Proud Highway:Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman (97 page)

Save the high boy for me. I plan to make the swing before April unless they deliberately prevent it. My ambition now is to ride the bike to the NCAA basketball finals and then load up on LSD for all four games. I'm
looking for a Kentucky-Duke final, which should generate real hysteria even without acid.

Sorry about the note to Sara [Blackburn], but these bastards won't answer my nice letters so I have to snap now and then. Significantly, I have no idea what sort of action you're referring to about Sara doing “everything she could.” What happened? What couldn't she prevent? I can only assume that Pantheon was forced to reject The Rum Diary. But what's this about “hardback rights … turning her flank”?

Pantheon is a hardcover house. It's precisely this kind of splintered wisdom that's driving me wild. The last I heard, Pantheon was set to publish The Rum Diary. As far as I know they have both manuscripts. I have none. If the fuckers won't tell me anything I have no choice but to write vicious letters. From this distance there is literally nothing else I can do. Somebody wrote the other day and said they saw an article of mine in some magazine that I've never even heard of. Meanwhile I have to borrow money to pay the rent. It's maddening.

Today I got word that the bike engine is shot—in addition to $200–$300 worth of chassis damage. Apparently the accelerator jammed on full throttle while I was unconscious and burned out a main bearing. Another $200, minimum.

If it looks from your end like I won't make it by April, don't be polite about bugging me for the $200. I tend to put debts out of mind unless goaded. By the way it looks now I'll have to get there, just to find out what's happening on the money front. [ … ] I've never turned down $100 a day for anything, and never would. Tell Cooke to read
Going Away
before he starts any labor reporting ([it's by] Clancy Sigal). OK for now. I'll save the grant queries until I can get there and zero in. I'm still certain that something terrible is going to happen and this Hell's Angels book will go down the tube somehow.

Hunter S. Thompson

Thompson greatly admired Nelson Algren, the Chicago-based novelist
.

February 10, 1966
318 Parnassus
San Francisco

Dear Mr. Algren—

I am about finished with a book that is supposedly about the Hell's Angels. The motorcycle gentlemen. And for some reason I find that I've injected a large part of the opening to
A Walk on the Wild Side
into my own manuscript. This kind of snuck up on me. I'd intended to take off on your
Linkhorn bit, relating it to the wave of bastard types who settled in California after the war.

These people are Linkhorns, no doubt about it. But a Linkhorn on a big Harley is a new kind of animal. Anyway, I figured I'd better warn you and maybe even ask your permission to quote you to the extent that I have. It looks like about a thousand words, all wrapped up in quotes and prominently attributed to both you and your book. (No, it looks more like 500 words, which I could probably steal legally anyway, but I figure it's better to write and ask.) The stuff is too good to paraphrase, especially now that Linkhorns are making news all over, even running the country.

If you have any objections let me know quick, because the book is already three months overdue and the final deadline is March 1. Random is handling the hardcover. It was scheduled for April, but christ knows when it will come out now. If you don't get vicious about the quotes I'll tell them to send you a reviewer's copy.

I've reviewed two of yours for the
National Observer
—or rather one of yours and Shag Donohue's tome.
³
Donohue seemed to like his, but they wouldn't print the one I did on [
Notes from a
]
Sea Diary
.
⁴
You have got to get over the idea that you have a sense of humor. No, that's not it. It's this gag-line stuff. You're not a comedy writer. Neither was Conrad, but he wrote some very funny stuff. At any rate, I've given up book reviewing and the
National Observer
too.

Let me know if you have any objections to using your Linkhorn description. If I don't hear from you by March 1 I'll figure it's all clear.

Thanks—
Hunter S. Thompson

February 16, 1966
Iowa City, Iowa

Mr. Hunter S. Thompson

318 Parnassus

San Francisco, California

Dear Hunter Thompson,

Thanks for asking my advice. It is that using 500 words of
anything
, without permission, would lay you wide open to the legal department of the copyright owners of that book: i.e.: Farrar Straus & Giroux.

