Fear and Loathing in America

by Hunter S. Thompson

  Other than that, I can’t tell you anything helpful about the magazine. Hinckle has weird and violent tastes. Maybe your agent can find out something. Mine is useless.

  As for The Ink Truck, I assume it shared the fate of most novels. Sandy read it and didn’t like it at all for about the first half, then decided she liked it. Both she and Peggy Clifford4 seem to feel you work too hard to write like a writer … and on the basis of your 12/22 letter, I can’t really argue with them. For whatever that’s worth … and since I know I do the same thing, well … what can I say? Except that maybe it’s best to write like something else. Actually, I think I understand the complaint, but the only instance I can cite right off is my distaste for your word “Bolly”—which they dropped, I see, from the title. It reminded me, as I said, of [Beatle] John Lennon’s book, In His Own Write—which I thought was a piece of silly shit … and so much for all that, too. I haven’t read The IT, but like I said, I won’t admit it when I do, so why talk about it?

  No word from Lee [Berry] or [Eugene] McGarr. No word of any importance from anywhere, on any subject, for any reason. Even the Observer has cut me off, so I didn’t read Greene’s review. He’s OK—nothing at all like Ridley & a weird bird to be working for the N.O. Frankly, I think we’re all fucked. Journalism is a hype and fiction is worse than bridge. Probably Agnew is right … and I leave you with all that. Ciao.

  HST

  TO JIM SILBERMAN, RANDOM HOUSE:

  As the deadline loomed for his book on “The Death of the American Dream,” Thompson tried to buy some time from his editor with a detailed outline of what would develop into his best-known work, 1972’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

  January 13, 1970

  Woody Creek, CO

  Dear Jim …

  Your 1/9 letter came as something of a relief. I’d been expecting it for months—like a demand note on a long overdue mortgage.

  First off, let me assure you that I’m well aware that we’re into another year … another decade. As you so artfully phrased it. Second, I massively agree with your notion that “It would be splendid to be publishing (me) once again. …”

  I wish I could explain the delay. It bothers me to the point of stupid, self-destructive rages in my own house—which is not really my house and probably never will be, due to total mismanagement of all my funds and efforts to secure a land-fortress. In a nut, my total inability to deal with the small success of the H.A. book has resulted—after three years of a useless, half-amusing rural fuckaround—in just about nothing except three wasted years. I came out here hoping to live in lazy peace with the locals, but finally—and inevitably, I think—that dream of “the Peaceful Valley” went from nervous truce to nasty public warfare. Last fall I found myself running a “freak power” rebellion that came within six votes of taking over the town … and the valley, for that matter. So now a lot of those people who called me a friend in those days when I was still trying to live the Peaceful Valley myth now call me a communist dope-fiend motherfucker. No more of that waving from my porch at friendly cattle-driving neighbors; I finished that one night a long time ago when the subject of Vietnam came up in a friendly rancher’s kitchen. I didn’t realize it then—but now, in edgy retrospect—I see how the whole problem began with a harmless mention of Vietnam.

