A Colossal Wreck (43 page)

Thus, in one stroke, the Trotskyite tourist for
The New Yorker
combines the Nazi view of Marxism as a peculiarly “Jewish” philosophy, the Bourbons’ contempt for the masses as wild animals, and the hoary capitalist warning that we must not “let down the bars” to the working class.

This leads up to the inevitability-of-war thesis. Wilson goes a step further than your run-of-the-mill warmonger. Not only can’t we get along with the Soviet leaders, but Americans “will never be able to cooperate as peoples” with the Russians. It is “ridiculous,” says Wilson, to think of the Russian people today as “civilized.”

Wilson, borrowing a cue from De Gaulle’s Malraux, evidently aspires to be a braintruster of the fascist forces. It is not only moral and intellectual rottenness that we find in his book, but the savagery of desperation.

One might have thought that Boards of Breeding would not have been on Wilson’s shopping list, only two years after the defeat of Nazism, but eugenic selection—ardently backed by American liberals from the start—was big in the late 1940s. In 1949 Garrett Hardin was writing about America’s declining IQ in his biology textbook. Malthus is never far away, nor the sterilizer’s toolkit, intellectual and physical.

February 8

Further memories of a Russian Hero. England in the late 1940s was famously grim. As I remember it, London back then was a very dirty place, from coal dust and smoke, from the grit stirred up every day by the jackhammers still clearing out rubble from the Blitz.

No one had any money. Fun for millions was the weekly flutter on racehorses or football teams. “Is the Middle Class Doomed?” asked
Picture Post
in 1949, and answered its question in the affirmative. Labour’s National Health Service opened for business on July 5, 1948, and the great race for drugs, false teeth and spectacles was under way. Spending on prescriptions went from £13 million to £41 million
in two years, prompting Rep. Paul Ryan’s ideological predecessors to howl that the NHS was on the edge of collapse.

My father was edging his way tactfully out of the Communist Party, though he was still spending time at the
Daily Worker
. More than my father’s articles in the
Worker
, the NHS helped the masses see more clearly. Hundreds of thousands of poor people previously had recourse only to prescriptionless specs from the tray in Woolworths. Now they perched on their noses prescription lenses in the 422 Panto Oval frame, as did I, though it took John Lennon, fifteen years down the road, to endow it with retro-chic.

At the
Daily Worker
, with or without prescription spectacles, there wasn’t much sign of the fabled millions in Moscow gold supposedly sent by Stalin to foment revolution. In practical terms the most important fellow in the office was a scholarly looking Burmese man who toiled away behind a vast pile of books and manuals. My father reckoned he was set to turn in a particularly meaty series on Burma’s prospects after independence, won in 1948 from British colonial rule. In fact he was the
Worker
’s racing correspondent, working up forms for the coming season.

The Burman was red-hot as a tipster and soon had a wide following. Once my father found the
Worker
’s manager half-dead from apprehension. He’d put the entire office Friday wage packet on a pick by the Burman, in the hope of getting the comrades something decent to take home to their wives. “Should that animal fail,” he said, trembling, “the lads’ll about kill me.” But the tipster came through, and that week everyone got full pay and even some arrears.

The biggest day in the National Hunt Steeplechase in England is the Grand National, run at Aintree, outside Liverpool, typically in April; four miles, 856 yards, thirty fences, often lethal to horses and devastating to jockeys. In 1928 the winner, Tipperary Tim, ridden by Billy Dutton and carrying odds of 100 to one, was the only horse out of a starting field of forty-two that didn’t fall.

Later, in Ireland, my mother bred horses. My father never cared for them, but he was pretty good at studying form and picking the odd winner, which was just as well because freelance earnings were scrawny, particularly if you were a well-known red.

But when it came to Grand National day, March 26, 1949, no laborious toil over the form sheets was necessary. Among the scheduled starters that year was a horse called Russian Hero. Although the cold war was limbering up, Russians were still heroes to many. Not just members of the CPGB but a wider swath of punters in the union movement would be likely to plump for a horse carrying that name, if only as a side bet in honor of Stalingrad, the siege of Leningrad, the Kursk salient.

