Several nice tributes to Hunter S. Thompson have appeared in the last couple days, and more are sure to follow. Here at Tingle Alley we’ve pulled Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72 off the shelf for a reread.

I have little to offer but a footnote: I noticed Ralph Steadman’s excellent remembrance in The Independent concluded with some choice quotes from Thompson’s work. The last quote comes from Kingdom of Fear: “O Ghost, O Lost, Lost and Gone, O Ghost, come back again.”

Thomas Wolfe fans will recognize this as an allusion to a mournful passage in Look Homeward, Angel (Chapter 37), which is studded with many an “O ghost!” and “O lost!” and concludes: “O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again!”

It’s a funny allusion for Thompson to make, one Southern-born writer riffing on another. And since no one outside Asheville seems to read Look Homeward, Angel anymore (except Henry Rollins) I thought I’d help you get it. What seems most telling to me, though, is the coda Thompson himself tacked onto the reference, which appears after the silence of a paragraph break:

My fits of Joy are soiled by relentless flashbacks and ghosts too foul to name….Oh no, don’t ask Why. You could have been president, Jann, but your road was full of forks, and I think of this when I see the forked horns of these wild animals who dash back and forth on the hillsides while rifles crack in the distance and fine swarthy young men with blood on their hands drive back and forth in the dusk and mournfully call our names….

O Ghost, O Lost, Lost and Gone, O Ghost, come back again.

Right. and so much for autumn.

(The original Rolling Stone piece the passage is taken from can be read here.)