WE ARE TURNING into a nation of whimpering slaves to Fear—fear of war, fear of poverty, fear of random terrorism, fear of getting down-sized or fired because of the plunging economy, fear of getting evicted for bad debts or suddenly getting locked up in a military detention camp on vague charges of being a Terrorist sympathizer.”
Those are the words of Hunter S.Thompson in “Extreme Behavior in Aspen,” published in 2003. In 2005, at age 67, despondent due to chronic physical ailments, including being confined to a wheelchair,Thompson put a semi-automatic Smith and Wesson .45-caliber hand gun into his mouth and fired.Well, he once wrote, “Never hesitate to use force,” and he sure didn’t.
My connection to Thompson, apart from reading him, happened through Latin. Believe it or not, lots of people take classes in it these days, one of them being Anita Thompson, Hunter’s widow. I manage the office of Classics at Columbia and met her in the classroom next to my office. “Carpe diem,” I said to myself when I’d heard she’d edited a new volume of her late husband’s work, Ancient Gonzo Wisdom: Interviews with Hunter S.Thompson, published this July.The book features previously unpublished interviews from 1974 to 2005 studded with outrageous anecdotes and quotes and some plain-old folk wisdom from the “Doctor,” as he liked to call himself.
“I haven’t done much press with this at all—that was part of the deal,” Anita tells me. She made an exception for New York Press, agreeing to discuss the book, which is about to be published in hardcover in the U.K. Anita was taking a semester off from college when she met Hunter through a mutual friend in 1999. He hired her as researcher, editor and cook, and she moved in the following year; they married in 2003. Somewhere in between, she began organizing the unpublished manuscripts and photographs from his archive, which consisted of about 1,000 boxes in their basement.
“He never threw anything away. I thought it would be a good idea to start preserving some of these things,” she tells me. “I started the process of collecting these interviews before Hunter died.” Naturally, this was a difficult time. “It was a source of comfort for me to go through his interviews, his writings, his letters. So I just started compiling everything,” she says, her eyes misty. “I was in a really dark place at the time. I felt Hunter’s spirit everywhere.
For a while I even avoided going to bed.” She didn’t expect his sudden death, although he’d spoken about suicide before and at the time, he was in a lot of pain. “He didn’t have his legs, but he was the king of recovery,” she says. At the time, he was estranged from his son, Juan, the product of Hunter’s first wife, Sandy. “I adored Juan at the time, and begged him to come up, telling him, ‘you have to come up, your father’s sick.’”What she was unaware of was the son, who eventually arrived with his wife and six-year-old child, had a pact with his father to assist him in the suicide.
Thompson’s death was a great loss to literature and political reporting in particular, but his words live on, attracting a dedicated band of followers. But more importantly, his invention of Gonzo journalism has permanently left its mark on how we report the news today. I graduated from journalism school only a few months after he died, and although we’d read some of his articles, including the seminal 1970 piece that began Gonzo, The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved, we would have been better off following his lead. To keep his memory alive, Anita has been working on a project called The Gonzo
Foundation.With Anita at the helm, the foundation, which hopes to enlist an alliance with a university, will attempt to promote journalism, political activism and literature based on Hunter’s legacy.The foundation will sponsor a residency for serious students of Hunter’s work, geared toward those writers who are dedicated to the craft.
Ancient Gonzo Wisdom isn’t Anita’s first book. In 2007, she wrote a slim volume of advice for Hunter’s youthful acolytes, The Gonzo Way. “After Hunter died, I received hundreds, maybe thousands of emails and letters every day from young people. Most assumed Hunter’s lifestyle gave him the ability to write like he did. These kids were writing me pages and pages bragging about Wild Turkey and cocaine.”What they didn’t realize was that, although he openly admitted to his consuming substances ranging from mescaline, marijuana, peyote, LSD and booze, Hunter had rigorous work habits and a daily schedule that devoted time to his writing and other obsessions. “It was his work and dedication and discipline actually, that made his lifestyle possible,” Anita says. But Anita also helped cultivate the Gonzo lifestyle that kept her husband writing. According to Anita, Hunter’s average day began when he awoke at 2. Fueled by a huge breakfast washed down by his everpresent whiskey and water, coffee and orange juice.Then he’d feed his mind on news ranging from the New York Times, the Denver Post, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal and a stack of magazines. Remote controls at the ready, he’d lounge in the chair in front of the TV. “That was a two-hour meditation for him that he maintained his entire adult life. That’s when he’d read; and that’s the only time he was really quiet,” says Anita. “Even when he was writing he was always making a ruckus.”Then, there’d be phone calls and errands or business items to check off the list. Thompson’s friends came over later in the day for a game or chat and at around 10, he’d begin to work. “His most productive hours were between midnight and 6:00 a.m.,” says Anita.
Few journalists today write with the literary flair and depth of Thompson whose assignments were like quests, Homeric odysseys that brought him and the reader to the edge. Of course, there’s no way to explain the edge except to those who’ve actually gone over it. However, sometimes the writer was a prisoner of his own cult of personality.
He was obsessed with guns, motorcycles, football, excesses of psychedelics and booze and abusive rhetoric against the politicians he often called “swine.” Playing the role of macho man to the hilt, a man who was bigger than life, it wasn’t surprising Hunter followed in Hemingway’s footsteps and shot himself to death.
>Ancient Gonzo Wisdom: Interviews with Hunter S. Thompson
Edited by Anita Thompson, Da Capo Press, 432 pages
