Proud Highway:Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman (91 page)

Plans now are to hustle this novel, then come to New York in the fall and seek action. I'll probably send feelers to the
Times
and the
Trib
, and perhaps even CBS, although my total lack of experience in that line is not much of a lever. If I decide to try it, however, I'll surely be bugging you for possibilities. Meanwhile, the situation here continues to deteriorate in every way. We had to give the dog away to avoid eviction, but the threat is ever-present. I'm trying to finish another piece for
The Nation
to pay last month's rent. I think I had them send you my motorcycle piece. If you got it, send a comment when you have time. I liked it, but in saving so much of the “chemistry” for another (still unwritten) piece, I think it came off a bit stuffy. My idea was to do another first-person job, for more money, but thus far I haven't managed to sell anyone on the idea.

The last weekend was spent in a fog of drunken violence, as befitting my position in society. I am beginning to feel “poor” instead of just “broke,” and that's a bad sign. I suppose the only hope now is a job, and that means New York. San Francisco is worthless for moneymaking. I have found that out the hard way. The weekend before last I passed out at the wheel and ran into what they call a “bridge abutment” at 70 mph, but somehow managed to pull out of the spin without hitting anyone. The right side of the car is wiped out but the beast still moves and I have to think I was lucky beyond anything I deserve. It scared me so badly that I am still afraid to drive. [ … ]

Sandy shouts from the kitchen to be sure to tell you hello. Juan is asleep and the dog, I am told, has a good home with a game warden in the north of Sonoma County. He may have found his action; what remains is for me to find mine. Time is getting short; every midnight I feel 48 hours older. And twice as useless.

OK for now. Send a line when you get time. Hello to Petey and tell Sevareid he should go to St. Petersburg.

Hunter

Thompson had spent a week hanging around Berkeley to write “The Non-Student Left,” which appeared in
The Nation
on September 27, 1965
.

June 8, 1965
318 Parnassus
San Francisco

Dear Mr. McWilliams:

Well, here is the final non-student piece. There is no use in telling you what I think I've made of this piece because I'm sure you don't need pointers. I didn't really expect it to turn out this way, but somewhere along the way my own rationale loomed up and kept a hand in. Despite all that I think it is a good piece and maybe closer to the truth than something “objective” might be. In talking to these hustlers I had a weird feeling of
déjà vu
, intensely personal. These people have I.Q. numbers, though, and a genuine respectability that all of us has-beens lacked. I think it would be a mistake to write this off as just another bolt of sophomore idealism. There is too much continuity now. The other day when I listened to I. F. Stone at the Teach-in I wrote on my pad that he had “finally found his audience.” They cheered him like Jesus. This continuity is crucial and if it holds it can't help but be a breakthrough of some kind.

I trust I have made the point that the difference between an activist student and an activist non-student is purely non-academic. The “non” term is really a misnomer and I had some trouble explaining what I was after. And that thing about it all being a “moral, rather than political” rebellion was quickly exposed as a hopeless non sequitur. I don't know if I happened to find an unusually bright bunch or not, but that
Spider
¹⁷
crew really put me over the jumps. They're a tough lot. Dealing with them was mentally exhausting. I came back home each time and had to watch TV until my mind got a rest.

OK for now. I trust I have stressed the urgency of quick payment—based on the assumption, of course, that you are going to buy this one. If not, well … christ. But I have to allow for the possibility, so what the hell. All us non-students learn to bounce; it's one of the first tricks in the book.

HST

Upbeat about the positive response to his Hell's Angels piece in
The Nation,
Thompson felt encouraged to continue writing about the revolutionary attitude in the Bay Area
.

June 9, 1965
318 Parnassus
San Francisco

Dear Seekoff:

I have tried and failed to find your last letter, but I think you owe me one anyway. Things here are chaotic, but not all bad. I have just finished the most biased, violent and wholly political piece I've ever written. For
The Nation
. If they run it I will be clamped for all time in the black (or Red) mold of the dirty outlaw. It is a far cry from my
Observer
stuff. Enclosed is my cycle piece, which I hate to send for several reasons: 1) because it will cost so fucking much, and 2) because your comments are bound to be cheap. But in deference to your ignorance and informational deprivation, I'm sending it.

