Ravings of a drug-crazed Wykehamist
Andro Linklater
SONGS OF THE DOOMED by Hunter S. Thompson Picador, £15.99, pp. 315 The real identity of Dr Hunter S. Thompson, author of such horror gothic works as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The Shark Hunt, has always caused problems. `Gonzo journalist' is his own unhelpful description. The United States air force, where he began his writing career 34 years ago, throws a little more light with its description of him as 'a morale problem' with an unfortunate 'flair for innuendo and exaggeration'. On the other hand, his friend, Ralph Steadman, ranks him higher, as the reincarnation of a mad Hawaiian king who murdered his wife. Having read Songs of the Doomed, his latest volume of reflections on murder, rape and politics, my own conclusion is that he must be an Old Wykehamist.
Most readers allow themselves to be deceived by the superficial details of his crazed, dope-fiend disguise. They read a sentence like:
I buried my head in a silver bowl of pure speed and snorted until my whole head went numb and my eyeballs seemed to be fusing together,
and assume that this is not the behaviour of someone who has shared a fragrant adoles- cence with Sir Geoffrey Howe on the banks of the Itchen. They note his predilection for the company of Hell's Angels, Republicans, Viet Cong, and other low life, they hear of his Aspen neighbour's fear that in the throes of a lethal psychotic spasm the playful doctor will force him to eat cocaine after shooting his mules and spraying his trout pond with gunfire, and conclude that such a one was never taught to lisp that manners makyth man.
This is a very superficial view.
The hallmark of all Thompson's writing is the horror he feels on discovering that civilisation consists of nothing more than a thin slime of hypocrisy coating the vomit of violence, venality and venereal diseases of various kinds which go to make up society. This is of course a thoroughly Wykehami- cal notion. As its motto suggests, the school believes that hypocrisy will hold the whole stomach-turning show together, while Thompson picks out violence as the key element, but you couldn't slide a flattened amyl nitrate popper between their under- standings of the basic situation.
This view reached a pitch of fevered paranoia in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, an account of Nixon's 1972 election, and other nightmares, which it would be impos- sible to match, and admirers will have to pick their way with care through this pre- sent selection of stories dating from the late 1950s to the early 1990s. They should try to evade the early, Hemingway- influenced pieces tinged with late- Hemingway angst, they will want to escape a re-run of his inexplicable passion for the marshmallow politics of George McGovern, and they will succumb with screams of fear and hatred to the umpteenth re-telling of his attempt to become sheriff of Aspen. But if their sanity holds out, they will be able to slake their vicious appetites with some deeply satisfy- ing episodes of full-bore, drug-induced frenzy, marked by the doctor's inimitable invective against the 'sleazebag greedheads' and 'half-mad dingbats' who constitute America's aristocracy. Nevertheless, much of the old poke is missing, and the book's subtitle, 'More Notes on the Death of the American Dream', points to what is wrong. By Thompson's reckoning, the American Dream died almost 20 years ago, and the sad fact is that the world has moved on. Since Nixon's departure from the White House, politics has lost its hallucinatory appeal, not merely for the doctor, but for the American electorate as a whole, fewer than half of whom can now be bothered to vote, and the dominance of the Moral Majority has given a bad name to the drink, coke, speed, et al with which Thompson had been accustomed to cut reality.
No once wild 'party' in Hollywood, Aspen or even Greenwich Village is complete these days [he writes bitterly] without the over- weening presence of superwealthy, hard- hitting ex-addicts, 'recovering alcoholics', and beady-eyed fat women who never let you forget that they 'used to hang out' with doomed friends and dead monsters like Janis, Jim Morrison, The Stones, or John Belushi, or even me.. .
To become part of history is bad enough, but to be part of the sqUeaky cleans' history must be gall and wormwood. There was some compensation last year when a woman journalist with an interest in sex aids and lingerie accused him of violating her left nipple, thus prompting a police raid on his house which turned up small quantities of LSD, cocaine and dynamite. The case collapsed under the weight of its own implausibility, but not before revealing that the doctor .was shown to be still un- repentantly faithful to his gonzo tenets. Nevertheless, he clearly needs a cause to
get his glands working. If he is indeed one of Winchester's alumni, it is surely time for him to return and write about the Death of the British Dream, a much more recent fatality. Don't our sleazebag City financiers deserve some recognition for killing off British industry? Can't the paranoid hood- lums in MI5 get anyone other than Peter Wright to hymn their achievements in undermining British democracy? And why doesn't Britain receive some attention for Paying the head of its degenerate, scumbag telephone service £650,000 in the year it apparently allowed 34,500 unauthorised phone taps on its subscribers, and plastered the phone-boxes with red and blue hermaphrodites practising fellatio? Come in, Dr Thompson, our time is up.
Previous page
