I may even seek employment myself, but I doubt it. It would be like lopping off my balls. After five years on the fringe, I couldn’t handle anything steady.
Thanks for the good words on the Reporter piece. There won’t be any others. Probably not many more in the Observer, either. This is the end of an era and god knows what the next one will bring. I will try, as always, to get to New York at once. The truck would make the run in two days, but that’s still unsettled.
Hello to Judy30 and keep me posted on any movements or shifts. Did Semonin leave any address? Do I have an address? What’s in an address, anyway? “Up the Hudson” sounds good. Or simply “West.” Send wisdom at once.
HST
TO WILLIAM KILPATRICK, PAGEANT:
The Thompsons had left Glen Ellen and moved into an apartment in San Francisco. Eager for cash, Thompson pitched another Big Sur story to an editor at Pageant.
October 23, 1964
318 Parnassus
San Francisco
Willie K.:
Yours of 10/21 got here today and put a bit of egg on my face. Re: my comments on the lunacy of a “Big Sur Service piece.” But the most impressive thing about your package was your correx on my San Francisco to Big Sur distance. I said 150, a lazy generality taken from Telegraph Hill to somewhere around Anderson Canyon, the more or less center of what’s supposed to be Big Sur. Your figure of 125 was only two miles off the map distance from the San Francisco city limits to the Big Sur highway sign just north of the village store. The exact figure is 127. And I say that from re-invigorated memory.
Which means nothing at all to our ultimate purpose, but we can’t deny that you racked a few good points on it. I’ll watch you from now on. You must have a custom-built World Almanac.
(Before I forget, I sent Sundell about a month or six weeks ago a piece on “The Rustic Inn & Jack London & The Valley of the Moon.” It was a pure color job, but a good one, and I’m beginning to think it never got there. The Reporter assigned it, then lost my original manuscript, and the ensuing fracas pretty well blasted our relationship. That and the demise of my editor. Anyway, let me know if you ever saw or heard of it. I don’t really want to think it’s your meat, but it’s damn sure somebody’s and I want to get it out on the market again.)
Now, as for Big Sur: I liked the preciseness of your comments, but I’m afraid you’ve swallowed the Big Sur myth. I lived there for a year and I still get down every few weeks and the people I drink with are now in the process of buying up the place, so I’ve seen both sides of the argument. I’ve also heard a lot of fascinating “Big Sur stories” that were pure balderdash. I hear stories about myself that put Henry Miller’s stuff in deep shade. You say, “Big Sur, in its heyday, had more talent per square inch than Paris in the ’20s.” Well, Willie, I don’t want to seem churlish, but I’ll have a lot of knowledgeable people on my side when I say that simply ain’t true. The best to come out of Big Sur is none too good. Miller wrote only one book there. Dennis Murphy wrote most of The Sergeant in his grandmother’s house, where I lived for a year. I guess Bennie Bufano is the only guy who really produced anything consistently in Big Sur, and even he was a short termer.
Too many people, including me, have pampered this myth of Big Sur as a boiling vat of creativity, but it’s not so. The most interesting aspect of the Big Sur syndrome, in truth, concerns the “artist” who goes there to “create” and winds up a local windbag. Or else he quits real quick. The fine distinction is that the myth of Big Sur attracts talent, but the reality of Big Sur erodes talent. This is a complicated subject and much too hairy for us to deal with here. All I mean to say is that the stories you mentioned ring several bells that bring a handful of stories to mind, but as a former resident and a man who’s done a hell of a lot of both formal and informal research on the place, I’m not about to open that Pandora’s box of fuzzy Big Sur legends and sign my name to any one of them.
I enclose, purely FYI, a piece I did in 1961 when I lived there. It got me evicted within 24 hours of the time it appeared on the Monterey newsstands, and my name is still anathema to a lot of people down there. Until Bill Trombly did his blitz in the Saturday Evening Post last year, mine was generally deemed the most rotten thing ever written about Big Sur. Trombly is barred forever, and I’d be in the same fix if I didn’t have an underground going for me, and unlimited bar tabs with “the syndicate.” (That’s a local joke, son.)
