Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967
Page 19
July 4, 1958
Time & Life Building
Rockefeller Center
New York
Dear Larry,
Well, I’ve finally managed to sit down at a typewriter: it’s been a long, hard month. It’s one that I’m going to have to write off as a total loss, work-wise, and a hellish experience, living-wise. I’ve consumed an ungodly amount of liquid spirits, given in completely to the sexual spirit, and thrown all the other spirits to hell. There are sweet little southern girls here too, but they seem to be a little different here than they are in their natural setting. I thought I was a pretty hardened lecher, but even I have paled more than once at the sight of the “sweet little ole southern (or midwestern) mask” slipping off to reveal a gin-inflamed bitch in heat. Carry me back to the womb, Daddy, just like you done with so many others!
But as Scott Fitzgerald must have said to himself more than once: “now is the time to get a grip.” I have to pay the rent with this paycheck, so my task will be that much easier. No more buying a fifth of McCarthy Square gin each night, no more damn cab races to the Plaza fountain or the East River for a morning “dip,” no more five-course dinners on the balcony, or cocktails on the roof, or all-night orgies, or theatres: in short, the squeeze is on us; the party is over—at least for two weeks. Then I’ll have money again. (Overindulgence, thy name is Hunter!)
But even though all these are pretty overt signs of galloping dissipation, they really aren’t my main source of concern. The real difference between this latest binge and all the others of the past two years is that I seem to have lost what I think is the most important thing a writer can have: the ability to live with constant loneliness and a strong sense of revulsion for the banalities of everyday socializing. It just doesn’t seem very important anymore that I write. I can understand this, I think, in light of what I call “the psychology of imposition.” This theory holds that the most overriding of all human desires is the need to amount to something. I’m not talking about the old Horatio Alger gimmick, but the more basic desire to know that your life means something. As Faulkner says, writing is his way of saying “Kilroy was here,” of imposing himself, however briefly, on reality. If only for an instant, the image of the man is imposed on the chaotic mainstream of life and it remains there forever: order out of chaos, meaning out of meaninglessness. Just as some people turn to religion to find meaning, the writer turns to his craft and tries to impose meaning, or to sift the meaning out of chaos and put it in order.
But—and here is where I’m going to try to justify my reason for not feeling the need to write—there is a school of thought (Oswald Spengler) which has classified men in one of two categories: the action men and the thought men. These are vague terms and Spengler’s were unquestionably better—but you should know what I mean, even if you don’t agree with me. So we look at people like Joyce or Proust or Pound, or for that matter, almost any of history’s best writers, and we find virtually the same personality type (of the two, anyway). But they were all people who depended on their writing to give them the meaning or the satisfaction, if you will, that they sought.
And then we have Rabelais, and Hemingway and to some extent Fitzgerald and certainly a host of others I’m not going to take the time to think about right now. Certainly the example of Hemingway should be enough.
Pause for re-location and abstract commentary of sorts … I’ve just been reading Time’s biographical file on Kingsley Amis (Lucky Jim) and the new British intellectuals. Somerset Maugham has a beautiful comment which I’m not at all surprised to have missed in many another article on the “angry young men.” He says, and I quote: “it (Lucky Jim) describes a new class, the white-collar proletariat … which does not go to the university to acquire culture, but to get a job, and when they get one, scamp it. Their idea of a celebration is to go to a public house and drink six beers. They are mean, malicious, envious … they are scum.”
Good old Maugham: it’s good to see the sledge-hammer coming down from the top for a change, instead of striking up at the belly of society from the bottom.
Of course you’re so far out of it up there that you probably don’t realize that the “beat generation” is taking over American literature, while the “angry young men” are the driving force in Britain. And although I’m neither beat nor necessarily angry, I’m glad to see somebody taking a stand for a change. It’s the first real “movement” in literature in many a year: a point of reference, if nothing else. The writing world seems at least to have settled into two very definitely opposing camps: the pedants and the hobos. Most of the best writers fit in neither camp, of course, but then very few of them ever have. A good writer stands above movements, neither a leader nor a follower, but a bright white golf ball in a fairway of wind-blown daisies. (If you’ve never played golf, you won’t understand how pleasant it is to walk down a fairway and see forty or fifty balls where yours should be—and then come a little closer and recognize the ball, a little rounder and a little whiter than the rest, and a hell of a lot more solid. The moral of this story is: Play golf!)
But I forgot that you’re Iceland’s answer to Jane Austen, so I’ll close this harangue and get back to my original thesis.
I was talking about the need to impose oneself on reality and the difference between action men and thought men. (I think that statement makes the whole thing more clear and concise than my entire first page succeeded in doing.)
But it’s obvious that the need is there and that the two categories of men have two different ways of doing it. And it seems that the ones who are either unable or unwilling to impose themselves on life through their actions are the ones who succeed most significantly in the thought (or writing, in this case) category.
Now Hemingway seems to have done it from both angles: he’s not even bothered—or possibly not been able—to create his own world in his books (à la Joyce, James, Faulkner, Proust, etc.) but he’s mastered reality and still managed to become one hell of a good writer as well. (There are others, of course, but Hemingway serves as such a good example because his life and times are so familiar as to still apply in our day.)
