Battles in the Kingdom of Fear:
Hunter S. Thompson at Home in the West
By Edgar H. Thompson
My notes on the outline for this paper look like Eminem’s
rhyme pad, notes that appear chaotic but have a common thread at the center, in
this case Hunter S. Thompson, on stage, at the center of this memoir, a loose
name for a very complex book with a complex structure. It doesn’t look like you
are going where you are going but when you get there, you have experienced the
trip of Thompson’s life to some degree, and it is an amazing ride, not only in
terms of the content but the stylistic structure of the book. This book is a
tribute to Thompson’s development from his original success with Hell’s Angels
to this book, his next to last, and in a way his most significant in my opinion.
It is put together in broad metaphors and themes in a sequence that doesn’t
necessarily make sense if you look at them originally, but do make sense after
the fact. Through the energy of the writing, the narrative drive moves all over
the place--up/down, real/imagined--but the story or structure moves forward over
time, and a story gets told.
At the center of the story is Hunter himself, starting with a childhood prank
when he was 8 or nine years old that changed his life. He and some neighborhood
boys managed to pull a federal post office box into the road in front of a hated
school bus driver. When the F.B.I. visits Thompson’s home and tries to
intimidate him into a confession based on witnesses the F.B.I. agents claim to
have, Thompson does something that changes his life forever. Instead of
accepting the word and authority of the F.B.I. without question, he asks “What
witnesses?” It turns out, there aren’t any, and Thompson learns something about
those supposedly in power [4-6]: Don’t assume anything; question those who
portray themselves as having authority. He does this the rest of his life.
Although he always questioned and lived on the edge [in a later book he says he
has been clinically dead 16 times], he never tried to impose his life on anyone
else. As he put it:
My life has been the polar opposite of safe, but I am proud of it and so is my son, and that is good enough for me. I would do it all over again without changing the beat, although I have never recommended it to others. That would be cruel and irresponsible and wrong, I think, and I am none of those things. [xxii]
Even though he never recommends his life to others, he
manages to put his readers vicariously into his life, into the moment of what
was happening to him. He does this stylistically through his storytelling, which
includes vivid description, sharp juxtaposition of images, and realistic
language. Consider his trip to Cuba to a film festival. Thompson is sitting in
the airport, and sees a guy approaching him who turns out to be a rich cop on
the lam. This is the kind of person you don’t want to be with you on your way to
Cuba. He doesn’t actually say this, but he implies it by what follows. He shares
his work on Cuba over the years, including a news article that lists the severe
penalties for criminal and political opponents in Cuba. He is nervous on the
plane from Cancun to Havana, and he tries to ask how much money he is supposed
to pay for food, and since he doesn’t speak Spanish that well, he is nervous
because the man he is asking help from says “I want no United States dollars”
implying that to accept such money publicly is a no-no [227]. He is going to
Cuba to screen the movie version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and
he remembers assuring the ambassador that he is not a dope fiend. Then as he is
shaving in the bathroom before the plane lands, he finds some hashish in his
toilet kit, and he is really beginning to get worried about getting into Cuba.
When he lands, the passengers are herded off the plane and separated, almost as
a way to disengage them from security. He would have run, but there was no place
to run to, so he does what has learned to do when you are guilty, “move toward
the police, never run away from them” [230]. Though afraid, he finally is
admitted to the country. Once there, he learns that you don’t have to go far to
learn a lot about what is happening in Cuba.
You can learn a lot of things just by hanging out in front of the Hotel Nacional
in Havana. There is a heavy mix of criminals and foreigners and beautiful women
with special agendas. Nobody is exactly what they seem to be in Havana, and that
is especially true at the Hotel Nacional, which enjoys a worldwide reputation
for the finest hospitality in Cuba.
The Malecon is the long, wide boulevard that runs along the waterfront in
Havana. The harbor is badly polluted, but a mile offshore, where the Gulf Stream
runs, the water is pure and fast. No islands dot the horizon. There is nothing
between here and key West except ninety miles of deep water and six million
sharks. Some people go out there for fun, but not many. The Gulf of Mexico at
night is strictly for business—commercial freighters, commercial fisherman,
floating wreckage, and the occasion human skeleton.
The Malecon is different. There is life along the boulevard, strolling lovers
and pedicabs and knots of police-affiliated hoodlums gathered here and there
under streetlights, hooting at cars and tossing fish heads to crocodiles, which
can surface like lightning and jump five feet straight up in the air when they
think they see fresh meat. A croc in a fit of temper can swallow a small boy and
two six-packs of beer in one gulp. [233]
By the end of this section, he has described interactions with people and more
about what is happening in Cuba, with commentary that gives us a perspective
that most of us do not have access to. [Side Note: His brief time in Vietnam
right before the fall, though only about five pages long captures the same kinds
of images I recorded in two poems of my own “Contraries” and “American Pie”
written in the same location about three years before Thompson was there. The
same thing happens in his description of the war in Granada.]
