First off, can you tell us a little about yourself?
My name is David Wright, and I'm a librarian with the Reader Services Department at The Seattle Public Library.
When was the first time you read Fear and Loathing?
Back in the mid 1980s, when I was a much younger man. I just read it again – thank you so much for the excuse - and was really pleased by how well it held up. I’d been a little worried that it wouldn’t turn out to be as good as I’d remembered it; it was better. Only it didn’t seem to be about Reagan’s America anymore, like it clearly was the first time I read it. As of course it wasn’t.
This novel is a great example of experimental literature, what with the chaotic, drug induced scenes and characters. Upon your first read, did it change your opinion about literature and the way that books are written?
I had already read Naked Lunch at that time, so Fear & Loathing was a little late to that particular party, but it probably would have otherwise. (Actually, come to think of it, when I was just a kid I had tiptoed into my dad’s copies of all sort of things I shouldn’t oughta have been reading – Carlos Castaneda, “Soul on Ice” by Eldridge Cleaver, Tom Robbins when he was brand new, Terry Southern – so I had pretty freaky associations about “grown up literature” by then anyway).
As a cultural historian/theorist, what seminal authors and texts laid the groundwork for this, the New Journalist era of literature?
Yikes – I’m not a cultural historian – just a librarian and lover of books – but I can tell you what it reminds me of. I almost feel like “Fear & Loathing” doesn’t even really fit w/ New Journalism. “Hell's Angels” (Thompson’s first book) does, and the pieces in “Great Shark Hunt” do, and to that extent I see Thompson as really coming out of Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer’s “Armies of the Night.” (And looking ahead to his heirs, P.J. O’Rourke, or this guy I love named Mark Sundeen...) But “Fear & Loathing” feels like it has turned into a different kind of book altogether – it seems unfair to the book and to journalism to even link them at all. Rather it feels like something that came by way of Kerouac and other Beats, and going further back out of Henry Miller and Andre Gide. And further still, form Rimbaud. These – not just trickster’s tales, but transgressor’s tales. I can’t help but think of “On the Road” and “Fear & Loathing” as bookends to something – the sixties, I guess – and so much better and more compelling than a lot of the stuff that came in between. But what a difference between the two; how that beatific angel has fallen. Glib, but Kerouac is to Thompson as is the ‘67 Monterey Pop Festival to the Stones at Altamont speedway.
Also I think Hemingway gets a piece of the credit – certainly for Thompson’s work, as he was a big fan, and it really shows in the writing, which is a lot cleaner and more direct than it might at first seem. He’s really a very direct, no nonsense writer, and at least some of that rubbed off from Hemingway, who did his own kind of proto-New Journalism, didn’t he? I think a lot of Thompsons forcefulness and gravity is probably Hemingway’s influence. Maybe the guns, too.
This book is often the stepping stone for many readers that have refrained from popular literature up until the point of reading it. What do you think about the cult following that now surrounds Thompson's life and works?
I remember that it made a huge impression on me when I first read it, and I wasn't a stoner or anything. I don’t have anything revelatory to say about the book – it hardly needs explication, being one of the most straightforward pieces of writing I’ve ever read – but it has always struck me as one of those rite-of-passage kinds of books, and I think that is a source of a lot of its power.
For example, you take another cult book like “Catcher in the Rye,” which just absolutely nails that moment that so many of us go through (I hope) where the people and authority that we’ve grown up revering as children suddenly become fallible. Our childish certainties come crashing down, and everything seems like a sham, a betrayal. Salinger nails that part of growing up. Some readers who don’t read that book until later in life wonder what the big deal is, but you just can’t argue with that kind of emotional truth.
Thompson captures like nobody else I know the intense, surreal experience that I’m sure almost everyone has had at one time or another, of getting well and truly high and losing control. Of stepping miraculously, terrifyingly outside the social masks and shackles we wear each day. On whatever – on punch, warm beer, it doesn’t matter what – but that giddy dangerous paranoid wild leap out of our everyday selves into abandon – Thompson just nails that particular rite of passage. And even readers who have never experienced that for themselves read Thompson just for that contact high.
Under that, there’s this disturbing, graduate level version of Holden Caulfield’s disillusionment. Not just that the adult world is seedy and shameful, but that the whole American way of life is lost, is monstrous and insane. It may be that not everyone agrees with the enormity of that vision, but most of us have it, at least in flashes. In the shopping mall. On the freeway. And oh my god, in Las Vegas! I was recently in Las Vegas, and walking the strip (sober) really freaked me out pretty bad. It's a nightmare.
This is also one of those books that you can judge people by. By which I mean to say if I met someone who disapproved of this book, I don’t think I’d want to put a lot of energy into trying to be their friend.
Do you think that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas can be described as a "timeless piece"? Or do you think that it solely has generational appeal? Why?
I suppose it will need some footnotes in a century or two - Spiro Agnew, nitrous oxide - but I really do believe it stands up very well – much better than a lot of other zeitgeist-y writing from back then – The Crying of Lot 49, say. Because the writing, as baroque and mad as it seems, is really forceful and compelling and true. Its damn good writing, to coin a phrase. And has such tremendous momentum – it is a pleasure to read, and very hard to put down, which is pretty good given that it is essentially plotless. Classic status is such a weird, corrupted and subjective concept that I don’t want to get into it, but I would say for anyone who wants to read all the important American books, this had better be on their list. It is a great book, upper or lowercase.
I just bought the Modern Library hardcover, which feels a little weird to read – I guess I always thought of this as a dogeared paperback – though I am tickled to think that Thompson is now that much in The Canon. Fired out of one cannon and into another.
It has been said that modern literature is becoming predominately autobiographical. Do you feel that Thompson's autobiographical works have influenced our recent fixation on estranged and fascinating stories about other people's lives?
You mean, like “misery lit?” I don’t really see it, because the most popular confessional literature is pretty uninflected stuff. Hear my testimony: the hell I've lived. Though there are some inventive confessional folks who seem influenced by Thompson – Nick Flynn’s “Another Bullshit Night in Suck City,” for instance, or Augusten Burroughs. But I don’t know if I even agree with that particular “it has been said,” honestly. We’re in kind of a golden age of fantasy and the surreal right now, with people flocking to stories of vampires and zombies – even serious literary novels about zombies, which, Corson Whitehead’s “Zone One” is awesome. Fabulism, slipstream, steampunk, it is pretty wild out there - so it all balances out.
Do you believe that Thompson was proselytizing his version of the American Dream in his novels? Do you think his version of freedom has been acclimated into society today? What other literary topics, in your opinion, did Thompson contribute to and help proliferate?
You know I never felt that Thompson was pushing any particular lifestyle or anything, or that his journey is seen as some sort of freedom. I guess that’s a difference I’d draw between him and Kerouac, who does seem to want to win converts to his way of seeing and being. Thompson feels more like Dante to me – here’s the trip I took, it isn’t pretty, it isn't even sane, but it IS the truth of things, so hang on. Less a version than a vision. And also really just an adventure, in the end. Nightmarish, surreal, caustic, but an adventure.
9) If you had any questions for the late Hunter S. Thompson, what would you ask?
“Is that thing loaded?”
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