THE JOKE’S OVER: Memories of Hunter S Thompson
by Ralph SteadmanHeinemann £20 pp416
Perhaps you can picture the work of Roald Dahl without the illustrations of Quentin Blake, or of Charles Dickens without the cartoons of Phiz. In a part of my mind, when reading Anthony Powell, I retain the images of the characters furnished by the imperishable Mark Boxer. Would we really have appreciated Alice in Wonderland without the drawings of Tenniel? However these questions may be decided, it is a certainty that the noir contribution of Ralph Steadman (who also produced a brilliantly illustrated Alice Through the Looking Glass) is as inseparable from the output of Hunter S Thompson as Marks from Spencer, or Engels from Marx.
This is not to say that the two men were exactly made for each other. Starting with their first joint assignment, which was to lampoon the Kentucky Derby for Scanlan’s magazine in 1970, Steadman was made to appreciate that he was yoked to a volatile and often dangerous manic-depressive. To describe the subsequent partnership as addictive would be disconcertingly accurate, although “disconcerting” would be the weakest way of expressing Steadman’s alarm at the properties of a small yellow pill that his friend so thoughtfully gave him on a later bad trip — if you will excuse the expression — to the America’s Cup in Rhode Island. The ensuing near-death experience is described without either rancour or self-pity, and, indeed, Steadman cannot claim not to have been warned.
For aficionados of what used so tritely to be called “the New Journalism”, there are only two kinds of people. There are those who have had the experience of a night at Owl Farm, at Woody Creek on the outskirts of Aspen, Colorado, and shared with “Dr” Thompson the cocktail of Chivas Regal, early-hours, high-velocity target-practice, late-night round-the-world telephone calls and associated diversions, and those who have not. I can proudly claim to have done it twice, but for Steadman such soirees were almost an oasis of tranquillity. For him, the really testing and formative experience was that of going on the road with this maniac, to Las Vegas or perhaps to the Congo in 1974 for the Ali-Foreman fight, and enduring the resulting mood swings and clashes with local authorities while learning over a crackling phone line that the magazine that was supposedly underwriting the venture had just declared bankruptcy.
Out of this frenzied collaboration came two catchphrases that helped light up the weird world of the early 1970s: the years of Richard Nixon and of both versions of Deep Throat. The first of these is Fear and Loathing and the second is Gonzo. There is no mystery about either: Gonzo was a nonsense word coined by Bill Cardoso of the Boston Globe to describe the hyperbole of the Kentucky Derby piece, and was annexed by Thompson to blur the difference between fiction and reportage, while Fear and Loathing was a general reaction to everything Nixonian. Steadman catches Thompson’s motive accurately, by describing it as “a last-ditch attempt to live up to the wild freedom of the 1960s before convention and ‘common sense’ closed it down for ever”.
Steadman was no Dr Watson or Sancho Panza in this partnership, and he makes it plain that he could and did do his own share of the substance-fuelled hyperactivity. To me, he always looks astonishingly like his fellow-Welshman Anthony Hopkins, and perhaps lent a hint of class and restraint to Thompson’s essentially trailer-park style. And here’s how he looks back on it: “When I began this book I thought it was going to be a journey of pleasure and warm memories, but as I write I feel more of the icy winds of rejection that were probably there from the beginning . . . Quite by chance I became a part of this man’s life, more as an infection than as a friend. I fooled myself that there was something in me that he found important. Actually, as time went by, he hated the very idea that something as putrid as a cartoon drawing could ever capture the essence of what he was trying to describe.”
Indeed, it turns out that the last transaction between the two men was a bribe, offered by Steadman so that Thompson would deign to sign all the copies of their final collaboration. Having kept his part of the bargain, Thompson went home and, a few months later in February 2005, blasted his head off. It cannot be said that nobody saw this coming. As far back as 1977 he had involved Steadman and others in the design of a 150-ft rocket with which his ashes were to be fired into the sky when the day came. “I would feel trapped in this life,” he had once said, “if I didn’t know I could commit suicide at any time.”
Given this, I think it is glib of Steadman to say that his old mate blew himself away because of his disgust at the Bush administration. If Thompson didn’t like something he got going about it, as his many campaigns to free innocent prisoners (or to get himself elected as local sheriff) can bear witness.But if it was hard to keep the 1960s going when he was in his thirties, it was impossible to revive the Watergate 1970s when he was in his sixties. Steadman once drew a caricature of the Thompsonian anatomy, showing it as bomb-proofed by five separately beating hearts against the assault of high-octane recreational poisons.
But nobody beats those odds indefinitely. And a film made just before the end, entitled Breakfast with Hunter, shows a man in the throes of a (literally) terminal boredom, lethally oppressed by diminishing returns while tormented by acquaintances who gleefully expect him to be outrageous when he just isn’t feeling up to it. I felt a premonitory chill when I watched it, and I feel another pang while reading this book, because something life- affirming and risk-taking was involved under all that death wish, and it isn’t pleasant to think of despair winning such an easy victory.
DATE FROM HELL
The most infamous collaboration between Steadman and Thompson, was on Thompson’s 1973 “nonfiction novel”, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, about Raoul Duke and Dr Gonzo’s drug-fuelled descent on the city in search of the American Dream. Steadman, who was illustrating Alice Through the Looking Glass at the time, was rung by Thompson and asked “whether you would be up for doing some vicious drawings”. Steadman, still reeling from a nightmarish, druggy trip to the America’s Cup with Thompson, produced the illustrations as “a psychological throw-up, a mental mess of half-remembered terror”. “I hardly drew them myself,” he recalls now. “I simply let them happen before my very eyes.”
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. The Joke’s Over is available at the Books First price of £18 (including p&p) on 0870 165 8585
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websites:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_S._Thompson
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