Gonzo, but no journalist

In the course of a long and memorable afternoon some years ago, the late Irving Howe sighed, waved a finger and admonished an avid younger writer that “the critic should always hesitate.”

Later, the listener -- still dizzy with the compliment of the great man’s company -- carefully copied the aphorism into his notebook. And if, as happened, the younger man subsequently came across other versions of it in several of Howe’s published talks and essays, he valued it nonetheless. Those who make their living from the keenness of their own intellect are entitled to their little economies.

And, certainly, their eccentricities -- which brings us to the subject of Hunter S. Thompson, who shot himself to death early Sunday evening at his Owl Farm compound outside Aspen, Colo. Howe’s advice seems particularly apt, because an appraisal of Thompson and his work somehow needs to take into account the extraordinary outpouring of reaction from writers and journalists of all stripes and ages that has occurred over the past week. Every reporter who ever met Thompson -- however briefly -- attended one of his purposely incoherent lectures or once owned a paperback copy of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” seemed gripped by an irresistible impulse to tell the rest of us what “Hunter” meant to them.

By Friday, Douglas Brinkley, the historian who edited two volumes of Thompson’s correspondence and is one of his executors, was talking about commissioning a bust of the 67-year-old writer, establishing an archive for his papers and endowing a Hunter S. Thompson professorship of journalism.

Since reportorial convention neither acknowledges the grief of others nor declines to intrude upon it, this is the moment to suggest that everybody take a deep, deep breath -- or, in the spirit of the occasion, another hit -- and get a grip. Hunter Thompson was a social satirist of bitingly comedic power, who managed to capture the spirit and style of a particularly turbulent moment of social transformation in a way that no one else did. “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved” and his experience of “Fear and Loathing,” first in Las Vegas and then along the campaign trail, are darkly hilarious works of social comment on the American ethos in the 1960s and ‘70s. But the fact is that it has been 40 years since Thompson published a recognizable work of journalism -- “The Hell’s Angels, a Strange and Terrible Saga.”

If the rest of his work requires a category, it’s performance art, not journalism.

Doctoral dissertations

In the period of struggle that followed publication of his book on the Hell’s Angels, Thompson created a character who happened to be a journalist called Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. Calling the character a journalist allowed Thompson to use current events and recognizable places as a backdrop against which the character -- who in the style of performance art always occupies center stage -- could artfully act out his calculated emotions, obsessions, delusions and rages.

The reason cartoonist Garry Trudeau could so easily satirize Thompson as the venal Uncle Duke in his Doonesbury strip is that Hunter already had handed him the character whole.

Historically, Thompson is usually situated among the “New Journalists” who came to prominence in 1960s. But unlike, say, Gay Talese -- who forever changed journalism’s notion of what a profile could accomplish -- or Truman Capote, who remade the nonfiction book, or Tom Wolfe, who integrated novelist conventions with feature writing, or Joan Didion, who did the same with literary essay, Thompson’s contribution -- Gonzo Journalism -- now seems like what paleontologists call an evolutionary dead end.

Wolfe himself seemed to sense that possibility, when he included two selections from Thompson’s work in his canonical 1973 anthology, “The New Journalism.” In his introduction of the excerpt from “The Hell’s Angels,” he noted that “Thompson’s use of the first-person -- i.e., his use of himself, the reporter as a character in the story -- is quite different from the way he uses the first person later in his Gonzo Journalism. Here, he uses himself solely to bring out the character of the Angels and the locals.”

In the introduction to an excerpt from “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved” by contrast, Wolfe wrote that Thompson had adopted “a manic, high adrenal first-person style in which [his] own emotions continually dominate the story. This approach seldom grates in Thompson’s hands, probably because Thompson, for all his surface ferocity, usually casts himself as a frantic loser, inept and half-psychotic, somewhat after the manner of Celine.”

The calculation and sophistication Wolfe intuited from that choice was true of Thompson’s literary style as well. Much as been made of his obsession with Ernest Hemingway and the way in which Thompson actually retyped the author’s novels to experience the way in which they were made. But the style Thompson adopted was more suited to the Beats’ experiments with spontaneous prose. The antecedents of Hunter Thompson’s mature style are not to be found in “The Sun Also Rises” but in Jack Kerouac’s “October in the Railroad Earth” or, perhaps, Neal Cassady’s infamous Benzedrine-fueled raps.

Outpouring of nostalgia

Part of the unhesitating outpouring that followed the tragedy of Thompson’s suicide -- and suicide is always tragic because despair is an affliction and not a choice -- was simply sentimental nostalgia for an era when there still were taboos to affront and barriers to knock down. Thompson certainly did that, but his work also can be misread as permission for so much of the tedious narcissism that now infects our journalism, as it does so many other aspects of our collective lives. The impulse that now pushed reporter after reporter into the first person or makes them think that every story must include a full recitation of their backgrounds and predilections -- personal and political -- is Gonzo’s deformed offspring.

Thursday, Thompson’s 40-year-old son, Juan, told an interviewer that his father frequently told him, “I’m a road man for the lords of karma.”

Juan, who clearly did not inherit his father’s taste for manic overstatement, called the remark “cryptic.”

Maybe not.

Last month marked the 400th anniversary of the publication of the initial installment of Miguel de Cervantes’ “Don Quixote de la Mancha,” Western literature’s first recognizable novel. Could those so inclined claim a karmic connection between the entrance of Cervantes’ ironic knight errant and the gonzo “journalist’s” exit?

Why not?

As Harold Bloom recently mused, “Don Quixote is courageously mad and obsessively courageous, but he is not self-deceived. He knows who he is, but also who he may be, if he chooses.”

That wouldn’t be an entirely unsuitable sentiment to carve on the base of Thompson’s bust. But then, so would his own aphorism: “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”