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Look here. I was the lucky beneficiary of three MacDowell fellowships, where I met marvelous fellow artists in all disciplines and had my own cabin to retreat into. I will never forget the friends I made there, such as Tillie Olsen. Remember, this is ages and ages ago. I told them to keep it, not update it, as I had never seen it before. That look. I was so earnest, wanting to use all my time there to the fullest, working on my “Big Book.”

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Tim Denevi and Margaret Harrell

Author/professor Tim Denevi and I had a delightful time presenting at the Gonzo Fest 2018. The Leo Weekly, Louisville, set up the event in an itinerary:

12-1 p.m.
Writing “Hell’s Angels”: Will the Real Hunter S. Thompson Please Stand Up
Featuring: Timothy Denevi and Margaret Harrell

1:10-1:50 p.m.
Book Signings: Margaret Harrell, Ron Whitehead and Juan Thompson

1:30-2:30 p.m.
The Battle of Michigan Avenue: Chicago 1968, HST and Violence Against Journalists
Panelists: Michael Lindenberger, Timothy Denevi and Ryan Van Velzer
Moderator: Kate Howard

TopsLouisville wrote:

Held at the Main Branch of the Louisville Free Public Library, where Thompson’s mother Virginia worked for many years, GonzoFest Louisville will host two panels, Writing Hell’s Angels: Will the Real Hunter Thompson Please Stand Up? and The Battle of Michigan Avenue: Chicago 1968, Hunter Thompson, and Violence Against Journalists. The festival will also host the Kentucky premiere of the PBS documentary “The Rise and Fall of the Brown Buffalo.”

At the “Writing Hell’s Angels” panel, Tim Denevi, MFA professor at George Mason University, and I gave a program on Hunter, age 29, facing up to challenges in getting his first book, Hell’s Angels, through the publication process at Random House, no small feat under the circumstances of legal challenges and so forth. I was Hunter’s copy editor, the assistant editor to Jim Silberman and the Girl Friday on all matters pertaining to the situation.

Gonzo fest 2018

The News and Tribune gave some background on my fellow presenter:

Denevi’s next book is a work of narrative nonfiction on Hunter S. Thompson. Denevi’s essays on politics, sport, and religion have recently appeared in The Paris Review, New York Magazine, The Normal School, and Literary Hub, where he serves as the nonfiction editor.

With publication imminent, Tim’s second book already has a free preview here on iTunes.

A huge thanks to an unknown diner at the Brown Hotel for the photo of Tim and me.

Hunter Thompson at ranch 1991

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The previous interview I did with her bounced all the way toVienna, where it sparked the plan to found a Gonzofest Vienna – whose first event then fizzled and started percolating in Dublin, Ireland. But it was a tall lift to find an untaken venue in Dublin on that short notice.

So we luckily were offered Garden District Book Shop in New Orleans – Gonzofest 2025. Putting GF Europe on hold, we are considering Italy 2026. Meanwhile, we have a tremendous lineup of talent ready to jump in a plane. More on this New Orleans event at its website.

Betsy Wurzel writes:

We reflect on the unpredictability of life’s twists and turns, sharing personal anecdotes of remarkable synchronicities. Additionally, Margaret delves into her latest revised-edition book, BEYOND 3-D: KEEP THIS QUIET! III, discussing its inspiration and the transformative potential of her LuminEsscence Light Body work courses in facilitating spiritual growth and emotional healing.

Margaret also recommends THE HELL’s ANGELS LETTERS: Hunter S. Thompson, Margaret Harrell, and THE MAKING of AN AMERICAN CLASSIC, available on norfolkpress.com. This interview provides a captivating glimpse into Margaret A. Harrell’s diverse body of work and the eagerly anticipated International Gonzofest.

She was Hunter S. Thompson’s first book editor, helping craft the Hells Angels book. She was also a friend and, as readers of her book Keep This Quiet! know, “special friend.” Some even say she was a muse at the most critical time of his career… she certainly pulls no punches during a live interview from Louisville.