The red-marked photos are the ones I mentioned. They’re mine. I have the negs. Rogue botched the layout on the big shots, and over-inked the small ones. The two I marked are the ones I mean to send.
So I’ll re-do this one over the weekend and ship it off by Monday. If it suits you, I’d appreciate payment ASAP. This hyper-social summer put me way down in the debt-hole and I’m sore pressed for funds. Instant funds. If your instincts are christian, you will keep that in mind.
On Thursday or Friday I’ll skip out to Idaho for a bit of hunting and a boondock election-day piece for the Observer. That should take a week or 10 days, during which time my address will be c/o Leadville, Box 201, Ketchum, Idaho. If you think of anything I can get for you up there, send a wire. But it would have to be something quick and short. I have to get back here by the middle of the month, rap out five or six more pieces, then flip out again for New York. I’ll be there around Christmas and will give a ring. Chances are I won’t get to the LA piece until after the Idaho trip. Your questions were more involved than they seemed at a glance, and I’ve already far exceeded the $50 “expenses” tab. With unlimited expenses I could answer all your questions and clear up all the fuzziness in three days. But my phone bill won’t stand that kind of abuse, so I’m having to rely on mail queries and personal leg-men to clear up such conundrums as “Neeny’s Hot Dog Stand” or “Neeney’s Roadside Rest”?
OK for now. Check on “Rustic” piece and let me know. Your suggestions on Big Sur seem as clear as I need. The LA thing will take a bit longer, but you can count on it. If I had more time and less madness in my life I could handle these things quickly and efficiently. But if that were the case I’d probably have a job somewhere, and not be writing at all.
Say hello for me to The Troops.
Bingo,
Hunter S. Thompson
TO PAUL SEMONIN:
November 15, 1964
318 Parnassus
San Francisco
Dear Tail-Chaser:
I read your eight-page autobiography some 48 hours ago and am now ready to undertake it again. Since I always read my mail at breakfast I can never afford to take it very seriously—like the newspapers—until I am fully awake later in the day or even later in the week. The main thing I re-member about yours is a flavor of hysteria, a sort of high-pitched chattering whine that led me to believe you will soon join some of our more vulnerable brethren in the luxury wards of the Norton Infirmary.31
But since I’d hate to see that, I am now prepared to read your tome again—in hopes of finding some thread of muscle or continuity to make me change my mind. Something of value, as it were. Mr. Roark32 said that. Or merely something to indicate you have not been flipped by a rising wave of spleen. I said that.
Yeah, I know. Plagiarism. Like [James] Baldwin using your phony Marx quote and not crediting Marx. As I recall, he used it to describe Scott Fitzgerald. The idea is pure bullshit, in any case, because it makes suicide the only logical human act. Or, shooting from another angle: who decides when a “situation” requires illusions? Who originates the demand to renounce them? And what, for that matter, is an illusion? I know you feel qualified on all these counts, but you might have trouble mounting a true consensus without the help of a loaded pistol.
And now to read your letter again.
I note right off the bat that you appear ignorant of the true-certain historical fact that all of Bolivia’s large tin mines were nationalized in 1952 by the government that was just deposed. A government agency titled COMIBOL has been running them since then—and runn
ing them deep in the red, I might add, to the general misfortune of nearly every Bolivian citizen except a few in the government and some 8 to 10,000 strongly unionized miners under the leadership of a man named Lechin. [ … ] The morning I spoke with Juan Lechin he caused a delegation of some 50 peasants to wait outside his office while he had himself shaved and barbered. He then emerged, looking and smelling somewhat like Ronald Reagan, and mingled with the mob like an oily Lyndon Johnson. After waiting with the other peasants for an hour and a half, I felt a sense of real gratitude when the prick finally deigned to speak with us. This man makes Nixon seem on a par with Pope John.