Variation in print--font, format, and the addition of pictures--adds a touch of
grounded reality and credence to the evolving story, a sense of documented
reality from many sources. For instance, when Thompson runs for sheriff in
Aspen, he so threatens the historical, traditional power base in Aspen,
Colorado, that Thompson is unfairly accused of all kinds of things. He is
eventually exonerated. This happens more than once to Thompson, and in each of
the three witness sections of this book, he interposes his own narrative with
actual news stories written by him and others, letters, pictures, and iconic
images all interspersed and linked together to tell each story. This keeps the
pace, tone, and voice in variance, which provides a underlying sense of life to
the actual written words on the surface.
In the case of Thompson’s run for the Aspen sheriff’s
office, the story starts with Thompson the Freak Power candidate for sheriff,
having his life threatened, and his home becomes an armed compound. Then he goes
back to his time at the 1968 Chicago convention, his observations as a
journalist, his being involved in the middle of violence, his understanding of
the sinister nature of the so-called traditional power base, and his and others’
principled reactions to this kind of politics. The story then returns to Aspen
1970. The national press is there because Thompson wrote about his concept of
“Freak Power” in an article in Rolling Stone, so this political notion of
a new left-wing political movement garners attention. Ultimately, he didn’t win
because the Rolling Stone article shared his strategy for winning, which
gave his opponents the information they needed to prevail. Back and forth,
stories and pictures, but when done, readers have a real sense of involvement.
This approach, which is repeated often throughout the book, gives us a sense
that life is a pastiche that only makes sense when looking back on it
reflectively.
A challenge for the reader, and the critical reviewer, is to determine how and
where what Thompson is writing is real or imaginary, and to what degree this
makes a difference anyway. For instance, in the section It Never Got Weird
Enough, he spent the night with Judge Clarence Thomas in the middle of Nevada
after each in different cars run into a herd of sheep in the middle of the
night. The Judge and his women friends ride with Hunter to the next town. This
narrative is written as though it really happened, though whether it did or
didn’t is irrelevant. What is important is how this approach so creatively
reveals Thompson’s opinion of Judge Thomas and Thomas’s views on pornography and
life. This is really a magical mystery tour, and Thompson sucks us into it.
Another example is when Xania, a dream life girl, comes to join him in his pool
early in the morning. Is she real or a dream, or does it really make any
difference? Fiction and non-fiction combined with drug dreams. It all gets hard
and difficult before it gets better, but it is cyclical.
Another example of Thompson’s vibrant style in this book is when he meets the
woman who will become his last wife. Love conquers all. It takes a woman with
intellect and insight to see through to the kind of person Thompson really is,
as opposed to the persona he portrays in his writing. He meets Anita as she is
being attacked by dogs in Venice, California. She goes away with him, and she
agrees to become his assistant, has a nervous breakdown, but they connect. Why?
She understands him. Consider the following section after Thompson crashes his
Cadillac in Big Sur:
We shot past a darkened house and past a parked Jeep, then crashed into a
waterfall high above the sea. I got out of the car and sat down on a rock, then
lit up the marijuana pipe. “Well,” I said to Anita, “this is it. We must have
taken a wrong turn.”
She laughed and sucked on some moss. Then she sat down across form me on a log.
“You’re funny,” she said. “you’re very strange—and you don’t know why, do you?”
“No,” I said, “I’m stupid.”
“It’s because you have the soul of a teenage girl in the body of an elderly dope
fiend,” she whispered. “That is why you have problems.” She patted me on the
knee. “Yes. That is why people giggle with fear every time you come into a room.
That is why you rescued me from those dogs in Venice.” [350-351]
Notice, even though this section reveals a lot about their
relationship in an intimate way, it doesn’t get into really detailed personal
information. Thompson is always on task, on the point as a writer, and by his
own definition “the most accurate journalist you’ll ever read” [xvi]. He is
open, but he doesn't reveal really personal confidences or experiences. For
instance, he mentions his son many times in the book and is clearly proud of
him, but he absolutely doesn't talk about his son's life in any personal way.
Thompson captures the chaos of life in his words. His life seems extreme, but in
fact all lives are extreme. We just assume they aren't. It is hard to define the
genre of this book, much as it is hard to categorize Edward Abbey's Desert
Solitaire. The west in The Kingdom of Fear is not like the west of Abbey’s
desert. Still, Owl Creek near Aspen, is an unusual place, a place where not only
"good" people but freaks immigrate to.
This is the point at which I arrived last September, a month after my own bypass
surgery. I had not concluded the paper. Hunter S. Thompson actually concluded it
himself with his suicide in February of this year. The March 29 issue of
Rolling Stone, which featured several published remembrances from family and
friends over the years, tied together a lot of loose ends.