  Not that it wouldn’t have begun over something else. Hell, almost anything in these ugly pigeon-holed years. When I lived here in 1963 the cowboys dug me; for a few months in the winter of that year I shot deer for $5 a head for a cowboy who sold the carcasses in town for $10. He would take the orders in town, then drive out to pick me up; he drove and I shot … and we had a good thing for a while, but one day he decided to show me how to shoot with my .44 Magnum; six shots later his face was bleeding in six places from the terrible recoil, and that sort of ruined our relationship. Now, in the wake of this new polarization, he is one of many locals who tell each other—in the course of their steady tavern-talk—that the valley would be a lot better off if somebody broke both my legs and dragged me back to Haight street behind a pickup truck. This kind of talk came out of the recent local elections, which I think I mentioned to you in a letter about that time. Or maybe I sent you that clipping from the Aspen News. That started the war; the election formalized it—and now we are all stuck with it. At least until next autumn, when our new and probably over-confident power-base is already geared to the idea that I’m going to run for sheriff. Our wild campaign mobilized a local, freak/young electorate that had never seen itself … until we lost the mayor’s race by six votes. Now, after coming so close, the buggers are convinced that next time, with a little planning, we can beat the fatbacks like old gongs. I may, in fact, run for sheriff, but only as a smokescreen for some less obvious Freak Power candidate for the County Commissioner’s office. There are all kinds of weird possibilities … particularly since I see this kind of power-struggle as one of the big stories of the 1970s. All we had to do, in Aspen, was persuade the freaks to register; the actual voting was fore-ordained. And our midnight registration campaign jumped the number of voters from 670 in 1968, to 1600 in 1969. In other words, we dragged the drop-outs back in—at least long enough to vote, and we found enough of them to almost overturn a very sophisticated local establishment. The freaks and young heads they’ve been trying to “run out of town” for the past two years came back to haunt them on election day. We sent teams of bearded poll-watchers to all three wards—all of them armed with tape recorders and xeroxed copies of all pertinent laws. And, despite illegal threats of violence and prison terms from the mayor, the cops and the D.A., we managed to run our people through a gauntlet that scared the hell out of them … and after 12 hours of crazed action our tally was 522. The Establishment candidate—a 55-year-old lady shopkeeper and former GOP committeewoman for Colo.—had only 517. Then they counted the absentee ballots, and the final tally was 533 to 527, against us. It was a long and brutal night.

  Anyway … that’s the situation that I’m trying to use, at this point, to start the narrative of what you call the AMERICAN DREAM book. I am still hung on the idea of running a narrative through it, rather than letting it go as a series of dis-jointed commentaries on scenes that may or may not hang together. But I’ve had a lot of trouble with the notion of mixing up a fictional narrative with a series of straight journalistic scenes. I’m convinced it can work, and I’ve done it before, but the problem now is that I’m so self-conscious about the mixture that I can’t let it work. The fiction part strikes me as bullshit and the journalism seems dated and useless. In the H.A. book I paraphrased a lot of dialogue without giving it a second thought—but now that I’m doing it consciously I give every line so many second thoughts that paralysis has become my work-pattern. It’s embarrassing to think that I can’t compete, in book form, with cop-outs like Medium Cool5 and Easy Rider … but the compulsion to write something better and more real than those things has left me with what amounts to nothing at all—except a bundle of weird article-carbons. It’s heartening to hear you say that you have a chunk of the manuscript—but as much as I’d like to get that $5000 that comes with sending in a proper third, I can’t honestly say that you have anything more than a heap of useless bullshit.

  (Aside—I just got a note from Warren Hinckle saying he’s scheduled my doomed Playboy piece on Jean-Claude Killy—or “flackism in America,” as you said it—for the first issue of his new magazine called Scanlan’s Monthly. He sounds happy with the notion of running the whole 110 page article, along with some correspondence with Playboy … and since he sent me a check for $1500 I guess I’m happy too. God only knows what kind of magazine he has in mind, but if he can drum up anything like the old, high-flying Ramparts, I know I look forward to reading it. As an editor, Hinckle is one of the few crazed originals to emerge from the jangled chaos of what we now have to sift through and define or explain somehow as “the 1960s.”)

  And that’s really what I’m trying to write about. As it sits now—in this heap of
terrible garbage on my desk—the AD ms. begins in Aspen, on election night in 1969, with a quick recap of Joe Edwards’ mayoral campaign and me sitting on the floor in headquarters, completely burned out after three weeks of sleepless work, wondering what kind of madness had caused me to be there. What kind of bullshit, delusions or common ego-disease had cast me in this weird role—as a mescaline-addled campaign manager for a 29-year-old Texas lawyer & dope-smoking bike freak in a Rocky Mountain ski resort? I gave it a lot of thought that night—while we waited for the ward-tallies—and finally I traced it back to that night in September, 1960, when I quit my expatriate-hitch-hiker’s role long enough to climb down from a freeway in Oregon and watch the first Kennedy-Nixon debate on TV in a tiny village near Salem. That was when I first understood that the world of Ike and Nixon was vulnerable … and that Nixon, along with all the rotting bullshit he stood for, might conceivably be beaten. I was 21 then, and it had never occurred to me that politics in America had anything to do with human beings. It was Nixon’s game—a world of old hacks and legalized thievery, a never-ending drone of bad speeches and worse instincts. My central ambition, in the fall of 1960, was to somehow get enough money to get out of this country for as long as possible—to Europe, Mexico, Australia, it didn’t matter. Just get out, flee, abandon this crippled, half-sunk ship that A. Lincoln had once called “The last, best hope of earth.”

