Far Gone and Out

So Hunter S. Thompson is dead. He put a gun in his mouth, or to the side of his head, and left his scattered brains for his son and wife to find and clean. A sad ending for a man who truly did walk tall on occasion. Tom Wolfe said he was a southern-gentleman, and Ralph Steadman (illustrator of Thompson's most famous work) considered him one of the "great originals of American literature." Many folks, myself included, sat up and took notice when they heard the news of his suicide.

Reaction to this news is, of course, mixed. At the NRO some pious geek ginned up a truly awful piece, complete with a wages-of-sin preachiness. The writer, some creature by the name of Austin Ruse, manages to misquote Thompson (how this is possible in the age of Google is beyond me) and blame him for leading pooor innocent children astray:

It is a blessing that his work is not now still terribly well-known for he was a net negative influence on an entire generation. His famous aphorism, "When the going gets tough, the weird turn pro" was the font of more ruined GPAs than any other single source back in the 1970s.

Editors of the Modern Library will no doubt be astounded to learn that Thompson's work is not only no longer "well-known" but that it is destined to be "forgotten."

On the other hand Salon marked the occasion with a bit so hagiographic as to be creepy, especially the part where his suicide - or at least it's cost to his loved ones left behind - is glossed over:

I think it is improper and disrespectful to whine about this suicide. Thompson was in the game for a very, very long time, and I think it is a safe bet that he was never comfortable.

As for me, well, I never had a need to make him a hero or a villain, a sinner or a saint. The fact that he had a gift for prose is indisputable. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Hell's Angels are superlative; even a collection of his correspondence makes for beter reading than much of the bilge presently littering the best seller lists. Equally indisputable is the fact that his best work was far, far behind him. It may have been the constant and excessive substance abuse. It may have been mental illness. It may have been the price of simply being Hunter S. Thompson, Public Spectacle at Large. Whatever the cause, the work suffered - the columns for ESPN were simply painful to read. Better to remember his high white notes. As Lileks observed:

A great writer in his prime, but the DVD of his career would have the last two decades on the disc reserved for outtakes and bloopers. It was all bile and spittle at the end, and it was hard to read the work without smelling the dank sweat of someone consumed by confusion, anger, sudden drunken certainties and the horrible fear that when he sat down to write, he could only muster a pale parody of someone else’s satirical version of his infamous middle period. I feel sorry for him, but I’ve felt sorry for him for years. File under Capote, Truman – meaning, whatever you thought of the latter-day persona, don’t forget that there was a reason he had a reputation. Read "Hell's Angels." That was a man who could hit the keys right.

Sound advice. Read Hell's Angels. Read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Forget the pathetic caricature he became - instead take another look at pro - a very weird pro - at the top of his game.

The dunes are flatter here, and on windy days sand blows across the highway, piling up in thick drifts as deadly as any oil slick... instant loss of control, a crashing, cartwheeling slide and maybe one of those two-inch notices in the paper the next day: "An unidentified motorcyclist was killed last night when he failed to negotiate a turn on Highway 1."

Indeed... but no sand this time, so the lever goes up into fourth, and now there's no sound except wind. Screw it all the way over, reach through the handlebars to raise the headlight beam, the needle leans down on a hundred, and wind-burned eyeballs strain to see down the centerline, trying to provide a margin for the reflexes.

But with the throttle screwed on, there is only the barest margin, and no room at all for mistakes. It has to be done right... and that's when the strange music starts, when you stretch your luck so far that fear becomes exhileration and vibrates along your arms. You can barely see at a hundred; the tears blow back so fast that they vaporize before they get to your ears. The only sounds are the wind and a dull roar floating back from the mufflers. You watch the white line and try to lean with it... howling through a turn to the right, then to the left, and down the long hill to Pacifica... letting off now, watching for cops, but only until the next dark stretch and another few seconds on the edge... The Edge... There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others- the living- are those who pushed their luck as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later.

But the edge is still Out there. Or maybe it's In. The association of motorcycles with LSD is no accident of publicity. They are both a means to an end, to the place of definitions.

-from Hell's Angels, by Hunter S. Thompson