The wicked and the undead

Hunter S. Thompson is a real person trapped inside a legend that is largely, though not entirely, of his own making. When we think these days of the pioneer of gonzo journalism, the first image to come to mind is the Uncle Duke character in Garry Trudeau’s “Doonesbury,” who is Thompson with the bald head, the cigarette holder, the guns, drugs and love of bizarre intrigue, but without any of the seriousness and idealism.

Idealism? What else can we call it when Thompson, who has savaged every U.S. administration in print for the last 35 years, can still muster fresh outrage for the current occupant of the White House? A cynic would have given up long ago. But “the death of the American Dream” won’t leave Thompson alone -- not when he has, by his own description, “the soul of a teenage girl in the body of an elderly dope fiend.” Kingdom of Fear” is a collection of articles, memos, letters, poems and other jottings from throughout Thompson’s career, including some autobiographical musings about what made him the way he is. We revisit familiar scenes -- the police riot at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, Thompson’s run for sheriff on the Freak Power ticket in Aspen, Colo., in 1970, the U.S. invasion of Grenada in 1983. But the title refers to American life as he perceives it to be right now.

For the record, Thompson says, “The most disastrous day in American history was Nov. 7, 2000. That was when the takeover happened, when the generals and cops and right-wing Jesus freaks seized control.” The Bush family, he says, “are only errand boys for the vengeful, bloodthirsty cartel ... who have ruled this country for at least the last 20 years, and arguably for the past 200. They take orders well, and they don’t ask too many questions.” Yet it’s fair to wonder: Is anybody paying attention? Thompson’s shtick has grown repetitious, his favorite adjectives -- “crazed,” “vicious,” “degenerate,” “twisted” -- blunted with overuse. Though he was once celebrated for his acute, if offbeat, insights into the political process, his targets are no longer obliged to take him seriously. His fans embrace him as a lovable eccentric. Good old Uncle Hunter.

It’s an old story, the marketing and domestication of artistic originality and dissent. The wicked wit that sells Gore Vidal’s books disqualifies him as a heavyweight pundit. Mark Twain is remembered for Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, not for the corrosive vision of “The Mysterious Stranger” or his broadsides against Belgian atrocities in the Congo.

Charles Dickens “attacked English institutions with a ferocity that has never since been approached,” George Orwell wrote, yet “the very people he attacked have swallowed him so completely that he has become a national institution himself.” Why? In part because Dickens, like Twain, was a humorist, though Orwell also noted: “A joke worth laughing at always has an idea behind it, and usually a subversive idea. Dickens is able to go on being funny because he is in revolt against authority, and authority is always there to be laughed at. There is always room for one more custard pie.”

Thompson, who hurls the equivalent of Molotov cocktails rather than pies, is another funnyman whose opinions have been devalued in the popular mind by the lifestyle and the verbal pyrotechnics that got him noticed in the first place. A rebellious writer, it seems, can’t win in the long run -- though Thompson has had far too good a time living the legend to mean it, quite, when he says: “It hasn’t helped a lot to be a savage comic-book character for the last 15 years -- a drunken screwball who should’ve been castrated a long time ago.”

It’s a problem, and writers and artists aren’t, at bottom, to blame for it. This is where Gavin Twinge comes in.

Twinge (pronounced “Twarnge”) is a fictional character but clearly an alter ego for English artist Ralph Steadman, who became famous in this country for his inkblot-splattered illustrations for Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” and “Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72.” Steadman’s art -- as inventive and barbed as that of German caricaturist George Grosz in the 1920s and ‘30s -- was a perfect match for Thompson’s hyperbole. Twinge shares their attitude, but unlike either Thompson or Steadman, he is doomed to obscurity.

Obscurity, Twinge would be the first to claim, isn’t the worst thing that can happen to an artist. The alternative is to be accepted and rewarded by the very establishments that made much of the 20th century a charnel house -- in other words, to fail at the artist’s essential mission: to get people to see the world anew. Twinge and his fellow “Doodaaaists” -- who try to do Marcel Duchamp and the Dadaists one better -- would rather be neglected and despised than “dead,” hung to rest in sarcophagi like the Thomas Kinkade galleries we find in every upscale shopping mall.

Still, it’s no fun if the price of not being branded, in the commercial sense, is to have hardly any audience at all. The Doodaaaists -- including Lily Potsdam (a.k.a. Whiplash Muralist), Schlemiel Weiss (Gnat’s Blood Organic Watercolorist) and Aaron Dickley (Primal Scream Environmentalist) -- have to console themselves with theorizing about their art, more cogently than we might expect, and with bohemia’s traditional anodynes: food, drink, music, sex and controlled substances.

Steadman, who has written several books, including “Sigmund Freud” and “The Scar-Strangled Banger,” calls this one a “triography” because he bases it on interviews of Twinge by another fictional artist, Ralphael Steed.

Steed tracks down Twinge’s relatives -- he inherited a Midlands plumbing fortune from ancestors who helped develop the flush toilet -- and follows Twinge on a journey by London taxi to Languedoc, France, where they try to top Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” with an assemblage that includes old auto parts, a hoist and Twinge’s girlfriend.

“Who is he, this man?” Steed wonders. “Who ever heard of him and, more important, who cares? Absolutely nobody, actually.” And Twinge knows this all too well. He is as angry at the powers that be as Thompson is, but “Doodaaa” is a gentler book than “Kingdom of Fear,” almost wistful. Steadman laughs at the modern artist’s plight so he can’t be accused of whining. He illustrates his story profusely, with line drawings and color plates, photos of weird Victorians and California Beats, a gallery’s worth of Twinge’s paintings and etchings, collages and sculpture. The jokes don’t end when the footnotes begin. Yet a sense of the futility of the whole enterprise is never far away.

Steadman/Steed asks rhetorically: “Who hurt Gavin Twinge so much that he wanted to be an artist?” Thompson asks a slightly different question: Who or what gave him the courage to be an outlaw? He answers with a tale about how when he was 9, in Louisville, Ky., he and a friend tipped over a mailbox in the path of a school bus whose driver they disliked. Tampering with the mail is a federal offense. Two FBI agents questioned him. Young Thompson was plenty scared but decided to deny his guilt -- and discovered that the agents were bluffing.

“The Mailbox incident was a confidence builder, I think,” Thompson says, “but it didn’t teach me that I was smarter than they were. It taught me that they were not as smart as they thought they were.” A lesson he took to heart.