Timothy Denevi. Freak Kingdom — Hunter S. Thompson’s Manic Ten-Year Crusade Against American Fascism, Hachette Book Group. 2018. 394 pages
Once upon a time, journalism school, 1980-ish, I was in the magazine track, learning to be a writer in the manner of the best. My professor/editor was William Emerson, formerly of the Saturday Evening Post (who himself was Joan Didion’s editor once upon a different time), and he and others tried to school us in the art of “The New Journalism.” That was even the name of our text, an anthology edited by Tom Wolfe, Apollo 13 and Bonfire of the Vanities Tom Wolfe. Among the essays in that collection, alongside Didion, Wolfe, Capote, Mailer, Plimpton, there was this by Hunter S Thompson: The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved,” in which he writes about spending a weekend in Louisville to cover the Derby with a British photographer named Ralph.
A drunken, raucous weekend, in which no one would expect any writing to happen beyond that of horses and hats, ends in unusual third person, as he drops his colleague at the airport:
Huge Pontiac Ballbuster blowing through traffic on the expressway. The journalist is driving, ignoring his passenger who is now nearly naked after taking off most of his clothing, which he holds out the window, trying to wind-wash the Mace out of it. His eyes are bright red and his face and chest are soaked with the beer he’s been using to rinse the awful chemical off his flesh. The front of his woolen trousers is soaked with vomit; his body is racked with fits of coughing and wild choking sobs. The journalist rams the big car through traffic and into a spot in front of the terminal, then he reaches over to open the door on the passenger’s side and shoves the Englishman out…
Thompson himself said to a friend: “It’s a shitty article, a classic of irresponsible journalism… Horrible way to write anything.” And the friend wrote back, “Hunter, I don’t know what the fuck you’re doing, but you’ve changed everything. It’s totally gonzo.” It would come to known as Gonzo Journalism, a peculiar blend of observation and autobiography, not necessarily completely true, with the writer as a part of the story, and Thompson would be celebrated for it.
This was what we were being encouraged to experiment with in journalism school circa 1980.
So, experiment we did. I have no idea to what degree any of this has crept into my preaching, but it can be very freeing.
The thing is — we were encouraged to study how Thompson wrote. At no time do I ever recall being asked to ponder why he wrote. And that is a completely other conversation.
So, in Freak Kingdom, Timothy Denevi explores the why, and hints of it in the rest of the title — Hunter S. Thompson’s Manic Ten-Year Crusade Against American Fascism.
From reading the essays Thompson is most known for — the Kentucky Derby, plus Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, plus The Hell’s Angels, A Strange and Terrible Saga, one could leave with the impression that Thompson was nothing more than an alcohol and drug driven bad boy with little to do besides look for trouble and bother to write it down.
Denevi’s account shows the life of Thompson in a different light, a man deeply principled who had dreams and visions for the world in which he lived, and who resented the hell out of anyone who couldn’t likewise see a world fit for all — with a special loathing for Richard Nixon, long before Nixon was known to be the man Nixon had been all along, illustrated in part by candidate Nixon’s machinations during the Vietnam War to implode the peace talks of 1968 in order to win election, and thereby condemning tens of thousands more young draftees to death in the jungles of Southeast Asia. Forced to cover Nixon in his 1972 re-election campaign against McGovern, he wrote:
This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it — that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable…McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context, they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose, as a matter of policy and a perfect expression of everything he stands for…This is the one grim truth of this election most likely to come back and haunt us: The options were clearly defined… And it is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal, and incurably violent side of American character almost every other country in the world has learned to fear and despise…
To be sure, he hated Hubert Humphrey nearly as much. But Humphrey had lost to Nixon in ‘68 and didn’t get the nomination in 1972. Not a factor anymore.
Thompson believed deeply in the possibility of America, and it seems quite plausible that the failures of the nation were the reason for his drug- and alcohol-fueled treatises.
Thompson didn’t go to Louisville to write about the Kentucky Derby because he thought it novel or interesting; He grew up in Louisville and had been to a lot of Derbies. He went this time because his political writing wasn’t paying his bills. Nor did he write it from the perspective of a drunken observer because he thought it would be more interesting that way; he drank and wrote because he didn’t want to have to write it at all; drinking made it tolerable. (Plus, drinking was what he did — along with a lifelong prescription drug habit.)
Likewise, the essays on the Hell’s Angels. Even Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was something he did to get paid so he could do what mattered to him — he accepted the assignment from Sports Illustrated to cover a dirt bike race in Las Vegas so he could spend some un-overheard time with a lawyer-turned-activist-turned-outcast from whom he needed information (and whose murder he would later investigate). The Las Vegas tome that eventually added to his celebrity was not the one about a bike race, although he did write that, as well as the piece for which he stole an activist from Beverly Hills and took off to Vegas in a convertible that would cover their conversation; the one that would add to his celebrity, though, began in what took shape in his isolated headspace as he drove back to California alone (his friend had returned earlier, due in court), a “hallucinatory road narrative,” Denevi called it. It was what he scratched out on offer from Rolling Stone — which loved it and contracted for more more more.
Frazzled, caustic, manic, hilarious, cynical, detached. Hunter S. Thompson — all those things, plus a death wish and an utter lack of fear or self-respect. That’s the image. The Thompson we’ve been taught.
Maybe it’s all true. And maybe it’s not.
Denevi has given us a gift — 270 pages, and meticulously annotated in another 100, in which we learn the Hunter Thompson that is perhaps less outrageous and more outraged, or at least equal parts each. We even see the private torment of a husband and his wife who lost two children to a rare disease, a man with deep friendships and community ties — he ran for sheriff in Pitkin County CO to try to save Aspen from developers — a man who wrote the things that made him famous for the money that would let him write the stuff he cared about. (Maybe that’s what all writers do.)
Denevi himself is no slouch. His writing, his research, his style all do a great reputational service to this writer that young journalists were encouraged to emulate. At least once upon a time.