Here are two more post-mortem appraisals following the suicide of Hunter S. Thompson.
Writer Tom Wolfe, who knew Thompson, finds much to admire.
Hunter's life, like his work, was one long barbaric yawp, to use Whitman's term, of the drug-fueled freedom from and mockery of all conventional proprieties that began in the 1960s. In that enterprise Hunter was something entirely new, something unique in our literary history. When I included an excerpt from "The Hell's Angels" in a 1973 anthology called "The New Journalism," he said he wasn't part of anybody's group. He wrote "gonzo." He was sui generis. And that he was.Yet he was also part of a century-old tradition in American letters, the tradition of Mark Twain, Artemus Ward and Petroleum V. Nasby, comic writers who mined the human comedy of a new chapter in the history of the West, namely, the American story, and wrote in a form that was part journalism and part personal memoir admixed with powers of wild invention, and wilder rhetoric inspired by the bizarre exuberance of a young civilization. No one categorization covers this new form unless it is Hunter Thompson's own word, gonzo. If so, in the 19th century Mark Twain was king of all the gonzo-writers. In the 20th century it was Hunter Thompson, whom I would nominate as the century's greatest comic writer in the English language.
Tough-minded Gerard Van Der Leun, who also knew him, expresses a much different view in debate with a reader.
You seem to be under the impression that I have zero admiration for the books of Thompson. Let me dissuade you that. I found Fear and Loathing (AT THE TIME) to be a fascinating and inspiring book in its way. In time I outgrew it. In time I outgrew the mental state that Thompson became stuck in. In time I outgrew almost everything about those days -- all the me, me, me of it, all the hate your country cool pose of it, all the vile behavior excused in the name of "freedom" which was, at the end, just code for selfishness. I outgrew all of it. Thompson did not. He was forever chained to a self of the moment. For him it was always 1972.In the end, his life was all about me and nothing about others. He ended typing non-selling screeds about the hatefulness and vilness of Americans and his country. He ended filing blubber nobody read for ESPN2. His own hate and bile dragged him down.
Finally, he ended in some gore spattered room giving his wife and son his final gift of spite -- his body and a mess -- to cope with and clean up. In the end he was what he was all along and what many of his ilk still are behind their cozy little lies of the self and the sole -- a selfish coward.
But take heart...because in the end that is not how Hunter Thompson will be remembered. In 10 to 20 years he won't be remembered at all.
I suspect he may be right.
Posted by Alan at February 22, 2005 09:47 PM