High White Notes: The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism

3.5 MB·English

by  David S. Wills

High
White
Notes
The Rise and Fall
of Gonzo Journalism
by David S. Wills
Beatdom Books
Published by Beatdom Books
Copyright © 2021 by David S. Wills
Cover design © Matthew Revert
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be
reproduced in any form or by any electronic or
mechanical means including information storage and
retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the
author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may
quote short excerpts in a review.
View the publisher’s website:
www.beatdom.com
Printed in the United Kingdom
First Print Edition
ISBN 978-0-9934099-8-1
Contents
Introduction i
The Rise
The Birth of a Writer 1
Becoming a Journalist 17
Attempts at Fiction 37
The Great Puerto Rican Novel 59
Literary Journalism 93
Outsiders and Outlaws 109
Hell’s Angels 133
Origins of Gonzo 175
Gonzo is Born 207
Freak Power and Brown Power 229
Fact and Fiction in Las Vegas 249
The Fall
On the Campaign Trail 299
Gonzo Grows Stale 323
Failed Assignments 349
Attempts to Quit Gonzo 373
Brief Returns to Form 409
Final Words 455
Notes 477
Bibliography 523
Index 540
Also by the Author
About the Beat Generation
Scientologist! William S. Burroughs and the
‘Weird Cult’ (2013)
World Citizen: Allen Ginsberg as Traveller (2019)
Other Works
The Dog Farm (2011)
6 Stories (2014)
Crossing India the Hard Way (2018)
Grammar for IELTS Writing (2018)
Introduction
Hunter S. Thompson was one of the most original writers
of the twentieth century, producing several books and
articles so shockingly different from anything that came
before them that he came to inhabit his own literary
genre: Gonzo. In an era of rampant experimentation, his
innovations – including a deliberately disorienting fusion
of fact and fiction – quickly became trademarks. In works
like Hell’s Angels, “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and
Depraved,” Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Fear and
Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, he introduced and honed
a style so completely unique that anyone attempting to
muscle in on it immediately looked like a thief.
But what made his work unique and, more to the
point, what created a mind capable of inventing such
groundbreaking stories? Many years ago, I noticed that
you could pick almost any paragraph from anywhere in
Thompson’s career and immediately know it was written
by him. Yes, there are the obvious elements—the truth/
fiction conflation, uncommon word like “atavistic,”
odd capitalization, unrepentant drug use, over-blown
descriptions, violent comedy—but this was all somewhat
superficial, and early on in his career there were many more
restrained articles, free of the “drugs and madness” that
became his trademark with the publication of his most
famous book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. When the
drugs and madness were scraped away, what remained was
the work of a writer with an incredible grasp of language.
This was the genesis of High White Notes, a book that
aims to explain the development of Hunter S. Thompson’s
literary style. The title, of course, comes from F. Scott
Fitzgerald. Thompson was a lifelong fan and often referred
to this quote. His interpretation of it was that “high white
notes” are brief flashes of brilliance, usually sentences
or paragraphs in a longer work that possess a peculiar
and enchanting musicality. He sought these moments
throughout his career and found them often during his
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most productive years. The famed “wave passage” from
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and the “Edge” section of
Hell’s Angels are prime examples.
This book will explore Thompson’s life from his
birth in Louisville in 1937 to his suicide in Woody Creek
in 2005. It will chart the development of his writing style
from his childhood, asking what could possibly have set
a mischievous little boy on a course for global literary
notoriety. It will look at his literary inspirations, from
Jack London to Ernest Hemingway, from Joseph Conrad
to John Dos Passos, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to
Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, and Ken Kesey. Of course,
it will also explore his lifelong obsession with emulating
Fitzgerald’s American masterpiece, The Great Gatsby.
Yet this is no hagiography. My original aim may well
have been answering the question, “Why was his writing
so damned good?” but Thompson was, in life as in work, a
complex, troubling, and enigmatic figure. He was a charmer
and an abuser; motivated and lazy; an habitual liar in search
of the truth. He labored over every word of some articles,
yet phoned in subpar efforts for others. His work ranged
in quality from among the finest in American literature to
efforts so abysmal that it is hard to believe they were even
written by a native speaker of the language, never mind a
professional writer.
This inconsistency struck me as I re-read his oeuvre.
How could the same man have written both Fear and
Loathing in Las Vegas and The Curse of Lono? The latter
sounds like a high school student’s attempt at imitating the
former. Hell’s Angels is one of the finest non-fiction books
of the twentieth century, yet Kingdom of Fear and Hey Rube
are almost unreadably bad.
Thus, High White Notes will investigate how Thompson
became such a brilliant writer and how he ended up writing
utter drivel. This was a difficult task for me. Many years
ago, Thompson’s works inspired me to become a writer,
and so it feels inherently wrong to devote almost half of
this rather long book to essentially savaging his work. It was
with a tremendous amount of guilt that I gave this book
its subtitle: The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism. Among
Thompson fans, it is near heresy to acknowledge The Fall.
But this book is intended not to denigrate a wonderful
ii
writer whose contributions to literature, culture, and even
politics were of undeniable importance. Rather, my hope is
that this book will cast new light upon his work. For such
a famous writer, there has been surprisingly little in the
way of serious criticism. There are various biographies, but
even the best of these dwell on the Thompson mythology.
