Proud Highway

by Hunter S. Thompson

  Your situation sounds golden and I have not given up on getting back to stay awhile. How long could you stand? Me, Sandy and the dog? Don’t be polite. The California place won’t be open till late September, if it opens at all, and I may wind up with a few weeks to kill between Semonin’s departure from here and another movement back to the coast. Since I want to get back to New York anyway, I might be able to combine a visit with you and a few quick and dirty contacts in the city. Not sure at all and won’t be until I get something more definite on the Moon Valley house, but may as well query and see what you say. I don’t want to move in and disrupt your life, but maybe we can work out a mildly disruptive compromise. Again, how long a visit could you take? 3 days? 3 weeks? Just give me an idea.

  At the moment I am hard at work helping Paul restore his home. We are living here with no running water, no toilet and no access road. The car is parked ½ mile away at the bottom of the ski slope, which is a brutal climb with luggage, groceries, wine, or even nothing at all. It is primitive living, but at least it’s a rest and I’ll be here another 2 or 3 weeks to catch up on the writing. We have gone 10,000 miles in 2 months with no maintenance on the car and the whole team is whipped. At least you can get credit—be thankful for that.

  A great relief to hear you nicked Ridley for money; I was afraid it would fall through and make me feel like a prick. My recent copy has been subpar and last week they were gracious enough to point it out to me. I replied that I was too tired to really give a damn, and today came a fine, bright, complimentary note that gave me to feel once again that gall is the better part of talent. Keep after them, but don’t bend or they’ll lean on you. What about the PR piece? Demand more money each time and they’ll generally give in. Bitch about poverty in general and threaten to take a job with Time or Newsweek.

  My Writers piece9 came out pretty watered-down and I bitched noisily, but even as printed (except for the lead and the ending, which was Ridley) it had horns and at least half a kick, which they need.

  Dennis Murphy read my book [“The Rum Diary”] and came to about the same conclusions you did, but not quite so final. After a bit of talk and thought I have decided to rewrite it for plot and action, separating the characters and trying to give them some meaning. If it goes slow, I’ll quit. If not, and if I enjoy the work, I’ll push on through. The title alone will sell 5,000 copies if I can just convince some bastard to publish it.

  I called the Partisan Review on your story, by the way, and some lazy-sounding girl answered the phone and said she’d think about it.… Sounds like a shitty outfit and damned if they’ll get anything of mine.10

  I am considering sitting down and rewriting every story I’ve ever done or even half done and getting them all in the mail. A man should have possibilities, and mine at the moment are too limited.

  OK. Will advise the breaks as they come. In the meantime, keep the contact and let me know on the visit possibilities.

  Bingo, and hello to Dana—

  HST

  TO DAVISON THOMPSON:

  When Thompson returned from South America he reconnected with his brother Davison. Their correspondence increased dramatically during the ensuing years.

  August 20, 1963

  Aspen, Colorado

  Dear D—

  Hope you found the pants, both the tan ones and the other pair you accused me of stealing. Now for a third pair; I think I left those brown corduroys (part of the suit) there. If so, let me know and I’ll stop tearing the car apart to look for them. Also, is my billy club there? And the hunting knife you gave me last Xmas? All these are missing.

  The shotgun is fine, although I can’t hit a damn thing with it, except for a coon I disintegrated in Big Sur. It does awful things to a small animal at close range—made hamburger of the coon, who was stealing our dog food. Your club is here and will be in the mail as soon as I can find the odd-shaped box I need for shipping. It is a bastard, probably the only one of its kind in the world.

