Despite the hazards of time, tedium and the benevolent tyranny of railroad crews, train travel still has a devoted following. When I finally got to Louisville an old and well-traveled cousin congratulated me on having the wisdom to travel by rail, instead of air.
“I took a plane once,” she told me. “It was from Sydney, Australia to San Francisco. I wanted to see Sydney Harbor from the air because I heard it was one of the three most beautiful harbors in the world. But when we got up in the air the plane banked the wrong way and I couldn’t see anything but sky,” she chuckled sadly. “I never did see Sydney Harbor, and after that I never took another plane. I like to see when I travel; I want to know where I’ve been.”
Well, maybe so. But once you’ve ridden trains for five years over the same routes you begin to lose that sensitivity. A small-town railroad crossing in Mansfield, Pennsylvania looks very much like one in Shattuck, Oklahoma—especially when the train windows are covered with a thin layer of dust and soot. You can appreciate just so many late-night depot platforms, with steam in the air and baggage carts rolling back and forth while men in grey jackets move silently along the tracks with their cigarettes glowing in the darkness. The depots are ancient and the schedules are chalked on old blackboards lit by yellow bulbs.
Perhaps there’s a touch of glamour in it all, but there’s also a sense of something dead or dying. One of the most obvious realities of train travel is the advanced age of conductors, porters and even ticket agents. Some of the long-haul Western lines have new cars and equipment, but compared with planes even this seems sorely out of date. And most of the branch lines—such as the rail link between Chicago and Louisville—are using cars that would have seemed old and moldy even to Thomas Wolfe. In all, it is hard to avoid the impression that the railroads have given up on passenger service—or at least given up in any sense of competing with the airlines—and are now merely hanging on, doing their duties with a shrug instead of a smile, until the inevitable progress in other forms of transportation renders them totally obsolete.
Not long ago, in San Francisco, I talked to a man who had just come back from Los Angeles. “I wasn’t pressed for time,” he said, “so I thought I’d take a train and see what it was like.” He shook his head sadly. “I wasn’t surprised when the agent said it would take 12 hours, but when she told me the ticket cost $33 I nearly flipped. Hell, I paid $12 for a plane ticket and got here in 45 minutes.”
Comparisons like that are hard to argue with. It’s not so bad that trains should be slow; people expect that. But when they are also dull, uncomfortable, and expensive, with bad food and worse service, to boot—then it is pretty hard to find reason to keep riding on them, except perhaps as a novelty or a nostalgic gesture to a myth that out-lived its creators.
TO PAUL SEMONIN:
Thompson filled Semonin in on his trip to Louisville and New York while issuing pointed barbs about his commitment to the struggle for racial equality. Semonin had gone to Paris on a Ford Foundation grant to research Fanon.
February 5, 1965
318 Parnassus
San Francisco
Well, Bobo, your last letter had some music in it and I’ve been meaning to bounce some back for about 10 days, but so far—and even now—the desperate rush for money has kept me away from anything personal. (There is wisdom in that line.) The first thing you should learn in Paris is to discount any propaganda you get from Marin County. That is like somebody from Greenwich telling you New York is “great, man, just great.” You ask me for the word on San Francisco and I can only give you mine, which is “nada.” This is what I meant in an earlier letter when I said we should have paid more attention to the things we sensed earlier, and less to what we’ve learned since we got wise. (Yeah, I know—you have the handle now, but the most truthful and human of your letters are the ones in which you sound like you did a few years ago; I think all you’ve found in your travels is historical justification for your instincts.)
Anyway, I just got back from New York about a week ago and found your latest along with one from Hudson (“Southwind,” Royal Suva Yacht Club, Suva, Fiji). He’s money-whipped but still trying to get around the world on his boat. It was me that called from New York, but not from McGarr’s office. I was abandoned in a strange apartment and found a phone; I’d have kept after you but a maid came in and I felt a bit awkward giving the operator such obviously expensive instructions. It was a pretty strange situation anyway, so I finally gave up. Sorry. They said you came in only now and then, but that Lee [Berry] would be back in an hour and would I like them to call me when he arrived? I said no.