From his teenage years onwards, he consciously sought
to perpetuate falsehoods around his life that built him
into a literary legend. Whilst this was a great part of his
literature, it ultimately made him into a cartoonish figure
who is seldom taken seriously. It has made studying his life
and work difficult, for getting at the truth is in some cases
impossible. His interviews and letters, whilst endlessly
entertaining, simply compound the problem by adding
different versions of his innumerable falsehoods.
In this book, I have corrected a number of
misconceptions about Thompson’s life because, in
examining his work I had to dig up sources that others
had missed. In looking at the interplay of fact and fiction
within his work, I naturally uncovered a great many of his
exaggerations and fabrications. Again, it is with a measure
of guilt that I do this. Many classic stories from his life,
which have even been reported as true in the best of his
biographies, turned out to have been entirely made up. It
is perhaps strange that a book of this nature would include
so much biographical detail, but for Thompson life and
literature overlapped. Amid the dizzying array of themes
in his work, the focus was quite often himself. Even when
looking elsewhere, he consciously embodied the things he
was writing about in order to better examine them. Gonzo
was a one-man genre largely because it always involved, to
some extent, Hunter S. Thompson.
For Thompson, there were no clear lines between
fiction and non-fiction, and there was no real delineation
between his life and his work. It was all blurred and it was
all unashamedly chaotic. To go along with his fabrications
is fun but it does not allow us to adequately assess his work
and whilst he did himself no favors by losing himself in
the life of his alter ego, Raoul Duke, he always wished to
be seen as a serious writer. It is my hope that by peeling
back the layers of fiction and examining the truth, all the
while looking at the mechanics of his work, this book will
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do just that.
It is high time that we put away the childish image of
Hunter S. Thompson as the literary clown and acknowledge
him as the exceptionally talented author he was, at least
during the period up to 1972. Though no one has ever
successfully emulated him, countless have tried. His work
has been of incalculable significance in American culture
and, to some extent, even politics. He was a comedic
writer, whose books portrayed the absurd so well that
perhaps they did him a disservice, but Thompson wished
to be viewed alongside other great satirists, including Mark
Twain, and certainly should be.
This book, then, humbly aims to be the first to do
justice to his work, exploring the entirety of his literary
career in search of answers to the questions, “What
made him so unique?” “What was Gonzo all about?” and
“Why did he lose his literary powers?” It will explore his
best-known works, but also a great many of the lesser-
known pieces that have slipped between the cracks in
Gonzo history, but which offer vital clues to the creation
and meaning of Gonzo, and which help us to better
understand this most misunderstood of writers. It will
be an uncomfortable book for many. Thompson was an
unsavory character in some ways. Whilst he often wrote
about the idiocy of racism, his own work was guilty of the
very thing he critiqued. Whilst he railed against injustice
and bullying, he could be unspeakably vicious to the people
who loved him. But this book will pull no punches, as they
say. It is Hunter S. Thompson, warts and all. It is the both
the Rise and the Fall and everything in between.
Acknowledgements
I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to the biographers
who have previously attempted to tackle the difficult
subject of Hunter S. Thompson’s life. Without these works,
my own efforts would not have been possible. William
McKeen, Peter Whitmer, Paul Perry, and E Jean Carroll
have made it possible for people like me to build on top
of their research and they have my endless thanks. Though
McKeen’s is the most comprehensive and up to date of
them all, each of these texts has a different focus and each
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has allowed me a better understanding of Thompson’s life.
Jann Wenner and Paul Scanlon have also made an
invaluable contribution by collecting an oral history of
Thompson’s life in Gonzo. Again, this text was hugely
important in establishing certain biographical details.
Doug Brinkley and Anita Thompson’s efforts in editing
collections of letters and interviews has also been of great
help to me, for these are incredibly important sources of
information.
I also owe a lot to Dr. Rory Patrick Feehan, who was
not only helpful in answering questions about Hunter
S. Thompson’s life and work but is also responsible for
running the Totally Gonzo website, which houses some
important resources that were cited in this book. Wayne
Ewing was also hugely important in answering questions
about Thompson’s later life and work habits. His
documentaries, vlogs, and blogs were also useful in my
research.
A Note on Sources
Much of Hunter S. Thompson’s writing was published in
newspapers or magazines first and then the best pieces
were republished later in his various collections. He was
often edited in order to remove his profanity or references
to violence or drug use. Sometimes the editors took out his
tangents or cut extraneous backstory. Later, when putting
together his collected works, Thompson would often
restore the deleted text. In researching this book, I have
tried to acquire the original and collected versions of each
piece of writing, but this has not always been possible.
In most cases, however, I will refer to the text from his
own collections because it is what the author intended
and therefore more accurately reflects his style and ideas.
However, sometimes it was appropriate or necessary to
refer to the original published version. This will be noted
in the text and also in the note section at the back of the
book.
All typos, grammatical errors, and problems with
punctuation in the quoted material is copied from the
original source. Such mistakes in my own words… well,
you can go ahead and ignore them.
v
Part One
1937-1971