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Wednesday, February 23, 2005
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 THE HOUSE THAT HUNTER BUILT
I had a strange reaction to the death of Hunter Stockton Thompson on Sunday night. While I wasn't greatly surprised, I felt as though a piece of me went with him. Hunter hadn't written anything great since his 1994 obituary of Richard Nixon and, other than his ESPN column, hadn't written much of anything at all. Most of his subsequent books were collections of columns or letters. His first novel, The Rum Diary, was actually written in 1962 and published in 1998.
Throughout the last 20 years, Thompson's work proved the law of diminishing returns. Yes, there were flashes of brilliance, but he would never again have a sustained period of incandescence as he did in the Seventies.
Perhaps this is because his writing was fueled a anger that verged on rage. Hunter's prose - particularly when he wrote about Nixon - was incredibly violent. The English language itself became the chosen instrument of his enemies’ destruction. As people age, the anger dissipates. And if rage is your muse, your art will inevitably suffer. Perhaps this, combined with recent health problems, is what lead to Hunter's suicide. He must have known that the writing that he lived for would never again reach the sustained level of greatness that it did thirty years ago.
Outrage was the creative spark that drove Thompson's best work. Much has been made on conservative blogs about the literal truth of his work. This misses the point. What Hunter was seeking was a larger truth that would inform his audience. Individual facts were incidental in this. As much as one may disagree with Thompson's truth, and I disagreed with virtually everything he believed in, you have to admire the larger honesty that tore through his work. He asked no quarter and received none.
The best example of this was in Thompson's profile of Jimmy Carter. He met the candidate at the unveiling of a portrait of former Secretary of State Dean Rusk. Upon seeing the portrait Hunter wrote that disrupted the ceremony by declaring that it was unrepresentative of Rusk as the artist neglected to paint the blood on Rusk's hands.
Thompson was a great admirer of H.L Mencken. Just as William Jennings Bryan was Menken's muse, so was Richard Nixon to Thompson. For those who enjoy caustic profiles (and I can't imagine anyone who reads this site on a regular basis that doesn't,) I can't recommend Mencken's writing on Bryan and Thompson's on Nixon highly enough. Reading that will show you where the inspiration for this blog came from.
When I started writing in this format, I consciously tried to not use Thompson's style too obviously. I have no such restraint in my personal conversations with people I know. I never wanted this to be third- rate Hunter. Hopefully, I succeeded. But I always knew that people of my age owe much to Hunter Thompson. This blog is written in a style that Mencken invented and Thompson perfected. Without Hunter this blog and others like it would never exist.
Just as Jay Leno said of Johnny Carson, this is the house that Hunter built. People like me borrow liberally from his palate, but we know that we'll probably never reach the level of artistry that he did.
I'm going to miss Hunter Thompson.
A nice tribute to Hunter in yesterday's New York Times can be found here.
PermalinkLabels: The Serious Side of skippy
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