R.I.P. HST

Dr. Thompson is dead.

The man whose obituary of Richard Nixon included terms of endearment like liar, bastard and war criminal is remembered today by friends, family, fans and fellow writers, the latter of whom are all hard at work this very minute composing for posterity their own memorials for Hunter S. Thompson, and facing a strangely daunting task in doing so, not simply because of the temptation to let a little Gonzo drift into their sentences and paragraphs, but also because of the manner of his death.

Inevitable comparisons will be made to Earnest Hemingway. I won’t make any comparisons myself until I find my copy of The Great Shark Hunt and reread Thompson’s take on Hemingway’s exit. As I recall, it was one of the few pieces on Hemingway’s death that didn’t read like bad psychology or, ironically, the insecure bravado of another would be suicide. Uncharacteristic in its thoughtful, straightforward admiration of its subject, this piece, as I remember it today, was a far cry from Hunter’s Nixon eulogy.

Which is no statement on the much-discussed erosion of Thompson’s talent. For reasons that may become clear, I haven’t read any of Thompson’s books since Generation of Swine. As far as I’m concerned, at that time, he hadn’t lost a step. He still made me want to turn the page. He still made me want to read aloud to anyone who would listen. He still made me wonder how much of his raving was strictly for his own amusement. For example, Res Ipsa Loquiter.

Not knowing any Latin, I had the uneasy feeling for years that one of Thompson's standard postscripts, Res Ipsa Loquiter was in fact his running joke at the expense half educated showoffs just like me. I imagined him grinning an evil grin every time he thought of some drunken, semiliterate college student pumping his fist in the air and declaring in a dead language, I am a shameless and compulsive masturbator.

Writer, journalist, counterculture hero, subject of two major motion pictures, scourge of law and order politicians and bane of moralists everywhere, Hunter S. Thompson lived by the pen, and died by the sword. He leaves behind a dozen or so books, hundreds of articles and thousands of rounds of ammunition.

The creator and sole master of gonzo journalism has left an imposing legacy. Unfortunately, the largest part of that legacy is a bit dubious, and I’m not talking about his conscious or unconscious promotion of reckless lifestyles or even his capitulation to suicide. The shadow side of Dr. Thompson’s gift to the world is darker and more insidious even than that and can be summed up in one simple, unadorned, declarative sentence.

Hunter Thompson inspired more bad writing than anyone else who ever lived.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas has been required reading for contributors to campus newspapers since Johnny Depp was in grammar school. And now half the bloggers that clog the Google searches of people like me who are just looking for a little information this morning are typing away like little Hunterites, complacent in their belief that none of their readers are hip or well read enough to know who’s being plagiarized. Poor dumb bastards. They don’t realize that the only people who read blogs are other bloggers. Just like the only people who read short stories anymore are other short story writers carrying on like demented survivors of an arctic plane crash – their activities a cannibalistic orgy of government funded, sadomasochistic, literary narcissism.

I like to think that’s how it’s done, if one must make the attempt. But that last paragraph took me longer to compose than all those that went before it put together and required the kind of monumental editing job normally reserved for state of the union addresses. I made up my own mind years ago that emulating Hunter Thompson is a fool’s errand, and stealing from him outright is to court contempt from people whose prose you wouldn’t stoop to read if you had to spend eternity in a waiting room or grunting on the toilet.

But it’s an awfully hard habit to break.

Hunter Thompson’s unique talent was just that, unique. He was either the best-read American journalist since A.J. Liebling or the most shameless collector of quotations since John Bartlett. He was the inventor of a style that no one has successfully copied or improved upon. At its best his writing, like the writing of the romantic poets he admired, produced genuine narcotic like symptoms – real adrenalin rushes and a bizarre kind of pathos flavoured it seemed by a curious blend of hardboiled detective fiction and the King James Version of the Holy Bible.

A weird mixture of Lord Byron, Raymond Chandler and St. John the Evangelist, soaked in liquor and hallucinogens and fired out of the greased barrel of an overheated howitzer at an unsuspecting world.

That’s the sentence I’ve been trying to write all morning.

In the final analysis, I believe that Hunter Thompson should be remembered not so much as a counterculture icon or an outlaw or a tragic figure or even as the godfather of a generation and a half of bad writers but simply as a great writer himself. And ultimately he will be. I offer as proof of my thesis Hunter’s favourite excerpt from what was clearly one of his favourite poems, In Memory of W.B. Yeats by W.H. Auden.

Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,
Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet.
Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.

Which leaves me with only one question. Who the hell was Paul Claudel?

Res Ipsa Loquitor

Huckleberry Finnegan
General Delivery – Parts Unknown
February 21, 2005