McGarr got pretty jittery about me using his phone; pretty jittery period, for that matter, but I can’t say that I blamed him. I’m a bad enough guest on my own, but with Juan and Sandy in tow it was a bit like the Snopes family who came to dinner. Eleanor got a bit edgy, but McGarr bore up heroically under the strain—and since Eleanor gave birth (a girl) 10 days after we left I suppose her edginess was heroic in its containment. I was there about 10 days, but Sandy stayed nearly 3 weeks. Luckily McGarr’s affluence was a cushion of sorts: he is, you know, living high on the hawg.
I’m now rereading your account of nights in Paris and I’m struck again by your apparent assumption that you have somehow crossed the color line. Have you done something to yourself? Why are you the only white man that all your negro friends will tolerate? You say, “They (the whites) mix with the negroes about like oil and water.” I’m not trying to pull any white jingo stuff on you here, but I’m curious. I wonder if you’re really as hip as you seem to think you are, or just deluded. In other words, are you just another one of these nigger-loving liberals, or have you found that secret bridge that Mailer keeps looking for?
Your comments on “the whore cock of life” (eh?) are interesting too. I believe that’s what I talked about several letters ago, advising you to wait until you’ve taken a few long thrusts before you lay down laws for the general populace. And since we’re down on this Freudian kick, it’s also interesting that you’d identify the cock with pain and evil. Mailer called it “the avenger of my crotch.” Is there something in this?
Your talk on Paris strikes a chord of some kind; in Louisville I listened to Minnish2 tell me why I should go to Spain and/or Mallorca, but for some reason it didn’t interest me. Now, with your comments, I understand more of what I half-understood then, and vaguely suspected three years ago: that Europe is no longer a valid haven from the malady.
As for the action-centers, my last spurt in New York convinced me that nothing else compares with Manhattan right now. California is just beginning a period of honest ferment, but I don’t believe I can stand to sit here five years and wait for something to happen. In a lot of ways this is the most reactionary state in the union. This is the dead end of America and the next five years will prove it. But I’d say the tories have the muscle right now and will have for at least 2 more years, then the balance will begin to shift and we’ll see a series of head-on collisions. Prop. 143 was just the beginning. Ronald Reagan is the prototype of the new mythological American, a grinning whore who will probably someday be President. Once California fills up with people like the rest of our country, it will have the same tragic and paradoxical dilemmas. Right now it is heaven for the negro and the Bircher alike, but only because there is still some space out here. Colorado is the next California, and after that I suppose it will be Montana and then Canada. If you mistake the current action for a simple racial conflict you are missing the biggest point: we are simply running out of room.
But I don’t want to get into that area right now. There isn’t enough time and these big-talk long-distance debates are pretty futile anyway. [ … ] I have come to grips with the main question in this country: “How holy is the system?” And I say not holy enough. This kept popping up in New York, especially with the humanist conservatives that most people call liberals. They have too much reverence for the social structure; it is like a civil rights rally at
an Athenaeum meeting. I realize I don’t sound exactly like I did this time last year and I suppose your letters have something to do with it. The very incoherence of your convictions made me curious as to what you were dealing with. Now I find it’s not necessary for me to read Marx because I already agree with him (re: your Prometheus quote). What interests me about him is not what he thought but how he managed to get so many people to agree with him. Maybe he just talked a little closer to man’s best instincts. I don’t know, but that would be the basis on which I’d compare him to Jefferson. The truth is really pretty simple; it’s the mechanics of making it work that breaks men down (that’s copyrighted).