As for your implication that I didn’t feel at home with the anarchists in South America, I can only deny it. I am at home with anarchists anywhere. A true anarchist is the only man who can afford to relax in this world; his vision is clear and true, his aims are simple, and his appetites are tiny compared to the various packs of jackals who make up the opposition. His only problem is that he can’t afford to be right, so most anarchists end up lying in the name of some necessary evil. The most important political break-through of the past five centuries will come when some desperate half-mad truth seeker learns how to justify his instinct to anarchy. It has to come, because it’s the only possible reconciliation between a man’s best instincts and his worst realities.
I saw something about Frei’s intentions re: China and Cuba, but I was up in Idaho for 10 days over the election and I didn’t see much of anything in the way of political bombast. But it does interest me to see how quick you switched your taste from Allende to Frei.33 He had the Pope on his side, you know. And Kennecott Copper, too. Are you selling out? When I was grilled by “this Covian guy” last year you were both telling me how Allende was going to mop up in Chile. Maybe I couldn’t learn much from Covian after all, eh?
Aside from that, I don’t think it would make much difference in this country if Frei turned out to be Raul Castro in disguise. Latin America is out of the news. Nada. A free-lancer down there now would pay hell making a living. The press has tuned itself to Johnson’s interests—pocketbook issues, as it were. Things like excise taxes on lipstick and Medicare. Johnson doesn’t know Chile from chili, and doesn’t give a damn, either. I think we are in for the final slide; eight years of it, unless he dies.
That “brain of your manhood” is a good line; where did you steal it?
I am reading now, seeing your comment on my meeting with you & Covian and his wife. In my mind it was a mercifully quick running of the gauntlet, but I see now how I “rejected” the fellow. Out of simple viciousness, no doubt. Or a hatred of the strangeness in him. Indeed.
Your massive sentence on page three is about the “heaviest” I’ve ever read—as you noted. Your phrase “fugitive logic” defines it pretty well. I look forward to talking to you on whatever distant day you finally realize you were put down in this muck for a very short time, and only once, and that nobody—despite the advertisements—has whipped up the dish you know you want to taste. I don’t imagine you’re far from the time when you’ll begin to get the fear that you’ll die hungry, but perhaps right now between Mr. Marx and Mr. Ford34 they are still teasing your taste buds, and you don’t know it yet. You are the Gatsby of the Marxist Left, old sport; he had his silk shirts and you have Tomorrow’s Gospel, and I hope we’re still able to talk like human beings when you find out that his Green Light was a hell of a lot more than a slack rich girl from Louisville.
Your idea that maybe next year I’ll be wise enough to absorb the wisdom of your friends is so petulant and patronizing that I don’t see any sense in talking about it. I’d enclose Mailer’s piece on the GOP convention—primarily for his comments on Baldwin—but the postage would be too much and you’d probably forget who sent it anyway. In some small way Mailer has come back from the dead. The depth and decency of his despair make Baldwin sound like a crotchety fag reading somebody else’s poetry.
For a man who has given up literature and art, for politics, you talk very heavily of literary influences. But, just for your own information, I get my irony and two-fistedness from a general shortness of cash, my apocalyptic vision from booze and desperate naiveté, and my sense of tragedy from Nancy Fitzhugh.35 And my money—like yours—comes from people who don’t take me seriously.
You still seem to have an ear for Faulkner’s rhetoric, but your quote about “that which is highest in us” (which I don’t recall) but which, if he said it, was stolen from a little fellow named José Martí, who described Simón Bolívar as a man, or perhaps a legend, who “appeals to that which is best and manliest in us.” Martí wrote that before Faulkner was born.36
You ask me what I mean when I say all systems are against me. I mean exactly that. Any organization is necessarily a pyramid—the few controlling the many—and every system requires an organization, much as you might hate to admit it. You only had six months in the Corps. It took me longer than that to get over the shock of the AF, and I’d been in at least a year before I calmed down enough to see it for what it was. You call yourself an “optimist,” but everything you say is masochistic pessimism. My feeling is that a man is born with decent instincts (and fuck this idea of original sin) which are steadily pressured and perverted every day of his life until he is either driven mad or turns into a vicious insensitive monster. The trick is to keep your feet in the shitrain, and any man who can do that deserves whatever ego he has left. I agree with you entirely that the U.S. is a root-rotten structure, menaced from without by justified resentment and buttressed from within by moneyed fear—but your alternatives strike me as being about as feasible as Bob Butler’s.
