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Cult Choice
Toby Litt

One of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists, Toby Litt, author of Corpsing, deadkidsongs, Exhibitionism, Finding Myself and Ghost Story brings us a monthly selection on cult literature.

This month features Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas starts off a few notes lower, but climbs up high 'C' within the first paragraph:

'We are somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs begin to take hold...'

From this point on, the reader can be absolutely sure, there will be no turning back.

'And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas.'

But it's another poet, an American, who most anticipates what you might call the climate of Hunter.

'I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,...'

Alan Ginsberg's 'HOWL' throws you straight in there, and gives you the only adjective that seems to adhere: hysterical.

This is the tone throughout Fear and Loathing... - hysterical. It's also macho, folksy, wacked, wired. But mainly it's hysterical - like Woody Allen on steroids.

If your ears can't stand it at the beginning, you have no hope of staying with the book's later ascent into the shrill upper registers of feedback. We are heading towards extreme noise terror.

It is 'this foul year of Our Lord, 1971', the 'doomstruck era of Nixon', and Hunter S. Thompson, Doctor of Journalism, aka Raoul Duke, aka Doctor Gonzo, is on his way to report on the fabulous Mint 400 - 'the richest off-the-road race for motorcycles and dune-buggies in the history of organized sport'. Alongside him is a 300-pound Samoan who, for what we can only assume are legal reasons, will only ever be referred to as 'my attorney'.

Welcome to the world of Gonzo Journalism.

Looking back on the book, in some unused 'Jacket Copy' subsequently published in The Great Shark Hunt, Thompson explained: 'It is a style of 'reporting' based on William Faulkner's idea that the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism...' But he adds: 'I should cut back and explain at this point, that Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas is a failed experiment in Gonzo Journalism. My idea was to buy a fat notebook and record the whole thing, as it happened, then send in the notebook for publication - without editing.'

This is the American Dream of American writing - the same dream that Ginsberg was chasing when he said, 'First thought, best thought', the same dream that Kerouac felt he'd sold out when he allowed On the Road to be taken from its original single paragraph form (sparsely punctuated, true, pure, etc.) and edited.

How can these two things - hysteria and editing - be brought together? Well, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the answer. As pure Gonzo Journalism, it may be a failure - but this is a failure most readers will be grateful for.

The talent of the book is in its hysteria, but the genius of the book is in its editing. Chronology is grossly insulted - with important episodes often appearing only as disbelieving flashbacks.

(Ralph Steadman's illustrations add to this dislocation; almost never do they appear on the page to which they are referring. The reader thinks, mercifully, that they've left some scene of degradation behind and - splat - there it is, halfway through what had seemed like respite.)

Cause and effect are entirely separated: reward is received for outrage, virtue entails punishment.

And, as writing, it almost all miraculously works. (Perhaps the least successful passage in the book, 'Breakdown on Paradise Blvd' is, tellingly, a supposed verbatim transcription of one of Dr. Duke's tapes.)

Here, finally, is the good Doctor's prescription: 'Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only real cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas.'

previously... on cult choice
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