One of the jockeys riding that day was young Dick Francis, later the immensely popular author of a long string of racing thrillers. Francis was on a great but temperamental horse called Roimond. In the last mile he took the lead. With only eleven horses still in the race, he was set for victory. Then, just short of the finishing line, Roimond got passed by a horse going so fast Francis knew he had no chance to catch up. It was Russian Hero, ridden by Leo McMorrow, carrying starting odds of sixty-six to one. Russian Hero beat Roimond by eight lengths.

As the BBC man calling the race screamed out the finale, my father—who was no longer a party member but who’d staked his well-frayed shirt on Russian Hero—loosed a triumphant roar. So, across Britain, did all readers of the
Daily Worker
following the advice of the Burmese tipster, who’d picked Russian Hero, no doubt partly through rigorous assessment of the horse’s genetic profile—contrary though this Mendelian posture was to the doctrines of Lysenko, riding high in Stalin’s esteem.

It was by far the largest collective transfer of wealth ever to Communism’s stalwarts in Britain. Around that time the party probably had around 50,000 members, and even a wagered half-crown looked pretty good when multiplied by sixty-six.

Dick Francis took second in 1949. Seven years later, a champion jockey in his eighth Grand National, he rode Devon Loch, owned by Elizabeth the Queen Mother. Francis was ten lengths clear, less than fifty yards from winning, when Devon Loch suddenly went down on his belly, tearing muscles in the process. It’s one of horse racing’s great mysteries, though Francis thinks it was a sudden wave of noise from the crowd that spooked his horse. “That’s racing,” the Queen Mother said stoically to Francis.

The event got Francis a contract to write a memoir. He retired from the track and took up a hugely successful life of crime writing. But “given the choice,” he says, “I’d take winning the National every time. I was a jockey first, writer second. It’s good having a book well received, but it doesn’t compare to winning a race.”

February 25

I guess I can call myself one of the Dylan generation since, at sixty-three, I’m the same age as him, but the prose stylists that allured an Anglo-Irish lad hopelessly strapped into the corsets of Latinate gentility were always those of American rough-housers: first, in the mid-’50s, Jack Kerouac, then Edward Abbey, then Hunter Thompson.

Thank God I never tried to imitate any of them. Thompson probably spawned more bad prose than anyone since Hemingway, but they all taught me that at its most rapturous, its most outraged, its most exultant, American prose can let go and teach you to let go, to embrace the vastness, the richness, the beauty and the grotesqueries of America in all its thousand landscapes.

I tried to re-read Kerouac’s
On the Road
a few years ago and put it down soon enough. That’s a book for excited teenagers. Abbey at full stretch remains a great writer and he’ll stay in the pantheon for all time. Lately sitting in motels along the highway I’ve been dipping into his diaries,
Confessions of a Barbarian
, and laughing every couple of pages. “Writing for the
National Geographic
,” Abbey grumbled, “is like trying to masturbate in ski mitts.”

Could Thompson have written that? Probably not. When it came to sex and the stimulation of the synapses by agents other than drugs or booze or violent imagery Thompson was silent, unlike Abbey who loved women. Thompson wrote for the guys, at a pitch so frenzied, so over-the-top in its hyperbolic momentum that often enough it reminded me of the squeakier variant of the same style developed by his
Herald-Trib
stable mate and exponent of the “New Journalism,” Tom Wolfe. In their respective stylistic uniforms they always seemed hysterically frightened of normalcy, particularly in the shape of girls, so keenly appreciated by Abbey.

