HOW DESPERATE to hear that the writer Hunter S. Thompson shot himself in the head on Sunday. It seems so in contradiction to how I remember him. Of course he was self-destructive — famously so; even when I saw him during our long night in Aspen in 1997, he was truffling up cocaine, and margaritas, and whisky, and dope, in quite staggering amounts. But what I always remembered him for was his humanity and his kindness.

I had gone to interview him at his shack in Colorado during a desperate time in my life — when my marriage was spinning out of control — and I was acutely anxious about my future. I always remembered how, as we lurched together to the airport in his 4x4 — he insisted on driving me, drunk, to the soundtrack of a tape of dying, screaming jackrabbits — he swerved suddenly to a halt. He shuffled on to the verge to stare at the bright town twinkling on the dark side of the sky and said: “I come here when I’m feeling out of things, to look at the lights.” I realised then how cut off from things he was feeling.

When we got back in his 4x4, he turned to me. “You’re quite beautiful, you know,” he said. “Are you a happy person?” He listened carefully to my answer, clumsily squeezing my shoulder in sympathy. At the airport we smoked cigarettes in the clear mountain air. He was still thinking about my problems, asking questions and giving me advice. “You’ve got to do something about it,” he concluded. “Otherwise you’ll end up looking like a prune.”

That was the soft heart of the enfant terrible: a man of great humanity and love.

Young people tend not to know who Thompson is. Journalists and pop stars tend to be obsessed by him. He is most famous for his 1975 masterpiece, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a dazzling, laugh-till-you-cry account of going with his attorney to Las Vegas, off his head on different drugs. He was meant to be covering a motorcycle race and devoted himself to drug-crazed antics instead. (This was pretty much the story of his life.)

The opening lines of Fear and Loathing still stand as some of the best ever: “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like: ‘I feel a bit light-headed; maybe you should drive . . .’ And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: ‘Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?’ ”

Thompson was famous, too, for his “gonzo” stream-of-consciousness personal journalism, his excoriating political articles (he was particularly proud of “getting rid of Nixon”), and his fly-on-the-wall book on the Hell’s Angels. He spent a year with them. Several became close personal friends, until the book was published, when they beat him to a pulp.

He was always a journalist (his early career was a skittle-like series of sackings and evictions). But what he really craved, yearned for, until his skin peeled with the attempt, was to write a great American novel. He worshipped F. Scott Fitzgerald (no doubt identifying with the grown-up children who people his books) and above all The Great Gatsby, which he had typed and plotted out in a bid to crack Fitzgerald’s magic art.

I had gone to see Thompson because he was finally publishing his own attempt at a great American novel. He had written The Rum Diary 30 years before, and his diaries, which were by then published, abounded with despairing references to this novel, which, like Godot, never seemed to arrive. But finally it was to hit the harsh light of the press, and so, at midnight, I ventured to his den. He lived in a place called Owl Farm on the edge of Aspen. I was greeted at the door by a sweet-natured blonde in glasses named Heidi, who turned out to be Thompson’s secretary-cum-lover. Also present was Wayne, a sort of camp-follower, who for 15 years had been filming a documentary about Thompson with his hand-held camera.

It was a strange, cliquey scene. All three began by languidly bitching about the last posse of journalists who had come round. Apparently, the female photographer had been pushy. “She walked round like she owned the place,” Heidi complained. “We shoulda tied her up in the basement,” Thompson growled. This unholy trinity parked me on a stool at the counter (where I was to remain throughout the long, dark reaches of the night) and put a ring-bound folder and a margarita in front of me.

Suddenly they were watching me expectantly; Wayne had turned on his video camera. I felt like crying. What the hell was happening? Who had sent me to this mad place? “Off you go,” Thompson said. They nodded in unison. I realised that I was to read aloud from the galleys of The Rum Diary. Oh my God! Thompson undid a huge bag of white powder. I cleared my throat.

“I was awakened the next morning by a tapping on my door, a soft, yet urgent tapping.” (Thompson had his head down; Heidi seemed in a daze.) “ ‘. . . Don’t answer it, I thought, don’t let it happen.’ ” (Thompson coughed and banged his chest, lighting a cigarette. “More emphasis on the words,” he ordered. “Slower.”)

“. . . I sat in bed and stared at the door for a minute. I groaned, putting my head down in my hands, wanting to be anywhere in the world but here and involved in this thing . . .”