Gonzo journalism was almost an accident in how it developed. Thompson had taken
an assignment to write a story for Scanlan’s Monthly about the Kentucky
Derby, and he just couldn’t get any writing to come. He finally sent the editors
some notes from his notebook, and he received rave reviews for his efforts. As
Gilmore describes it:
Thompson has hit on not just a style but a voice. He was inside the
story—documenting his own reactions, state of mind, following loopy digressions
until they landed in unanticipated pools of revelation—but he was also, on
another level, outside the scenes he wrote about: that is, he was a misfit,
chronicling systems of accepted values that really had no value at all. (44)
Thompson went on to formalize his approach in the following way: ”The eye & the
mind would be functioning as a camera. The writing would be selective &
interpretative—but once the image was written the words would be final” (44).
This is what he did in his writing for the rest of his career, particularly in
The Kingdom of Fear. As his son, Juan, observed, “He believed in the
darkest as well as they highest potential of the human heart and spoke in what
at first appeared to be hyperbole yet, on reflection, turned out to be a more
accurate, essential depiction, even though he took liberties with actual facts”
(72).
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was his masterpiece for many. As Gilmore
says, “Thompson’s Fear and Loathing was about disillusionment—the
feelings that gnawed at you after a dream that proved only a hallucination. It
was also the terror of losing that illusion, and having no refuse.” (47). Though
Thompson went on to write about politics with an insight not frequently found
among political writers and to write long-form journalism and outlandish,
imaginary stories that got at issues at the center of American life--e.g., his
story about Judge Clarence Thomas and women of ill repute on a trip through the
Great Basin in Nevada, etc., etc.—the experience of being at the edge changed.
Gilmore says it better than I can: “In the end, there was probably little left
for Thompson to say in written words. He’d already documented the abyss as had
few other writers . . . . He had not more to say about it, and no more to say
about himself” (47). With his physical health failing him, Thompson simply could
not, and would not accept, as Brinkley put it, becoming the “spokesman for the
“New Old’”(38). Thompson apparently came to understand that what he had observed
about Ernest Hemingway’s suicide during a visit to Ketchum, Idaho years earlier
was also true about him: Thompson said of Hemingway, “He was an old, sick and
very troubled man, and contentment was not enough for him” (36).
Yet in the middle of all of this and an extreme life style, he was referred to
by Johnny Deep (49) and Jack Nicholson (71) as a southern gentlemen, and
virtually everyone who called him friend spoke of how kind he was to them and
their families. His son said that it was a sense of community that his father
gave to people: “He taught us, or maybe he reminded us, what it meant to be a
community, about loyalty, about sticking together, about doing the right thing
for each other” (72).
Is Hunter S. Thompson a western writer? The answer is no in the classic cowboy
sense, but yes, in that he lived in the west, wrote a lot about contemporary
life and his experiences there, and all of this writing gives us, his readers,
an expanded sense of what life is like on the edge in the urban and rural west.
He left us with a lot.
I personally prefer to remember Hunter S. Thompson not on a drug and/or alcohol
induced high, but as a person, a writer, a chronicler of life. His description
of one of his characters leaving Puerto Rico near the end of The Rum Diary is
how I want to vicariously remember Thompson:
It was the last time I saw him and I remember it very clearly. He walked out on
the pier and stood near a wooden lamppost, looking out at the sea. The only
living thing in a dead Caribbean town—a tall figure in a rumpled Palm Beach
suit, his only suit, now full of dirt and grass stains and bulgy pockets,
standing alone on a pier at the end of the world and thinking his own thoughts.
I waved again, although his back was to me, and gave two quick blasts on the
horn as I sped out of town. (202)
To me, this is the image of a man looking towards the future, towards what could
and might be, and will be [Pause] in the imagination of those of us who follow
him into The Kingdom of Fear.
References Cited
Brinkley, Douglas. “Content Was Not Enough: Final Days at Owl Farm.” Rolling
Stone. Issue 970 (March 24, 2005), 36-42.
Depp, Johnny. “A Pair of Deviant Bookends.” Rolling Stone. Issue 970 (March 24, 2005), 48-49.
Gilmore, Mikal. “The Last Outlaw.” Rolling Stone. Issue 970 (March 24, 2005), 44-47.
Nicholson, Jack. “A Very Fine American.” Rolling Stone. Issue 970 (March 24, 2005), 71.
Thompson, Hunter S. Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003.
Thompson, Hunter S. The Rum Diary. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998.
Thompson, Juan. “My Father.” Rolling Stone. Issue 970 (March 24, 2005), 72.
Edgar H. Thompson
Emory & Henry College
P.O. Box 34
Emory, VA 24327
1-276-944-6215
ehthomps@ehc.edu