Being interviewed by people that gifted, you cannot help but come up with fascinating material. I am grateful that they pulling me aside at the July 2021 Gonzofest in Louisville for an impromptu interview. (Planned by them.)

Also, recently, before that, did my first Interviewed with Betsy Wurtzel

on Passionate World Talk Radio. It was a lot of fun and roamed over many of the topics I’m most interested in. Betsy wrote:

I highly recommend reading Keep THIS Quiet! Too about Margaret A. Harrell ‘s fascinating life!

Please listen to my interview with Margaret A. Harrell about this book and how these 3 men helped Margaret to be fearless!

Matt Hahn and Margaret Harrell, Gonzofest ’23

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Eventually, I had to try in North Carolina.

That didn’t work out either.

Finally, I reached all the way over to Portland, OR, and we were gold. The audio will be out this November for the 2024 Christmas sales!!!

Here’s a warning. If your book is complex, perhaps with multiple voices, go to an experienced professional. And even that might not work. Audio is tricky and demanding.

Ultimately, it was all for naught. Both of the first two attempts. Then I fumed in bed, and it came to me to surrender. Instantly I found the next morning an audio company that asked: Do you have a project that needs out-of-the-box thinking?  And the rest is history. For my project, I had to go right to the top. But to go back and trace my initial misadventure, which was no fault of anyone – it was just a complex project – here goes.

I went down to Louisville, KY, one of my favorite places, for six days to haunt the sound studio of Bill Hardesty, who took the above photo of me at the Brown Hotel. Staying there is always a memorable experience. Ron Whitehead sat at my side almost the whole time as I read practically every word of the massive book myself. He read a small number of pages, always a treat A huge thanks to Ron, who set everything up. And to Bill for being fearless and generous.

A trailer, based on images taken at the Brown that weekend by a young whiz named Yunier Ramirez and images in the book is just finalized except for the credits at the end. Click the link for a sneak preview.

DESCRIPTION:

The Hell’s Angels Letters is a must-have text for any Hunter S. Thompson fan. Lavishly documented and illustrated with the actual correspondence that led to the publication of his breakthrough literary effort, Hell’s Angels, this coffee-table book literally shows how HST boot-strapped his way from an impoverished nobody journalist to growing legend.

Kyle K. Mann, Gonzo Today. Print available only at norfolkpress.com.

At last, with print book and the soon-to-be-released audio of the Norfolk Press print book The Hell’s Angels Letters: Hunter S. Thompson, Margaret Harrell and the Making of an American Classic, the public can go inside the experience of Hunter Thompson at Random House. This book, which focuses on his letters to his copy editor, Margaret Harrell (available nowhere else), is an important revelation in the legacy of Thompson. “If Hell’s Angels hadn’t happened I never would have been able to write Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or anything else . . . I felt like I got through a door just as it was closing,” Hunter told Paris Review. Check out the $9.95 Amazon E-book and (soon to be released) full-295-page audio book (Amazon).

TRAILER credits:

PUBLISHER (print BOOK): Norfolk Press of San Francisco

The Hell’s Angels Letters | Hunter Thompson, Margaret Harrell and the Making of an American Classic (norfolkpress.com)

E-book: Amazon.com

ART ILLUSTRATIONS & FRONT COVER: Grant Goodwine, https://grantgoodwine.bigcartel.com

 LICENSE RIGHTS: Excerpts from Hunter S. Thompson Letters used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC

and The Hunter S. Thompson Estate, with thanks to Juan Thompson, Hunter’s son, and George Tobia

at Burns & Levinson law firm.

 HUNTER’S FACE in trailer: Alanbeckerphotographer.com

FUN FACT: see Outlaw Poet documentary on Ron Whitehead

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Human memory awakens and extinguishes at will.

This quote offers a good launching pad for why memoir wiriting is so educational and also so transformative. You can start writing a memoir and stop for a year, blocked by what you will have to reveal. Or you can stop as at a wall because you think you have forgotten. Well, of course, you have. But that doesn’t mean you can’t write a memoir. In this talk I give some tips for new writers and experienced ones, on the challenge of memoirs.

