In this sequel to Keep This Quiet! Margaret lives in villages in Morocco with her exotic, fascinating, unstable Belgian poet husband, Jan Mensaert. But the book focuses on her encounters with the three “outlaw” authors. She re-energizes on a one-liner diet of advice, deeply digested and wise, from genius-poet Milton Klonsky, which she reports to the reader, magically, as if her mind were a tape recorder. Also, the reader is privy to Gonzo updates from Hunter S. Thompson—the relationship never losing its hold, even necessity. At one point, trying desperately to find her in 1971, Hunter writes, “Dear Margaret, Where are you and why? I’ve lost track completely. My last definite word was from a toilet-hole in Algiers.” A most fitting ending takes place at Hunter’s Owl Farm. In fine form, he is trying to pick back up the romance and take it to the next level. They both are.
MARGARET’S COMMENT
Just landed on New York City soil for a brief stopover in New York, where did I go? Of course, unannounced, my feet took me down to West Fourth Street in the Village, walking the entire distance from midtown, telling myself I didn’t know where I was walking to. Of course, I knew. To Milton Klonsky’s for my yearly indispensable feasting on his witticisms and steely analysis of whatever current predicament I found myself in in my marriage. His advice might be, when I bemoaned Jan Mensaert’s suicidal tendencies, “Give him something to rise to. . . Or go down with him. But don’t be a bystander while this man commits suicide.”
Never, that is, be a bystander in your life. Plunge into it. I always felt ten miles high, after listening to such talk from an insider, who knew life through and through. And had the soul of a guru. With Hunter the attraction was otherwise, but—necessary. Often we caught up on these by phone and letter on these trips to the States. Then back to Morocco. Fourteen years of Oum Kalthoum, and Jacques Brel, and of course Mozart, all Jan’s favorites. And I forget Piaf.
Cover design: Gaelyn Larrick
“I’m not crazier than you,” Harrell reports once saying to her friend Hunter S. Thompson. Thompson’s response: “No, but you talk crazier.” That exchange, recounted in an introductory author’s note, kicks off the second in a series of memoirs (after Keep This Quiet!) by Harrell that examine her relationship with three fascinating men of letters: first that gonzo icon Thompson, for whom Harrell served as an editor at Random House and maintained a friendship with through his years of covering horse races and regatas, and Milton Klonsky, the beat writer who was her literary and spiritual advisor. Finally, there is the poet Jan Mensaert, her troubled husband, whose struggle with drugs, alcohol, and mental illness overshadowed his considerable artistic abilities.