Hunter Thompson, the “gonzo” guru of counter-culture arts and letters, finally achieved his lifelong pursuit of suicide by taking one of his beloved weapons and doing in an instant what it was taking a lifetime of abuse of drugs and alcohol to bring about.

The final, suicidal act of Hunter Thompson Feb. 20 has given us all unsettling insight into certain elements of our culture that glorifies excess, selfishness and the attitude, “If it feels good, do it.”

Thompson was a virtual counter-culture icon. He was a man who was widely respected, loved, admired and emulated by any number of celebrities, writers and other gatekeepers of what passes for our modern culture.

Though I have heard radio commentary about how he lived life to its fullest, I would argue that he more closely embodied the culture of death that Pope John Paul II has long prayed over.

He also reminds me of another counter-culture icon of a hundred years ago.

Oscar Wilde was every bit the outsider that Hunter Thompson was. An incredibly gifted writer, Wilde was hell-bent on living the good life that Victorian England had to offer to the well-connected, the entertaining and the talented. It was a life Wilde went to great lengths to fill with as much excitement, sensation, celebrity and sensual pleasure as he could muster.

In the end, he was able to muster quite a lot. But as high as that wave that Wilde rode was, the inevitable crash was just as powerful. But more about that later.

Though Wilde may not have lived in semi-seclusion on a 100-acre ranch in Colorado as Hunter S. Thompson did, his place in the pantheon of the avant-garde is equally secure.

But what a difference a century makes. In his book The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde (HarperCollins, 2001), author Joseph Pearce goes to incredible lengths to very clearly establish that Wilde was a tormented soul. He was a man who could not control his impulses, and he hated himself just a little more at every failing.

It might be a bit of armchair psychiatry on my part, but as I read the account of Wilde’s downfall through the Victorian legal system, I could almost believe that he somehow wished this end to come about.

Destroyed financially and spiritually by his prison experience, Wilde emerged from his incarceration a pathetic shell of a man. He couldn’t even find joy in the resumption of his decadent ways.

At great length, Pearce investigates Wilde’s lifelong dance around the Church and notes several key moments in his life, where for the wont of a few fateful twists, he might well indeed have entered into the Church long before he finally made the journey lying on his death bed.

The fits and stops of Wilde’s flirtation with the Church were as mercurial as Wilde himself, and because of the company he chose to keep, the obstacles to a true conversion always seemed to be around when Wilde’s baser nature needed them.

When he was riding high, when he was a successful playwright, author and the must-have party guest for every lord and lady in the Victorian upper class, Wilde had all the friends — mostly young men — that he could rent. But when he was in prison, when he was broke, when everything that he had valued had been taken away from him, he found who his real friends were.

They were few, but they were loyal. What is intriguing, according to Pearce’s book, that they were for the most part recent Catholic converts who had once embraced hedonism like Wilde but were making sincere efforts to mend their own sinful  ways.

And these men stuck by Wilde in his time of dire need, both financially and spiritually, while his other “friends” had gone off to greener pastures. These friends wept for Wilde and for the fact that his attempts to change his ways always seemed to fail.

They learned to forgive him seven-times-seven and more, but they did not for a moment pretend that his sinful nature was something that didn’t need to be rectified.

Maybe Hunter Thompson had friends like these too. I don’t know. Maybe in 20 or 40 or 60 years, someone like Pearce will write the definitive book on Hunter Thompson and through scholarship reveal to us the close circle of friends who saw the spiritual cul de sac a life of drug abuse and excess almost always turns out to be.

Actors, writers and all self-respecting, red-ribbon-wearing celebrities who occupy society’s cultural high ground who have commented on the death of Hunter Thompson have done so with a kind of homage to his lifestyle that Victorians and Martians would scratch their heads at.

Television reports, magazine features and every other media outlet that comes to mind that have commented on the topic of Hunter Thompson have done so with a kind of perverse envy over the life he lived. We’ve been told how he thumbed his nose at society and the status quo and how he was so brave, so different, and how he railed against the expectations society had for him.

The same posture that worked for Thompson in 20th-century America worked for Wilde in Victorian England.

But just how counter-culture were these two men?

It might be argued that the first counter-culture couple in human history lived in a place where the status quo was rather staid and conforming, yet these two yearned for something else, something exciting and something that had the extra cachet of being “forbidden.”

Seeking out that which is not good for us and that which every society ever devised for the most part has tried to quell, goes back not to Hunter S. Thompson and Oscar Wilde, but to the Garden of Eden.

It says a lot about the current state of our society that Hunter Thompson is celebrated just as much for his life of sensual excess as he is for his writing. Actually, his writing could not have existed if it weren’t for the experiences of those excesses that he so robustly pursued. 

Oscar Wilde on the other hand, wrote of beauty and of moral choices in his only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray even while he was living the same destructive life that would bring both his literary creation and himself to ruin.

Neither Wilde nor Thomspon invented the role of societal outsider and their quest for pleasures of the senses was not something new, but something as old as time. And I think a Trappist monk is infinitely more counter-culture than either of these two men could have ever dreamed of being.

The difference is that Wilde seemed to regret his choices and sought constantly to reconcile his life to a higher purpose. For Wilde, the society, as strictly structured as Victorian England might have been, was at least capable of presenting some kind of hope.

Unfortunately for Hunter Thompson, his society chose a different path. Thompson’s society has chosen a culture of death and destruction and has elevated Hunter Thompson to the level of patron saint.

Robert Brennan writes

from Los Angeles.