David S. Wills - High White Notes: The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism

Hunter S. Thompson was one of the most original writers of the twentieth century, producing several books and articles so shockingly different from anything that came before them that he came to inhabit his own literary genre: Gonzo. In an era of rampant experimentation, his innovations including a deliberately disorienting fusion of fact and fiction quickly became trademarks. In works like Hells Angels , The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas , and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 72 , he introduced and honed a style so completely unique that anyone attempting to muscle in on it immediately looked like a thief.

But what made his work unique and, more to the point, what created a mind capable of inventing such groundbreaking stories? Many years ago, I noticed that you could pick almost any paragraph from anywhere in Thompsons career and immediately know it was written by him. Yes, there are the obvious elementsthe truth/fiction conflation, uncommon word like atavistic, odd capitalization, unrepentant drug use, over-blown descriptions, violent comedybut this was all somewhat superficial, and early on in his career there were many more restrained articles, free of the drugs and madness that became his trademark with the publication of his most famous book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas . When the drugs and madness were scraped away, what remained was the work of a writer with an incredible grasp of language.

This was the genesis of High White Notes , a book that aims to explain the development of Hunter S. Thompsons literary style. The title, of course, comes from F. Scott Fitzgerald. Thompson was a lifelong fan and often referred to this quote. His interpretation of it was that high white notes are brief flashes of brilliance, usually sentences or paragraphs in a longer work that possess a peculiar and enchanting musicality. He sought these moments throughout his career and found them often during his most productive years. The famed wave passage from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and the Edge section of Hells Angels are prime examples.

This book will explore Thompsons life from his birth in Louisville in 1937 to his suicide in Woody Creek in 2005. It will chart the development of his writing style from his childhood, asking what could possibly have set a mischievous little boy on a course for global literary notoriety. It will look at his literary inspirations, from Jack London to Ernest Hemingway, from Joseph Conrad to John Dos Passos, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, and Ken Kesey. Of course, it will also explore his lifelong obsession with emulating Fitzgeralds American masterpiece, The Great Gatsby .

Yet this is no hagiography. My original aim may well have been answering the question, Why was his writing so damned good? but Thompson was, in life as in work, a complex, troubling, and enigmatic figure. He was a charmer and an abuser; motivated and lazy; an habitual liar in search of the truth. He labored over every word of some articles, yet phoned in subpar efforts for others. His work ranged in quality from among the finest in American literature to efforts so abysmal that it is hard to believe they were even written by a native speaker of the language, never mind a professional writer.

This inconsistency struck me as I re-read his oeuvre. How could the same man have written both Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The Curse of Lono ? The latter sounds like a high school students attempt at imitating the former. Hells Angels is one of the finest non-fiction books of the twentieth century, yet Kingdom of Fear and Hey Rube are almost unreadably bad.

Thus, High White Notes will investigate how Thompson became such a brilliant writer and how he ended up writing utter drivel. This was a difficult task for me. Many years ago, Thompsons works inspired me to become a writer, and so it feels inherently wrong to devote almost half of this rather long book to essentially savaging his work. It was with a tremendous amount of guilt that I gave this book its subtitle: The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism . Among Thompson fans, it is near heresy to acknowledge The Fall.

But this book is intended not to denigrate a wonderful writer whose contributions to literature, culture, and even politics were of undeniable importance. Rather, my hope is that this book will cast new light upon his work. For such a famous writer, there has been surprisingly little in the way of serious criticism. There are various biographies, but even the best of these dwell on the Thompson mythology. From his teenage years onwards, he consciously sought to perpetuate falsehoods around his life that built him into a literary legend. Whilst this was a great part of his literature, it ultimately made him into a cartoonish figure who is seldom taken seriously. It has made studying his life and work difficult, for getting at the truth is in some cases impossible. His interviews and letters, whilst endlessly entertaining, simply compound the problem by adding different versions of his innumerable falsehoods.

In this book, I have corrected a number of misconceptions about Thompsons life because in examining his work I had to dig up sources that others had missed. In looking at the interplay of fact and fiction within his work, I naturally uncovered a great many of his exaggerations and fabrications. Again, it is with a measure of guilt that I do this. Many classic stories from his life, which have even been reported as true in the best of his biographies, turned out to have been entirely made up. It is perhaps strange that a book of this nature would include so much biographical detail, but for Thompson life and literature overlapped. Amid the dizzying array of themes in his work, the focus was quite often himself. Even when looking elsewhere, he consciously embodied the things he was writing about in order to better examine them. Gonzo was a one-man genre largely because it always involved, to some extent, Hunter S. Thompson.