Proud Highway:Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman (35 page)

Third, our policy will probably be aimed at “the man in the street,” since that encompasses all but shut-ins and hermits, and there are not enough shut-ins and hermits in Puerto Rico to build the circulation we're aiming at.

We feel you had best return to your novel, perhaps even start another. You could build the plot around that bronze plaque on the Times Tower. You should always write about something you know intimately.

Too bad we couldn't get together. Lots of people go shoeless down here. You would have liked it.

We're keeping your application on file. If we ever get a candy machine and need someone to kick it in,
¹³
we'll get in touch with you.

Yours in zen,
William J. Kennedy
Managing Editor

TO WILLIAM J. KENNEDY,
SAN JUAN STAR:

Livid at the snide tone of the
Star'
s reply, for weeks Thompson daydreamed of finding a way to get to Puerto Rico just to pummel William Kennedy.

August 30, 1959
2437 Ransdell Ave.
Louisville, Kentucky

your letter was cute, my friend, and your interpretation of my letter was beautifully typical of the cretin-intellect responsible for the dry-rot of the american press, but don't think that lack of an invitation from you will keep me from getting down that way, and when i do remind me to first kick your teeth in and then jam a bronze plaque far into your small intestine.

give my best to your “literary” staff and your rotarian publisher, if they're half as cute as you are, your paper will be a whomping success.

i think, also, that i need not point out the folly of your keeping my application on file.

cheers:
Hunter S. Thompson

TO WILLIAM STYRON
:

Thompson appealed to Styron, his favorite contemporary writer and a stranger, for help in finding a first-class literary agent. Styron responded immediately, recommending his own agent, Elizabeth McKee.

September 4, 1959
2437 Ransdell Ave.
Louisville, Kentucky

Mr. Styron,

If you have a spare moment sometime soon, I wonder if you'd shoot me a line of advice. I'm just about through with a novel that I'd like very much to sell, but I'm not sure whether I should take it around to publishers or send it to an agent. Several weeks ago I took it to Viking Press, and this morning it came back to me with a very pleasant “thanks, but no thanks” note attached to the front page. No criticism of any kind. If this continues to happen I could easily spend a year trying to sell the damned thing, without ever finding out what's wrong with it.

I've been told—or advised—to send it to an agent, and if this is what I should do I wonder if you'd either recommend one or give me the name and address of yours. I wonder also if you'd tell me how you went about getting
Lie Down in Darkness
published. And with the mention of that book, allow me to doff my cap and banish any thought of flattery when I say it's without a doubt the finest book written in this country since the Second World War. I shall be highly pleased if mine is half as good.

I shall be here in Louisville until I finish this book, probably around October 1. At that time I'll head back to New York, where I've existed for the past two years. So if you can get that information to me before I leave here, I shall be most happy.

I presume you're pretty busy with your new book right now, but sometime later in the fall, when you have a spare hour or two, I'd like to hustle up to Roxbury
¹⁴
for a beer and a few moments of conversation. I'm not sure that either of us would find this particularly edifying, but I mention it here because it seems at the moment to be something I'd like very much to do.

But I, unlike the Pepsi-Cola people,
¹⁵
am not in a position right now to be sociable. My primary concern is to get this book finished and sold. If you can offer a word or two of advice on this subject—specifically, the name of a decent agent—I shall be eternally grateful.

Sincerely,
Hunter S. Thompson

TO JACK BENSON, VIKING PRESS
:

Benson had rejected “Prince Jellyfish” by form letter.

September 5, 1959
2437 Ransdell Ave.
Louisville, Kentucky

Jack Benson

Viking Press

New York City

Sir,

Manuscript arrived yesterday, as you predicted. Sorry to bother you with that letter.

Sorry also that you would not “care to publish” the book. It is my intention to make you rue the day you wrote that letter. I say this without rancor, of course, and I'm sure you'll understand my attitude. Accepting your judgment, in my case, would be suicide.

Naturally I regret that you had neither the time nor the inclination to include so much as a hint as to WHY you didn't care for the book. I'm not asking you for an explanation, but it seems to me that at least one sentence of criticism wouldn't be too back-breaking a chore for someone whom I can only assume to be a competent judge of manuscripts. Please understand that I appreciate your politeness and your immediate reply to my recent letter. I would have preferred, however, an honest opinion—however short or brutal—of whatever fault you found with the manuscript. But as I said before, I'm not requesting a re-evaluation of my work. It's just something you might think about.

In closing, let me thank you again for your kind cooperation.

Sincerely,
Hunter S. Thompson

FROM WILLIAM J. KENNEDY
:

Instead of quaking at Thompson's letter threat of August 30, Kennedy saw it as a challenge—and offered Thompson an interesting opportunity.

September 8, 1959
San Juan, Puerto Rico

Mr. Hunter Thompson

2437 Ransdell Avenue

Louisville, Kentucky

Friend Hunter:

You are probably not as good as you think you are and probably only half as irrational as you seem.

The fact is, we considered hiring you for a moment on the basis of your entertainment value alone. Also, we were after something other than a happy hack. Then we got to that bronze plaque paragraph and you faded away, Hunter. You faded away.

Only, however, as an employee.

We are still ready to regard you, as you regard yourself, as the bushy-tailed expert on the dry rot of American journalism. And to this end we are offering you a deal.

If you want to expend the time to summarize your feelings on what's wrong with American jouralism in, say, three or so double-spaced pages, we will run this in our first edition, presently planned for November 2nd. We will pay you at regular space rates, which are still to be established.

In order to make clear the reason for this contribution we would also want to print some of the correspondence leading up to the article, in which case we would want your permission to use your letters to us.

You can be as disagreeable in the article as you normally are otherwise. Just don't run off at the mouth. We're tabloid size.

