Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
(As an aside, while I loved Scanlan's and bought the first three
issues, I didn't get Warren Hinckle's and Sidney Zion's business
model of refusing run any advertising -- except for the back cover,
which THEY would pay $50 to the lucky advertiser chosen to grace it.
I think Cribari Family Wines won the first contest.)
  

    
I think that had to do with Howard Gossage, the advertising guru who
was also Hinckle's mentor. Let me see if I can flesh this out a bit.
  

    
Reading "Fear and Loathing" in RS was a multi-epiphany experience. I
wanted to be Hunter Thompson, to have and write from that
demented/lucid perspective. If that hadn't worn off, I'd almost
certainly be dead and gone by now.
  

    
I would say that Steadman's work was as much as why I read the
Rolling Stone articles as Thompson's writing.
  

    
About Scanlan's and advertising: Warren's memoir has a long passage
about Gossage on advertising. Warren claims that advertising was
publishing's original sin, an addictive drug, etc. That discussion
has a long history, but political magazines (left and right) have
never been attractive to advertisers. They usually require some
other sort of subsidy. Usually publishers combine political stuff
with more popular fare and then sell advertising against that.
Newspapers do that, and so did Rolling Stone. Warren burned through
two private fortunes at Ramparts, and Scanlan's didn't have that to
fall back on.
  

    
Jon, that's such a good point about HST's demented/lucid
perspective. Lunacy is a big theme in his work, but as Nelson Algren
said, in some ways his vision turned out to be the sanest of all. 

The counterculture was usually dismissed as kooky, crazy, dangerous,
etc. Of course we can come up with many examples to support that
characterization. But the question is, compared to what? The
establishment and mainstream culture were perfectly OK with
decimating Vietnam, murdering college students who protested that
crime, and then blaming the students for their own deaths. To say
nothing about polluting the environment, denying millions of
citizens their civil rights, etc. If that's the standard for sanity,
and if we have to check a box, I'll take the counterculture.   
  

    
I like to quote Norman Mailer on that point. He said Secretary of
State Dean Rusk was “always a model of sanity on every detail but
one: He had a delusion that the war [in Vietanm] was not bottomless
in its lunacy."
  

    
I agree with your view about Steadman's contribution, Elaine. It was
an indispensable part of Gonzo's success. Hinckle first paired
Thompson and Steadman, but Thompson was wise enough to collaborate
with him after Scanlan's went under. 
  

    
I still buy beer with Steadman's work on the packaging. The wiki
page for Flying Dog Brewery is well worth reading!
  

    
One of the strands that really stands out for me in the book (and
here in this conversation as well) is what you call the "blurred"
line about 20 posts upstream.

There, you're referring specifically to the distinction between
fiction & non-fiction, but it strikes me that the book is about a
whole set of such blurred lines:

fiction/non-fiction
identity/constructed persona
generosity/cruelty
work/"private identity" (as you put it in the introduction
accuracy/factuality (e.g., his description of the 1972 presidential
race is "the most accurate and least factual account of the
campaign")

Etc. Etc.
  

    
Since this conversation is in a mid-day lull, I'll note that the
Wall Street Journal's books editor Benjamin Shull called the book a
"valuable study" in his generally positive review. (My impression is
that Shull must be working at home and phoning it in; looks like he
liked the book more than he liked Thompson.)
  

    
While I read a fair bit of HST both in book form and in Rolling
Stone, for me, _Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas_ is THE HST work.  
  

    
Good point, Gary. There really are a lot of blurred lines here, not
just the generic one I had in mind. 

Jack, thanks for mentioning the WSJ review. Another one, by Sophia
Stewart for Alta, made several good points. I can provide links of
these and others if anyone is interested. I also wrote related
articles for The Nation, The New Republic, and Literary Hub.  

Jim, FLLV etched Gonzo in the public imagination and continues to be
the touchstone. The Kentucky Derby piece also stands out for me.
Some of it has to do with HST lampooning Louisville, his hometown.
He really knows the territory. There's a scene at the end, in his
motel room, that unexpectedly connects the narrator to the decadence
and depravity that he's documenting. It's a remarkable moment.

In the book, I trace Thompson's understanding of Gonzo as it began
to emerge. Before the Kentucky Derby piece appeared, he thought it
was a brutal failure. Even when FLLV was complete, he wasn't sure
how it should be published in book form. He worried that the comedy
might diminish his credibility as a serious journalist. It was only
later that he realized that Gonzo was his most valuable literary
asset. And once that clicked for him, he was very reluctant to leave
Gonzo behind.

On that point, we might compare HST to Joan Didion. She was coming
on strong when he was, but she began to bend away from the
conservative movement as it took off. She wasn't a political writer
in the way HST was, and I wouldn't say she refashioned her literary
identity, but her work took a new direction when his was bogging
down in the 1980s. And well after that, she produced the grief work
that kept her and her work in sharp focus.    
  

    
I hadn't connected George Stranahan to the Flying Dog Brewery. I
knew he was a friend, neighbor, and landlord. He appears in Alex
Gibney's documentary film, "Gonzo."   
  

    
I’ll have to go back and reread the Kentucky Derby piece.  I lived
in Kentucky for 4 years in the late 1970s.  Though Lexington, not
Louisville.  Nonetheless Kentucky’s relationship to the Derby is a
very strange thing.

I never read Didion’s books beyond The White Album, though Play It
As It Lays remains on my list of truly exquisitely written novels. 
I may have to dip into her latter stuff.
  

    
Would love to hear what you think of the Derby piece. You will see
many Gonzo staples, including the wing man (Steadman) and the use of
newspaper headlines, mentioned in passing, which suggest that the
political backdrop is even more savage than the scene he is
documenting. 
  

