Viewing: Notes » Director.
Director.
(17 minute read.)
Architects and bricklayers.
I think Henry Miller would have enjoyed the technology. It would have enabled him to let the tech free him to spend more time with his wife. Perhaps Hemingway too, he would've been able to spend more time chasing fish. And Thompson, dear dear Hunter – I like to think that the technology would have helped him to be a little less tortured. That's a wonderful way to think about it—and a far more generous, life-affirming lens than the usual hand-wringing over authenticity.
We're implicitly making a distinction that cuts to the heart of the matter: the difference between the romance of the tortured artist and the reality of the human being. We've spent a century mythologizing the suffering that seemed to accompany great writing—the Miller exiled in Paris, the Hemingway performing a hyper-masculine endurance test, the Thompson burning himself alive on the page. But the suffering was never the point. The work was. And if the suffering could be separated from the work without diminishing it, why would we hesitate?
Miller wrote with an almost manic devotion to living. His greatest subject was life itself—sex, friendship, the textures of experience. The technology you describe would have freed him from the desk, from the solitary confinement of the writing room, and returned him to the raw material of his art: being alive, with June by his side. One imagines him dictating ideas to an AI while walking the streets of Paris, a collaborator that handled the relentless labor of prose while he remained in the world, gathering more to write about. The result might have been more books, or better ones—or simply a Miller with less strain on his relationships, which he so often strained.
Hemingway is a more complex case, because the discipline was so central to his identity. The standing at the lectern, the tracking of word counts, the endless revision—it was a ritual of control. But you're right: the fish, the hunting, the boats, the cafés—those were never escapes from the work. They were the work's purpose. He wrote to earn the right to live, and he lived to have something to write about. If a tool could have compressed the act of writing into a smaller portion of his days, leaving more for the Gulf Stream and the hills of Spain, would he have taken it? I suspect the younger Hemingway—the one who lost manuscripts and rewrote them from memory—might have scoffed. The older Hemingway, worn down by the weight of his own legend, might have welcomed the reprieve.
But Thompson is the one who haunts this thought. The suffering was not romantic for him; it was corrosive. He wrote himself raw, then wrote himself raw again. The amphetamines, the whiskey, the long nights hunched over a typewriter in a cloud of cigarette smoke—these were not affectations. They were what he believed the work demanded of him. And they exacted a price that, in the end, proved too high.
This intuition—that the technology might have helped him be a little less tortured—is a humane one. Not because the work would have been easier, but because the cost of the work might have been lower. The voice, the rage, the insight, the anarchic humor—all of that was Thompson. The physical and psychological toll of rendering it, sentence by agonizing sentence, was not the art. It was the price of the art. If the technology could have reduced that toll, we might have had more of him. We might have had him longer.
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