  We are currently living in Paul [Semonin]’s house in Aspen. It’s primitive as hell, but at least a place to rest with nobody howling at me. No running water, an outhouse, and the car has to stay ½ mile down at the foot of the mountain. It is a hell of a climb up the trail, especially with luggage and groceries, but once you get here it’s fine. I spent an hour or so this afternoon practicing from the hip with the Luger and got so I can pretty consistently hit an 18-inch circle at 10 yards, snap-shooting like Billy the Kid. But it will be a while before I can bounce a tin can along the ground like Shane. I haven’t used the .44 much, because the scope broke and the ammo is so expensive. As soon as I get out of debt I’m going to get another .22 Mag. You can’t beat a penny and a half a shot.

  As for plans, there are two possibilities and they both broke today. One is a house on a mountain about 60 miles north of San Francisco, and the other is a house about 10 miles outside of Aspen. Neither would be available until September, but either one would be a good deal and a good place to live. At the moment I think I prefer Calif.; the house is more isolated and without the distractions (nearby bars) of Aspen. I’ll wait a week or so before deciding; it’s so damn good to have a choice that I don’t want to give up the feeling.

  Speaking of that, what’s the score on your end? Any new movements, changes, etc.? How’s the drinking going? Let me know any developments.

  I’ll be here a few more weeks and will let you know before I move again. Regardless of where I settle, I’ll have to come back to Louisville for that gear, which will probably be in late September. Right now I’m too broke to move at all. Yesterday I spent 30 of my last 35 dollars on the goddamn car, and both front tires are still bald. My checks are bouncing again, but that’s nothing new. Hopefully, I can stay here long enough to write myself out of the hole. […]

  Send Word.

  H

  TO CLIFFORD RIDLEY, NATIONAL OBSERVER:

  Ridley was urging Thompson to return to Rio or Mexico as the National Observer’s Latin America correspondent.

  August 23, 1963

  Aspen, Colorado

  Dear Cliff:

  For the past five hours I’ve been rooting through my 75-pound suitcase of Latin America notebooks, clippings, books, mementos and assorted flotsam, and all it has done has been to convince me that I should write a book on Latin America because my knowledge is far too vast and encompassing to fit into any smaller format.

  So, instead of giving in to the awesome sweep of things, I’ll try to focus down on those things that appear relevant to the Alliance for Progress.11 But I’ll be rambling here and a lot may be irrelevant or at least obscure. You will get an idea of what my first drafts are like, and I will get an idea of what it is like to write on Latin America from my new outpost in Aspen. So be it.

  I’ll begin with a quote from The New York Times [of] August 18, which contained a tiny dispatch from Lima, Peru, concerning the birthday (the second) of the Alliance: “Leading newspapers commented today that the Alliance for Progress was falling short of expectations.” La Prensa said that the Alliance program had “lagged behind the very great, and perhaps exaggerated expectations that it raised initially.” El Commercio said that two years after the signing of the charter of Punta del Este, under which the Alliance was established, “the balance does not show satisfactory returns.”

  I cite this because it is such a faithful echo of the comments I heard during the last six months of my stay in South America, almost always from Latins. From U.S. officials, I got a different line: guardedly optimistic at the office, and sometimes mean and pessimistic in private moments.

  As far as the Alliance is concerned, there are four main “reaction groups” in South America. U.S. officials and pro-American Latins are very much for it; American businessmen (with exceptions) and hardnose Latin leftists are against it—which in effect makes it a “middle of the road” sort of concept, which is odd. On the “anti” side I should also include a much smaller than is generally believed segment of “the oligarch
y.” Contrary to a lot of press opinion, the wealthy lads are not so stupid as to ignore which way the game is going, and it is only the diehards and the arch-conservatives who actively and vocally oppose the Alliance. The same is true, in a way, of U.S. businessmen; those (mainly young) who work for big companies (Sears, Willys, Ford, IBEC, Fruco, etc.) might disagree with the Alliance in practice—if they disagree at all* —while the old-line “free-enterprisers,” most of them running or working for small businesses, are the only ones who claim it is “just another one of Kennedy’s socialistic schemes.”

