Good to Gonzo

Ian Williams
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 25 December 2008 15.00 GMT

It was really difficult to tell whether Dave Cox was being curmudgeonly for the sake of it, or whether he really hates Hunter S Thompson, the 60s and interesting "gonzo" journalism.

I am all in favour of clog-dancing on the gravestones of people who deserve it, who have harmed others on a massive scale. But what harm did Thompson ever do to Cox, or anyone else for that matter, unless illuminating an era in an amusing and memorable way gets up his nostrils?

It behoves us to spring to the defence of Thompson, the 60s and gonzo journalism. Of course if you are part of the "just the facts" school of journalism, as he seems to be, you will rate Bernstein and Woodward, his Watergate heroes, highly for acting as stenographers to the disgruntled passed-over second in command of the FBI, while harrumphing at someone like Thompson who eschewed the faux third-person objectivity of "this reporter", for lavish, interesting and highly memorable use of the first person.

It is not only because Thompson's Rum Diaries were part of my research reading for my own book on rum that I appreciate him. His writing is in a tradition of impressionist, personalised journalism, putting colour in the facts, that goes back to practitioners like Mark Twain and Charles Dickens. I somehow doubt whether many people with read Woodward, Bernstein or indeed Williams and Cox, for pleasure and instruction in a century's time. But Twain, Dickens and Thompson depict times and places with far more depth and accuracy than any tediously correct fact-checking department could contrive.

Of course, Cox could be harrumphing because Thompson went beyond the traditional writer's ruin in the cocktail cabinet and raged experimentally through the pharmacopia. But a whole generation, from Presidents Clinton to Bush to Obama have near enough admitted similar experimentation, while rigorous application of the drug-free principle would see Coleridge and many others expunged from the literary canon.

But then, Cox clearly associates such practices with the 60s, which he detests with fogeyish fervour. I came of age in the 60s, and with no false nostalgia, it was a wonderful time. In my own gonzo way, I remember whole generations before who were married, procreating and middle-aged and old by their 20s – until the Beatles and the 60s.

And then there came a generation that knew how to enjoy itself, and still cared about Vietnam, about the developing world, about poverty and injustice in their own societies. Church-defined "sin" lost its popular mandate to ruin people's lives. As Philip Larkin said accurately, if unfact-checkably, it was in the 60s that "sexual intercourse began" resulting in "a brilliant breaking of the bank / A quite unlosable game".

It is true that some of that generation went overboard on the self-indulgent side: the people who took doing their own thing all the way through tech bubbles, property bubbles and major rip-offs. But they always had the other side on their case, those who could combine enjoyment with active interest in the common good.

In fact, maybe it was Thompson's undying hatred of Richard Nixon and what he stood for that has induced such dyspeptic prose on Cox's part. Nixon, with his repressive, obsessive personality, unable to relax and enjoy himself, imbued with an unhealthy self-righteous sense of sin even as he plotted mayhem is a fitting emblem for the pre-Beatles pre-60s Fear and Loathing era. Sounds a bit like Cox really.