I’ve been pondering what kind of epitaph Thompson would have written as an outside observer about an author’s suicide. It finally occurred to me he did just that in a piece he wrote on Ernest Hemingway in the National Observer in 1964 (reprinted in The Great Shark Hunt.)
Titled What Lured Hemingway to Ketchum, it wrestles with Hemingway’s later years in Idaho and his descent from the pinnacle of his career. Thompson recounts Hemingway’s response to the question, “What makes a great writer?”:
“Well,” said Hemingway, “there’s only one thing I live by – that’s having the power of conviction and knowing what to leave out.” He had said the same thing before, but whether he still believed it in the winter of his years is another matter. There is good evidence that he was not always sure what to leave out, and very little evidence to show that his power of conviction survived the war.*
The piece concludes,
Perhaps he found what he came here for, but the odds are huge that he didn’t. He was an old, sick, and very troubled man, and the illusion of peace and contentment was not enough for him – not even when his friends came up from Cuba and played bullfight with him in the Tram. So finally, and for what he must have thought the best of reasons, he ended it with a shotgun.*
I have to think that the manner of Hemingway’s death was heavy on Hunter S. Thompson’s mind in the last days and hours of his life. In the same article, he said, “Ketchum was Hemingway’s Big Two Hearted River, and he wrote his own epitaph in the story of the same name, just as Scott Fitzgerald had written his epitaph in The Great Gatsby.” I wonder how much of this Hemingway piece became Thompson’s own epitaph in the end?
He was the real deal, a man who lived life on his own terms and let anyone who didn’t like it know they could fuck off.
I cried a bit until I realized he’d tell us to knock it off. I’m sure he had his reasons for killing himself, and it’s not our job to second guess him. You shouldn’t be forced to live if you don’t want to. It’s not cowardly to make a decision for yourself, and it’s no one’s business to tell you to keep going if you wish not to.
I think he probably felt the effects of aging and decided it was time to say goodbye before he faded into the trappings of old age. I don’t blame him. I can’t see the good journalist sitting around in a diaper waiting for someone to bring him his Ensure.
Rest in peace, dear friend, I wish I could have know you. You will be deeply missed, and your contribution to journalism will not be forgotten.
One of my favorite tales of Hunter was of his meeting with Johnny Depp just before filming started on F&L LV. Depp is notoriously awkward and shy around new people and was already in awe of Thompson and Thompson also wasn’t famous for being a chatterbox around new people so there was tons of awkward silence and hemming on both ends. (This was at Thompson’s ranch and other attendees included Depp’s then girlfriend Kate Moss, her mother, and Thompson’s assistant.)
Finally Thompson asked “You want to go blow something up?” to which Depp said “Sure” and the two men broke the ice by shooting various targets and setting plastic explosives around the ranch. It culminated in setting some form of explosive on Thompson’s gas tanks and exploding them with high power firearms. Depp said that the heaven high explosion was one of the great moments of his life but that Moss & Mum were absolutely mortified. He and Thompson became great friends (though I’m not sure what Thompson thought of the movie).
One of the things I read about the HST/Depp friendship was that Thompson got a huge kick out of Depp’s spot-on ability to mimic his voice and inflections - so much so that while on the set of Fear and Loathing Thompson liked to call friends on his cell phone and then hand the phone to Depp and have him pose as HST. Depp’s ability was apparently good enough that he could actually fool Thompson’s friends over the phone.
To paraphase the good doctor himself… “Ye fucking Gods Man!”
Horrible, horrible loss. Finally the pain was too much to blot out with massive doses of whatever was handy. Cheers to what you meant to us all Doc. A vouyeristic part of me hopes you left one king hell note behind for the rest of us who’ve spend years just trying to understand.
He gave it thumbs up in his commentary for the Critarion DVD and reported back to the stars and directors saying he had a good time with it, and loved it. He said it was like “A eery trumpet call over a lost battl field”. Of course, he later said it was a “…failed attempt by a bunch of vicious queers…”, but this was in jest, and in response to some jokes Gilliam and others were passing around about Raol Duke and Dr. Gonzo being homosexual during the making of the movie.
I must tell this story before this thread fades. I was at Mardi Gras during a…particular phase in my life. I was partying with a guy whose father had been a Vietnam war correspondant and had written a couple of books on the subject. I had recently read Fear and Loathing for the first time and the subject of The Good Doctor came up. My friend told me that his father had met Thompson in Vietnam. Thompson had been sent there by Rolling Stone to report, but he just stayed in the hotel bar all the time while all the other journalists went out with the troops, etc. Every night at the hotel bar, my friend’s father would chastise him for it. Finally, Thompson agreed to go out with him.
The next morning, my friend’s father (hitherto referred to as “FF”) had commandeered a jeep and waited outside the hotel for Thompson to show up. Finally, after a long wait, he emerged in his customary costume (pith helmet, hawaiian shirt, bermuda shorts, etc.) with a cooler full of beer and a stopwatch around his neck. He was totally silent, but FF noticed while they were driving to where the action was that day, Thompson was keeping an eye on the stopwatch and every ten to fifteen minutes he would pop a pill and reset the timer. Finally, after much driving around, they reached the combat zone. Soon, the VC mounted a charge, and a group of GI’s came running out of the jungle with tracers flying everywhere. FF decided it was time to get the hell out of there, but Thompson was nowhere to be seen. Finally, after what seemed an eternity, FF found Thompson walking towards the jungle where the VC presumably were, arms outstreched, singing something unintelligible. FF said he seriously contemplated leaving Thompson to his fate, but instead he ran out, grabbed him, and drug him bodily back to the jeep just as a couple of F-105s dropped napalm into the jungle. As they sped away from the conflagration, Thompson leaned up to FF and yelled “Ye gods! Did you see those pteradactyls?”
I’m sure he was writing shortly before he died. A feeling in the pit of my stomach, that soon there’ll be a long and windy treatise about the fuckheaded shittiness of circumstances. He always said that the American dream was dead, that it had died long ago… I wonder if he ever really believed it. I guess he finally did. Or maybe he just got tired of having to constantly create and rebuild, over and over, his own personal dream.
I hope he wrote something. Anything. Even if it was just a single sentence. Even if he simply wrote down on a pad of paper, “Don’t take any guff from these swine.”
Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe he found a certain satisfaction, after a lifetime of putting every nuance and fired mental impulse onto paper, of leaving us all with nothing but the reverberating echo of his final lead hurrah.
Man, I feel sad. Sad, lonely, and way too sober. Working on the last one, though. I’ll raise many to the good Doctor tonight. I’ll add to what others have said, if you’re thinking about a crazed, mumbling druggie, you have missed the point. The man was a serious talent - always vivid, sharp, and evocative. I have nothing else to say.
I think there comes a point in the life of every journalism student when he or she sits down, reads a Hunter piece and then says “I wish I could write like that.”
I know I’ve done that a number of times.
He was a tremendous writer, even if his talents sometimes were underappreciated.
And on top of all that, he was a UK fan. His Page 2 column after last year’s NCAA tournament said a lot of things that all of Big Blue Nation was thinking.
I’m gonna miss knowing that there was at least one person who would point out when things weren’t right.