Nor can I say that I find the idea of someone using a part of a book of mine as his own highly appealing. I don't have the time—nor the loot—to engage in some coast-to-coast legal pursuit. All I'd do would be to advise the publisher of your book that I'd written part of it, that's all.

Frankly, I can't see what good stuffing somebody else's material into your own work could do anybody. It's always a good idea for a writer to do the best he can with what he has.

Best wishes,
Algren

Stunned by Algren's rejection of his request, Thompson fired back, unable to contain his disappointment
.

February 19, 1966
318 Parnassus
San Francisco

Dear Mr. Algren:

Your letter arrived this morning and gave me pause. I don't want to argue with you about this Linkhorn business, regardless of what I end up doing about it, but even if I change the whole bit I don't want to leave you with the impression that I ever considered “stuffing” your material into my own work and calling it mine. And as for a writer doing “the best he can with what he has,” maybe you should take another look at the
Sea Diary
. It seems to me you quoted a few people here and there: Villon, Hemingway, several critics, etc. What kind of special copyright law do you operate under? It must be a real hellbuster if it makes you legally immune to being quoted. It sounds like one of Nixon's laws.

I normally go out of my way to quote people who threaten to sue me for doing it, and so far I haven't been nicked for a penny. But I'll grant that maybe you misunderstood my letter. The tone was pretty sharp and boozy, but if you'll check line 13 and 14 you'll see where I said everything I intended to use is “all wrapped up in quotes and prominently attributed to both you and your book.”

Which makes me wonder why you'd threaten to “advise” my publisher that you'd written the stuff. Do you think the fucker is blind? Why would he need letters from you to tell him what is already a part of the manuscript? I've quoted dozens of people in the book and most of them will have good reason to want to sue me, but not for plagiarism. When you file your legal papers you'll be in good company:
Time, Newsweek
, Nixon, Sen. George Murphy, the Attorney Gen. of Calif., the mayor of Laconia,
N.H., the Kiwanis Club and about 200 cops. Hell, I welcome lawsuits. The more the merrier. But I want them to be for the right reasons.

So let's leave it like this: I'm enclosing (hell, I'll make it part of the letter) a copy of that section of my manuscript that leads into the Linkhorn bit. It never occurred to me, frankly, that you'd be anything but pleased, or of course I wouldn't have written. I'm not even sure why I wrote, but I suppose it was because I found myself using more of your Linkhorn description than I planned to when I started. Regardless of what you think, I know damn well that no law prevents me from quoting you. If you want to call it “stealing,” that's cool, but don't exclude yourself. I'm also using that “In my own country I am in a far off land …” thing that you stole from Villon. So I guess I'll see you both in court.

In the meantime, here's the context in which your Linkhorn description appears, as the text stands now. It begins on page 304 of the typewritten material, so you see I've developed a few leads before getting down to the Linkhorn angle. It is not a pillar of my narrative. Anyway, after devoting 300 pages to telling about the Hell's Angels, I decided to trace them back a ways—to develop their family trees, as it were. On pg. 303 I have a verse of a song that I stole from Woody Guthrie. This theft is clearly noted in the text, the words of the song are in italics (32 words in all) and the title is “Do-Re-Mi.” Immediately following Guthrie's chorus, the text continues like this: “The song expressed three frustrated sentiments of more than a million Okies, Arkies, and Hillbillies who made the long trek to the Golden State and found it was just another hard dollar.

“By the time these gentlemen arrived, the Westward Movement was already beginning to solidify. The ‘California way of life' proved to be the same old game of musical chairs—but it took a long time for this news to filter back east, and meanwhile the Gold Rush continued. Once here, the newcomers hung on for a few years, breeding prolifically, until the war started. Then they either joined up or had their pick of jobs on a booming labor market. Either way, they were ‘Californians' when the war ended. The old way of life was scattered back along Route 66, and their children grew up in a new world. The Linkhorns had finally found a home.

