What Finally Spooked Hunter S. Hemingway?

Hunter S. Thompson once wrote a great piece of journalism, a sort of post-obituary, for Ernest Hemingway a writer he both mimicked and adored. Not too many people seem to be aware of the article “What Lured Hemingway to Ketchum?” as Thompson’s short book “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” often overshadows it on the cultural landscape, but not only is it a brilliantly observed piece about Hemingway and the place where he chose to spend, and end, his remaining days, its also highly revealing about Thompson himself.

Often typecast as an insensitive drug-crazed lefty-nut job born only to self-consciously slash and burn conservative America, attacking both the nation and its people; all those who time and time again, Hunter felt, sold his beloved country so consistently down Shit Creek, Hunter S. Thompson is poorly represented in this light (no thanks to “Fear and Loathing…”) And yet he was all of those things, but at the end of the day he was still a writer, a “real” one, not simply a “Gonzo” journalist; a role he created and then struggled to live up to for the rest of his life.

“What Lured Hemingway to Ketchum” now appears after Hunter’s death as both a sensitive portrait of the older, quite damaged and seemingly embattled Hemingway retreating somewhere quiet to die, as highly prescient. In the article Thompson writes how Hemingway, having found his place in the world that he had fought so hard to carve, became quickly disillusioned when it no longer seemed as sharply defined as it had once been. His only way of reacting against most things was to write but he found his skills diminished by the new wave of the “Beat” writers, the generation that followed. And because they drew some of their inspiration from him he seemed overshadowed as they raced on ahead clutching that original flaming torch he himself had once carried. Hemingway for the first time finding himself lost for words was at least able to explain “It just won’t come anymore…”

Many parallels between the two figures; the four-thumbed Gonzo giant and the cojones-clutching literary heavyweight have already been well documented in a great many other blogs and newspaper obituaries; simply type the name of the article into Google and a few thousand links crop up. I don’t feel there is anything special to say regarding any similarities there might have been between the two men or the writing, there is much more to be said about Hunter’s article and the death of his literary hero Hemingway that lends the article a deep sense of foreboding which is clearly wrought in Thompson’s descriptive passages of the bleak scapes of empty Idaho. For Hunter all the signs of his strong empathy with Hemingway were there and by his hand they would grow far out of proportion.

A good example of this perceived empathy is apparent in Thompson’s post-suicide analysis of Hemingway’s last works such as “The Old Man and the Sea” and “A Moveable Feast” culminating, he thought, in the beginnings of a lived epitaph. “The Old Man…” cut from a much larger epic novel that never arrived, tells of a lonely fisherman who makes one last journey out to sea and after catching the biggest Marlin he’d ever found gradually has it picked apart by sharks as he tries to sail it back in to land. When he arrives he is left with only the bare skeleton of the fish and despite the other fishermen’s declaration that it would have been an impressive size the parable strikes a bleak chord as the old man is denied his true reward of bringing in such a mighty fish and so despite his accomplishment and the struggle he has endured his victory is at best a hollow one.

Again with “A Moveable Feast” a reminiscence of Hemingway’s time in 1920’s Paris, the gathering of the “Lost Generation”, we see the scattered thoughts of his current situation and even nostalgia take precedence, a tone most unsuited to the former Hemingway, normally so forward looking and irascible.

From these two final works we can notice a clear descent of feeling in Hemingway’s final years. Firstly, of the literary battle having been fought and won at a young age, perhaps too young, only for the glory of victory, a feeling Hemingway no doubt coveted, to slip away when faced by the unfamiliar world he now found himself a part of. Also, with the second book he looked back to the past when the world had been his for the taking, most of his early novels setting the literary world ablaze with his straight-talking harshly realist style that, much like George Orwell, brought the facts to the fore and dwelt on immediate physical sensation when others of the Modernist era were messing around with radical, yet somewhat indulgent, experiments purely in language.

But Thompson, in fact has much in common with the Modernists as well as Hemingway. Yes he tried to “tell it like it is”, especially with his IN-YOUR-FACE frankly bilious political reportage that whilst being very entertaining and crammed full of the “right” facts, was also biased and filled with deeply personal Nixon-loathing. Certainly not the most objective and thus fairly informative reporting that chasing the heels of presidential campaign trails (and potential impeachments) probably required.

