The Proud Highway - Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman: The Collected Letters of Hunter S. Thompson 1955-1967 edited by Douglas Brinkley Bloomsbury 683pp, 20 in UK
An increasingly incoherent Hunter S. Thompson, the raging buzzard of 1960s/70s American counterculture, still throws up the very odd piece of masterful vitriol (like his majestically unrepentant Exocet over Nixon's coffin in 1994), but his main operation nowadays seems reduced to the secretarial task of recycling old achievements. This shameless 660-page toecrusher, the first of three projected collections of letters, documents the forging-of-a-writer years: from Louisville high-school and life as an 18-year-old, pipesmoking sports editor of the US Air Force Command Courier, to out-drinking deadlines for national news magazines, most notably as a stringer for the National Observer from Puerto Rica, Lima, Rio de Janeiro, NYC, Big Sur and other Californian hotspots. It all ends up with The Nation's Carey McWilliams commissioning the piece that led to overnight fame with his Hell's Angels book in 1967 - which saw Richard Ellmann compare him to Rimbaud.
In the earliest letters, Thompson jests about saving them for publication, but if even a fraction of the drug-binges in his later Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) is true, you wonder where he gathered the synapses to anal-retentively carbon-copy and file over 20,000 of them in the basement of his Owl Farm hide-out in Colorado. Brinkley, a historian from the University of New Orleans, edited them down, reading them aloud in Thompson's presence, often with help from Woody Creek neighbours like actor Don Johnson.
There's a kind of significance in this, in that the rhythms and humoristic vehemence of Thompson's bizarre, gongeristic routines often overtake the content; and there's no mistaking the style from this mass of never-think-twice prose; great spewing, fountainous escape-valves of violent vocabulary and arrogant, bourbon-heated mind-flares.
The large welter of self-conscious juvenilia makes for heavy weather: jealous outbursts or surprisingly inhibited, longing missives to girlfriends, high-minded put-downs of fellow writers, etc. But as his CV extends - while still writing home to Mom for funds, or willy-waving back at his old Louisville gang - the writing gets better and funnier. An inevitable humanity peeks through, yet his wife Sandy and young son, Juan, are all but eclipsed here by the sheer juggernaut of his ego. He is hellbent on trouble and infamy; his untamable personality hardens enthusiastically around his exploits as an National Rifle Association member ("popping pigs" and "disintegrating coons"), getting arrested with Ken Kesey and Alan Ginsberg in Haight-Ashbury, or beaten up by Puerto Ricans and Hell's Angels.
There's also a great deal about literary ambition, the letters pastiching a checklist of Dos Passos, Salinger, Donleavy, Mencken, Faulkner, Ayn Rand (as a copy boy for Time, he typed out The Great Gatsby in full, just to get the rhythm of the sentences). One wonders how he helped along his never-published novel, The Rum Diary, with the wild, indignant letters to agents; berating writers like Norman Mailer, Nelson Algren (who didn't let him use a chunk of A Walk on the Wild Side in Hell's Angels) or William J. Kennedy, then a newspaper editor in Puerto Rica, whose initial dismissal of Thompson drew a furious threat to shove a bronze plaque up into Kennedy's intestines. Still, it resulted in a lasting correspondence and friendship.
Fixated gonzoids and Thompson scholars will gain many insights here - eg, borrowing the term "fear & loathing" from Kirkegaard, he first used it in a letter to William Kennedy after the assassination of JFK. Around this time, we see him engage with national politics over his gut-hatred of Nixon, Goldwater and Californian Governor Ronald Reagan ("the prototype of the new mythological America, a grinning whore who will probably someday be President")
In a way the letters deflate the sensationalised biographies, providing a warts-and-all picture of a hard-drinking, restless, reactive writer. Sometimes the relentless, quasi-psychotic sarcasm wears on the nerves - this book is a vast payload of displaced energy - yet while it displays the worst prolix instincts, it well foreshadows the mature deranged style. The second volume might be a lot more interesting. Where there are real whisperings of the heights he reached in the 1970s at the Roll- ing Stone national affairs desk, this book affords a cautionary glimpse of how political journalism in this country has never got anywhere near him.
Mic Moroney is a freelance journalist and critic