Hunter S. Thompson - madman or mythomaniac?

By PETER CONRAD

Hunter S. Thompson learnt how to write while straddling a motorbike among a pack of cursing, grunting, vroom-vrooming Hell's Angels.

For him, writing is an engine, trampling or noisily obliterating all resistance; style is speed, fuelled by amphetamines and hallucinogens not gasoline.

He writes, as the Angels rode, to ventilate what he calls, in this second volume of his collected letters, a "killing rage - a savage hatred of the venal politicians, thuggish police and crass commercial developers" who during these years in his view transformed America into a fascist state.

In 1975, sent to Vietnam by Rolling Stone to gloat over the withdrawal of American troops, Thompson wrote an uncharacteristically deferential letter to a Vietcong official, requesting an interview. He apologised for his typing, but assured the colonel that, "I am one of the best writers currently using the English language as both a musical instrument and a political weapon."

It was sweetly naive of him to imagine that military despots value such credentials; nevertheless, his self-assessment was just.

The music made by the language, in his use of it, resembles the percussive iteration of gunfire, or the fulmination of an exploding grenade. From inside his fortified bunker in Colorado, with his pet Dobermans slavering at the perimeter, he fires off missives as if they were missiles. Admiring a moonlit sky above the Rockies, he gives himself over to an inimitably American spasm of romantic sublimity: the Milky Way is so clear and close that "a madman with good reflexes could shoot the stars out of the sky, one by one, with a .264 Magnum."

Thompson's electric typewriter sounds like a machine-gun, and serves much the same purpose. Writing to an editor at Random House, he shows off a row of inky column-breakers, which look like bullet-holes on the page.

Thompson has his own fond equivalents to the endearments which are customary in letters. He greets Tom Wolfe as a "worthless scumsucking bastard" and a "decadent pig". Has there been anything so inventively foul-mouthed since the Montagu and Capulet gangs abused each other in Romeo and Juliet?

This rabid, lethal anger is of course the cover for a thwarted love; Thompson fears and loathes America because it has disappointed him, betraying its initial ideals.

During the decade traversed in this volume, he is planning a book (never completed, though he regularly invoiced the patient publisher for expenses) called The Death of the American Dream, which would show how a peaceful agrarian society had grown into a belligerent empire, renamed Amerika by Thompson.

That 'king-bitch stud' John Wayne would now, Thompson argues, "be proud to pistol-whip a radical punk like Thomas Jefferson" and beat him into a "bloody, screaming hamburger".

Thompson's vilifies those who killed the dream - the "criminal geek" Nixon; the "babbling, pus-filled nightmare" Spiro Agnew, "that bone-head ward-heeler" Gerald Ford with his skull like a "rotten pear". At the same time he sets out to renovate politics by presenting himself as a candidate for public office.

Mobilising what he calls Freak Power, he campaigns to become mayor of Aspen, and in 1976 makes a trial run for the presidency. (Jimmy Carter, who was elected that year, jokily deferred to him. He said he thought of withdrawing from the contest in Thompson's favour, then wondered if he might be bought off with "the higher office of sheriff", which would enable him to do more shooting. Between volleys of rhetorical fire-power, Thompson lobbies the same elected officials, hoping for a sinecure.

He wanted to be made governor of American Samoa, "the last Jeffersonian frontier", and in selling the notion to Senator George McGovern (a presidential candidate in 1972) he quotes The Great Gatsby, that earlier elegy for a polluted dream.

This offshore America in the Pacific would be his "fresh green breast of the new world".

Finally he decides, realising that Fitzgerald has written his intended book for him, that "the saga of Richard Nixon is the death of the American Dream. He was our Gatsby, but the light on the end of his pier was black instead of green ... " Fitzgerald's narrator Nick Carraway goes back to the Midwest at the end of the novel; Thompson, moving further west for safety's sake, retreats to a "goddam soundproof dungeon" atop the isolating mountains.

Though Thompson represents himself as a madman, he is in fact a mythomaniac, in whose imagination national dreams and nightmares do lurid battle. At the end of the book, he proudly recalls his career as a juvenile delinquent in Louisville, Kentucky. His great triumph was to steal a case of beer and then throw all 24 unopened bottles through the windows of the house owned by a petty bureaucrat who'd had him expelled from school.

Like all Western heroes, Thompson is a fuming conscience armed with a gun - or rather with a keyboard.

* Fear and Loathing in America by Hunter S. Thompson, Bloomsbury, $75.