DECADENCE AND DEPRAVITY IN LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY: At Quillette, David S. Wills looks at the rapid rise and slow drug-fueled decay of Dr. Gonzo, Hunter S. Thompson.

Despite his reputation as a sybarite, Thompson mostly smoked cigarettes and slugged beers while writing. Recreational drug use was generally reserved for when he was not at his typewriter. However, when David Felton at Rolling Stone asked Thompson to review Sigmund Freud’s Cocaine Papers for the magazine in 1973, he thought it would be dishonest not to try the substance in question and had Felton send him some. Most of the people close to Thompson identify this as the turning point after which drug abuse overwhelmed his ability to write. The Freud review was never published, and Thompson subsequently developed a habit of taking assignments and simply not completing them.

There were also the pitfalls of fame to navigate. After Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Thompson was practically a household name, and his notoriety only grew throughout the rest of the decade. He became trapped in the character of Raoul Duke, particularly after he was satirized in Gary Trudeau’s comic, Doonesbury. Even when he tried to do his job, he found himself hounded by autograph hunters. Fans, journalists, politicians… everyone wanted to meet America’s glamorous outlaw journalist. On one occasion when he was attempting to report on a court case, the judge blurted out, “I’m so honored to meet you, Mr. Thompson.”

He retreated to his “fortified compound” in Woody Creek, Colorado, where he surrounded himself with friends, drugs, guns, and other distractions. Soon he was partying with John Belushi, Bill Murray, Jack Nicholson, Sean Penn, and Johnny Depp. This hedonistic existence was not exactly compatible with a journalist’s deadlines or a novelist’s long meditations. As the years went by, it became harder to recall the days when he had sweated over every word and sentence and paragraph as he redrafted Fear and Loathing. Gonzo had been the breakthrough that allowed Thompson to command vast fees for his increasingly erratic writing and disastrous speaking engagements. He had planned to apply his unique approach to a wide variety of stories, but instead he became trapped in the cartoonish world he had created—what had once seemed so fresh and original soon became stale and repetitive.

He had arrived on the scene with a bang in the first years of the Seventies, but most of what remained of the decade disappeared in a blur of disappointment and failure. He flew to Zaire to cover one of the biggest sporting events of the century, “The Rumble in the Jungle,” and spent several weeks taking drugs instead of trying to get face time with Muhammad Ali or George Foreman. Hours before the fight, Ralph Steadman found Thompson in a swimming pool, clutching a bottle of scotch and surrounded by chunks of floating marijuana. The pair of them had been paid by Rolling Stone to report on the fight, but Thompson had sold their tickets.

A year later, he flew to Vietnam to cover Saigon’s fall to the North Vietnamese, but days before the city fell, he fled to Hong Kong. He refused to hand over what little writing he had managed to produce to the Rolling Stone editors, and it was 10 years before his report was eventually published. In the Eighties, Jann Wenner managed to entice Thompson to cover the US invasion of Grenada, and was rewarded with the same fiasco. A trip to New Orleans similarly turned into a week’s abuse of his publisher’s credit cards, with not even a half-baked article to show for it at the end.

This kind of behavior became normal for Thompson. Long-suffering friends like Wenner who had tolerated his tantrums and abuse and chronic unreliability finally ran out of patience. Few editors would dare hire him, and those that did found that he would take vast sums of money and then simply not turn in any work. Sometimes he tried hard and failed, and other times he just did not try at all. When he did manage to file copy, it was frequently so unintelligible that his editors would have to work for days patching fragments of disordered prose into something comprehensible. From a bottom-line point of view, it was usually worth the effort because his name still sold copies and his fans did not much care what he turned in. But the decline in quality was steep.

By the end, the man whom Tom Wolfe credited in the mid-1970s as being the star of “New Journalism” was reduced to a painful-to-read ESPN.com column, culminating in Thompson red-lining the Godwin meter in 2004:

The long-dreaded 2004 Olympics in Greece will be the ultimate crossroads for sports and politics in this new and vicious century. The recent photos of cruelty at the Abu Grahaib all-american prison in Baghdad have taken care of that.

Yes, sir. We have taken the bull by the horns on this one, sports fans. These horrifying digital snapshots of the American dream in action on foreign soil are worse than anything even I could have expected. I have been in this business a long time and I have seen many staggering things, but this one is over the line. Now I am really ashamed to carry an American passport. Not even the foulest atrocities of Adolf Hitler ever shocked me so badly as these photographs did.

Around that time, James Lileks wrote:

Thompson has less hope than the Islamists; at least they have an afterlife to look forward to. All we have is a country so rotten and exhausted it’s not worth defending. It never was, of course, but it’s even less defensible now than before.

He can say what he wants. Drink what he wants. Drive where he wants. Do what he wants. He’s done okay in America. And he hates this country. Hates it. This appeals to high school kids and collegiate-aged students getting that first hot eye-crossing hit from the Screw Dad pipe, but it’s rather pathetic in aged moneyed authors. And it would be irrelevant if this same spirit didn’t infect on whom Hunter S. had an immense influence. He’s the guy who made nihilism hip. He’s the guy who taught a generation that the only thing you should believe is this: don’t trust anyone who believes anything. He’s the patron saint of journalism, whether journalists know it or not.

Thompson would be dead less than a year later.

Rolling Stone published what Doug Brinkley described as a suicide note written by Thompson to his wife, titled “Football Season Is Over”. It read:

No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your age. Relax — This won’t hurt.

In his Quillette article, David S. Wills concludes:

As a young man, Hunter S. Thompson had visited Ernest Hemingway’s home in Ketchum, Idaho, to discover what had driven a great American writer to take his own life. He concluded that Hemingway had lost confidence in his voice and was unable to describe a world moving at a frantic pace. Forty-two years later, Thompson found his own reasons. The publication of his electrifying dispatch from the Kentucky Derby on May 2nd, 1970, had announced him as among the most innovative and powerful voices in American letters. But when a great writer can no longer write, and when even the possibility of turning out another great book no longer exists, there is little else to do. It was a tragic end to a life of unfulfilled promise.

Read the whole thing.