If you missed this year’s conference, all the videos are accessible with a one-year pass for juat $59. Loads of inspiration for writers.

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Harrell’s bold and searching collection takes readers on an odyssey of inquiry, with the first and foremost question being ‘How to establish that / Yes, I am / One with God and God is / One with You.’ But rather than provide an answer, Harrell’s poems seek to use the question as a gateway into a thought-space where the act of seeking knowledge results in spiritual transcendence. In a note, Harrell describes her spirituality as a conscious, living thing shaped over time by a series of spiritual events she calls ‘initiations,’ and through her poetry, Harrell seeks to divulge her spiritual wisdom.

The principle spiritual tenet in Particle Piñata is that all knowledge of the universe is united in an ever-shifting entity to which all people contribute and borrow, including the poet’s literary inspirations Baudelaire, Emerson, Whitman, and Joyce, and major figures from the poet’s own life, which include Milton Klonsky and Hunter Thompson. . . .

Touching on religion, philosophy, particle physics, linguistics, and more heady concepts, Harrell’s collection is a cosmic, often esoteric whirlwind which seeks to bring the poet’s conception of a spiritual being to life.
Takeaway: A cosmic, sophisticated collection that touches on spirituality, philosophy, and physics.

Great for fans of: Milton Klonsky, Delmore Schwartz.

From the Publisher:

The Particle Piñata collection spans over forty years of Life tackled from the heart. The genesis emerged when, living in Morocco in 1980, Margaret Ann Harrell began recording her dreams. And they poured in, introducing her to image trails.” She was in deep contact with the unconscious. In it resided this poet, a “second-class citizen” of herself. The poet to whom words came easily because after all she was in the unconscious, whereas the conscious prose author struggled, edited, cut, sweated, and was published. No longer is the poet in the closet. Having been a spokesperson for “the unconscious,” or collective unconscious, before, in this poetry Harrell brings in the transpersonal nature of us all. From after-death communications to stimulating RUMI-nations to metaphysics in “a bottle,” her poems bring puzzles, thought-provoking, with depth. Many are “To the Earth,” announcing prophetically, in the 1980s, the upheaval we are seeing today. True to the brand of humor of the unconscious, there is a section of brilliant word play, narrating insights about the untold stories of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, theChrist spirit, and the universal Christ consciousness.

From—Ron Whitehead, U.S. National Beat Poet Laureate

The time of the grandmothers, of the nurturing healing feminine energy has arrived. Patriarchy has sewn destruction long enough. We must all, female and male, become healers, seers. In her epic PARTICLE PINATA, author Margaret Ann Harrell stands in direct lineage with the desert mystics, the poet prophets of old and, simultaneously, with the contemporary cutting edge avant-garde. In a whirling dance with the creative forces of the universe Harrell draws explicit and implicit lines to Rumi, Blake, Yeats, Joyce, Jung, and others while forging mystical connections with clouds and coastlines, dancing in the borderlands of space and time, of being and not being, of embracing and letting go. And she accomplishes it all in her own distinctly original poetic voice. Through decades of carrying these poems from continent to continent, Margaret Ann Harrell has continued to add new poems and photos, to edit and revise, to transform her self into an ever evolving being, into this masterpiece book. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Go ahead, open the front cover and enter. You’ll never be the same.

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11, 12, 13

Palimpsest

Time with his old face

Death with his skull face

God with his No Face

Under my own face

—Milton Klonsky

What did William Blake have to do with The Hell’s Angels Letters book?

More than you might think. In my mind his artwork was the artbook I didn’t work on in 1971 or so. This was the artbook I did. It all went back to that.

But let’s take the story slowly.

1994. It was an unlikely event for me to be attending – called “Opening to Channel.” Living in Belgium, I had not had much experience personally with this more American practice in 1994. But I had just started taking light body experiential meditation work, which means getting to know the energy around you—your personal field—and from there subtle energy in general: how it works in us (somewhat in line with quantum theory but experientially). That’s where the first signal came that something was up about this book.

