Hunter S. Thompson drove into Las Vegas with a boot full of drugs. At which point the idea of journalistic objectivity was probably in some difficulty.
In the last piece, I wrote about Didion and Mailer, two writers who appeared to have almost nothing in common but shared a suspicion about journalism. Both understood that the supposedly invisible reporter wasn't really invisible at all. Someone chooses where to look, whom to interview, which quotation survives and which detail becomes the opening paragraph. Mailer's solution was sometimes to put himself directly into the story. Didion's was subtler. She could make herself almost disappear while controlling exactly what we saw.
But if the journalist can never really be invisible, another possibility remains. Stop trying, and nobody stopped trying quite like Hunter S. Thompson.
A journalist drives into Las Vegas
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas begins, famously, somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert.
Thompson, disguised as his alter ego Raoul Duke, heads toward Las Vegas with his attorney, Dr Gonzo, in a red convertible. Dr Gonzo was based on the real Chicano lawyer and activist Oscar Zeta Acosta. The ostensible purpose of the trip was journalism. Thompson had been sent to cover the Mint 400 motorcycle race for Sports Illustrated. What followed became something considerably stranger.
The race almost disappears. Las Vegas takes over. Drugs take over. Thompson takes over. What began as an assignment becomes a hallucination about America.
This was not entirely without precedent. Thompson had already developed the approach that became known as Gonzo journalism. His 1970 piece "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved", produced with illustrator Ralph Steadman, had turned a sporting assignment into something much stranger and more personal. The term "Gonzo" was subsequently applied to it, and Thompson had found the form that would become inseparable from his name.
But Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas pushed the idea much further. Here was a style of journalism in which the reporter wasn't merely visible. The reporter was causing half the trouble.
What exactly is Gonzo journalism?
Gonzo is sometimes reduced to Thompson's surface characteristics: drugs, alcohol, guns, paranoia, extravagant insults and sentences that appear to have been written by somebody driving considerably faster than the road permits.
That's certainly part of the fun. But underneath the performance is a serious idea about journalism.
Traditional reporting asks the journalist to behave as though their presence has not affected what they are reporting. Gonzo starts from the opposite assumption. The journalist is already part of the event. Their reactions, prejudices, mistakes and experiences therefore become part of the material.
Thompson took that idea to an extreme. Raoul Duke isn't Hunter S. Thompson in the straightforward autobiographical sense. He is Thompson turned into a literary character. A caricature. A distorted version of the journalist created by the journalist himself.
The writer isn't simply holding the camera any more. He has turned it around, and that creates a rather obvious problem. Why should we believe him?
The least reliable journalist in Las Vegas
If Truman Capote worried us because In Cold Blood sometimes presents reconstructed or disputed material with the authority of fact, Thompson presents almost the opposite problem.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas makes reliability seem faintly ridiculous.
The narrator is intoxicated, paranoid and frequently incapable of distinguishing what is happening from what he imagines is happening. Real experiences are exaggerated. People become characters. chronology bends to literary purpose. Thompson called the work a "nonfiction novel", and the distinction between reportage, memoir and fiction becomes deliberately unstable.
And yet I don't read Fear and Loathing thinking that Thompson has failed as a journalist.
Quite the opposite, which bothers me because if we have spent several posts worrying about writers changing reality, why are we suddenly willing to forgive Thompson for doing precisely that?
Perhaps because Thompson never really asks us to mistake his version for a police report. We know the narrator is unreliable. More importantly, he knows we know, and that changes the contract between writer and reader.
Capote's authority depends partly upon convincing us that this is how it happened. Thompson's depends upon convincing us that this is how it felt. Those are not the same thing.
Didion saw the dream falling apart
This is where Joan Didion comes back into the story. In "Slouching Towards Bethlehem", Didion went to Haight-Ashbury in 1967 to report on the counterculture. America already had a story available about what was happening there: youth, liberation, drugs, peace, rebellion, a new society emerging from the ruins of the old one.
Didion found something else. She found fragmentation. Runaways. Drugs. Children living among adults who themselves seemed barely to understand what they were doing. People had rejected one set of social structures without necessarily discovering anything capable of replacing them.
Didion's great subject wasn't really hippies. It was collapse. She stood at the edge of the counterculture and watched the story people were telling about it fail. A few years later, Thompson drives into Las Vegas and finds himself living in the aftermath.
Where the wave finally broke
For all the drugs and comedy and grotesque behaviour in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, there is a sadness running beneath the book.
At one point Thompson looks back towards San Francisco and remembers the extraordinary optimism of the middle 1960s. There had been, he writes, a sense that "we were winning". With the right eyes, he suggests, you could almost see the "high-water mark" where that wave finally broke and rolled back.
It's one of the moments when the manic performance suddenly falls away. The book isn't really about taking drugs in Las Vegas. It is about waking up after a dream.
The counterculture believed, however briefly, that America might be transformed. By the time Thompson reaches Las Vegas, that confidence has curdled into paranoia, consumption and spectacle. The journey into the "heart of the American Dream" takes him not towards enlightenment but casinos, hotels, narcotics, police conferences and people trying to sell one another things.
Didion and Thompson therefore make an unexpectedly good pair. Didion reports the collapse. Thompson writes from inside the wreckage.
But did it actually happen?
This is where things become difficult. Suppose I gave you two accounts of the Mint 400.
The first told you how many competitors entered, who won, what the weather was like, what time the race began and what happened at each stage.
The second was Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which would be more accurate? Presumably the first.
Which would tell you more about America in 1971? I'm not sure, and that distinction between accuracy and truth is where Thompson becomes genuinely interesting. We normally use the words almost interchangeably. If something is inaccurate, we assume it is less true. Literature has always known things aren't quite so simple.