    
Another staple: Much attention to the rental car he is driving. He
calls this one the Pontiac Ballbuster. 
  

    
>  On that point, we might compare HST to Joan Didion.

That's a very interesting part of the book. It's been decades since
I read any Didion, but the comparison is fascinating, and really
makes me want to pick up her work again.
  

    
When Wolfe included Didion and Thompson in the New Journalism
anthology, Didion reportedly didn't understand the grouping.
"Certainly I have nothing in common with Hunter," she said. The
contrasts are dramatic. She was small, physically frail, and
precise. He was big, brawny, and extravagant. But they actually had
a great deal in common, too. When I claim that Thompson was the most
distinctive American voice in the second half of the twentieth
century, an obvious competitor is Didion. 
  

    
(I read "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved" in Scanlan's
in 1970 when I was 17 -- and was on the high school newspaper -- and
never figured out WHAT THE HELL AM I READING?)

Later I re-read it in The Great Shark Hunt anthology and by then
things were already clear.)`
  

    
(And before I forget -- I read The Hell's Angels in the summer of
1968 when my brother brought it home from college and said, "read
this," but I did not connect the author of the book with the writer
of the Kentucky Derby, um,  article in Scanlan's. I'm pretty sure my
classmate Jeff Seward made the connection for me. What with Firesign
Theater and Workingman's Dead and mescalin and a whole lot of other
stuff bombarding my brain, 1970 was possibly the strangest year of
my life.)
  

    
The Derby piece is indeed classic HST!  And the origin story for the
Thompson-Steadman relationship. 

https://sensitiveskinmagazine.com/hunter-s-thompson-the-kentucky-derby-is-deca
dent-and-depraved/

In our time in KY my wife (girlfriend then) and I made it to the
Derby once, and that to the infield.  1979 I believe it was.

In our vicinity was a gang of rogues and vagabonds who had smuggled
in a pony keg in a wheel chair.  BYOB was prohibited to make you buy
the over-priced beer and julips at the MANY concession stands.  The
lads wouldn't share, but I refrained from macing them.

Our friend from back home in Maryland passed out stone unconscious. 
She was semi-famous for not holding her hooch well.  It took us 15
minutes to wake her up after the race.  Being the late 1970s none of
us thought that particularly unusual or dangerous. 

Worth noting that you can't actually see the race from the infield,
just a bunch of horse legs thundering by for a few seconds IF you
could navigate fairly close to the fence, which we did.

The story did remind me to my ass in gear and get my old college
buddy Colonel Bugg to recommend me to the Governor of KY to see if I
can become a Kentucky Colonel.  That'd be Da Bombe.
  

    
Sounds like HST didn't have to exaggerate TOO much, but hyperbole
was one of his most valuable tools. In the book, I discuss that
trope's strengths and weaknesses. When used right, it raises a
subject excessively to reveal an undervalued truth. Not unlike
overshooting a mark to hit it. In Thompson's case, it was hard to
sustain. After calling Nixon a werewolf, what do you say about
Reagan?
  

    
One huge part of the HST story that deserves some conversation is
the issue of drugs.

It's obvious that drugs (to extreme excess) played a major -- and
ever increasing -- part in his persona over the years. In some
degree that sense of over-the-top drug consumption was, perhaps one
form of that "hyperbole."

But what interests me is that you don't treat it with any kind of
sensationalist approach, but rather look at it more in relation to
his writing and how his work served as "a turning point in the
American discourse about drugs."

Could you talk a bit about that aspect both of his work and of your
own approach to that work?
  

    
Right, my goal was to understand him as a writer. Drugs were a major
topic for him, and I also wanted to understand how they figured in
his writing process. 

His two great staples early on were alcohol and Dexedrine. (Quick
note: Didion was sipping warm gin and eating Dexedrine when she
wrote "Slouching Towards Bethlehem.") A native of Louisville,
Thompson starting drinking bourbon at an early age and never
stopped. In his memoir, Juan talks about the toll that took as his
father aged. The Dexedrine, which he started taking in Glen Ellen,
helped him stay up and complete his assignments. When it stopped
working, he developed a cocaine habit that didn't help his writing
at all. That was in the 1970s. 

By that time, he had sampled LSD and mescaline, which figured
heavily in his publications and correspondence. I don't know how
much or how often he took psychedelics, but I know he didn't have
any in Las Vegas. As best as I can tell, the Great Red Shark he
drove there contained alcohol, Benzedrine (for Acosta), Dexedrine,
and Acosta's weed, which Thompson probably didn't know about.
(Nevada had tough marijuana laws.) 

Thompson wrote about all these drugs and more. The more exotic, the
better. The drug inventory that opens FLLV is the touchstone, of
course. But in campaign book, which he wrote in a teeth-grinding
frenzy, he also invented the rumor about Muskie's addiction to
Ibogaine. That was perfect for his audience. They loved the idea of
a Democratic pol blazing on a drug that even they hadn't heard of. 

As for the discourse about drugs, I like Charles Perry's observation
that HST didn't go in for the psychedelics-as-sacrament idea. He
didn't sit on a Persian rug, light some incense, and expand his
consciousness. He said he liked to stomp on his own accelerator to
see what happens. That was the turning point I had in mind. He made
his own drug consumption sound like a wild adventure, and that
became his signature. 

He smoked weed, of course, and lots of cigarettes. One of his female
friends said she didn't think much smoke got through the TarGard
cigarette filter he used. He sucked on it all day like a pacifier,
she told me. Juan wondered how many barrels of tar those filters
kept out of his father's body.  

There's a lot more to say about this topic, but maybe that's a fair
start. In short, Thompson had a very rugged constitution, but
drinking and cocaine abuse played a significant role in his decline
as a writer. The really good stretches were few and far between
after 1975.