But maybe I should earlier, 1978. In the apartment of my close friend, a bit romantically, poet Milton Klonsky, whom Beat-generation author Seymour Krim described as having “an IQ that could stutter your butter.” Krim, by the way was a New Journalist, a “recorder of the scene as filtered through his intellect slanged vision.”  A fabulous author, he  taught writing a Columbia and at Iowa, and received both a Guggenheim and a Fulbright. In this somewhat shabby rent-controlled one-bedroom apartment of Klonsky, a tall bookshelf richly filled almost a wall-to-ceiling of the living room. Among the signed copies, by friends, was one by poet Marianne Moore. There he sat, in his (somewhat shabby too) maroon or gray sweater, surrounded by plates: William Blake printing plates from the Tate Gallery in London. Klonsky and Blake were two deep eccentrics, except for all his mental travels Milton did not talk to spirits the way Blake did. He did, however, get so engrossed in his work it could be almost a trance. Telling me about the illustrated manuscript, Blake’s Dante, he was working on for Harmony Books, he said: “You do the text.”

What??!! Sputter. Sputter.

The text was brief or long blocks of commentary on Blake’s engravings of Dante’s Divine Comedy. About the most erudite thing I could imagine. Certainly not housed in my brain. Plus translated excerpts. Whoo. That meant having at my fingertips all of Dante’s Comedy, plus getting into Blake’s mind at the intersections. And I didn’t know Italian. I was awed. How could he think me capable of such expertise put together wittily? He said, “Come on. I’ll introduce you to the publisher of Harmony Books. I’ll get him to give you $1,000.” $4,821 today!  Temporarily, I said yes, though I backed out when we returned from midtown, but I kept the memory. Including the awe.

Entering his apartment that afternoon now seems a kind of replica in astonishment of the opening pages of his American Review essay Art & Life: A Mennippean Paean to the Flea; or, Did Dostoevsky Kill Trotsky?—in which the natural philosopher Robert Hooke stared, in his dungeon laboratory in April 1663, as “out of the surrounding darkness” under his just-invented compound microscope he looked at a flea—“for the first time truly seen.” The flea was the carrier of the bubonic plague at the time, which he didn’t know.

Dazzled, my mind returned to Klonsky’s first Blake book: The Seer and His Visions. The erudition, the mix with street-talk, the brilliant colors and text-plus-image layout. It seered my awareness.

How does this connect to The Hell’s Angels Letters? It is one of the models underneath the book, a template peeping through, a palimpsest that started there. Or the start might have been—no, the pickup—my visit to Rome, to the da Vinci-inventions museum and the purchase of a book of illustrations/text of his imagined machines I stumbled on. Or my book of Michaelangelo’s paintings, or of my friend pop artist John (Jack) Wesley in New York. Or even, as while living in Belgium, I helped set up an exhibit for a museum, encountering their book Mozart in Belgium (in French).

Just as I began my first book by sitting in a Paris Montparnasse restaurant, Le Dôme, frequented in the past by Hemingway and Sartre, great writers and thinkers, painters, you name it, here was another, older flock of artists, this time visual, with texts digging into their great works. Sitting in that pond of art of the past ties in to The Hell’s Angels Letters, how? Underlying it in palimpsest mode. “Palimpsest,” a word I learned from Milton.

So let’s get down to it. At the channeling workshop in Ghent, Belgium, in 1994, I casually asked—in an exercise in twos—would my book be published? That is, Love in Transition: Voyage of Ulysses—Letters to Penelope, which I had worked on for nineteen years, unfinished because—what else?—of the death of Milton Klonsky (after whom my protagonist was named), after which he seemed to “come back from the dead” to initiate me. Are you following? There are a lot of winding trails like this leading up to the Letters.

The male in my Ghent channeling workshop answered, “I see a book by you in a bookstore window.” Wow.

