Well, Robert, your 5/13 letter was the most cheerful and edifying piece of mail I’ve had in quite a while. I got back from Denver about 4 a.m. last night, after driving through 5 hours of rain in the valleys and vicious snow/ice in the high country … and when I got here there were three pieces of mail: one was from the L.A. Times, authorizing $500 (instead of $200) expense money for an article on Oil Shale that I’ve been doing for a few weeks; another was from my new agent, saying she was appalled at (her carbon of) my letter to the Times in which I demanded more expense money, on the weirdest and most bizarre sort of term—(she felt my general attitude would terrify the editor and kill the assignment)—so I just wrote to ask her to ask for an explanation as to how such a letter should have resulted in a 150% boost in expense money and a personal commitment to publish whatever fiendish garbage I finally write. And the nut of my letter was the assurance that I was about to send an article that could not possibly be published in the L.A. Times. I said this when they offered me $350 for it, and I said it again when they boosted the price to $500 with $200 expenses; now I’m doing it for $1000 & $500 expenses—and if I’m sure of any one thing in this world, it is that this article I’m writing will never be published in the Los Angeles Times. But it’s a fantastic subject and I’m learning a lot by bugging right-wing millionaires, which is a hell of a lot of fun for $1500 … so what the hell? And so much for all that. It’s spring here, and goddamn the snow, but summer will have to come soon and if you can give a fair warning you’ll be welcome.
None of which has much to do with my genuinely visceral happiness about your decision to get off to Mallorca and back to the madman’s game. But in this case you seem to have some insurance, which is only right in the case of a man who has paid his dues and survived in the total risk league … so it’s about time you got a few dividends from all that bullshit, and in terms of dividends this job with Fielding sounds like pure gold. Man, $11,000 a year in Spain, with six months of travel and research and a house on Mallorca—I don’t see any way you can beat that in this country. The only way to enhance it, I think, would be to write some sort of jangled journalistic log about how it all happened. People like McGarr would buy it in great numbers, because the conventional wisdom these days holds that the sort of life you’ve been living is no longer possible. Only a lunatic, for instance, would quit an up-mobile job in NY and run off to Brazil for a gig with the Rio Chamber of Commerce … and then expect to come back to NY and pick up a job with Life … and then flee again for a fantasy-style job in/on Mallorca. Christ, you really put the screws to every known theory of how to get by in this world by slowly killing yourself. You’ve put the lie to all that, and once you get back in the habit of writing for print, you might get a boost out of writing a very understated Bowling Green to NY to Mallorca saga—with huge emphasis on How to Beat the NY Big-Salary-Death-in-Life Syndrome. Shit, you’d sell 50,000 copies in NY alone.
But to hell with all that; it’s 4:25 a.m. here and I have to write Stewart Udall to bid my Hell’s Angels royalties for a herd of wild horses in Montana that are about to be auctioned off for dogfood. I want to top the dogfood bidders and turn the horses loose in some better place—like right behind my house. I have 5 million acres back there. But that’s another story for another time, right? I’ll let you know what happens.
The question of a Thompson visitation to the Bone castle on Mallorca is already settled—the only question is when, and a good guess at that would be roughly a year from now, when my Joint Chiefs book is due and when, if I ever finish the bastard, I’ll probably be willing to give both arms to get out of this country for a mental rest. This is assuming, of course, that the revolution you mention won’t rip the country apart in the interim. I think this summer will be a series of horror shows, but I don’t see a really revolutionary situation until next year … unless maybe Johnson decides to move for a self-draft in Chicago: that could really touch it off. I intend to be there, with a helmet on.
My public works, of late, have been nil. The N.Y. Times thing went all to hell when I literally threw it against the wall and let the pieces drift. The Harper’s piece is hanging, subject to my willingness to leave Woody Creek prior to its publication. My Nixon piece, for Pageant, will half-appear in the July issue (or maybe August), but it hardly matters because they cut 15 of my first 20 ms. pages, and then refused to take my name off the shredded remains. I finally gave in and went back to working on my motorcycle. My $10,000 guarantee for a 40,000-word “Fantasy book” on LBJ went down the tube when the bastard ducked out … but in some ways that was worth $10,000. Except that now we have Hubert Humphrey. Jesus, keep a room for me over there.
