rage, beating on the cage, cursing the parrot repeatedly: “You fucking bird, you fucking bird!” And this was no elaborate goof by Thompson; Hacker was genuinely freaked out by the incident.

Relations with Rolling Stone collapsed after a series of journalistic debacles: Thompson would go out to cover event, drop tons of money, and come back with nothing. At one point, they sent him to Saigon to cover the Vietnam War, but he left soon afterwards and wrote nothing of it.

Many, like the former Stone editor quoted above, believe that Thompson’s early political coverage was successful because it contained substance to go along with his inimitable style. As time went on, Thompson lost interest in the substance of the issues and relied exclusively on his idiosyncratic style of writing, which focused almost entirely on his own escapades and drug-addled imagination. However, it seems that substance and style go hand in hand in Thompson’s case; and that actually the distinction between style and substance in writing (in general) is often one without a difference. Thompson’s forceful and engaging style in Campaign Trail ’72 and genuine interest in the campaign necessitated the inclusion of “substance.” With the Hell’s Angels and with the 1972 presidential campaign, Thompson immersed himself in the projects, so the substance of the relevant issues emerged almost spontaneously. After those two extended, journalistic exposes, one struggles in vain to find an instance where Thompson committed himself to any other project with comparable determination. Without this immersion process and the lessons learned from direct experience, the style itself lost its edge.

When I scoured through Campaign Trail ‘72 in an attempt to extract the substance from the style, I quickly realized the intent of the mission made little sense. For one thing, it seems that there is nothing all that fascinating about what one would traditionally describe as the “substance” contained even in Campaign Trail ‘72. The style is the substance. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote: “One is not a writer for having to say certain things, but for having chosen to say them in a certain way. And, to be sure, the style makes the value of the prose." This is particularly true with Thompson.

The decline of Thompson was not the result of writing “screeds without substance” so much as it was writing screeds with a degraded style. In his intro to Campaign Trail ’72, Thompson himself wants us to know that, “This is more a jangled campaign diary than a record or reasoned analysis of the ’72 presidential campaign." So he didn’t even attempt to write something particularly challenging or dense. His reports told us what we already know about politics and society, or what we already think we know. The value of it being that he did so in a highly original and memorable way that stirred passions and triggered laughs. Educating himself with the research of others, combined with experiencing the events first hand, set his stylistic talents in motion. The effectiveness of Thompson results from his ability to take us inside an event in the unique and dysfunctional way in which his senses experienced it. Unfortunately, it seems that self-indulgence and fame prevented Thompson from further, similar forays of genuine experience. And without the experience he could no longer pick up on the cutting edge of anything, so his style suffered as well. And so he became a mediocre, armchair commentator. His musings during the 80s and 90s are often humorous but they do not stand the test of time and they do not typically qualify as notable journalism, New or Old.

Of course, one is eager to forgive Thompson for all of the garbage that he’s inflicted on us because he contributed so much fresh and exhilarating material when he was good. When his friend Allen Ginsberg died in the 90’s, Thompson demonstrated that he hadn’t completely lost his artistic ability to spew venom. Johnny Depp delivered Thompson’s funeral eulogy to Ginsberg, in which the journalist used the occasion to denounce the poet as “a dangerous bull-fruit with the brain of an open sore and the conscience of a virus.” After some relatively kind words, the invective continued, “He was crazy and queer and small. He was born wrong and he knew it.” Reading Thompson’s words, Depp concluded, “He was gracious as ever. He said he’d welcome the Grim Reaper…because he knew he could get into his pants.”

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Mark Grueter is pursuing a Masters in Liberal Studies at the Graduate Faculty for Political and Social Sciences. He is the Publications Manager and Web Editor for The Canon, the school's student publication and is a contributor to Stop Smiling, a magazine based in Chicago. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.  Grueter may be contacted at grueter@methree.net.

© 2003 Me Three