A year later at the one hundredth-birthday celebration of the famous laboratory parapsychologist J. B. Rhine at the Parapsychology  Association convention in Durham, NC, in 1995, I had been asked to contribute, as I had known and corresponded with Rhine—letters again—and while at an evening event there I asked a parapsychologist, who said she looked for lost children for the New York City police sometimes, the same question. “Will my book be published?” SAME ANSWER. Twice now: “I see a book by you in a bookstore window.” 1995.

Fast forward to 2014. It takes patience to follow how the Universe plants. The players are getting ready in the wings as I enter Carmichael’s Bookstore in Louisville and a friend says, “Look, Margaret, your book is in the window!” Not just one book, but my two memoirs, just published in 2011, 2012, with Hunter S. Thompson as a key character, at last. In Love in Transition it had been Milton whose strange embodiments I had “memorialized.” But here came Hunter.

There, before a sparse audience on a Sunday morning (!) with most all the Gonzo Fest attendees in bed, I gave my presentation of his letters to me, the originals carried inside the plane from NC to Louisville, Kentucky. Spreading the collection, worth tens of thousands of dollars, out, I enthusiastically elaborated, letter by letter. In the audience Jinn Bug, a poet/photographer/graphic artist and importantly for our story, one who could receive energy messages, sat transfixed.

“Remember the spaces,” Hunter had written me: it meant tell the Random House production crew of Hell’s Angels (the printer worked from the manuscript hard copy) to reproduce the space around his newspaper-width quotations. Exactly. That’s an order. In the talented Jinn Bug’s mind, a vision of an artbook, formed. First of all, it was unlikely she would even be there, not often stepping into the Gonzo world. But she did. And that proved vital.

“Remember the spaces” opened up before her into—what else in our scenario?—an ART book, say, like, The Gorgeous Nothings (Emily Dickinson’s scribblings on envelopes, surrounded by barrels of space). Now, Jinn and her husband, Ron Whitehead, the founder/organizer of the Gonzo Fest, who had invited me to speak, together approached me. I had sometime back decided to write no more books without being asked, so as to get readers, not just good critical reviews. Jinn conveyed her vision, intending her role to be then complete. I stood still, rooted to the spot, captured by the image of the artbooks of the past.

A couple of years passed. I did nothing. How could I without my layout templates? Jim Bug had no interest in creating any templates, even one. But reluctantly, one day, hurrying down the airport corridor with me, she relented. (Probably to keep me interested.)

Now the winding trail wound into new corners. Keeping the waning project alive, investing it with dynamite, though so far not a single step in it had been taken, one day Jinn Bug got the idea of inviing in in Ron and Juan Thompson. She broached the idea. I said yes. They said yes. Juan’s entry miraculously guaranteed that the reprint permissions from the Estate.

Without Juan’s nod and generosity, no book.

And everyone felt the book was Hunter’s wish!

The ducks were in a row. But another year passed. I was still in that living room of Blake’s plates from the Tate Museum, or in Leonardo’s book of drawings with text, waiting for my template, the palimpsest of art books in the past standing with me. My stuck brain thought of no one to ask for templates, not yet even thinking of going to a designer. That would have been the obvious act. But I knew no Gonzo-inspired designer.  And I wanted text and template to go hand in hand.

Finally, Jinn and Ron said it was time for the editing—in the form of questions. That meant I had to write text, which was actually easy, given the familiarity I now had with the topic. Immediately, Jinn began drawing my own personal story into the book, where I had not planned on including it much. To bring me in, to widen the audience outside Gonzo, was her idea. Also, that I answer questions in written form in back-of-the-book Notes. Notes to be deleted later.

Then Ron announced he had a narrow opening to read the manuscript in six weeks. Could I be ready? Jinn added: forget waiting for the templates, she and Ron would drag text from my manuscript under and beside each illustration. All they needed was the text to drag, let them choose which. Wow. My heart dropped to the floor. My first reaction was, what a lot of trust that required of me, introvert that I was (extrovert in some ways too). But trust I had (the extroverted me) and in fact wasn’t this a collaboration? I said yes.