  One of the main enlightened bitches about the Alliance concerns its focus on government-to-government action. This gives a lot of people who work for private companies the feeling that they are being left out, although Alliance blueprints call for a large percentage of the funds (better check the figure) to come from private enterprise. While I was in La Paz, for instance, a Grace Company official blew his top during a visit by Teodoro Moscoso. He drafted a cablegram (which he later tore up and which I retrieved from his wastebasket) to an American publication (either Time or The New York Times) saying that Moscoso had been in La Paz for a week and had not seen a single representative of “private enterprise.” He had spent his time, said the cable, with nobody but Bolivian and U.S. government officials (which, as far as I could determine, was true).

  A lot of people were complaining about it, and eventually the word reached Moscoso. On the day that he left La Paz, he called a sort of open press conference—specifically inviting the gentlemen from private enterprise—and proceeded to give about as weak-kneed and unimpressive an outline of the Alliance’s objectives as I ever hope to hear. I was really shocked, because I had dealt, indirectly, with Moscoso in Puerto Rico, where he ran a tough, hell-for-leather show as director of Fomento, which was then Puerto Rico’s version of the Alliance. But he was a different man in La Paz, and it got almost embarrassing when people began yelling from the audience, “Where do we fit in?” and “How about private enterprise?”

  His only reply was, in effect, “Have faith.” And that didn’t satisfy anybody. Even me. He did say, “Now I’m no man to bow down before the sacred cow of private enterprise—but if the cow gives good milk, I believe we should milk it.” He did not mean it to sound as condescending as it did, but I know from conversation that it left a pretty rancid taste in a lot of mouths.

  After Moscoso’s talk he left for Santa Cruz and I got hold of one of the Alliance’s lawyers—a man named Rodgers—and told him that it was my impression, after four months of travel in South America, that the Alliance was in bad trouble. I then cited a few examples of failure and delay, and asked if he wished to comment on the outlook.

  “Well, we expected trouble,” he replied. “And the opposition is damned tough—but we’re tougher.” That was all I could get out of him, so I shook my head sadly, smiled, and thanked him for his time. On that day in La Paz I realized the Alliance was in worse trouble than I had thought.

  Now, in retrospect, I don’t believe we’re in such bad shape as I thought then, but it took me a long time to get over that encounter with the Alliance “brain trust,” and I hope the next one will not be such a come-down.

  If I had to give one single impression concerning the Alliance, it would be the contrast between the publicity it gets here in the States, and the nearly negligible interest it has stirred up in Latin America. During the first few months of my stay in South America I was constantly talking and asking about the Alliance, but after a while I realized the natives didn’t particularly give a damn about it and—in the main—were only being polite when they took time out from more immediate pursuits to discuss it with me.

  The fact is that, were it not for the stream of propaganda emanating from USIS offices in every Latin country, the Alliance for Progress would barely be mentioned at all. To the average Latin, it is merely a program of more and faster aid, to counter the menace of Castro and his widespread disciples. The concept of partnership is entirely missing, and the main feeling now is that the U.S. has promised a lot, but given little.

  There is a kind of bitterness that lurks beneath the surface of most conversations concerning U.S.–Latin relations as regards the Alliance. The biggest Latin complaint is that the action is moving “too slowly,” and that the funds are tied up in “Washington bureaucracy.” The American immediately counters with the (correct) charge that Latin governments are moving even more slowly in submitting the necessary plans and blueprints for development projects. This leads, of course, to a dead end of rationalization, excuses and counter-accusations.

  What generally emerges is something (from the Latin) like this: “After fifty years of vicious exploitation, what do you expect from us? Why shouldn’t you help us? Why shouldn’t you pay us back for all you’ve taken? Now that you’re in trouble, now that you’re afraid of the Communists, now you expect us to be on your side like old friends—and you want to pay us off with a handful of dollars.”

