Proud Highway:Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman Read Free Page B

that he would become the F. Scott Fitzgerald of his generation, Thompson lugged his bulging correspondence around with him in trunks, believing that someday it would be his nest egg. “I’ve just been reading over two letters I sent you in Iceland,” Thompson wrote his Air Force buddy Larry Callen in 1959. “Perhaps I’ll try to publish my collected letters before, instead of after, I make history.”
    Taken as a whole, the early letters reveal a brilliant craftsman who, as a teenage hoodlum, developed a nonconformist philosophy like that of his favorite heroes in Ayn Rand’s
The Fountainhead
, J. D. Salinger’s
Catcher in the Rye,
Herman Hesse’s
Siddhartha,
or Somerset Maugham’s
The Razor’s Edge,
always marching to the beat of his own drum, a voice without restraint. “I’m afraid of nothing and want nothing,” he wrote a girlfriend in 1958. “I wait like a psychopath in a game of dodge-ball, breathing quickly while the fools decide which one will throw at me next, and jumping aside for no reason except that I like being in the middle.” It is clear from the letters that Thompson deliberately cultivated himself as the American Adam, a figure defined by critic R.W.B. Lewis as “an individual standing alone, self-reliant and self-propelling, ready to confront whatever awaited him with the aid of his own unique and inherent resources.” 1 Thewriters Thompson most admired in his twenties—Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, Henry Miller—were not part of a literary movement or elite club but were their own traveling salons. “A good writer stands above movements,” Thompson wrote, “neither a leader or a follower, but a bright white golfball in a fairway of windblown daisies.” It was no accident that Thompson moved to Big Sur in 1960—he wanted to be near Miller, whose iconoclastic forthrightness he admired above all others.
    One constant theme of
The Proud Highway
is Thompson’s contempt for the mainstream press, he saw its members as sycophantic mouthpieces for the Rotary Club, the U. S. government, and the Eastern establishment. He preferred the subjective journalism of H. L. Mencken, Ambrose Bierce, John Reed, and I. F. Stone over all
The New York Times
’s supposedly objective journalists combined. After being fired from the Middletown (New York)
Daily Record
in 1959 for kicking a candy machine, Thompson wrote what might be considered his all-purpose motto. “I damn well intend to keep on living the way I think I should.” And in that same note he also expressed two cardinal rules for aspiring writers. “First, never hesitate to use force, and second, abuse your credit for all its worth. If you remember these, and if you can keep your wits about you, there’s a chance you’ll make it.”
    It is difficult to know precisely when the so-called new journalism began Certainly the 1965–1966 period covered in
The Proud Highway
demonstrates that the new journalism was being promulgated by a number of bold writers and developing a large and appreciative audience. While Gay Talese, Jimmy Breslin, Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, and Terry Southern—all prominent acquaintances of Thompson’s—have pointed to
Esquire
and the New York
Herald Tribune
as the breeding ground for the new journalism, Thompson—who prefers the phrase “impressionistic journalism”—doesn’t buy this parochial version of the phenomenon Long before George Plimpton picked up a football and wrote
The Paper Lion,
Thompson marveled at how Ernest Hemingway, Stephen Crane, and Mark Twain had combined the techniques of fiction and reportage while emphasizing the virtues of authorial involvement in describing newsworthy events.
    As I read through Thompson’s correspondence and notebooks from the early 1960s, it became clear that George Orwell’s firsthand account of the Spanish Civil War