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Every time I sit down to write, I want to create the
perfect opening paragraph -- that is, one that so grabs the
reader that he drops everything and thinks I've got to
read the rest of this, right now.
And in nearly 50
years of reading, I've encountered only two such
openers.
One began a short story, An Imperfect
Conflagration,
written in the 1880s by Ambrose Bierce:
Early one June morning in 1872 I murdered my father --
an act which made a deep impression on me at the
time.
The other, by Hunter S. Thompson, appeared in 1971:
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the
desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying
something like 'I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should
drive.' And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around
us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all
swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which
was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down
to Las Vegas.
In December of 1913, Bierce rode a horse into Mexico,
which was then suffering from a civil war. He had earlier
written to a friend, If you hear of my being stood up
against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please know
that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life. It
beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs.
To be a Gringo in Mexico -- ah, that is euthanasia!
And then he vanished, although his last adventures
inspired a fine novel, Gringo Viejo
by Carols
Fuentes, and a decent movie, The Old Gringo,
based
on the novel.
Thompson killed himself last weekend. I have no idea why, and the one time I ever talked to him -- he called me in the wee hours once to talk about the Lisl Auman case -- I was rather tongue-tied and star-struck, for he might have been the most influential journalist of the late 20th century.
Thompson's famous gonzo style didn't just hatch one
morning. If you read the best collection of his work,
The Great Shark Hunt,
which came out in 1979, you'll
find a lot of great more-or-less traditional journalism,
much of it written from South America for mainstream
publications, as with this from 1963:
When the cold Andean dusk comes down on Cuzco, the
waiters hurry to shut the venetian blinds in the lounge of
the big hotel in the middle of town. They do it because the
Indians come up on the stone porch and stare at the people
inside. It tends to make tourists uncomfortable, so the
blinds are pulled. The tall, oak-paneled room immediately
seems more cheerful.
Then came his 1966 book Hell's Angels.
He didn't
just interview people and quote police authorities; he got
into the story, so deeply that he ended up getting stomped.
A friend in college was highly impressed by the book and
urged me to read it, so I did, and when we encountered that
memorable 1971 opening Barstow paragraph in Rolling Stone
magazine, we checked to see if it was the same Hunter
Thompson who had written the Hell's Angels book.
It was, and Thompson was at his prime then, writing not only what he saw but speculating about what might be happening, making himself a character who might be half-crazy, but that made him a lot saner than the full-bore lunatics who ran our country.
Thompson had some good effects on American journalism;
he loosened it up with a vicious style that captured the
situation in just a few words. In the 1972 Democratic
primaries, Hubert Humphrey campaigned like a rat in
heat,
and Edward Muskie sounded like a farmer with
terminal cancer trying to borrow money on next year's
crop.
He had some bad effects on American journalists of my generation, many of whom seemed to think that creativity required trunkloads of uncontrollable substances, and that bragging about your consumption somehow improved your writing.
I yearned to be able to write like Thompson or Bierce.
Bierce fought the good fight against the railroad barons
that dominated California politics. Thompson was more of an
idealist than the cynical Bierce, as evidenced in 1973:
what a fantastic monument to the better instincts of the
human race this country might have been, if we could have
kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like
Richard Nixon.
The greedy little hustlers are still running this country, 32 years later. Good writing only goes so far, no matter how compelling the opening paragraph.
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