A novel can invent every person and event it contains and still tell us something recognisable about jealousy, grief, class, marriage or power. Nobody finishes Anna Karenina and complains that Tolstoy failed to provide documentary evidence that Anna existed.
Journalism doesn't have that freedom. Or at least we don't normally think it does. Thompson wanders straight across the border.
The seductive idea of emotional truth
There is a phrase that should make every reader slightly nervous. Emotional truth. Writers use versions of it all the time. Perhaps the conversation didn't happen exactly like this, but this captures what was said.
Perhaps these events occurred on different days, but combining them makes the experience clearer. Perhaps this person didn't literally say those words, but they express what the person believed. Or perhaps it didn't happen this way.
But this is what it felt like. You can see the appeal. You can also see the danger. Once emotional truth becomes a defence, almost any alteration can potentially be justified in the name of a larger meaning, and suddenly Truman Capote is back in the room.
Capote versus Thompson
Capote and Thompson make an interesting pair because both blur the boundary between journalism and fiction while asking us to respond very differently.
Capote disappears from In Cold Blood. The prose has enormous authority. Scenes unfold with the confidence of a novel. We enter rooms, hear conversations and move between perspectives. The writer seems to know everything.
Then we discover that some details and scenes have been disputed. The spell changes. Thompson never creates that spell in the first place.
Raoul Duke is obviously unreliable. The prose exaggerates. Reality buckles. The journalist is not merely present but chemically, emotionally and stylistically incapable of behaving like a neutral observer.
So perhaps Thompson has discovered a strange kind of honesty. He tells us not to trust him. And because he tells us not to trust him, we begin to trust him, which is quite a trick.
The writer becomes a character
There is another consequence. Hunter S. Thompson eventually became almost impossible to separate from Hunter S. Thompson the character.
The cigarette holder. The hat. The drugs. The guns. The sunglasses. The wild behaviour. Gonzo became not merely a method of writing but a persona readers expected Thompson to perform.
Raoul Duke escaped from the page. That should make us pause too because we've spent this journey asking what writers do to other people when they turn them into material. Thompson demonstrates that writers can do it to themselves.
Create a sufficiently compelling version of yourself on the page, and eventually readers may prefer that character to the inconvenient human being who created him. The journalist becomes the story. Then the story begins consuming the journalist.
But Thompson wasn't alone in the car
Somebody else shouldn't be forgotten. Oscar Zeta Acosta. He was a lawyer, activist and writer in his own right. He travelled with Thompson and became the basis for Dr Gonzo, the enormous, volatile attorney rampaging through Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The character is unforgettable. He's brilliant, but a character is what Acosta became.
Thompson selected details. Exaggerated. Rearranged. Turned a real person into part of the Gonzo mythology. Acosta himself believed his contribution to the work deserved recognition and a share in its success, and suddenly we are somewhere familiar again.
A real person enters a writer's orbit. The writer observes them. The writer transforms them. Readers meet the transformation. And we find ourselves back here: "Writers are always selling somebody out." Didion's sentence has followed us a surprisingly long way.
Can you tell the truth by making things up?
I think Thompson's answer would be yes, and, irritatingly, I think he may sometimes be right.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is not valuable because it provides the most dependable factual account of a motorcycle race. It is valuable because Thompson found a form capable of expressing something about America that conventional reporting might have struggled to contain.
The madness is part of the argument. The unreliability is part of the argument. Even Raoul Duke is part of the argument. That doesn't mean facts cease to matter. Quite the opposite.
The moment we accept that a writer can distort reality in pursuit of a larger truth, we need to become even more interested in where the distortion occurs, why it occurs and who pays for it.
Capote taught us to be suspicious when a writer disappears. Mailer taught us that stepping aside doesn't remove the writer's choices.
Didion showed us that observation is itself a form of arrangement. Thompson does something stranger. He tells us the camera is unreliable, grabs it anyway and starts running.
And somehow the pictures still tell us something.
The person on the other side of the lens
This leaves us with another problem. Maybe Thompson can choose to turn Hunter S. Thompson into Raoul Duke, and a writer is entitled to make a character out of himself. But what about everybody else?
What about the person who sits down with the journalist because they believe the journalist understands them? What happens when trust becomes access, access becomes material and material becomes a book?
Didion told us writers are always selling somebody out. Thompson showed us how thoroughly a writer can transform reality while still producing something that feels true.
So perhaps the next question isn't whether we can trust the writer. Perhaps it is whether the person being written about ever should.
What does a writer owe the person who trusted them enough to become material?
Janet Malcolm has an answer. It isn't particularly comforting.
Recommended reading
1. Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
The obvious starting point. Read past the mythology of drugs and excess and there is a surprisingly melancholy book about the collapse of the 1960s American dream.
2. Hunter S. Thompson, The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved
The piece where Gonzo journalism really begins to take recognisable form, with Ralph Steadman's illustrations becoming part of the experience.
3. Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72
Possibly even more useful if you're interested in what Gonzo could do as political journalism. Thompson brings his prejudices openly into the reporting rather than disguising them as neutrality.
4. Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Read alongside Fear and Loathing and the connection becomes fascinating. Didion watches the promises of the counterculture fracture. Thompson writes from the bitter aftermath.
5. Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night
The bridge between the previous post and this one. Mailer turns himself into a character in his own reporting, but Thompson takes that idea somewhere much wilder.
6. Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer
Read this next. Once Thompson has made us wonder what a journalist can do with reality, Malcolm asks the nastier question: what does the journalist do to the person who supplied it?
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