The thought occurs that your disdain for our as yet unpublished publication will deter you from this task. Offhand I don't know of another publication which would give you the time of day, so if you mean that dry rot business, here is your chance to put up or shut up.

Intestinally yours,
William J. Kennedy
Managing Editor

TO WILLIAM J. KENNEDY,
SAN JUAN STAR:

Thus began a correspondence that has lasted nearly forty years.

September 10, 1959
2437 Ransdell Ave.
Louisville 4, Kentucky

Daddio! You mean the bronze plaque paragraph bugged you? Why hell-fire, I thought it was the swinginest thing I've writ in years. I mean, man, it was vivid!

And so much for that. I don't mind saying, friend Kennedy, that I enjoyed your letter. This is a weird bit of correspondence we have here, my man, and I don't know whether it makes me laugh or cry. Actually, I enjoyed your first letter, too, and took great pleasure in composing my reply. It's relationships like this that make our short lives worthwhile.

Your smug challenge, however, gives me considerable pause. If you're serious—and I mean serious enough to think I'll attempt a definitive essay on “The Dry Rot of the American Press” in three double-spaced pages—then I can only assume that your tragic optimism is exceeded only by your appalling inability to see either the scope or the seriousness of the problem you ask me to explain. Surely you're aware that the “dry rot” of the press has its roots in the psychopathic complacency of the American public … which can be blamed almost entirely on inadequate facilities for information and education … for which the press is in large part responsible … and for which it is suffering now because newspaper men have become a breed of useless hacks and gossip-mongers … and so on and so on in that familiar vicious cycle which can have its end only in the eventual disintegration of the greatest and most optimistic political experiment in the history of man.…

So, having said this, and feeling quite certain that the press of today has no use for “abstract generalities” of this kind, I can take another tack and assume that your challenge stems from your undeniable sense of humor; that you plan a ceremonial mangling, in your first issue, of a jabbering beatnik who had the ridiculous gall to seek employment, of all things, with a hot-shot paper like the
San Juan Star.

Fortunately, your motives would make little difference to me in this case. I'd enjoy writing the piece, whether you used it or not, and will in all probability give it a fling. If I have the time, and if I can write it to my own satisfaction, I'll send it to you sometime before October 1st. What you do with it is none of my concern. And as for my letters, I'd probably have no objection to your reprinting them if and when I write the article. At any rate, I'll get in touch with you again sometime in the near future,
either to send the article or to explain why I'm not sending it. So until then, I remain,

disagreeably,
Hunter S. Thompson

TO ELIZABETH MCKEE
:

With Styron's literary agent now his own, Thompson grew more confident that “Prince Jellyfish”—once completed—would get published by a major New York house.

September 12, 1959
2437 Ransdell Ave.
Louisville 4, Kentucky

Elizabeth McKee

30 East 60th St.

New York City 22

Dear Miss (Mrs.) McKee,

I wrote William Styron the other day, requesting the name of a decent agent, and in his letter this morning I found your name, address, and the information that you “might be very interested” in seeing the manuscript of my novel.

I certainly hope this is true. And if it is, I hope further that you might find a publisher who'd be “very interested” in getting my book between two covers, bringing it out with a great thunder of publicity drums, and generally doing everything possible to hoist me out of this bog of frightful poverty I've been wallowing in for the past two years.

All that would be nice, of course, but all I really need is some idea of how to get this thing on the road to publication. When I began it some eighteen months ago, crouched in some dark hole a few blocks from Sheridan Square, I had not the shadow of a doubt concerning the excellence of my finished product. Now, however, with so many months of sporadic labor behind me, I seem to have lost all hope of any objectivity concerning my own work. I say this not to flagellate my own hopes, but to qualify my judgment when I say that my book is better than
Soldier's Pay,
better than
This Side of Paradise,
and better than
The Torrents of Spring.
This, to me, is a recommendation of sorts. Whether it's valid or not remains to be seen.

I should warn you, though, that I've taken three chapters and an outline of the remainder to Viking Press. It was branded there as a work they “would not care to publish.” I can't tell you why this was so, because they
didn't give me the faintest idea. And that's precisely the reason I decided to look around for an agent. I can only presume that, if the book is unpublishable, you'll at least tell me why.

At any rate, I should have it finished by the middle of October. If you'd like me to bring it to you then, or if you'd like to see the completed portion of it anytime before then, I hope you'll let me know as soon as possible. I shall return to New York as soon as the book is finished, and my address until that time will be the same as it is now. If you're at all interested, I'd like to hear from you.

Sincerely,
Hunter S. Thompson

TO WILLIAM J. KENNEDY, SAN JUAN STAR:

While holed up in his old room polishing “Prince Jellyfish,” Thompson took time to write a one-act play for Kennedy to publish in the San Juan Star.

October 1, 1959
2437 Ransdell Ave.
Louisville 4, Kentucky

Dear Hack,

Here's your piece, old buddy, and I'll be the first to doff my Beat Generation Beanie if you have the guts to publish it.

It's not exactly what you asked for, and—I hope—not what you thought you'd get. You know as well as I do that the subject can't be handled effectively in “three or so double-spaced pages.” I thought this was the best way to do it: a brutal, low-level, sledge-hammer drama. It's a farce, of course, but its theme is a big one, and I think the point is well made. You told me to be as disagreeable as I wanted, and I took you at your word.

You could supply the final and ridiculous irony to this whole thing by hacking my play to pieces to fit it into a capsule space. It wouldn't surprise me at all if you did this, so let me say now that if you don't want to run it
the way it is,
then send it back. And realize that, in doing so, you will confirm not only my suspicions, but my accusations as well.

If, however, you decide to use it, I would very much appreciate five copies of the edition in which it appears. Deduct for these copies when you send me the check for the play. And please do this, regardless of the cost to me.