“Nelson Algren wrote about them in
A Walk on the Wild Side
, but that story was told before they crossed the Rockies. Dove Linkhorn, son of crazy Fitz, went to hustle for his fortune in New Orleans. Ten years later he would have gone to Los Angeles. Algren had worked with Linkhorns, and got drunk with them in the midnight roadhouses of Texas and Oklahoma. When the time came to describe them, he did it about as well as it has ever been done …”

It is at this point that I interjected about six paragraphs of your stuff on the Linkhorn ancestry, beginning with, “Six-foot-one of slack muscled
shambler, etc.…” and ending with the thing about Fitz and the White Trash convention, using only those paragraphs that seemed to apply to the Hell's Angels. After your stuff, my own text (or “stuff”) picks up again, to wit: “Anyone who drives the western highways knows the Linkhorns didn't stay in Texas either. They kept moving until one day in the late 1930's they stood on the spine of a scrub-oak California hill and looked down on the Pacific Ocean. They had come to the end of the road.…” After this point I was forced to fall back on my own resources for another 200 pages, although toward the end I was tempted to compare an Angel who was killed on his 29th birthday (no, his 30th birthday, or several hours before it) to Bruno Lefty Bicek. The reason I didn't was that I figured I'd already given you enough credit, and if I mentioned you again some motherfucker like Fiedler
⁵
would call me an Algren fag and put me down the tube as a “naturalist.” I had the same problem with Thomas Jefferson; he said too many good things.

So that's how it is. I'm not sure what I'm going to do about the Linkhorn angle, but I won't do anything until I find out from the Random House lawyers just what kind of a law you and Nixon have brewed up to keep me from quoting you. It would be easy enough for me to call the bastards “Buckhorns,” or “Scroggins,” and just paraphrase your stuff about their background. You aren't the only person who ever wrote about white trash going west, but for one reason or another you just said it better. My whole point is that the Hell's Angels didn't jump out of some Hollywood garbage can, and I thought your Linkhorn angle would help to put them in context. I still think so. They are the 1st generation of Anglo-Saxon boomers, and they have a lot of names besides Linkhorn.

I'm sorry if my letter of February 10 led you to believe I was going to steal a portion of your book. Maybe the letter wasn't very clear. But I should think this letter is about as clear as it has to be, and although it's not necessary that you reply I wanted to get it down in writing to make sure you don't sue me for the wrong reasons. If you are addled enough to think you can't be quoted or even mentioned in the public prints, it makes me feel kind of sad and the best advice I can offer is that you change your lawyers. I find this incredible, but of course you have a right to your own ideas and opinions. In any case, I don't want you roaming up and down Muscatine Street, brooding and bitching about some punk on the Coast who's stealing all your stuff. I happen to think you've written some very good stuff, and not even the most swinish letter from you will change my opinion or my tastes.

Beyond that, let me emphasize that this letter is in no way a request for either permission or advice. Unless I hear from you to the contrary I'll assume that you intend to sue me for one reason or another, and naturally I'll advise Random House to get braced for it. If you think it will help things, I'll urge you to write them too.

My inclination is to close on a decent note, but I don't want to lay myself open to another weird blast. Things like that ruin my breakfast. You can rest assured that whatever I decide to do about Linkhorn will be judgment-proof. Changing a name and rewriting a few paragraphs will have no effect on the book. If I have to do it, naturally I'll be pissed off—mainly because I felt I was paying you a compliment of sorts in deferring to your description of White Trash. It was well done, no doubt about it, and if I still insist on stealing it—or trying to—I hope you'll feel properly proud.

I also admired that line at the end of your letter: “It's always a good idea for a writer to do the best he can do with what he has.” You have cultivated some tough ideas since you talked to Donohue. Or were you referring to
other
writers? Everybody except Algren. You are the only one around with a good right hand, and you haven't used it for years. I'm curious. Do you ever hear any high white sounds out there in Iowa? I'll close on that stolen note and get back to work.