The Truth about Hunter S. Thompson, Writer

My thanks to Beck here for pointing the way to Colby Cosh's insight into Hunter Thompson, the writer. I'm not generally a reader of Cosh, so I would have missed this:

Utterly unsuited to any work but the creation of English sentences, HST was a true graduate of the school of crap-or-bust; if he hadn't gotten a passing grade, he'd have turned up stone dead on a beach, of literal starvation, forty years ago. Anyone who falls for the mythology--the image of the slouching, bleary-eyed addict desperately force-feeding hand-scrawled notes into the maw of a primitive fax machine--deserves the swift, sharp crack on the skull that's coming to him.

That's precisely why I got on Peggy Noonan's case for her precious hit job on Thompson at the Wall Street Journal just a few days after Tom Wolfe had handed Thompson a high spot in American letters. I sent this comment off to the WSJ, which did not post it:

Peggy Noonan makes a mistake by attempting on these same pages to upstage Tom Wolfe on the matter of Hunter S. Thompson. Wolfe, as a preeminent man of American letters, has the standing to judge Thompson's work and should not be so blithely accused by Noonan of being merely a "chauvinist" for his era. There are plenty of writers from Wolfe's era whom he has taken down, and hard. Thompson was not the sort of journalist who moved about his subject as if by ricksha. His vehicle was a style that roared along his beat at top speed like a Corvette. It's not surprising that he offended more genteel sensibilities. His death by self-inflicted gunshot is not an occasion for "compassion," as Noonan suggests. When writers die it is their work that steps forward. Tom Wolfe gave Hunter his due, and Peggy Noonan has no business trying to snatch it back.