But instead of revolutionizing language in such a formal way as the Modernists Thompson ripped up the rules of journalism, he wrote as he moved, drove at high speed, or struggled to keep his feet (and mind) attached firmly to the ground.

Primarily, Hunter was stream-of-consciousness and time-shifting analysis giving him closer ties to Modernists, like Virginia Woolf, instead of the soft touch F. Scott Fitzgerald, another of his literary heroes. Thompson blurbed his conversations verbatim, and lists wig-outs and fluctuous waves of paranoia [in parentheses] when other journalists would mention it was sunny or that the Convention’s sandwiches were merely sub-par. It is this fiery ride that makes Hunter’s writing far more engaging, and thus more widely read and enduring, than “regular” reporting.

But perhaps most importantly the Hemingway piece shows that he could also write in that flowing gentle style, in his stride, he simply chose to transcend it and in doing so wrote to the beat of his own crazy pulsing drum like the mad rhythms of his frantic heart. It was this freer adventurous style of journalism that makes him great, fact blurred with brilliant fiction.

Meanwhile, the alter-ego “Raoul-Duke” was constantly seen stepping in and out of the action like the ugly death masque that many writers claim to see in themselves. This brings out another important similarity between the bitter end shared by Thompson and Hemingway, that of the encroaching sense of doubt, the seeping fear that served to undermine their conviction and thus weaken their resolve to write. Hemingway was fried by EST, like so many other “greatest minds of my generation”, in order to cure his growing sense of depression that he subsequently attempted to drown in drink, no doubt worsening his mental state. He claimed this destroyed his memory and so without the ability to fully remember observations he’d made (the bricks and mortar of any story), he could no longer piece together a novel, he was too fractured, and so, too self-aware that he had become fractious.

Hunter as well seems to have shown similar signs of mental decay. I was always slightly sceptical of his high-drug intake, a fact mentioned in almost every piece of journalism he wrote from the seventies onwards. Mainly because I could never understand how one human being could take so much and still say such dazzlingly humane things. Hunter was certainly aware of this; he often commented that he should have died many times over, not a pleasant thought. And in videos of him there is a visibly growing slur in his speech as he aged, but also the kind of stop-gap speech that sustained drug usage can cause. This is even more noticeable when you remember that Thompson was well known for his staccato “machine-gun” like speech (belying a mind constantly running at full speed) and the rich low timbre of his voice, replaced by the mentally distant drawl of a drooling older man, still funny at times, but lacking that famed initial spark that was well known for ripping the heart from a story and devouring it, still beating, like the wild bloodthirsty lizards of the Vegas strip.

What both men shared in their final days is a gradual erosion of their sense of belonging as a writer and thus of their purpose in life. All men come to fear the world as they grow older. Hunter has stated in many interviews that he gradually became more afraid and unstable with his self-created persona of the “Gonzo journalist”, as too did Hemingway with his archetype cut-and-dry tough man hero, always graceful under pressure, both men seemed well aware that their masks were slipping.

David Bowie once talked in a very similar tone as Thompson, of his Ziggy Stardust persona, a skin that he immediately shed once it had served its’ purpose all along with the rush of public fame and notoriety that viciously threatened to consume him. Rich layering of identity upon identity can lead to a mire of unknowable and constantly shifting faces which can in turn lead to a kind of madness. To become something completely unknowable to others is a very exploitable position in the media world, but to lose self-control, the hold upon one’s identity will inevitably lead to an abyss of self-doubt.

Hunter once argued that he never quite knew exactly who, or even how, people expected him to be, Hemingway tried to be like the men he wrote about, either way both men tried to make others happy through living a partial lie, a difficult thing to rest upon one’s conscience.

It seems very sensible to say that even though he was still young, and whether he knew it or not, with the “Ketchum” article Hunter S. Thompson wrote a part of his own future and with it his own final epitaph much better than any other media vulture, myself included, could have said it on his behalf.

The Hemingway article is available in the collection of Hunter S. Thompson’s journalism The Great Shark Hunt 1979.