Congratulations on the second womb-child; Sandy’s ready for another go in the fall, so I might be up with you on the Kennedy ground-pollution scale. But what the hell again? Keep me posted and see the other side of this page for a further note.
Ciao …
HST
TO DAVISON THOMPSON:
Thompson’s brother Davison was three years his junior.
May 20, 1968
Woody Creek, CO
Dear D …
The delay, this time, is more or less intentional. And pardon the typing, because I can’t use my right index finger, which I nearly ripped off two days ago when I wound up and hurled a chunk of wood for Darwin to chase and a jagged piece at the end hooked into my skin and took a piece the size of a dime flying off across the yard. So it’s hard to type, and besides that it’s about 5:00 a.m. here, so I’m only writing this because I know it’s so long overdue and maybe important.
That word “maybe” is of course what we’re talking about. The day after your letter arrived, I got one from Jim, thanking me for a small check I’d sent him and talking in general about what he was up to. I mention this only because he wrote his letter about the same time you wrote yours … and also because of the contrasting attitudes the two letters conveyed. Yours was easily the more coherent and sensible of the two, and I have to agree with everything you said—including your note about remembering 19 “as a miserable goddamn age.” I agree with you 100% on that, but in looking back and trying to recall why I feel that way, all I remember is a year (and more) of bedrock, basic confusion—my first full year out of that Louisville womb and learning far more than my brain could handle in a single year … and I’m sure I must have sounded like a fool and a borderline psychotic most of that year, when I talked to people who thought they knew who and where they were at the time … but looking back now, I see that if I wasn’t Right, at least I wasn’t Wrong, and in that context I was forced to learn from my confusion … which took awhile, and there’s still no proof that what I finally learned was Right, but there’s not a hell of a lot of evidence to show that I’m Wrong, either. Which hardly matters—except to say that I’m the last person in the world to give anybody—and especially a brother—a hard time about their “attitude.” I agree with you that Jim seems wholly unmotivated right now, but back off for a moment and recall how you felt about going to UK. I remember how I felt; in terms of preference it was 50–50 between UK and volunteering for the draft, which I did on a whim after wrecking Almond Cooke’s truck, and when they told me I couldn’t be drafted for a month and a half (six weeks, as it were) I went down the hall and joined the AF, where the only hangup was a quick phonecall to Dotson, who vouched for me and made it possible for me to leave 48 hours later. Which sounds fairly horrible, looking back on it … but the point is that it seemed pretty reasonable to me at the time, and also that it worked out fairly well because it gave me time to straighten out my own head. And in those terms, I recall age 19 as the year I was most confused and unhappy. That was the year when I thought I should finish my “tour of duty” and go back to some halfass college and get some halfass degree and admit, in fact, that all the people who’d been giving me advice for the past five years were right. But a year later I understood that they were wrong, that they were trying to get me down in the doomsday bag where
they were, so as to justify their own bad scenes and timid failures … and I’ve never had any reason to believe otherwise.
So I doubt if I’m really the right person to tell Jim that he has some sort of huge obligation to himself and his future and his past, for that matter, to “make his grades” and to “get off probation at UK” and not to “screw up” and all the rest of that bullshit. As far as I’m concerned, his only reason for staying in school is to keep from being drafted, but the situation has changed a bit since we talked at Christmas, and [General Lewis] Hershey’s blind stupidity has caught up with him in the form of his decision to draft college grads and first-year grad students instead of high-school grads. This will introduce chaos in all ranks of the army and—along with the Paris/Vietnam talks—return military service to its rightful status as a bad joke. The only problem is that, in the next few months, a lot of draftees are going to be killed and crippled for no reason at all, and that’s where Jim has to be careful.
TO ROBERT CRAIG:
Now hunkered down in rustic Woody Creek on land bordering Colorado’s vast White River National Forest, Thompson aimed to secure his position at the end of the road.
