Reviews

Simon & Schuster, 2000 (2006 paperback reprint), 756 pages, C$21.00, ISBN 978-0-684-87316-9

This second volume of Hunter S. Thompson’s letters takes us to Thompson’s most memorable years: 1968-1976, spanning not only the eight years of the Nixon/Ford administration, but most of Thompson’s best-know work.  Gonzo journalism was born in 1970 with “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved”, with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas written not too long after, eventually published in the middle of the 1972 presidential campaign that Thompson was covering for Rolling Stones and eventually ended in Fear and Loathing ’72: On the Campaign Trail.  Add to that the continuing echo of Hell’s Angels (1966), his candidacy for Aspen’s Sheriff position, Thompson’s increasing fame and the crystallization of his reputation as a hard-living journalist and you end up with a fascinating eight years.

What editor Douglas Brinkley has done with this second volume of letters is similar to the work accomplished on the first volume of Thompson letters (The Proud Highway), with a few differences.  For one thing, there are quite a bit more contextual notes to explain passing allusions, which reflects Thompson’s gradual accession to national affairs.  The other difference is that the book reprints a number of letters sent to Thompson, including a number of dark and angry missives from Oscar Acosta, the “Chicano Lawyer” often mentioned in Thompson’s seventies work that was so famously parodied in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.  It’s easy to see the rough nature of their friendship, and even easier to see how it breaks down to mutual hostility.  Other notables whose letters are included are Tom Wolfe, George McGovern, Katharine Graham, Pat Buchanan, Jann Wenner, Gary Hart and Jimmy Carter.  There are also, unusually, snippets of Thompson prose that don’t seem to have been reprinted anywhere else –including fragments about his influential experience in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Convention, where he got caught in riots and beaten up by policemen.

Many of the notes and caveats about The Proud Highway also apply here: This is the closest we’ll ever get to a Thompson autobiography, especially as it details on a quasi-weekly basis what Thompson is working on.  (Alas, reading the book as it details numerous projects that Thompson never finished is enough to make one wonder about What Could Have Been –am I the only one who thinks “Guts Balls” could have been a splendid Palahniuk-like story?)  It’s a very, very long book, and the low density of content will make it of interest to dedicated Thompson fans.  There are minor revelations here and there, but rest assured that those have already been cherry-picked by the recent wave of posthumous Thompson biographies.  A few photos, some never seen before, are inserted between each year’s worth of letters.

A few things do evolve, though: Thompson’s worries about money never completely disappear, but Fear and Loathing in America takes place after his move to Woody Creek and the relative peace of mind that a stable home base provided to him.  At the same time, though, Thompson’s prose style finally solidifies in the aggressive gonzo style that he would keep until his death in 2005: the strong-willed but polite southern gentleman of his formative years has ceded place to an obsessive writer whose invectives become legendary.  It’s also worth nothing that, perhaps due to the increased panoply of communication devices available to Thompson as the seventies go on, the bulk of the book takes place before 1975, and the lengthy “here’s what I’ve done lately” letter updates are increasingly replaced by letters regarding specific issues.

It all neatly sets up the much-awaited third tome of the series: The Mutineer has been promised for years by the Thompson Estate, and was pushed back from October 2009 to June 2010 as I was reading this second volume of letters.  Who knows what awaits in Thompson’s correspondence between 1977 and 2005?  We’ll find out in a year or so… assuming the book isn’t pushed back even further until then.

Ballantine Books, 1997 (1998 paperback re-issue), 683 pages, C$24.95 pb, ISBN 978-0-345-37796-8

My lofty intentions to read Hunter S. Thompson’s entire output in strictly chronological order of publication don’t make much sense considering The Proud Highway, a 1997 collection of letters written between 1955 and 1967. In a bid to solidify Thompson’s position as an American writer of some renown (and to please legions of fans accumulated since 1972’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), Thompson authorized noted academic Douglas Brinkley to dig in his archives and assemble volumes of correspondence.

Thompson famously kept copies of nearly everything he wrote, even from a young age, and it’s those copies that fuel this collection of letters published before his first book (Hell’s Angels) hits the market. Those are the letters of a young man, a cocksure writer just waiting for greatness. Some juvenalia aside, the first letters collected here date from Thompson’s years in the Air Force, where he channels his renegade energies into sports writing, and then in engineering his own departure from the US military forces.

The rest of the book follows Thompson as he travels across America, and then from one continent to another. Thompson fans will track his travels from New York to San Juan to Big Sur to South America to San Francisco, only to end up, pages before the end of the book, in his home base of Woody Creek, Colorado.

This is as close as we’ll ever get to a Thompson autobiography, as we track his progress through quasi-weekly letters written from always-desperate circumstance. A vivid letter describes as Thompson manages to write in the cargo hold of a military flight heading back to his usual post; another hilariously portrays Thompson as battling insects while writing to his friend. One thing’s for sure: Thompson’s character was forged well before he hit his stride with Hell’s Angels: even his early letters show an aggressive and self-assured spirit: in fact, some of his letters to female acquaintances are uncomfortably pointed –especially for those who don’t know the context.

Still, life wasn’t easy for the young Thompson. Nearly every single letter mentions monetary difficulties of some sort, to the point where it becomes tiresome. Small wonder if Thompson-the-older-man would remain fixated on monetary issues, often to the detriment of his relationships.

Readers with specific interests may learn a few good details of trivia through those nearly seven hundred pages of letters. As a science-fiction fan, for instance, I was amused to find out that Thompson had sent a few stories to SF magazines at the beginning of the sixties –what an alternate universe that would have been if he had found success in that field! Similarly, the first editor to buy something from Thompson was Frank M. Robinson, an editor who would move west to San Francisco, become Harvey Milk’s speechwriter and eventually develop in a fine SF writer in his own right. Small world…

It almost goes without saying the The Proud Highway is aimed squarely at Thompson fans and scholars: Brinkley’s contextual input is slight, and the book’s best moments often illuminate other aspects of Thompson’s work. (The whole bizarre “American ambassador to Samoa” allusions in Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 finds an explanation in a series of letters actually sent to Democratic Party honcho Larry O’Brien, for instance.) A lot of the material is either repetitive or desperately trivial, and casual readers may not want to wade through it all.

But for the Thompson fans, The Proud Highway is a look at the early years of a noteworthy writer. The 1967 date at which the book ends is significant, since it finds Thompson safely housed in Woody Creek Colorado, waiting for Hell’s Angels to hit bestseller lists and the subsequent events that would catapult him to national fame. But that story is covered in a second book of letters, aptly named Fear and Loathing in America…