  I have two friends in Rio, both of whom are “pro-American,” and both of whom feel exactly this way. One has just completed his training for the diplomatic service, and the other is a young executive in the real estate and investment business. They have both traveled and visited the States and they both want to go back. They like the way we live here and they have no use at all for communism.

  But, man, you start criticizing Brazil’s slothful reaction to the Alliance, and both of them will give you the same business. In reality, they’re not talking to you; they’re talking to your father and your grandfather, but you’re the one who has to take the guff. The Latin personality is such that it never forgets an insult or a humiliation, and in their eyes that was all they got from the U.S. from 1900 until Castro became a threat in 1960.

  They are psychologically unable to let us forget it, even though it might have no bearing on either of our current problems. The unvarnished truth is that we need Latin America today, and that is a new reality. The Latins are quick to recognize it and even quicker to throw it in your face if you get uppity.

  There is the queer duality of our problem in Latin America. The new generation is very aware of their problems, and also aware that the U.S. wants and needs to help in the solutions. But don’t push me, they say, because for the first time in your history I’m important to you. And they are.

  And the crucial thing to remember is that they would rather do nothing at all than be forced into action by the “gringos,” whose heavy-handed ghost is so much more visible to them than it is to us. We are paying now for the “big-stick” tactics of an earlier generation, and the best we can hope for is to settle the score as quickly and gracefully as we can.

  In nearly every Latin country there is a congenital suspicion of American motives—although it often takes queer and contradictory forms. In Bolivia, for instance, I spent an entire afternoon and evening arguing with a labor leader that nearly everybody considered a communist. He hated Wall Street, he said, and felt certain that both Kennedy and Moscoso had come under the sway of “capitalist bosses.” He made a clear distinction between “Wall Street” and “the American people,” which was all the more pathetic because of his ignorance of what “Wall Street” means. He also thought that both John Steinbeck and John Dos Passos were young American writers, whose work he admired and with whom he felt sympathy. It took a few hours and quite a bit of prodding before he admitted that he’d learned to read English by reading Playboy.

  But the Alliance for Progress? As far as he was concerned it was just a new and subtle form of exploitation. Just another scheme to keep the capitalists in power. He had no use for Russia or even Cuba, but he wanted no part of Washington either. He was for Bolivia, he said, and the idea that the Alliance for Progress might be for Bolivia, too, had never crossed his mind.

  In most cases, Americans are made nervous by anti-American Latins, and after a few encounters they tend to keep their distance. Only the Peace Corps, to my knowledge, has made an impression on that segment o
f the population that is also most susceptible to communist influence. And, in doing so, they constitute one of the few visible proofs that the American personality is not quite the same as it used to be.

  In Brazil, arch-leftist Leonel Brizola, the president’s brother-in-law, calls members of the Peace Corps “spies for the State Department.” He urges the populace to stone them, but his advice falls on deaf ears when an American comes to a poverty-stricken village and shows the people how to plant tomatoes and learn to read and generally participate in the social and economic development of the Twentieth Century. My impression is that one American working with his hands in Latin America is worth ten running their mouths.

  The Latin is no stranger to grand rhetoric, and he has good reason to be suspicious of it. When the Spanish first came to this continent they talked to the natives about saving their souls, and in the meantime made off with all the gold and silver they could get their hands on. Then a new, homegrown generation rose up, under Bolívar and San Martín,12 to “free these nations from the Spanish yoke.” But the result was more of the same, with new bosses.

  Then Uncle Sam came on the scene; he penetrated the continent only so far as was necessary to secure obedience and security for U.S. private enterprise. This conquest, like all the others, came under the banner of “freedom, liberty, democracy” and all the other fine words that most Latins no longer take seriously.

  So now, in this tense age, how can we be surprised when Latins seem suspicious of our talk about “preserving the free world”? How can we expect them to give all-out support to the Alliance for Progress, when nearly every student is learning—from a legion of anti-American teachers—how the gringos have humiliated and exploited the Latin countries ever since our history brought us in contact with them?