2008jan28. Excerpts from Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson by Jann S. Wenner and Corey Seymour.
Sandy Thompson: When “gonzo” first happened, Hunter’s first reaction to it was terrible guilt – just terrible. They didn’t get it. But he could also see that here was an avenue; people seemed to really like this, and they were going to pay him for it. He thought it was gibberish. It was past deadline, and the editors of Scanlan’s were trying to get the Kentucky Derby piece from him and he said, “I can’t send it to you; it’s gibberish.” They said, “Send it anyway.” It wasn’t up to his standard, but finally he sent it. And what do you know – they called and they said it was great. Hunter knew it wasn’t; it was outbursts of greatness and wildness. But it wasn’t a final draft by a long, long shot. He did not feel good about that. [pg 125]
Charles Perry: [ ... ] We passed around the manuscript ["Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"] to the editors, and it took us a day to read it and observe it. I remember someone saying that the day after you read it, life just seemed incredibly dramatic, like you never knew when a pack of pythons might come attack you from around the corner. [pg 133]
Tim Cahill: Hunter imitators were all over the place. All these writers were writing this gibberish, but they lost sight of one of Hunter’s saving graces, which was that he was hilarious. He couldn’t have been effective without his humor. But there were dozens of Hunter imitators who all thought that they should be published. [pg 140]
Tim Crouse: [ ... ] Watching him, I began to realize that he was trying to bypass learned attitudes, received ideas, clich[eaccent]s of every kind, and tap into something that had more to do with his unconscious, his intuitive take on things. He wanted to get the sentence out before any preconception could corrupt it. One of Hunter’s methods of composition was to write a bunch of ledes and then somehow fit them together. By lede, I mean the opening portion of a story, which is ordinarily designed to pack more of a virtuosic wallop than the sections that follow. Early on, I remember, Hunter showed me a stack of ledes he’d accumulated, as if he were fanning a whole deck of aces. On a tight deadline, my job would sometimes be to stitch together the lede-like chunks that Hunter had generated. Ideally, the story would function like an internal-combustion engine, with a constant flow of explosions of more or less equal intensity all the way through. [pg 157]
Pat Caddell: [ ... ] That evening – or morning – ended with Hunter driving to Bethesda Naval Hospital, where Nixon was being treated for viral pneumonia, and walking up to the front desk with his fairly official-looking kit bag with him and saying to the receptionist, “I’m Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, here to treat the president.” [pg 172]
Margot Kidder: Tom and I went over to meet Hunter at his hotel in Miami, where he was supposed to be writing a piece about the [1974] Super Bowl. He’d set up his mojo machine on a table, but of course he hadn’t written the article. So he said, “You – get under the table.” So we got under the table and pulled the plug in and out of this thing while Hunter fed pages that he’d just typed a bunch a random letters on, and then he got on the phone to Jann saying, “I don’t know what’s the matter with the goddamn machine you sent me – it’s not working. I’m trying to get the pages through.” And I remember thinking, “Holy mackerel – here’s a live one.” [pg 178]
Paul Scanlon: [ ... ] We were sitting at Jerry’s bar, and I had the termerity to lecture Hunter, saying it was time to maybe take some time off, drop the Raoul Duke persona, lay off the drugs and the booze a little bit, and get back to being the guy who wrote Hell’s Angels. And he stared at me while he reached into his safari jacket and pulled out a tab of blotter acid. He looked me in the eye, put it in his mouth, and started chewing. [pg 179]
