Thoroughly confused by "Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson", I turned to Ralph Steadman's account of his long and eventful friendship and collaboration with Thompson. I found a book that's part love letter, part listing of grievances with the dead. Steadman, like many, became fond of Thompson, and found him to be part boon companion, part monster.

Steadman has forgotten nothing: pictures stolen, professional jealousy, help unappreciated, and a torrent of verbal abuse. Steadman doesn't come out looking entirely innocent - he is (justly) embittered at times, and can be unreasonable. I think this was the underlying tension; did Thompson really value Steadman as a friend, or was he only an audience to Hunter's antics and a collaborator who was grudgingly accepted for the quality of his work.

Thompson let no-one in to his mind or heart entirely, so the answer isn't easy to discern. It was the man's nature that his friendship had to be accompanied with impositions of the most bizarre and annoying kind, as if every day was another test of whether you'd put up with him. Thompson was also capable of altruism, kindness, and brilliantly talented writing, and Steadman tries to do justice to both sides of his friend.

"The Joke's Over" needed more vigorous editing; I found myself skipping over some of the longer, more unnecessary, letters. Steadman's writing is fine, but could have been tightened up.

An entirely different book could be written about Thompson by the women in his life, but this is valuable reading for anyone trying to understand the man. ( )

I've long been fascinated by Hunter S. Thompson, but Ralph Steadman's drawings have never held me in similar thrall, although one cannot deny their originality nor the artistry. The same cannot be said for Thompson himself, who was obviously inspired and captivated by his collaborator's grotesque illustrations. Steadman's writing is not up to the same standard, and HST (partly from a strongly developed sense of territoriality, partly as vicious criticism) never lost the opportunity to tell him so.

This memoir does, however, shed light on a period in history that seems almost fantastic now, even after one has discounted the distortions of substances and nostalgia. Drinking and smoking everywhere, slipping over borders and past security, securing vast sums for extremely dubious assignments...

I would rather read one of HST's books, but have a drink with Steadman, no question. I wouldn't mind being in the same room with Thompson when things got weird (at a safe distance), but from the way he treats Steadman (allegedly one of his dearest friends) and others around him, it's hard to entertain any warmer feeling than respect for him. There was brilliance and hilarity there, but venality, cruelty and solipsism were always in the wings by the sounds of it. That's the business of the eternal soul of HST, Steadman and those who knew them to worry about - better for us to enjoy the marvellous and terrible bouts of debauchery, and reflect on the phenomenon that is Gonzo, what it did and the much more it could have done. ( )

n the spring of 1970, Ralph Steadman went to America in search of work and found more than he bargained for. In Kentucky to cover the Derby, he met a former Hells Angel called Hunter S. Thompson. Thompson wrote later: 'The rest of that day blurs into madness. The rest of that night too. And all the next day and night. Such horrible things occurred that I can't bring myself even to think about them now, much less put them down in print. Steadman was lucky to get out of Louisville without serious injuries, and I was lucky to get out at all.' That meeting nevertheless resulted in a working relationship and a friendship that lasted for more than thirty years. In "The Joke's Over", Ralph Steadman tells the story of a remarkable collaboration that documented the turbulent years of the Civil Rights movement, Nixon and Watergate, and the decay of the American Dream. It is also the story of an unusual friendship, of both unique understanding and of extraordinary betrayals. Few people knew Thompson as well as Ralph Steadman did. In this remarkable memoir, elegaic, bizarre and hilarious, Steadman tells his story for the first time, the story - in words and pictures - of Ralph and Hunter, a great British original on a great American original, Butch and Sundance on acid...

The illustrator Ralph Steadman is a brave man. Not only did he survive humiliation, gunplay and hallucinatory despair through decades of collaboration with the legendarily difficult journalist Hunter S. Thompson, he decided to include as the epigraph to his memoir of those adventures a remark of Thompson’s: “Don’t write, Ralph. You’ll bring shame on your family.”

To follow this with a 400-page ramble is the sort of dare the prank-loving Thompson, who committed suicide last year, might have appreciated. For the sake of the Steadman family’s honor, it should be said that “The Joke’s Over” features a lot of Steadman’s drawings, though reduced too much from their original size. True, these pictures don’t exactly constitute writing, but they are brilliant. Splattery explosions of ink, detonated in the presence of politicians and stolid middle-class citizens, they stand as the mangling visions of a 20th-century Hogarth. When they originally appeared (usually in Rolling Stone), lodged amid Thompson’s prose, the images served as the visual equivalent of the writer’s “gonzo” — a term Steadman defines as “controlled madness” — explorations of America.

As for Steadman’s writing, let’s just say it won’t bring shame to his family, but it won’t slather the clan with glory either. At his best, Steadman, who is Welsh, does a passable imitation of Thompson’s mad rants.

They met in 1970 on Thompson’s home turf of Louisville, covering the Kentucky Derby on assignment for the short-lived magazine Scanlan’s. Steadman’s drawings — vicious caricatures of local residents, including Thompson’s brother — shocked the writer with their predatory vigor. Thompson, soon to become famous for a similar bloodthirsty tack in prose, demanded of the artist: “Why must you scribble these filthy ravings and in broad daylight too? ... This is Kentucky, not skid row. I love these people. They are my friends and you treated them like scum.” Their first collaboration ended with the journalist spraying Steadman from a can of Mace. “We can do without your kind in Kentucky. Now get your bags and get out, and take your rotten drawings with you!”

