Douglas Barbour wrote:
> You could be right, Ken. CBC's As It Happens, the phone show, called a
> novelist friend of Thompson's, who was shocked but had lots to say
> about the man (McGuane it was), & talked especially about how he's not
> been seen for the great stylist & comic (satiric) writer he was.
> McGuane was himself quite funny about the somber moralizing critics who
> missed what he was doing.
Then I guess I am both, and how I wake up in the morning will often
govern how I view someone. Thompson was both an extremely incisive and
funny man and a self-destructive human car wreck. FLCT was and remains
a great book. Can one be both--incisive and self-ruinous? Of course
("he said"). W. Eugene Smith was an even better photographer than
Thompson was a writer, yet both did the proverbial crash-and-burn.
Smith was not even 60 when he suffered a terminal alcohol-abetted stroke
in an Arizona supermarket in October 1978, Thompson seemed addicted to
anything he could ingest, regardless of the consequences. If I'm one of
the thank-God-unknown "sombreros" Tom McGuane appeared to laugh at in
discussing Thompson, it's not because I think the liquor and drugs
necessarily detracted from Thompson's accomplishment or somehow made him
a "bad person" (though I'm glad I never ate dinner with him). I find
myself saddened by the human tragedy of a human being who seemed to take
as his mission a series of self-destructive role plays (Sonny Barger's
comments about him are savage but probably dead-on), wrecking himself
and then concluding the journey as he did.
As for McGuane, writer on outdoor sport as well as novelist, he's still
here.
Ken
--
Kenneth Wolman
Proposal Development Department
Room SW334
Sarnoff Corporation
609-734-2538
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