Now I am going down to the integrated donut shop for some late coffee and furtive scribbling. It is raining here. I’d like to go into the “New York vs. the Coast” business a little further, but there ain’t enough time right now. When are you coming back? Your idea of starting a paper sounds good if you have enough CASH to carry it for a while. Maybe a long while. Everybody and his bedbuddy are starting papers and little magazines these days and most of them are rotten. I saw [Porter] Bibb in New York; he could handle the business end for you. He’s back for the duration. Cooke is marking time. McGarr is up to something that I can’t quite figure out. I stopped in Aspen & saw Harcourt4 & he asked me how to join SNCC.5 I told him to write you.
Hunter
TO CHARLES KURALT:
Charles Kuralt of CBS News had been one of Thompson’s drinking buddies in Rio when they both lived there in 1962 and ’63.
March 1, 1965
San Francisco
Dear Charley:
If you ever get the feeling that you’ve lost touch with everyday John Doe reality, go out and do what I did today. Look for a job. Not a TV slot or anything where you already have leverage, but just any job that several thousand people in the immediate vicinity can do just as well as you can. It is a truly humbling experience. I haven’t done it in five years, and then only for a few months in New York, which is different. But jesus! I didn’t realize until today why so many people re-enlist in the army. I also used to think “dehumanizing” was a New York liberal cliché. My treatment at the hands of various clerks and receptionists reminded me of the old Nazi theory about giving little people just enough power to let them feel big. [ … ]
My situation today was like that of a man whose job has been croaked forever by automation. Assuming that was his only real skill, he can’t compete in any other job market—so he gets in line for whatever comes up for grabs. Down in the ditch, scrambling for the high ground, elbows churning. This may be a white cousin of the Harlem syndrome: degradation leading to frustration leading to violence. If so, rape and mugging will soon be passé. The new thing will be senseless violence, an outburst of supposedly normal people running amok in the streets with tire irons and butcher knives. At the end of the afternoon I came home and kicked the dog. And that was only one day.
I see that my unnerved state has prevented me from fully explaining what I undertook today. Not much, really. Very simple: I offered myself on the labor market, claiming experience in just about everything but journalism. And I suppose that 20 or so days of the same brutal seeking might lead to employment of some kind, but at the end of 20 days I’d be reduced to jelly. You ought to try it sometime, especially if you ever hear yourself deploring the public’s taste for escapist entertainment. If what I got today was a valid taste of the workaday world I can easily understand why the poor bastards who never get out of it don’t want documentaries on Vietnam or “problem dramas” when they get home at night.
Anyway, I gave up. Or maybe not, but if I try again it will have to be something physical. Right now I’m hustling on a short story that should sell, interrupting the novel I’ve been wrestling with ever since you left. I’m writing somewhat desperately of late, but fiction doesn’t depress me like journalism. It’s harder, but much more human work.
Needless to say, your loan was a godsend. After you mentioned it the first time I gave it some thought and decided to ask you for fifty to get the landlord off my back. The one-ten sounded like a fortune—for about 12 hours. But it did in fact get the landlord and PR … E [electric company] off my back. At times I think I’ve drifted all the way past communism, to a stance of violent anarchy. I have a definite suspicion that most minds in this country’s power structure view the poor as Mistah Kurtz, in “Heart of Darkness,” viewed the Congo natives: “Exterminate the brutes!” Which would not bother me so much were it not that I’m one of the poor. In this light I can see [Lee Harvey] Oswald’s act as a massive achievement, a sort of ultimate retaliation. Warped reasoning, no doubt, but in Oswald’s mind it must have seemed beautiful. You don’t just belt a fat-face clerk at some employment agency or write letters to the editor or march on some violent picket line, but flip completely out of the framework of conventional protest and go for the holy jugular. Aside from being a fantastic shot, the man had a hell of an imagination. What will they do with the money he accumulated in his social security account?
Another story I want to work on ASAP concerns the reaction of the press corps to the president’s decision to grow a beard. First a rumor, then a planned leak by desperate staffers, and finally a nightmarish appearance before a joint session of Congress. But no mention of the beard, no explanation, no official comment. How does it strike you? Could I sell it to Friendly?6 Would Eric Sevareid buy it?