  In October of 1960 that phrase suddenly made sense to me. I’m not sure why. It wasn’t Kennedy. He was unimpressive. His magic was in the challenge & the wild chance that he might even pull it off. With Nixon as the only alternative, Kennedy was beautiful—whatever he was. It didn’t matter. The most important thing about Kennedy, to me and millions of others, was that his name wasn’t Nixon. Far more than [Adlai] Stevenson, he hinted at the chance for a new world—a whole new scale of priorities, from the top down. Looking at Kennedy on the stump, it was possible to conceive of a day when a man younger than 70 might enter the White House as a welcome visitor, on his own terms.

  That was a weird notion in those days. After eight years of Ike, it was hard to imagine anyone except a retired board chairman or a senile ex-general having any influence in Government. They were the government—a gang of rich, mean-spirited old fucks who made democracy work by beating us all stupid with a series of billion-dollar hypes they called Defense Contracts, Special Subsidies, and “emergency tax breaks” for anybody with the grease to hire a Congressman.

  Yeah … and why worry this thing any longer, particularly in a letter? My point is (or should be) that since 1960 I’ve gone through so many personal brain-changes—in so many special places and rare scenes—that I still don’t know exactly what brought me, in the fall of ’69, to that election-nite headquarters in a room above the Elks Club in Aspen, Colo. …brooding about the fate of a candidate I barely knew & whose name hardly mattered.

  (Time out for an hour to read the galleys of the Killy article; my wife just came back from the P.O.—with a huge envelope about 20″ × 30″. The pages are incredibly heavy, with a protective tissue sheet between each one (or two). … Hinckle doesn’t fuck around; but where will I find an envelope big enough to fit this thing when I have to send it back? …Aside from that, the swine have lopped off the whole end of my original ms.—about 25 pages of high-white prose that I thought was the best part. Goddamn the tasteless pigs. This magazine action is about on par with writing copy for FoMoCo pamphlets. Not even your friends can make room. …)

  Which is as good a reason as any, I guess, for writing books—they may be the only word-form left where a writer has even a slim hope of getting something published the way he really wrote it. I’ve been writing for a living for 11 years, and never—not once, not even with my poem in Spider magazine—have I ever had anything published straight. The H.A. book was the closest I ever came … and that’s sad when you recall all the terrible senseless haggling we went through.

  And so much for all that. I see I’ve wasted another night by writing “letters.” It seems to be that with all that fine talent you command, you could come up with some working idea about how to put all this deranged garbage into a saleable package. Five pages a night for three years mounts up to a really massive lump … we could call it “The Uncensored Ravings of HST—a P.O. Censor’s View of the 1960s.” Or—“Fear and Loathing in the ’60s—from the files of Hunter S. Thompson.”

  I leave you to ponder it. And meanwhile I’ll look back and see what I’ve said here, if anything. Many words & no focus; that’s my epitaph for the past three years.

  And, speaking of history, I trust you noticed the unspeakably savage public re-birth of the Hell’s Angels. Did you read the coverage in Rolling Stone? That scene at the Altamont rock festival shames my worst fantasies; the sharks finally came home to roost.6 There is no doubt in my mind that Shir-Cliff seized that opportunity to send all remaining PB copies of my book to a warehouse in the Mato Grosso. …

  Odd … but lines like that don’t seem so funny anymore. One of the problems with owing people money is that it undermines most of what you say about them—for good or ill. This crippled debtor status leaves me robbed of all that righteous anger that I had so much fun with for so long.

