I don’t think much good would come of another visit to Tallahassee, for I don’t think you’re going to make much progress toward my point of view. Not for a few years, anyway. (And by the way: did you ever read Lie Down in Darkness by William Styron?) I’m in the unfortunate position, however, of being enough in love with a part of you that I can overlook the rest. This is doubly unfortunate because of the fact that I realize it. I don’t even have any illusions, and sometimes I miss those more than anything else.
As for your point of view, I don’t really know what it is about me that attracts (or attracted) you, but I’m not foolish enough to think it’s based on anything but illusion. It pleases me, now and then, to think that you understand yourself better than I think you do. And every time I think that, one of your letters comes along to convince me I’m wrong.
Perhaps, in spite of all this, I will get down that way sometime this summer. I don’t know exactly how, or why, but anything can happen if you push hard enough, and I may decide to push. It would be useless, but pleasant. We shall see.
If you think I’ve been wrong in some of the things I’ve said here, by all means let me know. This is one case where it doesn’t make me happy to be right.
Love, Hunter
TO ED FANCHER, THE VILLAGE VOICE:
Another early gonzo news release. Thompson was poking fun at Cuddebackville’s city fathers, anti-Communist patriots and proud of it.
June 12, 1959
Cuddebackville
New York
Ed Fancher
Village Voice
22 Greenwich Ave.
New York City
Sir,
Thought you might like a Cuddebackville correspondent. See enclosed sample. Since I’ve been unemployed for several months, I don’t have much to lose by flogging the government. It’s all good, clean fun, anyway.
Generously,
HUNTER S. THOMPSON
PRESS RELEASE #1 OF THE CUDDEBACKVILLE, NEW YORK, CITIZENS LEAGUE
CUDDEBACKVILLE, NEW YORK (June 12)—All organizations except the American Legion were banned in this lovely little mountain burg today, as the reaction to the Supreme Court’s Barrenblatt decision swept through these hills like a tormented hurricane. Immediately after the ban was announced, twenty-seven members of the local 4-H Club received the bastinado on the village green.
The newly elected Burgerchief, a forty-seven-year-old rummy with the unlikely name of Benito Kampf, stood on a gas pump in the center of town today, and told a baffled gathering of the burg’s ninety-one citizens that “the pinkos are about to get what’s comin’ to ’em!” Kampf’s thundering oration was punctuated by bloodthirsty screams and hoarse shouts of “kill them pinkos!” from a black-shirted band of Legionnaires who stood in a half-circle behind him. The Legionnaires had roused the citizens out of bed at four in the morning with cane whips and cold water.
The twenty-seven 4-H Clubbers were given the bastinado several hours later. They had protested Kampf’s decree that they purchase and eat, within one week, all the surplus eggs produced by local chickenfarmers during the past two months.
The local school-teacher took the bastinado with the agricultural group. She had protested Kampf’s decision to oversee the school’s curriculum for the coming year. Later in the day she was flogged again when a copy of The Reporter magazine was found in her home.
“The pinkos are on the run,” said Kampf in a latenight interview. “I have nothing to fear, but fear itself.”
TO ROBERT D. BALLOU, VIKING PRESS:
Thompson had sent a query about his novel, “Prince Jellyfish,” to Ballou at Viking Press. The editor, in what reads like a form letter, invited him to submit the manuscript.
June 17, 1959
Cuddebackville
New York
Sir,
Many thanks for your prompt reply to my letter concerning unsolicited manuscripts, capital gains, and such. For some reason, your letter made me feel more like a writer and less like an unemployed journalist. And that is important.
It will be several weeks, possibly months, before I’ll have enough confidence in my manuscript to let you read it. Last week I read two fairly recent first novels—Acrobat Admits (Harold Grossman), and After Long Silence (Robert Gutwillig)—and saw enough mistakes to make me look long and hard at mine. Although I’m already sure the Thompson effort will be better than those two, I’m looking forward to the day that I can say it will be better than Lie Down in Darkness. When that day comes, I will put my manuscript in a box and send it to you.
So, until then, I remain,
Sincerely,
Hunter S. Thompson
TO RUST HILLS, ESQUIRE:
To Thompson’s embarrassment, Hill’s very polite rejection letter arrived just as this vitriolic missive went out. A year earlier, Thompson had sat in on a literature course Hills taught at the New School for Social Research; a month earlier he had sent the Esquire fiction editor one of his short stories.
June 20, 1959
Cuddebackville
New York
Rust Hills
Esquire
488 Madison Avenue
New York City 22
Goddammit, Hills, I don’t think there’s an excuse in the world for you people holding onto my manuscript this long. It’s been over a month, now, and I’ve heard no news at all. For all I know, it might never have gotten to you.
If it has, however, I think you might do well to remember that, although you don’t in any way depend on me now, there may come a day when you will. You might be in a position to take these stories lightly, now, but it just happens that I depend on them for rent and food money. I have no job, no salary, and my landlord is a down-to-earth bastard. As long as Esquire holds onto my story, I don’t know where I stand. As I said before, for all I know it didn’t even get to you.