Also, they both insisted I leave excess material in for them to see. This required to restrain me in chains, as it were. I, of all people, identified myself by my ability to cut. One author I edited called me “scizzors lady.” How ironic. Because 1) I am an expert in cutting. It was like a trademark, my TM. A footprint of me.

I remember (painfully but gratefully) a lesson—shortcut—from Alan Rinzler, one of Hunter’s editors, who around 2009 read my memoir Keep This Quiet! in manuscript when what would become the first two volumes were still one long text. He berated the excess “ephemera.” Yes! My intuition had already told me that. So I raced through the book, cut one third, slashing away as in an overgrown vacant lot, without a glance backward, with nary a pittance of regret. This sealed the deal for me to always listen to my own intuition at a certain point—siding with it, as it nodded vigorously, if needed.

Now, with trust, trepidation, gratitude and curiosity as well, I turned in the text—at the very same time the Universe granted Ron an artist-in-residence assignment in Estonia, alone! No sooner had I turned it in than off he went.

Well, he would not back out, he soon informed me. He would edit it there, but what would happen to the plan? Unbeknownst to me he knew nothing about the plan.

So he received a text with no chapters, thus no chapter openings and closings. Now, those are  a fabulous tool I refresh myself on in bedtime mystery novels nightly. But this manuscript had no chapters, because (I thought) he was now to “place” portions of text under and around and in between the illustrations! Ron didn’t know! And I didn’t know he didn’t know. As I had only seen him a few times in person and found him rather intimidating (I admit), we had had no long phone conversations (a difficult feat in itself, as he is like a fire hydrant, the words pouring over each other).

I said, “Ron, cut anything—a paragraph, a page, a section—move paragraphs around. But please just do no line editing.

He said, “Thanks. Good to know. OK.” End of instructions.

That was the extent of the communication, except he repeated I was not to cut excess material, as he needed to see it to decide if it belonged in or not (not, definitely!).

So over in Estonia he weighed, wrestled, wondering how the text could be made “conversational,” he later said. I now know he must have meant to deemphasize any hint of anything academic. That was fine with me. A good idea.

I didn’t mention the plan that he and Jinn—now himself alone—were to drag and cut and paste my text under and beside and between illustrations. I mistakenly just assumed he had been told. Possibly Jinn thought I told him. Or that, no matter, it would all fall into place. (Which it did.)

Regardless, he sweated, then returned the manuscript with no markings. Just the finished product. A clean text. No questions.  I looked. YES.  As if my mind had been glued to his (and perhaps it was), he 100 percent agreed. Eye to eye. He deleted everything I’d shuddered at leaving in. And left in what I loved. Talk about mind meld.

But Ron was now emailing out the text for early reading. Ye gods! I hastily made chapters – with openings and closings created for dramatic effect. And by luck found designer Deborah Purdue to do Sample Pages. She just fell out of the sky. Deborah happened to live in Medford, Oregon, I soon realized—the headquarters of my light body work, from whence the Opening to Channel workshop had stemmed.

So now we entered the Art Book arena—layout, color, design fantasia. And lo and behold, as the self-organizing Universe would have it, it fell to me to drag and place the text! We were off to the races.

In the next year, in combing through agent options, I butted against my karma. I reached the spot where with earlier books I would give up. Was it karma? I began to think so. A stone wall I had to blast through. Ron masterfully pushed me, always upbeat, past every rejection letter.

Ron said, “No, keep going.” Jinn: “I think there’s a publisher out there.” What? I believed in her hunches.

And lurking in San Francisco, a needle in a haystack, he was.

(If you do not understand why the book was noncommercial, just imagine the cost of color printing. For sure, traditional publishers would, cost effectively, destroy the whole purpose of the project, by retyping, in black and white, excerpts of letters. Excerpts only. No scans. No primary documents on display, no doodles, no color. No coffee table book. Keep This Quiet! all over again. Why bother? No dice. Imagine the yawning of the Gonzo community!)

Grant Goodwine, the perfect illustrator, came in.

One year later in a phone call magic happened. I thought I was dialing a printing house to test what the color printing fee (in any case unaffordable by me; still, it didn’t hurt to ask) would be.