  Which drags us back, I guess, to the question of “the book.” And all I can say about it, for sure, is that I want to get it written and DONE … finished, gone, off my neck and somewhere way behind me. I loathe the fucking memory of that day when I told you I’d “go out and write about The Death of the American Dream.” I had no idea what you meant then, and I still don’t. I remember telling you this on those steps outside your office … and in several letters since then. I don’t remember exactly when my hazy angst turned to desperation, but at this point even a word like “desperation” seems stale.

  That’s a nasty word and maybe it’s the wrong one for this—because I guess if I really felt desperate I’d have sent you a bundle of pages by now … even bad pages. But I keep telling myself that if I juggle my research a bit longer, it will all fall into place—a magic framework, or formula, to make sense of this swill. I have it all here: two rooms full of notes and memos—but all I can do is juggle it. I spend most of my waking hours in a black rage at almost everything, but every time I sit down to write about it, I end up with 10 pages of finely-phrased bullshit that I never seem to mesh with what I wrote the night before, or the night after. I don’t want to make it sound any worse than it is … but I’m beginning to think the situation is really pretty bad. The angst has become malignant; I feel it growing in me, choking the energy, causing me to flail around like some kind of dingbat. There is a weird, helpless kind of rage in not understanding how I can write so many pages and still not get anything written.

  Your suggestion about making “bookends” of “reports on those extremes” sounds convenient, but I can’t see how it could work without dropping the whole idea of a narrative, linking the scenes. Maybe we don’t really need that, but without it I see the book as a jumble, a lazy copout that won’t say much of anything except as a limp advertisement for what it could and should have been. I’m coming around to the idea that I’d be better off writing a bomb than nothing at all … but I haven’t come so far that I’m ready to write a thing that even I think is bad. The problem harks back to The Rum Diary—which I’ve always wanted to publish, but I’m beginning to wonder now if I might not have killed the book entirely by brooding and haggling over it for so long. About three times a year I have a dream about what might have happened if Pantheon had managed to publish The Rum Diary before you got a hold of Hell’s Angels. That lost option haunts me in some kind of left-handed way. If nothing else, it might have saved me from getting locked into this nightmare assignment of explaining the Death of the American Dream.

  Christ, I shudder every time I see that term in print. I should have taken Shir-Cliff’s advice and done a book on surfers. Hell—anything at all would have been better than this millstone: Cops, Winos, Scumfeeders … anything with a focus, a
subject, some reason for writing about it, a handle … or even just a fucking excuse. As it is, I feel like some kind of pompous old asshole writing his memoirs. I feel about 90 years old. Why in the name of stinking jesus should I be stuck with this kind of book? Maybe later, when my legs go. Fuck the American Dream. It was always a lie & whoever still believes it deserves whatever they get—and they will. Bet on it. There is a terrible wave building up, and by my calculations the deal will go down in the winter of ’74–75. When [James] Baldwin wrote The Fire Next Time he was talking about 10% of the population—but this time we’re looking at 50%. If Nixon makes it to ’76 he’ll have to be carried out of the White House on a strait-jacketed stretcher … and Agnew will be dragged out by his heels.

  Yes…I seem to be getting a bit wiggy, so maybe I’d better close off. I wish I could end with some kind of happy reassurance about The Book. Maybe—with a touch of inordinate luck—I can find a narrative opening sometime soon and break out of this terrible bind.

  Thompson ravings … cont.

  Jesus, looking back at that heap of mad swill (pages 1–6), I have to wonder if perhaps I haven’t gone mad. Read it and let me know how it sounds on that end.

  Meanwhile, I thought I’d try to outline the situation as briefly and cogently as possible. Keep in mind that the following is done off the top of my head—sort of howling at the moon. But it might be easier to do it this way, than to keep on rambling in straight letter form. So … to wit:

  THE PROBLEM: My book is long overdue. The material exists, the research is done (with one possible exception)—but no book exists.