Now I’m not foolish enough to expect you to actually buy the thing, but as long as I don’t even know where it is, I feel completely helpless. The landlord is in my driveway every morning, asking about the three-weeks-overdue rent money, and all I can say is that I expect a check any day. I don’t, of course, but you don’t say things like that to your landlord.
So I ask you, in all sincerity, to either send me a check or send me the manuscript so I can get it into the mail again. And if you didn’t ever receive it, please let me know immediately. Things have come to a pretty bad pass, here, and it doesn’t help to have my potential income farmed out to Madison Avenue.
I don’t mean to be rude, here, and I’m sorry if I sound that way. It’s just that things are getting a little hectic. And the story, incidentally, is called “The Cotton Candy Heart.”
Sincerely,
Hunter S. Thompson
TO RUST HILLS, ESQUIRE:
Undaunted by Hills’s rejection of “The Cotton Candy Heart,” Thompson then sent him “The Almost Working Artist,” a Henry Milleresque homage to the creative souls who toil at their crafts in garrets.
June 25, 1959
Cuddebackville
New York
Hills:
Your comments on “The Cotton Candy Heart” were appreciated, but a little puzzling. Your conclusion that it was “romantic” and “slick” indicated either a perfunctory reading on your part, or an excess of subtlety on mine. As I tried to point out with the title and with the comparison to the Coca-Cola ad, the story was not a maudlin grasp at some fading thread of personal nostalgia, but a slightly rueful commentary on the essential phoniness of the kind of nostalgia I was writing about. You know, the grass is always greener.…
My inquiry as to the whereabouts of the manuscript was mailed the day before I received your comments. My apologies for bothering you, but I was seriously beginning to wonder if it might have been lost somewhere along the way.
At any rate, here is another one, “The Almost Working Artist.” Perhaps I should point out that it is not an account of the artist’s compassion for the downtrodden working man, but a r
eminder to all those who take art for granted that Picasso was not always a millionaire, and that loneliness and uncertainty are as common to artists and other “world beaters” as they are to shit-shovelers and ribbon clerks.
In saying that, I place the “burden of proof,” so to speak, on my own shoulders. Nevertheless, that’s the point I’m trying to make; and if the story doesn’t make it, I can always write it again. In the meantime, however, if you know of anyone who wants to hire a neo-literary mountain hermit, please let me know. And I am, incidentally, being forced to sell my Jaguar. If you know of anyone who’d like to buy a 1951 Mark VII, mine is available for $900 or best offer.
Leaving you with my problems, I remain,
psychopathically,
Hunter S. Thompson
TO ANN FRICK:
Frick had written “Hunty” a five-page reconciliation letter professing her love amid a barrage of questions that had been weighing on her mind.
June 26, 1959
Cuddebackville
New York
Dear Ann,
Yes, once in a while I smile for a picture. See enclosed. It was taken for a passport.
It is now four o’clock in the morning in Cuddebackville, New York. The two general stores are closed, the church is dark, and aheavy mist hangs over the Neversink River. It is raining, and has been for two weeks. The mountains are green and the roads are forever damp. Cuddebackville lies in a valley at the foot of the Otisville mountain. The mist is thick in the valley tonight, and the road up the mountain is dark and empty.
Far out on the Oakland Valley road, some two-and-a-half miles from town, a black Jaguar sits in a driveway beside a cabin high above the road. A light burns in the cabin, perhaps the only light in Cuddebackville. Inside, a man sits before a typewriter, drinking iced tea and smoking a cigarette. He has been writing since eight in the evening, and he has just finished the third chapter of a novel. He has been writing almost constantly for several weeks. Within a month, he should have enough of the book finished to take it to New York, where one of the editors of the Viking Press (publishers) has agreed to read it.
That’s why he hasn’t written the sparkling-eyed girl in Tallahassee about his work: because he’s doing nothing but writing, and what is there to say about that?
And so, Ann my girl, there you have it. I am writing. And if—when you ask if I’ve had any success—you mean monetary success, the answer is no. This week, as a matter of fact, three of my stories came back to me in the mail—with nice little rejection slips attached to all three.
Sad? Hopeless? Well, perhaps it is. Before we assume that, though, I’d like to quote you one or two little things I came across recently:
(A) “From 1919 to 1927 I sent stories to American magazines without being able to sell one until the Atlantic Monthly published a story called ‘Fifty Grand.’ ”
* that’s Ernest Hemingway, and from 1919 to 1927 is eight years.
(B) “After hours I wrote stories.… There were nineteen altogether.… No one bought them, no one sent personal letters. I had one hundred and twenty-two rejection slips pinned in a frieze about my room.”
* that’s Scott Fitzgerald. He wrote a few things back around the twenties.
So you see, my love, yew can’t never tell. There is some that makes it, and some that don’t. I just happen to think I’m going to make it. I couldn’t afford to think otherwise.
At the rate of three rejections a week, I should catch up with Fitzgerald in thirty-six weeks. And that will still give me about six years before I catch up with Hemingway. If I get this novel published, however, I’ll be ahead of them both. And, oh lordy, won’t that be fun. So have faith, yew cute li’l ol’ dark-eyed thing. They ain’t throwin’ dirt on my coffin yet.
