The New York Times > Books > An Appreciation: The Thompson Style: A Sense of Self, and Outrage

The New York Times > Books > An Appreciation: The Thompson Style: A Sense of Self, and Outrage: "February 22, 2005
February 22, 2005
AN APPRECIATION
The Thompson Style: A Sense of Self, and Outrage
By DAVID CARR

Hunter S. Thompson died on Sunday, alone with a gun in his kitchen in Woody Creek, Colo. In doing so, he added heft to a legend that came to obscure his gifts as one of journalism's most influential practitioners.

Somewhere beneath the cartoon - he was Uncle Duke in the Doonesbury strip, of course, but Bill Murray inked him well in the 1980 film "Where the Buffalo Roam" - and a lifestyle dominated by a long and sophisticated romance with drugs, Mr. Thompson managed to change the course of American journalism.

Of all of the so-called practitioners of New Journalism, Mr. Thompson was the one who was willing to insert himself and his capacious reserve of outrage into the middle of every story. In his articles for Rolling Stone and his seminal 1973 book, "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72" Mr. Thompson threw himself at the conventions of political reporting. Not only was he not neutral, he was angry, an avenging proxy for the American polity. Brick by brick, he tore away a wall - since rebuilt - that made politics seem like a low-stakes minstrel show.

"He spent his life in search of an honest man, and he seldom found any," said James Silberman, his longtime editor and publisher at Random House and Summit Books.

As a writer though, Mr. Thompson met plenty of honest digressions, and engaged them all to their fullest. He would begin with a premise - Richard Nixon was doing Satan's handiwork, for instance - and then in writing about it, tumble through the Tet Offensive, the drugs from the previous night he was trying to fight through, Hubert Humphrey's alleged spinelessness, Nixon's surprising knowledge of the N.F.L., and the fecklessness of his editors, before landing the entire rococo mix in one tidy package, like a gift.

His assignments always became quests. It was not enough for him to journey south to Cozumel off the Yucatán Peninsula to write about rich white men hunting sharks; he also had to retrieve 50 doses of MDA, a drug he was fond of, that he had stashed in the shark pool of the aquarium the last time he was on the island. Mr. Thompson managed to live and write his own version of the Heisenberg principle: That the observer not only changes events by his presence, but his presence also frequently surpasses the event in terms of importance. Like many contemporary American writers, Mr. Thompson lived the bell curve of a writer's life. Long after the "Fear and Loathing" rubric had been arrayed over everything from shark fishing, the Hell's Angels and Las Vegas, he was hounded by the fact that his moment - a white hot one where in which he found himself face to face with a shark or George McGovern - had passed.

His friends would continue to drop by Woody Creek, his remote, mountainous salon near Aspen for smart, engaging talk accompanied by the explosives, narcotics and weaponry Mr. Thompson counted as enduring hobbies. Ed Bradley of "60 Minutes" was one of them, and said yesterday that Thompson's menace was overestimated, that it was frequently overwhelmed by courtliness. George Plimpton was a frequent visitor, as was Walter Isaacson. Even the town sheriff was welcome, as long as he called ahead so Mr. Thompson could tidy the premises.

For a generation of American students, Mr. Thompson made journalism seem like a dangerous, fantastic occupation, in the process transforming an avocation that was mostly populated by doughy white men in short-sleeve white button-downs and bad ties into something fit for those who smoked Dunhills at the end of cigarette holders and wore sunglasses regardless of the time of day. It is to his credit or blame that many aspiring journalists showed up to cover their first, second, and sometimes third local city council meetings in bowling shirts and bad sunglasses (no names need be mentioned here), along with their notebooks.

For all of the pharmacological foundations of his stories, Mr. Thompson was a reporter, taking to the task of finding out what other people knew with an avidity that earned the respect of even those who found his personal hobbies reprehensible. Hunter S. Thompson knew stuff and wrote about it in a way that could leave his colleagues breathless and vowing to do better.

He had a gift for sentence writing, and he tended to write a lot of them. But his loquaciousness was not restricted to articles and books. In "Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist," his memoir published in 2000 which was composed of correspondence, it became clear how in his hands even the lowly expense report, usually a relentlessly banal document, could be a thing of beauty.

To Mr. Thompson, it was all true, every word of it. Maybe not literally, you-can-look-it-up true, but true in a way that the bean counters would never understand. Friends say that he appeared to be relatively happy of late, and was fully engaged in the writing projects he had before him. But a chronic series of physical infirmities - he had to use a wheelchair at times - left him feeling that he was finally being maneuvered by forces he could not medicate or write into obscurity.

And his suicide had its own terrible logic. A man who was so intent on generating a remarkable voice that he retyped Hemingway's novels just to understand how it was done, gave a final bit of dramatic tribute in turning a gun on himself.