edison on hst
Thank you, Edison of Merely Popular, for offering words where I had none.
In the comments section of the previous post, Edison had this to say about Hunter S. Thompson:
I still vividly recall reading HST in Rolling Stone; before it got slick, before Wenner had doubts, and before most people began to (finally) question the mainstream media. Thompson showed how a journalist could tell me a story and retain personal integrity and at the same time, make me smile. So many owe him a debt of gratitude, not only for rescuing their souls, but also, I believe, for planting the seed that grew into what we read now in the best blogs. I'm sad he's gone, but oh so glad he lived.
3 Comments:
Norman Mailer had a hard time dealing with Hemingway's suicide. It was not the sort of thing one hoped Papa would do. "I wonder," he wrote, "if the deed were not more like a reconnaissance from which he did not come back." He was looking for a cure for "a death of the the most awful proportions" that he carried around inside him. He knew what this cure was: "to risk dying many a time". In this case, suggested Mailer, he was risking death by playing with the "no man's land" in the trigger of a shotgun. I don't think Mailer himself was convinced either.
My point is different. Thompson was not Hemingway, but, like Hemingway, suicide isn't "like him". It isn't true to something that we thought we had learned by reading him. For Mailer, thinking of Hemingway, suicide was not courageous enough, I suppose, so he needed (for a time) to think of it as a reconnaissance. (The last I heard, Hemingway had just undergone some medieval treatments for mental illness, which, to my mind, explains everything.)
What do we/I want to think of Thompson's suicide. That it was a dumb accident. That he was drunk. That he was screwing around with his gun. That he was putting his foot in his mouth and shooting himself in it at the same time. (Forgive it, I can't get it out of my mind.) We can't accept the simple idea that he finally took proper aim at himself and "got him" ("Shoots Self in Head", as the headline puts it), i.e., got that asshole who's been fucking up his life all these many years. We can't accept that because we thought he was a master at dealing with the complexities of Self, of dealing with them precisely as complexities, and not simple facts. You have to have figured yourself out pretty good to end it this way.
Maybe we were hoping he never would.
Wow.
Thank you for this, Thomas.
Yes. What hurts (and/or perplexes) does have to do with the fact that "we thought he was a master at dealing with the complexities of Self".
As for him finally having figured himself out, I don't know. Maybe I hold a naive view of suicide, but I guess I can see it happening for two reasons: 1) fear of unbearable suffering that outweighs fear of death; or 2) a kind of eclipse of the self (and not a revelation or clarification of it). Am I just taking the easy, more palatable, way out? I don't know. I hope not. There's a part of me which just can't make sense of the notion of a self that could, lucidly, decide to bring its life to an end (save for the first reason). It seems like a contradiction in terms . . .
Well, yes, we hope he hadn't achieved a clear sense of himself when he died. My point is that if a suicide is not accidental then it goes along with a pretty clear sense of purpose at the decisive moment. We'd agree, I think, that this sense is in fact an illusion. And my point is that it was precisely Thompson's greatness to show us that we could live without such illusions. His suicide suggests that maybe he/we can't pull it off after all. Which is why I propose some alternatives, knowing that I'm probably doing something a bit like Mailer, for which there's no need because an explanation that has very little to do with the writing probably exists. If for example, Thompson turns out to have been suffering from some terminal painful disease (like Deleuze) or even clinical depression (like Hemingway?) the fact that his death is at odds with his work is much less disturbing.
Note, however, that while a solution like that may always exists, the problem doesn't arise for all literary suicides. Sylvia Plath's suicide, for example, is not "at odds" with her work in the way the Hemingway's or Thompson's is. At least not for me.
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