[One of the better articles I've seen on HT:}
Posted on Mon, Feb. 21, 2005
Hunter S. Thompson takes his last trip, echoing Hemingway
BY MARK LAYMAN
Knight Ridder Newspapers
COLUMBIA, S.C. - (KRT) - You didn't really expect Hunter S. Thompson would let age, illness or infirmity slowly sap the life from him.
Did you?
After all, in "What Lured Hemingway to Ketchum?," which he wrote for The National Observer in 1964, Thompson concluded of Papa: "He was an old, sick and very troubled man, and the illusion of peace and contentment was not enough for him. ... So finally, and for what he must have thought the best of reasons, he ended it with a shotgun."
It wouldn't be accurate to say Thompson had a death wish. Just the opposite: He was the self-described "champion of fun."
As Paul Perry, one of his biographers put it: "He rides the edge at high speed while engaging in a mix of raucous verbal and gestural antics: hoax, legerdemain, gargantuan exaggeration, buffoonery, conscious alteration, threat, insult. ... He gets people hooked on him because he's fun, irresistible, liberating, infectious."
But once the fun was over, Thompson often made clear, he wasn't going to stick around and watch the janitors sweep up.
In George Plimpton's "Shadow Box," he imagines meeting death in a flaming car crash. In the introduction to his collected works in 1978, he jokes about leaping from a 28th-floor office window.
In a BBC documentary included with the "collector's edition" of the "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" DVD, he discusses plans for a giant monument on the back 40 of his ranch in Woody Creek, Colo. A hundred feet tall, it would include a cannon to fire a canister containing his ashes out over the valley.
All to the tune of Bob Dylan's "Mister Tambourine Man."
Like Hemingway's, though, it was a quieter end that Thompson chose Sunday afternoon, alone, at his ranch. Thompson "took his life with a gunshot to the head," his wife and son said in a statement released to the Aspen Daily News. He was 67.
No other information was made public Monday, though some speculated that Thompson's four or five decades of unrepentant smoking, drinking and drugging must finally have taken an irreversible toll on his iron constitution. ("About every two years my doctor tells me I'm going to die," he said in that BBC documentary.)
Thompson's best work was years in the past, but you could say the writer went out on top. After years of attempts, his most famous book, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," finally had been made into a movie - and a good one, at that. Monty Python's Terry Gilliam directed; the movie starred Johnny Depp as "Raoul Duke" and Benicio Del Toro as "Dr. Gonzo," the character based on Thompson's fellow traveler, the Chicano attorney Oscar Zeta Acosta.
Two volumes of his letters, covering the 1950s through the 1970s, have been published, with an introduction by respected historian Douglas Brinkley. In 1996, Thompson was feted in New York on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Vegas book - which was republished in a Modern Library edition in 1998.
Many found it hard to take Thompson seriously - Garry Trudeau turned him into "Uncle Duke" in Doonesbury - but a roll call of his friends and acquaintances includes many others who did.
>From the world of politics, there were George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Gary
Hart and Samuel "Sandy" Berger, who became President Clinton's national
security adviser 20 years after Thompson met him during the McGovern
campaign. From the world of letters, P.J. O'Rourke, "Ironweed" author
William Kennedy (whom Thompson befriended as a young journalist in Puerto
Rico) and the late Ken Kesey. In the media, Ed Bradley of "60 Minutes" and
the late Charles Kuralt. And from Hollywood, - Johnny Depp, Matt Dillon,
Sean Penn and John Cusack.
After all the ESPN.com columns and slap-dash collections of later years, it's also easy to forget that Thompson was, for much of his career, a careful writer of considerable skill. He paid his dues as a roving correspondent in South America in the early '60s, wrote a well-regarded book about the Hell's Angels and deeply admired F. Scott Fitzgerald - to the point that he copied, by hand, "The Great Gatsby," to try to internalize the rhythms of its sentences.
As legions of sophomoric imitators have proved in the breach, only a master of the craft could have invented "gonzo" journalism.
All Thompson fans know the story: After attending the Kentucky Derby in his hometown of Louisville on assignment for Scanlan's Monthly - his first collaboration with English artist Ralph Steadman - Thompson came down with writer's block. In a fit of desperation, he ripped pages from his notebook, sent them to the magazine, unedited, and waited for the ax to fall.
Instead, "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved" was hailed as a milestone of the "new journalism," the style of writing popularized by Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote and others who applied the techniques of fiction writing to reportage.
Thompson took it a big leap beyond that with "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," which originally appeared in back-to-back issues of Rolling Stone. - What began as an assignment to cover a desert motorcycle race for Sports Illustrated turned into a drug-crazed book that defined a generation and make Thompson a star.
"A scorching, epochal sensation," Wolfe wrote. "The best book on the dope decade," The New York Times echoed.
Everyone wanted to know: Was it true?
Mostly, Thompson would reply, citing "William Faulkner's idea that the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism."
Then he turned his talents to politics, something he knew about firsthand from running for sheriff in Pitkin County, Colo., on the Freak Power ticket. "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72," serialized in Rolling Stone throughout the year and then published as a book, blew Theodore White off the throne of campaign chroniclers. McGovern campaign manager Frank Mankiewicz called the work the least factual, but most accurate, account of the race.
By then, Thompson's celebrity made it hard for him to work. He started out to cover the 1976 presidential race but gave up when he proved as popular an attraction at campaign stops as the candidates.
``College speaking engagements and movie options paid the bills; why write when I can make more money answering the phone,'' he said at one point.
Perhaps his last truly great piece of writing ran in Rolling Stone's 10th-anniversary issue in 1977. Titled "The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat," it was a tribute to Oscar Acosta, "the Brown Buffalo," whose life had unraveled after the Vegas adventure with Thompson.
Rather than the "old, sick and very troubled man" he saw in the latter-day Hemingway, many will remember Thompson with the epitaph he bestowed on Acosta: "Too weird to live, too rare to die."
And always, dancing beneath the diamond sky, with one hand waving free. ...
<http://www.sanluisobispo.com/mld/sanluisobispo/news/nation/10955900.htm>
Carl