Thompson’s best writing was always in the form of flourishes, of pell-mell bluster wrenched from himself for the anxious editors waiting well past deadline at
Scanlans
or
Rolling Stone
, and in his later years often put together from his jottings by the writers and editors aware that a new
Fear and Loathing
on the masthead was a sure-fire multiplier of newstand sales. Overall, Thompson’s political perceptions weren’t that interesting except for occasional bitter flashes, as in this sour and prescient paragraph written in 1972: “How many more of these goddam elections are we going to have to write off as lame but ‘regrettably necessary’ holding actions? And how many more of these stinking double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me at least the 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote for something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils? I understand, along with a lot of other people, that the big thing, this year, is Beating Nixon. But that was also the big thing, as I recall, twelve years ago in 1960—and as far as I can tell, we’ve gone from bad to worse to rotten since then, and the outlook is for more of the same.”

There’s nothing much to the notion of “Gonzo” beyond the delighted projections of Thompson’s readers. The introduction of the reporter as roistering first-person narrator? Mark Twain surely did that, albeit sedately, and less sedately we had Henry Miller, another man who loved women. Which of the road books will last longest between Miller’s
American Nightmare, On the Road
and
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
? Kerouac and then Thompson drove faster but they didn’t write better. Norman Mailer took the form to the level of genius in
Advertisements for Myself
, with political perceptions acuter and writing sharper by far than anything Thompson ever produced.

“Gonzo” was an act, defined by its beholders, the thought that here was one of Us, fried on drugs, hanging on to the cliff edge of reality only by his fingernails, doing hyperbolic battle with the pomposities and corruptions of Politics as Usual. And no man was ever a more willing captive of the Gonzo myth he created, decked out
in its increasingly frayed bunting of “Fear and Loathing …” “The Strange and Terrible …,” decorated with Ralph Steadman’s graphic counterpoints.

Like Evel Knievel, Thompson’s stunts demanded that he arc higher and further with each successive sentence’s outrage to propriety, most memorably in his obit for Richard Nixon: “If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.”

Kerouac ended sadly at forty-seven. As Abbey nastily put it, “Jack Kerouac, like a sick refrigerator, worked too hard at keeping cool and died on his mama’s lap from alcohol and infantilism.” Abbey himself passed gloriously at sixty-two, carried from the hospital by his pals to die at his own pace without tubes dripping brief reprieves into his veins, then buried in the desert without the sanction of the state.

How about Thompson? His Boston lawyer George Tobia Jr. told the
Globe
the sixty-seven-year-old author sat in his kitchen Sunday afternoon in his home in Woody Creek, Colo., stuck a .45-caliber handgun in his mouth, and killed himself while his wife listened on the phone and his son and daughter-in-law were in another room of his house. His wife had no idea what had happened until she returned home later.

Seems creepy to me, same way Gary Webb blowing his brains out a while back with a handgun was creepy. Why give the loved ones that as a souvenir? I suppose Thompson’s message was: We were together at the end. Webb was truly alone. He lifted the curtain on one little sideshow of the American Empire, and could never quite fathom that when you do that The Man doesn’t forget or forgive. Thompson engaged the Empire on his own terms and quit the battlefield on his own terms too, which I guess is what Gonzo is all about.

March 6

Relentlessly, the increased hours Americans have to work, just to squeeze by, is sapping their will to live any sort of pleasant life, at least in terms of the way “pleasant” was parsed half a century ago.

My neighbor Joe Paff says his older brother Bill worked for McDonald Douglas in the 1960s as a blue-collar line inspector, had a $19,000 house in Anaheim, two bedrooms, swimming pool, hardwood floors, new car every year or so, boat and trailer, and time to enjoy them.

There were millions like Bill and his wife. Back then, when the incomes of ordinary working people reached their apex, the average family lived in an affordable house with a couple of late-model cars at reasonable insurance rates. Their kids could go to college either for free or cheaply. The man worked reasonable hours and could even look forward to a decent pension instead of having it looted by Bernie Ebbers. The woman didn’t have to work prodigious hours at two thirds of the man’s rate of pay so that they could meet the mortgage payments. They might have a little hideaway in the country. They were not so exhausted that they fell asleep over their supper. They stayed up night after night to watch Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show,” having already enjoyed light-hearted commentary on their happy condition from Jackie Gleeson. The whining racism of Archie Bunker was still ahead, in the 1970s, when the fortunes of the white working class began to dip.