Hunter S. Thompson: The Last Interview

Hunter S. Thompson was so outside the box, a new word was invented just to define him: Gonzo. He was a journalist who mocked all the rules, a hell-bent fellow who loved to stomp on his own accelerator, the writer every other writer tried to imitate. In these brutally candid and very funny interviews that range across his fabled career, Thompson reveals himself as mad for politics, which he thought was both the source of the country’s despair and, just maybe, the answer to it. At a moment when politics is once again roiling America, we need Thompson’s guts and wild wisdom more than ever.

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Hunter S. Thompson

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Hunter S. Thompson: The Last Interview
INTRODUCTION DAVID STREITFELD I once spent many agonizing minutes watching Hunter Thompson, who liked to boast that he could use the English language as both a musical instrument and a political weapon, trying to sign his name.

This was in late 1990, in a hotel room in New York City. A publicist asked him to autograph his latest book before she left, a little souvenir of hours spent trying to get the writer to do the most basic things, like get out of bed. Hunter would start writing, get distracted, pause, gather his wits, stare at his hand as if it were an alien life form, throw something. I thought, Signed books by this guy must be really scarce.

A few decades later, with Gonzo nostalgia in full swing, eBay was auctioning a signed copy of Generation of Swine or Songs of the Doomed nearly every day, usually with just the scribbled letters “HST.” Collectors sometimes bid hundreds of dollars. Most of the autographs must be fake, but probably a few are real. At this point, who can tell the difference?

It’s been almost half a century since the work that made Hunter’s name and more than a decade since his suicide, but he was so controversial, so denounced, and so celebrated that the smoke still hasn’t cleared. He was influential and entertaining, everyone must give him that, but did he ever become the artist that he so palpably longed to be? Was he a madman, or was he a writer who played a role and got trapped in it? Did his prodigious intake of drugs and alcohol weaken his work, or make it possible in the first place? Like most of the great American writers, he did his best work first; is his life a tragedy of blown opportunities and persistent decline, or fundamentally a success?

Hunter himself was plagued by doubt, and other opinions were sharply divided. Tom Wolfe, who worked some of the same territory, called him “the greatest comic writer of the twentieth century.” But Hunter’s first wife, Sandy, who made his career possible in so many ways, said, “Hunter wanted to be a great writer and he had the genius, the talent, and, early on, the will and the means. He was horrified by whom he had become and ashamed—or I really should say tortured. He knew he had failed.”

That’s pretty harsh. Few writers achieve the hallowed groves of immortality, and those that do follow different roads. Hawthorne, Melville, Gabriel García Márquez, and Nabokov made it on their work alone. Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Kerouac all found that the stories they wrote merged with the story they lived, and so did Hunter. It happened gradually but inexorably. The first edition of Hell’s Angels from 1967 has a picture of a member of the biker gang on the cover. The Modern Library edition, printed thirty years later, bears a photo of Hunter, who always made clear he was not an Angel.

One of Hunter’s biographers, William McKeen, calls him “the favorite writer for many people who didn’t read books.” He stands in front of his work, often obscuring it. The books about him, including a half-dozen full-scale biographies, outnumber the books he wrote. There are movies (both Bill Murray and Johnny Depp played Hunter, not very successfully), documentaries, memoirs, comic books, lavish oversized reprints designed for the coffee table rather than the shelves, even a memorial beer. The original work is scarcely necessary, which seems a shame, because we need it more than ever.

These are tumultuous times. The country is on edge, unable to look away from what is going on in Washington. Hunter loved moments like this. The thing he hated the most was boredom, and no one is bored now. The thing he loved the most was politics, which continually disappointed him but which he couldn’t let go of. His great nemesis was Richard Nixon. Douglas Brinkley, a friend and historian, said, “Hunter hated Nixon so much he loved him.” In the Age of Trump, we’re all Hunter Thompson.

Hunter would have done more than relish the current scene; he would have realized how we got here. Indeed, he predicted it. After hanging out with the Hells Angels, the writer concluded that they were not “some romantic leftover” but “the first wave of a future that nothing in our history has prepared us to cope with.”

As he told Studs Terkel in 1967, the Angels were the vanguard of the masses rejected by technology, by progress, by history:

The people who are being left out and put behind won’t be obvious for years. And Christ only knows what’ll happen when it’s 1985. There will be a million Hell’s Angels. They won’t be wearing the colors but they’ll be people who are looking for vengeance because they’ve been left behind.

It took rather longer than Hunter thought, but that pretty much nails the millions of voters who put Trump over the top in 2016. There were so many more people out there looking for vengeance—social, personal, political, economic—than anyone realized.

American politics is always circling back to its past. The Trump/Clinton face-off has curious parallels to the 1972 election. Richard Nixon, Hunter noted, said the voting that year would offer “the clearest choice of this century.” Nixon was right but not in the way he meant.

“It is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character almost every country in the world has learned to fear and despise,” Hunter wrote. “Our Barbie-doll president, with his Barbie-doll wife and his boxful of Barbie-doll children is also America’s answer to the monstrous Mr. Hyde. He speaks for the Werewolf in us; the bully, the predatory shyster who turns into something unspeakable, full of claws and bleeding string-warts on nights when the moon comes too close…”

Americans chose the dark side in 1972 and did so again in 2016. We like to go up to the edge, daring ourselves not to fall in. Hunter recognized the impulse because it was the same one he lived by. He insisted on amping things up, putting the entire bet on one role of the dice.

A favorite anecdote: somewhere in the early seventies, Rolling Stone writer David Felton went to visit Hunter at a California hotel. The inventor of Gonzo journalism “had a leer on his face and he was just slamming the door to his apartment as hard as he could, over and over again until it practically came off the hinges,” Felton told a biographer.

“He would slam it and then he would smile and open it; and he’d slam it again. It was because the guy upstairs complained about the noise. And Hunter’s theory on those things, which he’s done many times, is that if somebody complains about the noise you turn it up, not down, and they’ll stop complaining eventually.”

This was the reason why Hunter was placed on this earth: to make everyone realize how far you can go when you’re going too far. He was provocative without even trying. It’s a shame he never made it to Twitter. His quips—“I think having…