This is the sort of thing that doomed me with the Observer. Anyway, let me know if you think a TV version has possibilities. We could do it like the Orson Welles Martian thing—pull it off as a newscast, follow it day by day, interviews with Cabinet men and pundits. The meaning of it, sir? Is the president quite mad? How to prepare the public for it?
Well, I see I sound a bit drunk here, but I’m not. I think it’s the shock of coming in contact with the job market after a long absence. God help us when this Beatle generation begins to feel the screws tightening on them; that will be the time to move to Montana for real. Anyway, a definite hello to Petey7 and thanks again for the night on the town. As I said, it was particularly good for Sandy because she rarely gets out and she misses the action. Send a line when you have time, and a card ahead when you get out this way again. Ate Logo—
Hunter
TO LYNDON JOHNSON:
Morally outraged at President Johnson’s policy on escalation in Vietnam, Thompson withdrew his offer to serve his administration as governor of American Samoa. The condemnation would prove prophetic.
March 11, 1965
318 Parnassus
San Francisco
Lyndon Johnson
White House
Washington, D.C.
Dear Mr. Johnson:
This is to inform you that I have reconsidered my application for the governorship of American Samoa and wish to void it at once. After watching your foreign policy develop over the course of the past few months I’ve decided I could not, in good conscience, serve your administration in any way. Nor would I feel physically safe representing this nation outside our own borders.
I refer specifically to your hysterical Vietnam policy, which has put the United States in a position very much resembling Nazi Germany’s in the Spanish Civil War. I am neither a pacifist nor an advocate of non-violence, but my sensibilities are grossly offended by the spectacle of a small group of old men whose mania for blood and bombing will inevitably cause thousands of young men to be killed for no good reason.
As a white Anglo-Saxon Air Force veteran and shooting enthusiast I can’t be shrugged off as a politically impotent East Coast minority-group liberal beatnik draft-dodger. Nor am I totally ignorant of foreign affairs. In 1962–63 I was South American correspondent for the National Observer and spent more time defending this country in arguments than I did earning a living. God knows, I would hate to be down there now, trying to explain and/or justify our Vietnam policy.
It is also a fact that I actively supported John Kennedy in 1960 and you in 1964—
but in your case I’ve been badly disappointed. The specific actions of the U.S. in Vietnam are not nearly so ugly as their implications. Where do you mean to bomb next? Will you send Marines to the Congo if that flares up again? Do you mean to police the entire world? Are you getting your foreign policy advice from Goldwater and Nixon? Is it true, as I’ve read and heard, that your real intention is to provoke Red China into action over Vietnam and then bomb the Chinese nuclear sites?
If so, count me out. If you get this country into a war I have no intention of being pressed into military service, regardless of the consequences. Beyond that, I can only wish you the worst of luck in 1968.
In closing, I suppose I should offer a solution—if only so I can’t be labeled a frustrated nay-sayer with no alternative to what I oppose. OK. We should get the hell out of Vietnam and not apologize for it to anybody. We have no business there in the first place and certainly no business spending several million dollars a day in order to stay there. We cannot possibly prevail in Asia, any more than Hitler could prevail in Europe. And that money could be damn well spent here in the U.S., as I’m sure you know.
So, let’s simply quit. Call a spade a spade and admit that we overextended ourselves. And stop trying to peddle this balderdash about the menace of Red China. They’re not going to bomb or invade us. Russia hasn’t, and they’ve had nuclear weapons for nearly twenty years. And I don’t think I need to explain why.
Anyway, those are my ideas. You didn’t ask for them, but then I didn’t ask for yours either in 1960. If Kennedy had lived I believe he would have us on the way out of Vietnam by now, while you have us sunk to the eyeballs. So it’s your war and I leave you to handle it without my help. You can’t win it without eventually killing us all, and—unless you start acting like a thinking human instead of a senile political beast—you are going to end up the goat, with a belly-full of blame for your own mistakes as well as other people’s.