Wolfe's problem is that he's too crusty to participate in his stories. The people he feels comfortable with are dull as stale dogshit, and the people who seem to fascinate him as a writer are so weird that they make him nervous. The only thing new and unusual about Wolfe's journalism is that he's an abnormally good reporter; he has a fine sense of echo and at least a peripheral understanding of what John Keats was talking about when he said that thing about Truth & Beauty. The only reason Wolfe seems “new” is because William Randolph Hearst bent the spine of American journalism very badly when it was just getting started. All Tom Wolfe did -- after he couldn't make it on the Washington Post and couldn't even get hired by the National Observer -- was to figure out that there was really not much percentage in playing the old Colliers' game, and that if he was ever going to make it in “journalism,” his only hope was to make it on his own terms: By being good in the classical -- rather than the contemporary -- sense, and by being the kind of journalist that the American print media honor mainly in the breach. Or, failing that, at the funeral. Like Stephen Crane, who couldn't even get a copyboy's job on today's New York Times. The only difference between working for the Times and Time magazine is the difference between being a third-string All-American fullback at Yale instead of Ohio State.

And again, yes, we seem to be rambling -- so perhaps I should close this off.

The only other important thing to be said about Fear & Loathing at this time is that it was fun to write, and that's rare -- for me, at least, because I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like fucking, which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling.

Nothing is fun when you have to do it -- over & over, again & again -- or else you'll be evicted, and that gets old. So it's a rare goddamn trip for a locked-in, rent-paying writer to get into a gig that, even in retrospect, was a kinghell, highlife fuckaround from start to finish. . . and then to actually get paid for writing this kind of maniac gibberish seems genuinely weird; like getting paid for kicking Agnew in the balls.