But Fitzgerald tried and Fitzgerald failed and Fitzgerald didn’t learn to think until it was too late. He was probably one of the great natural talents of any age and he could make a typewriter sound like a piano when he was in form, but he was not a thinker—and neither was (or is) Hemingway. And yet, they’re both—from the point of view of natural facility with the world—two of the best writers of the century, anyway.
So the difference, I think, boils down to this: you can either impose yourself on reality and then write about it, or you can impose yourself on reality by writing.
It’s time to go now: I have to go down to the Village and destroy some furniture. This is merely the first of a series of lectures on “subjects Thompson needs to get straight in his mind.” I find that writing is the best way. So until later, it’s cheerio.…
Hunter
TO KRAIG JUENGER:
Kraig had gotten a job at the Rawlings sporting goods company in St. Louis. Thompson tried to lure her to New York.
Time & Life Building
Rockefeller Center
New York
July 4, 1958
Dear Kraig,
Your letter was a real surprise; a very pleasant one, of course, but nevertheless, a real shot out of the blue. And then to find out that you’d actually written your previous letter from the Rawlings desk was almost too much. It was so typically Kraig that I had to smile.
I’d been meaning to write before this, but something has always come up to send me off after something else, usually drink. I think I’ve written about three letters during the past month; it’s been a very expensive but very pleasant binge. You’d probably be interested to know that I’m getting better and better at binges, sometimes wild and sleepless three-day things which travel from a Greenwich Village rooftop to the East River to the Biltmore and then on to the Plaza fountain
for a morning swim. And sometimes they just sit in my place and explode. That’s the good thing about orgies—you never know exactly what’s going to happen.
But today I wanted to be in St. Louis. I forgot it was the fourth of July and thought of it as just a hot and lazy midwest Sunday. I thought I’d like to drive in from Collinsville with your top down and see The Student Prince at the Muny Opera again; and then I thought I’d like to drive through Forest Park and out to the Tic Toc Tap for a tall gin-and-tonic and maybe listen to George Shearing or possibly Errol Garner. And then I decided to drive on out past Collinsville to someplace like Trenton where we could stop and sit in one of those endless fields and drink Crystal Apple Wine out of tall thin glasses while the moon sparkled on the grass and the wind made our cigarettes burn a bright orange in the dark. But it would be late by then and you’d be tired, and the dawn wind would be cold as we drove back to Collinsville. We’d keep the top down, though, and watch the sun climb out of the east and know that New York was a thousand miles and a million quiet towns behind it. Somewhere behind the sun the windows of the Empire State Building would be sparkling in the dawn and the East River would be very quiet and very silver.
But it’s all a dream and if you’re ever up at dawn look up at that sun as it comes climbing out of Indiana, and think that I may be standing out at the end of a pier in the East River and watching the sun float off over the Alleghenies to St. Louis, and wondering if you’re watching it too.
And that’s enough of daydreams.
If you remember my “meanest” letter, you’ll recall that everything I said was aimed at your conception of Madison Avenue. I merely wanted to straighten you out if you thought that’s what I’m doing in New York. Oddly enough, you took it all as a personal insult, cancelled your trip to my grotto, and told me off—all in one fell swoop. But—having an excellent sense of humor—I took it well.
I may even make it to St. Louis for a day or so sometime in the middle of August. It’s certainly not definite, but I might be able to swing it; probably for no more than one or two days, at best.
And naturally I leave my invitation open. Just let me know a little in advance.
Write and tell me what you’re going to be doing in the fall. School? Where? And what after that? And tell my clean-cut bourgeois friends at Rawlings hello for me. I think you’d better come to New York. One of us is looking at the wrong Hunter.
So until then, I remain,
the same, incorrigible,
HST
TO LARRY CALLEN:
Thompson wrote Callen in Iceland about his wildly erratic behavior at Henry Luce’s Sunday Time-Life parties. He also explained why letter writing is so cathartic.
July 14, 1958
57 Perry Street
New York City
Dear Larry,
Another soul-purge is at hand, so perhaps you’d better save this for one of those long and sunny arctic nights—it won’t make very good reading for the daylight hours when you have better things to do.
The title of this one might well be: “The Midnight Sins of HST, a Study in Alcoholic Kleptomania.”
It might surprise you to know that Henry Luce sets up a free bar for his employees every Sunday night. It then follows logically that one or more of Luce’s employees invariably gets blind scowling blabbering drunk every Sunday night. I am that employee: there are others, of course, but others of a milder temperament than mine. Another logical conclusion we could draw would seem to be that Luce’s employees would think well of him and refrain from doing strange and vicious things to or on his property. Guess again.
Last night I staggered out of the building at about one in the morning, weaving under the burden of a huge floor fan. And among other prizes, I had a dictionary of synonyms, five turkey sandwiches, and desk pen and holder, a huge ashtray, one copy of Winesburg, Ohio, and one copy of the Viking Portable Sherwood Anderson. All of this was in a monstrous box I carried on my shoulder—and all of it belonged to Luce. Had I been apprehended, I would undoubtedly have lost my job and had “fired for stealing” emblazoned on my employee’s card. Hence, no reference for future employment.
