Football Season is Over
The Death of Hunter S. Thompson
In 1964, a young Hunter S. Thompson set out for the mountain village that his hero Ernest Hemingway had called home for the last two years of his life. It was there, as Thompson put it, that “for what he must have thought the best of reasons, he ended it with a shotgun”.
Hemingway had killed himself three years earlier, in the home that Thompson was now visiting for a National Observer piece called “What Lured Hemingway to Ketchum, Idaho?” It was a small house, built only a few years before Hemingway’s purchase, and in the style of the chalets made for visitors of the nearby Sun Valley ski resort. “It is built on a hillside looking down on the Big Wood River, and out across the valley at the Sawtooth Mountains,” Thompson wrote. “A comfortable chalet with a big pair of elk horns over the front door.”
That home is preserved today, much as it was then, and there’s one small room with a small desk at which Hemingway would stand and, with great effort in those years and few returns, work at his typewriter.
For his short piece, Thompson spoke with Hemingway’s neighbours and visited the local pub where just a few years earlier the famous writer had raucously entertained locals with tales of Hollywood and war. Hemingway compulsively exaggerated, or wholly confected, personal stories – often to disguise his insecurity – and the local barkeep was wondering if locals weren’t now exaggerating their own connections to the dead writer.
This minor piece of Thompson’s, collected in The Great Shark Hunt, was one of the first I read of his – enjoyed after Hell’s Angels but before Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. For reasons I’m trying to recall now, the piece greatly moved me, and I would read it a few times a year through my early twenties. What I do remember is that the following chimed gloriously with me, but just how and why I don’t know, given my naivety and artlessness. But if I were to guess, it was the confidence of Thompson’s assertions:
“Today we have Mailer, Jones, and Styron, three potentially great writers bogged down in what seems to be a crisis of convictions brought on, like Hemingway’s, by the mean nature of a world that will not stand still long enough for them to see it clear as a whole.
“It is not just a writer’s crisis, but they are the most obvious victims because the function of art is supposedly to bring order out of chaos, a tall order when the chaos is static, and a superhuman task in a time when chaos is multiplying.”
What strikes me now about this piece is that it was one of the last that Thompson wrote before fame, and before he struck upon his signature style – now known as “gonzo” – in which he transferred his private cultivation of an outlaw persona to the very sentences he made on the page: an extravagance of profanity and hyperbole expressed in lean, propulsive rhythms.
And so the Ketchum piece is, relatively speaking, very plain. There are moments when he attempts some lyrical ascension while emulating the style of his subject, but elsewhere there are moments of pure magazine hackery. “Anybody who considers himself a writer or even a serious reader cannot help but wonder just what it was about this outback little Idaho village that struck such a responsive chord in America’s most famous writer.”
There’s a moment in the piece when Thompson quotes a local telling him of the time when he asked Hemingway “what it took” to make a creative life. “‘Well,’ said Hemingway, ‘there’s only one thing I live by – that’s having the power of conviction and knowing what to leave out.’”
As it was, Thompson himself had left something out of his own piece. That “big pair of elk horns over the front door”? Thompson stole them, in an act which might be thought of as both defiling and worshipful. Presumably the young Thompson thought it symbolically empowering, the young outlaw snatching the mantle of the revered elder. It was brazen and gross, qualities which would later define his own work.
In the Ketchum piece, the writer had not yet caught up with the writing – Thompson’s egotistical deviance which, when committed to a literary style would make him famous, does not appear on the page here. Instead, this strange and ambitious man, who has just effectively robbed the grave of his hero, files a tender, thoughtful but rather thin piece that gives no sense of what he’s just done or what he’s capable of.
*
Hunter S. Thompson killed himself on February 20, 2005. Like Hemingway, he ended it with a gun, and like Hemingway he pulled the trigger in his own remote home, surrounded by mountains. He was 67; Hemingway was 61. Via accident and self-abuse, both had the bodies of much older men.
I read the news of Thompson’s death on the very first day I began an honours thesis about him. Given my ambivalence about post-graduate studies, and the academic career it faintly gestured towards, this felt like an awful omen. But I persevered, not through any belief in my abilities as a potential scholar, but because the government student payments were the majority of my income. I loved Hunter, but I was also biding time.
The curious thing, though, about studying Hunter S. Thompson that year was that my reverence quickly evaporated. While I agree with Louis Menand that “Thompson’s anger, in writing, was a beautiful thing, fearless and funny” it also became clear to me that the man wrote very little of worth after Nixon left the White House in ‘74.