So now we go on to the next question: what part of you attracts me? Well, Ann, I don’t think you phrased that question any too decently, so I’ll try to answer it the way I think you meant it. If I answered it the way you wrote it, I don’t think you’d write me anymore.
Hmmnnnnnn … that ain’t so easy. It would be much easier to answer it the way you wrote it. But no, I’m too high-minded for that sort if thing.
I would be foolish to deny, however, that there is a very definite physical attraction. And I think that’s just fine; I wouldn’t have it any other way.
There’s more, of course, but I’ve never really thought about it. I only know that you’re the only girl I’ve run across since I was about sixteen who’s had any lasting effect on me. It’s been about three years, now, and I still haven’t managed to bump you out of my mind. And I have tried. Lord! Three years! Does it seem that long to you?
Are you aware, by the way, that on February 5, 1957, I was addressing you in letters as “Cheri,” and calling you “emotionally stubborn”? And are you also aware that on September 25, 1956, you were giving me a very familiar line that ran something like this: “About this weekend. I’ve got quite a lot to do and I’m going to be pretty busy.…” A very familiar phrase, that. You went on to say, however, that you “could go out Saturday afternoon or Saturday night,” but that “probably Saturday night would be best.”
I don’t remember exactly what happened, that weekend, but I’m sure it must have been frustrating.
Are you still as pretty as you were, by the way? Why don’t you send me another picture? Please stay pretty. It’s very important to me that you be pretty. I’m serious.
I’m in such a fine mood now, that if I close my eyes I can almost see you here in the cabin. If you were here I’d take you immediately to bed. Depraved, but true, I’m afraid. Here I’m going to frustrate myself again; damn, I can’t stand it.
But wouldn’t it be nice? You being here, I mean. I’m smiling; you smile, too. I’m not drunk, either. Not at all. Haven’t had so much as a glass of beer in three days. I’m just happy. I don’t know why, exactly, but it must be the idea of you being here in bed … yes, that would make me very happy indeed.
Smile!
And not just bed, either. I’d enjoy having you here all the time. I’d enjoy just looking at you. By the way, can you cook anything? I am hungry, now, and I must go make a tuna fish sandwich. I live on tuna fish and peanut butter and bread and milk.
I’m looking at your picture as I write this, and trying to imagine your answers and your reactions. I’m enjoying them.
I have one smiling picture and one very solemn picture. I switch back and forth, depending on what kind of reaction I expect.
This is a very strange letter and I haven’t answered many of your questions, but I’ve had a good time.
The answer to one of your questions, though, is that I’m in love with all of you except the part I don’t like. That’s the part of you that’s like all the other girls I see. The part of you that thinks everyone—even Hunter—has to settle down sooner or later with a nine to five job and a mortgage on the house and two chrome-covered cars in every garage and a slew of stupid, happy neighbors and nothing to look forward to but eternal manipulation by forces you never took the trouble to understand. That’s the part of you I don’t like, and the part I’ll never like.
When you write again, I want to know the part of me that you don’t like. Or perhaps the part you do like … if that’s easier.
You also say I haven’t told you what I want out of life. In a nutshell, it is this:
I want to be able to support myself (and, barring disaster, my family) as a writer. I want a house somewhere in the West Indies, high on a bluff overlooking the Caribbean Sea. I want enough money for good scotch and good food. I want to be in love with my wife and I want her to be in love with me. That’s about it; I don’t want many things, but I think the ones I want are important. If you disagree with me, I’d like to hear your point of view.
And while I’m here, let me quote you something else:
To be nobody-but-yourself—in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you somebody else—means to fight the hardest battle which
any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
* that’s e. e. cummings, a contemporary poet, of sorts.
That’s a pretty dramatic finish, so I think I’ll bring this lengthy missive to an end. My situation here is very fluid, and there is still a chance that I will get down that way this summer. I shall let you know what happens. As far as I can tell, right now, things are going to get worse before they get better. I speak, of course, of my own fortunes.
Stay pretty and have faith. I think you and I are fighting a losing battle, here, but then so is everybody else in this lunatic world, and if you were on my side it might take the pain out of losing.
Love, HST
TO WILLIAM J. DORVILLIER, SAN JUAN STAR:
Determined to find work in the Caribbean, Thompson responded to an ad in Editor & Publisher magazine for a sports editor for Puerto Rico’s San Juan Star. Publisher Dorvillier went on to win the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for his editorials on the separation of church and state.
August 9, 1959
Cuddebackville
New York
William J. Dorvillier
Star Publishing Corp.
Box 9174
Santurce, Puerto Rico
Dear Sir,
I hear you need a sports editor. If true, perhaps we can work something out. The job interests me for two reasons: the Caribbean location, and the fact that it’s a new paper. Salary would be entirely secondary, as it definitely would not be here in our great rotarian democracy. My minimum, if I thought you could afford it, would be somewhere around $400 a month. I wouldn’t want to set a figure, though, until I found out more about you and the actual conditions of the job. There are some jobs I wouldn’t do for two thousand a month, and others I’d be happy to do for two hundred. So let’s leave salary for later, shall we?