May 24, 1968
Woody Creek, CO
Robert—
The enclosed letter is one I began just before dawn last night, but it got out of hand and I quit in favor of shooting magpies. The tone of the letter is increasingly weird and outlandish, but since it conveys the spirit of what I was trying to say, I don’t see any sense in rewriting it—particularly since I doubt if you’ll find time to read it. I will, however, send a copy to George Stranahan, if only because he’s rumored to be involved to some extent in the ownership of this property. And if he is, I’d prefer to have him aware of my interest in buying some of it.
You can rest assured that you’ve made yourself clear as to your lack of eagerness to discuss questions of sale … and while I admire your attitude, I’d just as soon avoid the very tangible problems it creates for me. For one, I’ve been talking with Toby Hess about finishing the basement of the house—a project involving walls, floors, ceilings, etc. and costing several thousand dollars. But I couldn’t possibly get into something like this without some kind of assurance that I’ll be living here to use the work-rooms I want to create … and by “assurance” I mean a lease with an option to renew and/or buy, along with a contingent agreement of some sort regarding financial responsibility for major improvements. You’ve been entirely reasonable on that score in the past, but the “improvements” I’m thinking of now are too substantial for me to shrug off any prior agreements for payment. No contractor, for instance, is going to come out here and build a $2000 deck around half this huge brown-elephant of a house without knowing exactly who’s going to pay for it. The work in the basement will cost at least twice that, so we’re talking about fat & ugly bills that I think might disturb you if they came in the mail with no warning.
This is why I keep trying to ask questions about this property; I’m hamstrung in every way, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit around all summer and let it ride that way. I told you last night in your living room that I could see the “Aspen syndrome” at work in this action, and of course I was right. You assured me I could pick up the survey maps from Scarrow in Glenwood, but it developed that there were/are no survey maps. I asked you at one point about the water rights and you assured me there was no problem, but Morrisey’s letter says “… you must refuse to warrant title to any water rights. …” Meanwhile I’m about to tap the ditch for some irrigation water—on the natural assumption that any land in Woody Creek would have to come with water rights—but after seeing Morrisey’s letter I suspect I’ll have every landowner from Red Mountain to Basalt on my ass the moment I tap the ditch.
Jesus, the more I write about this thing, the more I come to hate the whole concept of Property Rights. There has to be some reasonable way to deal with them. If you don’t want to sell any of these acres—or even if you don’t want to sell them to me—you could spare us both a lot of trouble by simply saying so. No doubt you could do a lot better by holding the land for five years and then unloading it all to the Levittown crowd. Certainly you can’t be blamed for trying to protect yourself in Old Age. Our senior citizens need security, Robert … what are pig-farms to the blind, or saw-mills to the deaf? What the old folks want is apple-butter, right? Income. Dollars. Bucks. Take a hint from Billy Sol Estes.63 Or that freak Gerbaz. Buy a mercury-vapor yard-light on credit, and let inflation pay for it … hell, yes. Cultivate a Brazilian sense of humor. Tomorrow, the riots—but today, the mazurka.
Goddamnit, I got sidetracked again. I was talking about a lease and the dim hope of cracking this Aspen syndrome and maybe getting some questions answered. But while we’re chipping at the edges of the syndrome I think a malleable lease is the best interim solution. That would be a start, and after running for months in a perfect circle, I’m sort of in the mood for a start—or even a finish. I won’t expect a reply to any of this because I’ve gone that route before; but I’ll be in touch, and meanwhile, here’s the rent. Ciao …
Hunter
Robert Craig
Box 1725
Aspen, Colo.
Dear Robert …
It was good of you to wave as you passed this afternoon; that plastic bag you ran over when you cut the corner at 65 was your dinner from last night, we were keeping it warm in the sun—in hopes it might tempt you to stop and perhaps point, however vaguely and without committing yourself in any way, to even one corner or line of trees or even a shadow to indicate the limits of this vast property or at least that part of it that doesn’t show on the maps your attorney sent me.
As a matter of fact he sent me three maps, all of them decorated with a sort of bastard olde english script and dating, most recently, from the year of Oure Lourde 1917. These are wonderful documents to have and to hold, but I’m sure you understand that they aren’t worth a rat’s ass to me or anyone else who might be interested in buying some part of this property.
