Hunter S Thompson was driven by the Great American Dream and its decay into a nightmare
HE WAS one of the greatest writers that America has ever produced, but he never could manage a novel, or at least not one to the standard he sought. Finally, he took his own life. That wasn’t the only reason Hunter S Thompson did so six years ago this month, but it was a notable one.
I wasn’t terribly surprised when I heard of Hunter’s death. Having read him for many years, I had long realised that behind the humour and the outrageously exaggerated lifestyle, on the level that really matters his work was deadly serious and deeply personal. Behind all there was a sadness, a sense of mourning for the lost and the unachieved.
His subject matter was shattered illusions, broken dreams and disappointments. A recurring theme was the Great American Dream, and how it had been reduced to a nightmare, thanks mainly to corporate greed and political corruption. He saw the murders of Martin Luther King and the Kennedy brothers as horrible proof of his point.
Whenever someone or something worth believing in came along, it was bound to be distorted or snuffed out by the powers it threatened. He sometimes alluded to a moment of innocence at the zenith of the flower power era in the 1960s as a glorious missed opportunity.
That moment had given way to the likes of Charles Manson, and the National Guard gunning down protesting students at Kent State University. His allusion to the hippie ideal was a metaphor, but it said much about Hunter.
At heart, he was a romantic. A large part of him yearned for an America that had never existed, and never could exist except in a promotional brochure. He was left raging against the reality, like a dog crying at the moon.
Eventually, Hunter went the way of all romantics, crushed under the suffocating weight of human ugliness. That isn’t to say he was wrong in his analysis: far from it, he was absolutely right.
Hunter S Thompson was a giant among journalists. At a time when the media felt its role was to kowtow to power and vested interests, and to ignore the attendant corruption and rank hypocrisies, he took the opposite approach. He launched an unrelenting attack on authority and its figureheads. Along with much else in a similar vein, he wrote of Richard Nixon during the 1972 presidential election campaign: “. . . it is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal, and incurably violent side of the American character almost every other country in the world has learned to fear and despise”.
Hunter was not a believer in objective journalism. In fact he thought the idea risible: “With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.”
It wasn’t a few journalists trying to be objective that angered him, but the damage being wrought by the vast majority who were pretending objectivity. In truth, Hunter didn’t much like being a journalist anyway. He considered it a means to an end. He felt his talents demanded the higher platform of pure fiction.
What talents he had: insight, a towering intellect, a monumental command of the English language, and descriptive and imaginative powers that could take your breath away – all tethered to a beautifully smooth and rhythmic style. Most writers would sell their mother for just one of the aphorisms he scattered about him like confetti. He made brilliance seem effortless.
He was outrageously funny as well, of course. And this became a problem. He felt he wasn't being taken seriously enough, that the core of what he was saying and the beauty of his writing was being lost to the laughter. And haunting him, always, was the brilliant novel he had been trying to write for decades. To measure up, it would need to be on a par with The Great Gatsby.
Decades passed and the novel still hadn’t emerged, so it is easy to imagine him questioning his own talent. When writer’s block was not upon him, as it often was towards the end, he was a half-hearted parody of himself, locked inside a character he didn’t want to be any more.
But a half-hearted Hunter was still 10 times better than most. Him on George W Bush: “Did you see Bush on TV, trying to debate? Jesus . . . It was pitiful. I almost felt sorry for him, until I heard someone call him ‘Mr President’, and then I felt ashamed.”
In the end, unable to realise his dream, Hunter’s biggest disappointment became himself. He felt he had not fulfilled his talent, or, more likely, that he had been kidding himself all along about the extent of his talent.
The bloody fool: it next became Hunter himself who snuffed out one of the few things worth believing in.