For all of Thompson’s charismatic rage and ambition – his early letters vibrate with the stuff – he had lucked upon the style that would come to define him. In 1970, Thompson pitched a story on the Kentucky Derby to the editor of Scanlan’s Monthly – a radical, muckraking rag from San Fran which folded inside a year but not before it aroused the interest of the FBI. The pitch was accepted, and Thompson was joined by the British artist Ralph Steadman. Indifferent to the horse race itself, the two were committed to witnessing the debauchery of the crowd – but Thompson wrecked himself with booze and acid, and in the anxious funk of comedown filed a mad screed which he assumed was unpublishable:
“Beyond drink and lack of sleep, our only real problem at that point was the question of access to the clubhouse. Finally we decided just to go ahead and steal two passes, if necessary, rather than miss that part of the action. This was the last coherent decision we were able to make for the next 48 hours. From that point on — almost from the very moment we started out to the track — we lost all control of events and spent the rest of the weekend just churning around in a sea of drunken horrors. My notes and recollections from Derby Day are somewhat scrambled.”
He thought he was done. His career over. The piece was too personal, too strange, too violent. But the years of reading and admiring literary rhythm, of typing out passages of the King James Bible and The Great Gatsby, had internalised themselves, and from this moment of desperation and delirium poured something unusually gripping. “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved” was a great success, one which Thompson would describe as like “falling down an elevator shaft into a pool of mermaids”.
But this discovery of style – of which he was the outsized centre – would both make and destroy him. In “What Lured Hemingway to Ketchum?” Thompson quotes his subject:
“‘We do not have great writers,’ he explains to the Austrian in Green Hills of Africa. ‘Something happens to our writers at a certain age… You see we make our writers into something very strange… We destroy them in many ways.’ But Hemingway himself never seemed to discover in what way he was being ‘destroyed’ and so he never understood how to avoid it.”
But both men sought fame, and cultivated absurd caricatures of themselves to sustain it. Those caricatures outlived their talent. Hemingway was very sick towards the end – at the very least suffering grave depression, and the effects of a severe head trauma experienced during a plane crash – and Thompson destroyed himself with the drugs that, for a while, had sustained his heroic stamina and profitable weirdness.
But there are only so many years in which your talents might survive a daily breakfast of grapefruit, whiskey and cocaine; and only so many years that your professional dedication might survive the swollen myths of your own outlaw genius.
In the end, both men could only write awful parodies of themselves. For his last three decades, Thompson largely wrote gibberish – his editors becoming uncredited co-authors in their attempts to wrest order from the drunk’s logorrhoea.
In 1980, Bill Murray played him in a film so awful that most involved with it disavowed themselves or made apologies. Almost twenty years later it was Johnny Depp, albeit in a much better production. Great news for his legend, but by now Thompson was scratching his columns very far from the things he wrote about. His connection to the world was mediated by coke and cable TV, and when the towers fell in New York, the famous journalist-adventurer was watching from a couch in the Colorado woods, and filing his screeds for ESPN.
It was not the world that destroyed him.
*
It was not surprising then, but certainly sobering, to find in the 2016 memoir of Thompson’s son Juan a domestically tyrannical man, abusive, irrational and volatile. About a particularly nasty fight between his parents, in which the police are called, Juan Thompson writes: “I understood my mother’s feeling of helplessness in the face of his strength, his intelligence, his lies, and his malice, and I hated him. I hated him deeply and completely. If I could have called down a god’s wrath on him and destroyed him with a lightning bolt at that moment, I would have done it.”
Juan writes of being frequently intimidated by his father; mocked, ignored, screamed at. He missed his birthday parties and graduations. Worse, Juan watched his father serially threaten and belittle his mother.
Thompson’s mythical eccentricity, funnily enough, was worn heavily by his family. And if Thompson once spoke truth to power, his wife and child could barely speak to him. If there’s a tragedy here, it’s this: Thompson neglected his family for his work and indulgences, but his extreme self-aggrandisement both alienated his family and made for ever-degrading art.
Father and son reconciled, in their way, towards the end. In adulthood, Juan was forgiving, patient. He chaperones his father to hospital, helps him during periods of incontinence and acute alcohol withdrawal. “He was an old, sick and very troubled man, and the illusion of peace and contentment were not enough for him,” Thompson wrote of Hemingway all those years ago, and the same was true for him now.
It was Juan that heard the gunshot and found his father’s body.
*
The year Juan Thompson published his memoir, Thompson’s widow, Anita, confessed Hunter’s secret and returned the elk horns to the Hemingway family. She explained: “He got caught up in the moment. He had so much respect for Hemingway. He was actually very embarrassed by [the theft].”
And perhaps he was. Evidently, per his son’s memoir, there were several embarrassments that he kept private – like the early disintegration of his body, and the sad dependencies it obliged. Nappies and crutches were not for the wildcat who once liked to lick acid and shoot Nixon effigies from his porch. And so he wrote his suicide note: “No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun – for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your age. Relax – This won’t hurt.”
And then, and for what he must have thought the best of reasons, he ended it with a .45 handgun.