It has, by the way, drawn four letters from publishers. I am hysterical at the prospect of money and book publication, and will surely blow the whole thing, but right now it looks good. I am trying to play them off against each other, angling for immediate funds to solve my present rent crisis. Luckily, Sandy is still working and brings in the food and beer money. The big apple at the moment seems to be The Rum Diary, which I have to rewrite at least in part before any of these bastards will send me a cheque. But it is a wild feeling to have fatbellies actually seeking me out, calling McWilliams at
The Nation
who has been inundated with swine asking how to get hold of me. If I had the novel in shape right now I could knock off a $1500 advance tomorrow. But, sadly, it is not good enough to send out. The next few weeks will be a hell of long hours and steady work. I have to punch while they're digging me. [ … ]

I have spent the past two weeks doing a piece on the non-student at Berkeley. It took me into the world you recommended last year, the hard-nose radicals, etc. I found them sympathetic but not impressive. My piece is not as mean as it should be, however, and for a bunch of 22- and 23-year-old punks they are raising a good amount of hell over there. Some of them may last. I am coming around to a revised notion of this action on the Coast. It is amateurish, but hellishly persistent and not without guts. The Legislature is now organizing a full-scale investigation of Cal, to begin next year, and that should bring the roof down. I may have to stay out here until Xmas or so, just to cover the action.

As for what I said earlier about the Coast, I think it was right in that context, but I didn't realize the number of hard-nosed busters who are lurking in this area. Beyond that, the Establishment here is incredibly disorganized and bumbling. So far, the battles have all been lost, not won. But things are more open here and it is easier to get a grip. My advice now is to keep an open mind until we can talk it out. You might fare better out here but I can't say for sure. If you can work it I think you should probably check in for a few weeks in late September and get the feel of it. I can put you in touch with the people you'll feel like contacting. At least I think I can. I'm not real sure just which group you'll want to compare notes with.

I am also hooked up with
The New Republic
for a piece or two from here. I could do some stuff for the wild boys but unfortunately I have to pay my rent. As I said, the radicals can't write a fucking line. All the pros have been hired by the other side. When I read that radical stuff I suffer for them. If the fuckers could say what they really mean, without resorting to old clichés, they might be able to shake some people. As it is, the best thing to date on the “New American Left” was in the
Saturday Evening Post
. Even the Berkeley boys agree. There is no money on the Left. That is one of the basic problems. At the Berkeley “Vietnam Teach-In” the other day I finally had to leave because too many cups had been rattled under my nose. It gives the whole thing a Losers' smell.

Even so, I think we are getting some action here. Press coverage of Santo Domingo borders on anarchy and Vietnam is nearly the same. They are smoothing Johnson, hip and thigh. His hired liars are being grilled mercilessly. Mavericks are popping up in strange places.
The New York Times
for all practical purposes queered the administration's stance in the Dominican. The consensus is falling to pieces. I think you will find a different atmosphere than the one you left here. Dr. [Benjamin] Spock, for instance, is traveling around the country berating our Vietnam policy. Mailer, at Berkeley, told a crowd of 10,000 that Johnson is insane, and they cheered wildly. Strange pollen is in the air. NYU is where most of the talk is, but the action is busting out everywhere: Michigan, Yale, Mississippi, Chicago and even L.A. Things are happening, for good or ill. [ … ]

HST

TO ANGUS CAMERON, ALFRED E. KNOPF
:

The renowned editor had written Thompson to inquire whether he would be interested in writing a book on “American Loser-Outsider types.”

June 10, 1965
318 Parnassus
San Francisco

Dear Mr. Cameron:

Thanks for your good letter of June 7. There was a tone of decency about it. Besides that, getting letters from publishers is good for my morale. It makes me feel like a writer—the public kind.