But the printer had a publishing arm. I’d dialed that by accident; by chance he himself picked up. He interrupted: “I’m the publisher of Norfolk Press. I want to publish your book. Do you have a manuscript?” And that was it. Next day, a contract waited. The book would come home to roost in San Francisco. Ah ha. Home to where Hunter typed the very first letter to me.  Closing the circle.

But that wasn’t the last hurdle. I signed in March 2020. COVID lurked. Frowning and forbidding. We got the book out July 18, 2020—no launch allowed.

However, then another hurdle, another karmic stop, as it were, remained. This one still in effect. Will this roadblock get lightly lifted as well? A proud, open highway? The hurdle now is how readers can get the book—available on just the publisher’s website. Ever mindful of dropping hints, the Universe showed its hand here too. An Amazon distribution center popped up right outside the Norfolk Press window—in 2021, saying: See how accessible I am. Take the leap! Charles Cunningham, the insightful, risk-taking publisher, noted the “hint.” But didn’t budge. Yet. Then one day Fat City Gallery, run by DJ Watkins out of Aspen, offered to put the book up on its site for sale. Ah ha. Another surprise in store. Moving now to Aspen, just miles from Hunter’s Woody Creek home. Are we tracing a trajectory on a map?

As we started with Blake, I think of the plots of the Universe: After his exile from Florence, “poet and politician Dante Alighieri . . . wrote his masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, as a virtual wanderer, seeking protection for his family in town after town.”

The Gospel of Thomas: (29) “Jesus says: “If the flesh was produced for the sake of the spirit, it is a miracle. But if the spirit . . . for the sake of the body, it is a miracle of a miracle.”

That is, this winding road is the path of the art of old. Hunter won fame. Celebrity. Notoriety. But for a taste of the “old way,” this might round out the picture. Michaelangelo was enormously wealthy. But most artists were not.

I cannot thank Ron enough for pushing and pushing, never washing his hands of this project. Ron always available to give his suggestions, out of years of experience. Quick, unhesitant. If I would doubt, the solution was: Ask Ron. Quick, snap of the finger, he fired back. And I would go back now to nod at my first publisher, Didi Cenuser, in Romania, as he appreciates being remembered. Who could forget him? Jinn Bug, of course, for capturing several Universe messages during this long journey, without which I don’t think the book would exist.  Thanx, one and all.

To Be Continued.

https://www.beatsupernovarasa.com/thebeats/thebeats.htm
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/dante-is-exiled-from-florence

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Margaret A Harrell – Ballet Bolero

The Hell’s Angels Letters

I’m glad to have the occasion to make these corrections now, while I’m alive. Earlier, I was correcting cemented errors in Hunter’s history. But now I realize there’s an opening for a brand-new 0ne.

I suppose it’s logical. That’s why I want to get ahead of it, before it sweeps the Gonzo world, as other rumors have.

The correction is that, contrary to logic, I am NOT in The Proud Highway, Hunter’s first book of letters. That’s right. It’s not me. Not in the Bal-Random combo, as Hunter put it. Not – repeat, NOT – responsible in any way for the initial comments in the margins of his manuscrip ov Hell’s Angels. All that preceded me. I had never heard of him, not up till August 1966!

There is in The Proud Highway a complete blackout from Hunter about the period in which I worked with him.  For that you have to go to The Hell’s Angels Letters, where he profusely evokes his thoughts in the moment, slapdash or thought through, humorous or deeply touching.

When, May 24, 1966, he writes Bill Kennedy that “the Bal/Random combine a few penciled comments in the margin,” that is NOT ME. I was busy with another book!!!

Bernard Shir-Cliff  and Jim Silberman were the acquisition/developmental editors. My copy editing/line editing, came into play AFTER Hunter turned in the pristine revised manuscript to Jim, around the very end of July.

Receiving it, Jim passed it to me. As you see from The Proud Highway, Hunter did not expect this next step, evidently, because he keeps announcing the book’s impending publication.