Actually, I don’t quite understand exactly why I feel so bad about all this, because it was merely another in a long chain of “Thompsonisms” which stretches in a black and unbroken line all the way back to the second or third year in my life. But as the old saying goes, “he who lives by the sword shall die by the sword,” and I have a strange premonition that a figurative death is nigh. Perhaps it’s just one of those odd psychological phenomena concerning the nature of guilt; I haven’t spent enough time with Jesus to know. Maybe I can succeed in purging my guilt by understanding it; maybe.
But it wasn’t just the pointless theft; the entire night was one of the most frightening and most typical I’ve spent in some time. It began at about five when I started drinking and ended at about five this morning when I passed out on my couch. During those twelve hours I managed to get into drunken and sarcastic arguments with several people at work, make an ass of myself with the girl I’ve been dating, spend about six dollars in cab fares, drink a fifth of scotch, fall down about five times in the Plaza fountain before the police hauled me out, come within an ace of spending the night in the tombs (jail), wake up with the occupants of an entire building at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-fifth, terrorize an apartment full of girls I know in the same building, savagely alienate the two companions who made this odyssey with me, and lose an entire day of writing in sleeping the thing off.
Taking the whole night as a sort of definitive act, it implies an approach to life which not only is characterized by, but embodies, a complete lack of organization and discipline, an all-pervading selfishness, the epitome of irresponsibility, and an absolute lack of self-control. And I don’t even want to go into what the alcoholic theft might imply; I might decide to have myself committed.
The point of all this, though, is not so much that I do these things, but that I do them and understand them and do them again. Just as surely as this kind of thing has happened before, it’s damn sure to happen again—probably next Sunday, for that matter.
Now I’ve run out of things to say. There’s obviously no sense in talking about this kind of thing … or maybe there is, at that: I find that by putting things in writing I can understand them and see them a little more objectively. And I guess that’s one of the real objectives of writing, to show things (or life) as they are, and thereby discover truth out of chaos. And now that I think on it a while, I think that the very fact that I write this letter and that I feel a need to write it shows the value of putting words in order on a piece of paper. For words are merely tools and if you use the right ones you can actually put even your life in order, if you don’t lie to yourself and use the wrong words. And I guess that is why I write as many letters as I do, because it’s the only way—outside of actually getting to work and writing fiction—I can look at life objectively. Otherwise, I’m so involved in it that I forget that the rest of the world is merely a stage setting for my life. And that’s about it for now. I don’t expect you to answer all these questions; just write occasionally and tell me how things are coming on “The Rock.”14 Until I hear from you or see you, I remain …
paradoxically,
Hunter
TO ANN FRICK:
In August 1958 Thompson hitchhiked around the country. He stopped in Tallahassee for an evening to see Ann Frick; it was the highlight of his journey.
August 29, 1958
Time & Life Building
Rockefeller Center
New York
Dear Ann,
I’ll try to keep this letter as mild and detached as possible: my last two strayed off toward two separate extremes, so I shouldn’t have much trouble going right up the middle on this one. Let us see.
I should begin, I suppose, by saying that I enjoyed last Monday night as much or more than I’ve enjoyed any date in many, many a day. I think I did an excellent
job of maintaining my composure, but to be truthful, I was absolutely astounded with almost everything that went on all night. It seems quite impossible that anyone—especially someone as conscious of change as I am—could return to a place like Tallahassee after a year’s absence and find it even better than it was in memory. Frankly, I was more than a little leery of making a return visit at all—that’s why I allowed only one day and one night of my time for Tallahassee. And now I’m sorry I couldn’t stay longer.
But perhaps it’s best that I came and left as fast as I did. It was like a night snatched out of the past, a pleasant memory materializing into reality for a few hours and then fading into the distance once again. It was the absolute reverse of what I’d expected and I’m afraid it left me a little unnerved. I don’t know whether or not you realize how difficult it usually is to recapture a memory (some people spend most of their adult lives trying to live in the past, you know), but whether you were so perfect on purpose or not, you managed to do a damned masterful job. If you were merely putting on a performance, then I suppose I should thank you: but if you did it by merely being Ann Frick, I’m afraid a simple “thank you” would hardly be the thing to say. As a matter of fact, I feel the same way now as I did that night—I don’t know exactly what to say.
What I really expected, you see, was to come down to Tallahassee and find that you were someone I didn’t even know anymore. I was pretty sure that the Ann Frick I remembered was just a pretty picture in my wallet and a few pretty memories drifting around in the back of my head. The idea that the reality would be even better than the memory never even crossed my mind. So I suppose you can see why I’m a little confused: instead of purging a bothersome memory from my mind, I’ve only succeeded in bringing it back into bright and insistent focus again. The effects of this sort of thing can easily be unfortunate. Last night, for instance, I found myself forced to sever relations with a young woman I’d been dating pretty regularly for several months. It was a savage but necessary thing to do: I just took one look at her when I got back and decided that she no longer measured up. I felt like hell about it, of course, but I really had no choice. I’ve never been very good at leading people on, especially when I have to be a bigger hypocrite with every passing day.