Isn’t this how all great buddy movies begin? Of course they were bound to work together again, and they did a few months later, scoping out the America’s Cup in Newport, R.I. Steadman, a woozy sailor, asked Thompson if he might have one of the little yellow tablets that he assumed the writer had been taking for seasickness. Thompson obliged; a colossal acid trip ensued. The two men decided to jump-start their nonexistent story by spray-painting profanities deriding the pope on the hulls of multimillion-dollar racing yachts. Detected, they panicked, nearly setting a boat on fire with a flare. “Pigs everywhere!” Thompson cried. “We must flee like hunted animals.” Steadman spouted gibberish, which Thompson avidly recorded in his notebook. “That’s good, Ralph. ... Go on. What else?”

Steadman ended up catching a flight to New York — no shoes, no socks and a suitcase containing only dirty underwear and a sketchbook. He collapsed at a friend’s home, where a doctor was summoned and shot him full of Librium. “This trip ... established a pattern of journalism, if that is what it was, that cemented my friendship with Hunter and laid the ground plan for future assignments. ... It remains a defining moment in the evolution of gonzo and, without doubt, a dress rehearsal for ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.’ For Hunter, it provided living proof that going crazy as a journalistic style was possible.”

For a few years in the 1970s, it did appear that insanity was a great career move, that a deranged journalist might fruitfully subvert tired conventions that kept a writer from injecting himself into his work. “He was his own best story,” Steadman writes. “The Joke’s Over” shows Thompson stumbling and mumbling his way through the early ’70s with the heart of a lawyer for the A.C.L.U. and the brain of an acidhead. His gift then was not so much for intoxication as for high dudgeon. Thirty-five years after its publication, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” illustrated by Steadman at bargain rates (he’s still bitter), holds up as more than a generational relic. Thompson depicts himself as a drug-taking idealist blundering through a nightmare, all the while gripping his sanity as tightly as a steering wheel.

Of course, the gonzo journalism that Steadman claims he and Thompson tripped their way into always amounted to a high-risk proposition. “The Joke’s Over” makes clear that Thompson was always writing about himself under the influence, that presidential campaigns, for instance, were just another form of intoxicant, a deranging ordeal capable of twisting the mind as surely as a tab of LSD. If the self wasn’t up to snuff, the stories could become as tedious as an overheard cellphone conversation, exercises in terminal narcissism.

The second half of Steadman’s memoir, which spans the years from 1980 to Thompson’s death, is a sad, sloppy affair, puffed out with faxes and bad song lyrics. No writer, it appears, is a hero to his illustrator, at least not when money is involved. Their collaboration floundered over ill-fated projects. Thompson “was much more into deals than personal affection,” Steadman complains.

The prosecutorial details mount. Seemingly against his own wishes, Steadman indicts Thompson on matters large and small. The writer’s feet stank because he wore Converse sneakers without socks. He was unkind to pets; Steadman shows Thompson hauling his mynah bird Edward out of his cage for refusing to speak, and then berating the creature. “There is not a bird-God who is going to save you now, Edward! ... You are doomed!” In Steadman’s view, Thompson treated his young son, Juan, with only slightly more finesse, grabbing him by the ear and twirling him about the room “like an average-sized cat.” And yet, conflicted to the last, Steadman writes, “I saw nothing uncommonly vicious.” It was “as though the outward signs of distance and malevolent behavior were put on strictly for visitors.”

Indeed, by the end of his life, Thompson had turned himself into a totem of his own invention, and spent his days rattling the bars formed by the cage of his celebrity. His illustrator tries to put the best possible light on the matter, but betrayed and appalled, he can’t. All told, it’s not a pretty picture. ( )

"Don't write, Ralph. You'll bring shame on your family." - Hunter S. Thompson

Far be it from me to disagree with the greatest American writer since Mark Twain, but Ralph Steadman does a fine job chronicling his 30-year friendship with Hunter.

Starting with their meeting at the Kentucky Derby for the Scanlans’ article that introduced the world to Gonzo Journalism and ending with a Magnum 44 that Steadman seems convinced was held by George W. Bush, this memoir is required reading for any fan of Gonzo Literature.

Steadman must have caught the bug from Hunter, because pure gonzo poetry rears its head throughout the book:

"...he would always convince those around him that they were the ones who were mad, irrational or just plain dumb and he was behaving as a decent law-abiding citizen."

"I banged again more emphatically and thought I heard a muffled cry from somewhere inside, like the sound a whale makes when searching for its mate."

"I had no intimate knowledge of any American thus far and maybe all Americans take these pills to withstand the pressure of the responsibility thrust upon them as defenders of the known Free World."

"There were snarling, red eyed dogs eating my socks..."

Steadman’s book pulls no punches. Not only do you see the charming juggernaut of a personality that pulled everyone around him into his wake, but also revealed is the jealous and paranoid artist who hated sharing the limelight and faxed his crazy missives to friends at all hours of the day and night.

If you like Steadman’s art and writing, make sure to pick up his other works – he is more than just Hunter’s right-hand man, he is a true artist and author apart from his friendship with the Doctor of Gonzo. ( )

Gonzo-otic ( )