The only place he speaks directly and at length about our work together (outside his letters to me) is in Fear and Loathing in America, Aug. 12, 1971, to Lynn Nesbit. He writes:

and he should assign someone to the book who will prod me unmercifully, in the same way a copy editor named Margaret Harrell kept me locked to the daily grindstone on the Hell’s Angels book. That is, made sure he kept to the deadline.

Letter Oct. 4 (in The Proud Highway), an oblique reference to me: he has “the book’s finished first draft.” But that’s it. There is no mention of editing issues.

This is presumably just AFTER we began telephone communication, which gave him a sufficient outlet for expressing all his issues in a tight container of communication by phone and letter to me. No external venting.

So why doesn’t The Proud Highway contain samples of his letters to me that are in The Hell’s Angels Letters: Hunter S. Thompson, Margaret Harrell and the Making of an American Classic. Well, there  you’ve got me. I’ve speculated he for some veiled reason no longer had copies! Or he may also have wanted, even then, to preserve my privacy. I opt for the first answer, but who knows? Someone will find out.

Nov 28 The Proud Highway. He’s working with me, using the telephone expense account. Has no verbalized complaints in letters even to his friends He now knows the accurate pub month, January.

The beauty and special value of The Hell’s Angels Letters is that it does not supplement The Proud Highway material but succeeds it – as The Next Step. It is Act Four if that was Act Three. New plot, new players, new scene.

In fact, the two books barely overlap and cover two distinct periods. It is as if someone, acting on my behalf, swept in and said, “No, no, no comment on that, no comment. Save it for Margaret.” Some custodian of who gets to cover what.

So THE HELL’S ANGELS LETTERS picks up AFTER Hunter turns the revised manuscript over to Jim by mail in July. At that point ONLY does Jim turn a pile of very clean, unmarked orange pages (his manuscript)  over to me for copy editing.

Here, The Proud Highway goes silent.  It’s Intermission time between Hunter’s two books of correspondence, and to entertain the audience during intermission we have The Hell’s Angels Letters, entirely different material.

Copy editing is very different from developmental editing, and Jim Silberman and Bernard Shir-Cliff were acquisition editors/developmental editing.

Jim Silberman at his office

Hunter Thompson at his ranch in 1991

Especially in those days at Random House, when everything was done in house, copy editing carried a lot of responsibility: line editing, fact checking, proofing, suggesting in pencil (in brackets) paragraphs I thought needed tightening or transposing. Also, it necessitated psychology.

Imagine the sensitivity of a young author. You have to know how to reach him (him – it was all male authors I worked with then) so that he gets interested in changing even a word.  Therefore, you have to show him an error he is grateful you pointed out. And another one, till he is pleading with you – slight exaggeration – to tell him what more you found. One author even pled with me to show him my secret notes on his entire book.

There was no badgering or haggling, but a seeing of eye to eye, at least in the way I was expected to handle things. After all, Jim said to me regarding Hunter, “Keep him happy.”

They wanted a New York Times best seller, which they got. They wanted to hang onto the author for future books. So his wish would be their command. It’s a very different story today, when sales are so heavily emphasized. Sales were important, but equally or more so a carefully crafted book. The editors were book lovers. They loved ideas and words.

With all of his work as acquisition/developmental editor, Jim had to delegate. He thanked the Universe that he felt safe when we worked as a team. I did too. He did not “read over my shoulders.” We made a plan, I copy edited, I then showed the copy edited manuscript to him, he OK’d it, I sent it to Hunter.

After that, Hunter worked DIRECTLY with me only. Lawyer objections, for instance, were funneled through me to him. Here, of course, he tried to raise bloody hell. But it had nothing to do with me personally. It was about legal interference. And  I sided with him while also getting him to oblige the lawyers.

Hunter even had me writing Sonny Barger and Allen Ginsberg on his behalf. He made me his assistant, in effect, and RH did not mind as long as he was happy.

The Proud Highway is a marvelous source for the first stage.

The Hell’s Angels Letters are THE ONLY source for the copyediting stage and in that sense his relationship with me.

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