As for your Loser-Outsider thing, I have plenty of ideas along that line. Some people will tell you I have an obsession. My original opening graph on the Hell's Angels piece went like this: “In a prosperous democracy that is also a society of winners and losers, any man without an equalizer or at least the illusion of one is by definition underprivileged.” My title was: “A Question of Equalizers, and Some Notes on the Anatomy of Outrage.” For some reason I haven't understood, the whole concept of “equalizers” was chopped from the piece. Unfortunately, it was my central thesis, although it seemed to get through anyway, but without my fine rhetoric.

Another publisher wrote and asked if I could do a book on “fringe types,” which sounds very much like your own idea. I replied that I could, but would need a bit of expense money to deal with it. So they asked to see my novel.

At any rate, there are more people “out of the ballgame” than anyone in New York could possibly understand. Or maybe that's unfair, but as a generality it holds up. I enclose a piece I did for the
National Observer
last year when I was a roving correspondent for them out here. Before that I was their South American correspondent for a year and a half; I am enclosing one from that era, too. Please return them. If nothing else, they should give you a sense of my drift or bent.

For six months or so I tried—with a friend at NETV in New York—to hustle up $100,000 for a film on these Boomers, Drifters, and Hard Travelers. They are wandering echoes of the Wobbly era, a weird breed to fall among. I have a working knowledge of Boomer bars all over the West, but mainly in places like Ely and Elko, Nevada; Butte, Montana; Moab, Utah; Wallace, Idaho and Auburn, California. There are plenty of other stops on the circuit. Denver is a big one; Casper, Wyoming is another, an oil town.
San Francisco is going to be big in a year or so when they start on this rapid-transit project, driving tunnels under the Bay. Gay Talese did a good piece in
Esquire
on one aspect of this thing, the Indian high-steel workers who follow the payroll from job to job.

Hell, I see where I'm headed for a six-page letter if I don't get a grip on myself real quick. I look forward to seeing Christopher Lasch's book on “the intellectual as loser.”
¹⁸
That would follow, although it might depend on his idea of an intellectual. I have recently developed an outrageous theory about the American Dream being essentially an Irish vision, challenged now by a view of reality that is basically Jewish. It has to do with Jay Gatsby and John Kennedy, the I.W.W. and the Hell's Angels, the New York syndrome, the “bogeyman factor” that dominates the press, and god only knows what else. Mike Murphy, who runs the mystic establishment down in Big Sur, tells me someone has been putting LSD in my gin.

The temptation here is to carry on, but it's late and I have to go over my novel for a few hours, then get up tomorrow and write something about abortions. I have just finished another piece for
The Nation
; it concerns the “non-student” at Berkeley. There is another Outsider for you, but this one is a new breed. The reason that Losers are so important these days is that there are so many of them, and some are only Losers by other people's definitions. The truth is that real Losers don't interest me; the thing I enjoy is the irony of an unnatural pecking order, and that sense of something about to break, for good or ill. On the other hand, I have a pretty esoteric definition of Losers. Ten years ago it was only a grudging suspicion, but now, incredibly, it is proving out. I leave you to ponder it, and to send whatever word seems fitting.

Sincerely,
Hunter S. Thompson

A letter to the editor had appeared in
The Nation
challenging Thompson's statement, in the article “Motorcycle Gangs: Losers and Outsiders,” that wild boar are aggressive
.

June 14, 1965
318 Parnassus
San Francisco

Editor,
The Nation
New York

Dear Sir:

I am always pleased to see someone defending wild boar, and especially Kay Boyle, for she has a certain eloquence. But I would rather not be pegged, even eloquently, as a man who knows nothing of these animals simply because I haven't romped with them in the forests of France and Germany.

I assume Miss Boyle is aware that Monterey County, California, where I used to live and still hunt, has either the largest or second-largest concentration of “European” or “Russian” boar in the country. The other boar community exists in the Cherokee National Forest between Tennessee and North Carolina. At a rough guess I'd say I've spent between 200 and 300 days hunting boar, and the first one I ever saw came at me so fast and suddenly that I couldn't even aim my rifle. I have also seen them tear up dogs. Monterey County is full of hunters who know how dangerous the wild boar can be.