Gonzo Republic: Hunter S. Thompson's America

William Stephenson, Gonzo Republic: Hunter S. Thompson's America (Continuum, 2012)William Stephenson, in his new study of Hunter S. Thompson the man and the writer, seeks, perhaps above all else, to give his subject the benefit of the doubt. This should not surprise readers. After all, Stephenson, a senior lecturer in modernist and postmodernist literature, finds as his subject an American writer who, as very few others before or after, not only grew in fame as a writer but established singlehandedly a new genre, a new way of expressing oneself in a rapidly changing world. Readers are leftto judge whether he deserves Stephenson's sympathetic scrutiny.The word 'gonzo' or 'gonzo journalism' and the expression 'fear and loathing' will always be associated with Thompson, a writer who today may not be read, but continues to be remembered and revered. Stephenson does his best to explain the origins of each. Typical of Stephenson, the writer's contribution to his age is placed in historical context, a context that begins in the near past, but which often stretches far beyond. Stephenson sees Thompson's role in modern literature multi-generationally, from the early Modernists such as T.S. Eliot to his contemporaries such as Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe and Williams Burroughs. However, he locates the man and his work in the context of his times and in reaction to current events. This, it would seem, is the essence of 'gonzo':Writing on 22 November 1963, the day of Kennedy's assassination, Thompson used the phrase 'fear and loathing' for the first time, as a description of his gut reaction to the murder. He perhaps borrowed it unconsciously from Soren Kierkegaard's nineteenth-century existentialist interpretation of the story of Abraham and Isaac, Fear and Trembling. Thompson later denied the connection with Kierkegaard: the phrase 'came straight out of what I felt ... I just remember thinking about Kennedy, that this is so bad I needed new words for it.' Douglas Brinkley states that Thompson's source for the phrase 'fear and loathing' was Thomas Wolfe's novel The Web and the Rock, published posthumously in 1939. The Web and the Rock's protagonist, George Webber, is appalled by the squalor of his own background: 'Drowning! Drowning! Not to be endured! The abominable memory shrivels, shrinks and withers up his heart in the cold constriction of its fear and loathing.' (101)Kennedy and, we will find out, Richard M. Nixon played important roles in the forming of Hunter S. Thompson's world view. It is to some extent a way of seeing things that men and women of his generation shared. There was Kennedy and his Camelot, a moment of hope, one might say, that intelligence, charm and justice might win out in the end. Nixon, the author points out, came to be seen by Thompson and his contemporaries as the incarnation of evil or, at the very least, the end of American innocence.I said earlier that Stephenson takes Thompson seriously. It should perhaps be pointed out that Stephenson seems to take everything about Thompson seriously, including his adolescent view of history, his romanticism and his shameless naivete. All the same, the author persuades this reader that that these were precisely the necessary ingredients for Thompson's unique style of writing. …