Your bullshit about “who is the enemy in San Francisco” makes me wonder. Your bloated rhetoric makes mine seem like cold hard logic. “The enemy,” the fucking silly enemy, is the same right here as he is over there. The enemy is any man who is willing to take the necessary steps to protect his own short-term interests—now or later, often never admitting it even to himself, rarely understanding his own implications, and always a little too human for any moral censure except in the name of fate and expediency. Hitler was a hero until he fucked up. So was Khrushchev. And good old Ike was such a hero, for two terms, that he was finally permitted to lay a golden egg, named Nixon, who came very near being king.
(I see I am beginning to chatter and whine a bit, myself, so I’ll cash in and cool off till the next session. Selah.)
Hunter
TO PAUL SEMONIN:
November 25, 1964
318 Parnassus
San Francisco
I feel pretty snappy and eloquent tonight, and that just about sinks any possibility of thinking seriously on your letter. I suppose you’re foaming and pissing after what you’ve already read, but this is 10 days later—a wild and active ten days, I might add, but not explain, in deference to your new humorlessness—and the air around here is highly charged. I have spent the evening watching television: the news from Stanleyville, a film on Mussolini’s conquest of Ethiopia, and finally a film dealing with army turncoats. Also the commercials, which I avoided by reading five or six book reviews on the subject of Kennedy.
The result of all this, in my mind, is an overwhelming desire to get out of the country. I’ve been shouting for so many hours that right now it seems silly to put it all on paper because I know you’ll nit-pick it to death with borrowed clichés and hashish wisdom that will not make much contact by the time it arrives here cold and stale 2 weeks after you write it. This is not to say I don’t look forward to your letters, because you’re about the only contributor to my mailbox who talks like a blood-filled human. (That’s “filled,” in deference to your defensiveness.) It was not meant as an attack on you. Honest.
As for facts, Butler has not shown up here since I wrote the last letter, but there are still a few hours left in this night and it would not surprise me at all for him to arrive ten minutes from now in the company of H. Boone,37 whom I haven’t seen or heard from since our visit. In
1960. Noonan shaved off his beard and seems generally confounded. San Francisco remains essentially a hiding place. Sandy is going to New York for Xmas but I think I’ll stay here—unless I get a spate of money, and that’s not likely as long as I take time to write these goddamn long letters. Seven or eight of my checks bounced this week. I have just about decided not to write any more journalism except for my memoirs. The only problem now is to figure out how to live on fiction. Maybe you can get me a grant, eh? Tell ’em I’m secretly OK, but willing to rave a bit if the pay is right.
I am writing nothing. I have no interest in it. The hump is not far off. When I get really desperate I’ll undoubtedly plunge into political action of some kind, knowing all the while that the more feverishly I involve myself with ludicrous movements, the happier it will make the fatbellies. I never had a course in political science but somebody told me in a bar once about how most visible politics are efforts to divert somebody’s attention away from the real fight. The Kennedy-Nixon thing was an exception and a rare one. But this last farce was … well, hell, you know all about that.
I was ready to hoot at you for apparently believing that your news from La Monde gave you an inside track on U.S. politics. But maybe you don’t carry your delusions quite that far. Sorry. Anyway, your comments on what happened here are essentially correct, and hardly novel. Mailer is miles ahead of you, saying that in some secret, half-perverted way he hoped Goldwater might win—if only to bring about another confrontation. Peggy Clifford reports a shade of this from Aspen, and before Mailer’s piece appeared. I don’t know whom she overheard, or where, but when she said it I remember thinking, “Yeah, why not set the bastards up for a real fall?”
Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967 Page 60