Hunter, the unread genius, from tomorrow's Daily Telegraph (it being tomorrow today in England), offers a similar analysis of the late Hunter S. Thompson to our own Wilfred McClay's Reasons for Living, posted last Wednesday. Jemima Lewis writes that
like many pioneers, Thompson became a victim of his own success. He spawned so many imitators that his literary style — together with his personal mythology — turned into a cliché. Gonzo mutated into the boastful, beery house style of the lad's magazine. And Thompson himself became a pin-up for spotty youths who, lacking the wit and courage to stage their own rebellion, hoped to bask in the reflected glory of his.
Like On the Road, or anything by Noam Chomsky, Fear and Loathing [in Las Vegas] has become intellectual window-dressing for adolescents — a badge to be sported in the student union, that shouts: "Look at me! I'm a drug-crazed outlaw!"
Thompson, it should be said, did much to encourage this puerile hero-worship. Like a tiresome office prankster, he constantly advertised his own "madness". He was, he warned interviewers, "drunk, crazy and heavily armed at all times". One of his most famous lines — "I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone, but they always worked for me" — sounds just like one of those jokey placards that management types have on their desks: "You don't have to be mad to work here, but it helps."
On the other hand, writing in The Wall Street Journal, in an elegy titled As Gonzo in Life as in His Work , Tom Wolfe said of Thompson that his 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.
One scratches one's head at that last judgment, even when one likes Thompson's writing more than do Ms. Lewis and Dr. McClay. (Though I last read him fifteen years ago and may find myself less enthused now, being, presumably, more mature.)
Much of the humor in Thompson's books comes simply from his doing outrageous things and offending people whom the old Adam enjoys seeing offended. (Wolfe tells a couple of these stories himself — of the time Thompson let off a boat horn with a twenty mile range in a small crowded restaurant, for example — apparently without realizing that the proper reaction to them is "Thompson was a jerk.")
This kind of thing is funny, for a while, and when you're young or childish enough to find upsetting people funny, but it is not a kind of humor that lasts. There's no point to it: no revelation of the human condition, no mocking of the powerful (abuse, yes, but not mocking), no subversion of the pompous and the proud, no reminder of our equivocal place in the cosmos. Gonzo may be funny, but it's not really comic.
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