I was particularly pleased with the 1891 map, which seems to prove, beyond any reasonable doubt, that one Frederick Clavet owns the land I’m now living on, and which makes me a trifle nervous about sending you my overdue rent check. It also makes me wonder about Ferdinand Bevy, who seems to own the adjoining land. I trust the “restrictive covenants” you’ve made with him are a little more stringent than those pertaining to the land in Little Woody, where the enterprising settlers have recently established a pig farm and a commercial sawmill. I think this is wonderful; it’s that “creative society” that Butch Clark64 and [California Republican] Gov. [Ronald] Reagan are talking about. But I don’t see much room in it for me, and I’ll be goddamned if I want Ferdinand Bevy building a trailer court next to any land I might or might not buy if I could find out where it was and how much it costs.
So that’s my problem. And it’s compounded, on a daily basis, by the fact that I’m doing a hell of a lot of work on both the house and the grounds—like when you passed today I was finishing that wooden fence that will hopefully discourage these freaks who keep driving in here to ask where they can find the “hunt club” or where to rent a trailer, so I thought I’d close off the entrance—and that’s just a small example of the psycho/physical stake I’m building up here. I’m sure you’ve been made aware of some aspects of this, to wit: the septic tank, the attic insulation, the junk car removal, etc. And next we have the porch, the replacement of some 720 board feet of rotten wood … and beyond that the need for some manner of waterproofing or preservative on the house itself, which is degenerating quite visibly after several years of neglect.
There is also the matter of making the bottom half of the house liveable again, after at least two winters (according to Springer’s tales) of serving as a sort of giant cesspool. This wretched situation has apparently been cured by the fact of the new septic tank—but it’s already flooded once since the tank went in, so I’m still nervous. After nine
months of flushing my toilet into my own basement I’m not entirely rational on this point. I kept expecting Juan to come down with typhoid fever, and when that happened I planned to sue you for at least enough money to buy 1000 acres in Montana.
Which brings us back to the original point of all this, which has to do with my frequently-expressed desire to know at least enough about the property I’d like to buy (the small mesa and the Pinion Draw triangle behind the house) to be able to decide whether or not I can afford it … and, beyond that, whether or not I can buy enough land in Woody Creek to insulate myself against the rape I think is coming. Whatever restrictions you imposed on the future development of Little Woody would seem to have been drawn up and worded by the purchaser’s lawyer if they permit the construction of a commercial saw-mill. Little Woody used to be one of the best little valleys in the world, but right now it’s an embryo-horror. I don’t see how you can smile at what’s happening down there and still talk seriously about “trying to preserve Woody Creek.” This question of intent is the one that concerns me most; I’m not about to buy into a giant trailer court, regardless of the profits. When I talk about buying land I’m not thinking in terms of resale value; I’m thinking of a place to live. My income doesn’t depend on buying and selling whatever land I can get my hands on to the highest bidder…and I’d rather move somewhere else than fall into an orgy like that.
The other side of that coin is the obvious fact that I’m already dug in here, and despite the distance from any literary market I managed to earn some $20,000 last year and unless I get a good money lawyer I’m likely to more than double that this year. One of my problems at the moment, in fact, is how to draw enough money to make a down payment on land in 1968 without being crucified by the tax man. I mention this only to assure you that I’m not talking in wistful, would-be terms when I refer to buying some of this property. Goddamn, if only Hubert65 were here—I could explain this whole thing in terms of the “finances of joy.” I think your man Hubert would know what to do with Woody Creek—sell it all to Butch Clark with a balloon option and a renewable escalator clause to the fifth generation. All water rights to the estate of Martin Bormann, to be held in perpetuity in lieu of gold teeth. Forty pigs and a trailer for every vote, and 200 chickens per year to the cheapest county commissioner. I heard you weren’t going to run, by the way … so if it looks like another choice between illiterate 10 percenters I’m afraid I’ll be forced to offer the voters an alternative; my campaign shall consist of a series of lurid improvisations on the theme that “people get the kind of government they deserve.” That’s a quote from Nelson Eddy,66 in case you didn’t catch it. Or, as [eighteenth-century English writer] Sam Johnson liked to say, “Almost all the absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble.” And in the words of Alexander Woollcott, “Germany was the cause of Hitler just as much as Chicago is responsible for the Chicago Tribune.”67