EFFORTPOST Hunter S. Thompson

Introduction

Hunter Stockton Thompson was born in 1937 in Louisville, Kentucky. It is not known whether he is cricimcised or not. According to biographer Peter Whitmer, there was “a sort of indescribable charisma that Hunter exuded from an early age”, and his peers recognised the “unique sense of humour” that would come to characterise his writing. As a youth, Thompson was very interested in sports, and he played baseball while he attended I.N. Bloom Elementary School. During 1948 and 1949, he wrote and distributed a sports journ*lism newspaper for his neighbourhood, and it served as an outlet for both his love of writing and his love of sports. At the time, Thompson was only eleven, and his writing was “linear and to the point, but that would change as he gained more experience. When he was fourteen, his father, Jack Thompson, died from a rare neurological disorder known as myasthenia gravis. Jack's death had a profound impact on Thompson, and some believe that it is the reason why he “left behind the dream of becoming an athlete”.

Thompson's foray into experimenting with intoxicating substances began in high school when he started drinking alcohol. During this time, he also turned into a delinquent, and his stunts initially involved setting fire “to a small eatery where students went for lunch”, but they soon grew more violent and came to include:

>pouring sulphur across the top lockers at the Collegiate Girls School, and lighting it;

>appearing at the Athenaeum Christmas dance with an entire department of stolen festive lighting; flooding the first floor of the high school with three inches of water during an assembly;

>dumping a truckload of pumpkins at the entrance to the Brown Hotel,

>or chasing the history teacher, Mr. Gearhart, around the classroom, threatening to hang him out the window by his ankles.

Thompson's alcohol-fuelled antics eventually caught up to him, however, and he frequently found himself in trouble with the law during his senior years of high school, culminating in him spending sixty days in jail after being charged as an accessory to robbery. After spending some time in the Air Force, he settled in New York where his passion for literature grew. As Whitmer notes, Thompson would spend hours “reading and outlining The Great Gatsby”, just so he could understand its inner workings. The text was highly influential on Thompson, who would go on to write his own drug-fuelled version of the pursuit of the American Dream.

Thompson the Writer

Thompson's professional writing career started in 1959 when he began working as a journ*list for Daily Record, a newspaper in Middletown, New York. His time there was brief, however, and he soon relocated to South America, where he failed to find a scoop and advance his journ*lism because, as he discovered, “in Brazil, it is more than who you know: it is who you are related to, and how much money you can give to the cause”. In typical Thompson fashion, he entangled himself in legal issues after he was found with a .357 Magnum, and “it then took real diplomatic intervention to extract him from jail”. He returned to the USA in 1963, where he settled in San Francisco.

His return to the USA coincided with the crescendo of the hippie movement, and Thompson had a first-row seat to see it all unfold. He shared some of the ideals of the hippies, as he was anti-establishment, and was a “gourmand of psychedelics”, but he did not always have a high opinion of hippies, especially those of Haight-Ashbury whom he accused of being “lazy, apolitical, unmotivated by money, and totally lacking aggressiveness”, descriptions which they would have likely not contested. He crossed paths with Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters but “his rancid attitude towards the unmotivated hippies, didn't allow him to fit naturally with the peace-loving pranksters for more than a few long drug-sodden weekend blasts”. Thompson voices his criticisms of Kesey and his Merry Pranksters in Fear and Loathing, casting derision on their carefree philosophy. After a bad experience, the protagonist thinks of the hippie mantra “tune in, freak out, get beaten. It's all in Kesey's Bible”, and concludes that it is all “bad gibberish; not even Kesey can help me now”.

Thompson began building his reputation as an eccentric journ*list, and he developed a unique method that involved him using an audio recorder as the basis of the writing and using drugs when witnessing the events that he was reporting. He grew comfortable with what Whitmer terms “confabulation”, meaning he would “glean a few facts from his friends, splice it with his inimitable style, and phone in an article, all the while recovering from a terminal hangover”.

Thompson the Character

To some degree, it could be argued that the public persona of Hunter S. Thompson is a fictitious creation. Even if one accepts this argument, it should not be forgotten that the same could be argued of any public figure who is conscious that they are being watched and judged. Merely knowing one is being observed adds a performative element to one's actions. Throughout Thompson's antics, there is a sense that he is keenly aware of his public persona, as seen in his 2003 interview with Conan O'Brien which he does while drinking liquor, smoking, and shooting with rifles at his own books.

Thompson's self-awareness should not fool one into thinking there are no genuine aspects to the writer's legend. Although his criminal history before Fear and Loathing has been discussed, it should be noted that even with his newfound fame, he continued to get into trouble with the law, including in 1987 when he fired a shotgun at a golf ball on the Aspen Municipal Golf Course. His disdain for those in power is also displayed through the scathing articles he continued to write about politicians, including Clarence Thomas. This lifelong record of criminality suggests that his oppositional stance toward authority and his devil-may-care attitude are integral parts of Thompson that would have existed regardless of whether he became a bestseller and public figure or not.

The one aspect of Thompson that is certainly not made up is his copious drug use which eventually caught up to him. In his later years, his health deteriorated so badly that his physician told him: “You are dead. And you have been for two years!”. He died in 2005, at age 67, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. It has been speculated that his copious drug use likely contributed to the depression that led to his suicide. The paradoxical legacy he leaves behind, as Whitmer summarises, is that of a “hillbilly high-school dropout with a half-dozen bestselling books to his name”.

Conclusion

There is not much more to be said. The man is a legend. I'm not going to cut myself today because I distracted myself with writing, although I can't stop thinking about sliding that razor on my skin. Tune in next time when I discuss Sodom and Gomorrah.