The Rum Diary: A Novel

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We're all going to the same damn places, doing the same damn things people have been doing for fifty years, and we keep waiting for something to happen. You know - I'm a rebel, I took off - now where's my reward?"

Yeah," I said. "I got that feeling at the airport." I looked over at him. "What keeps you here? It's only forty-five dollars to New York." The airport in San Juan is a fine, modern thing, full of bright colors and suntanned people and Latin rhythms blaring from speakers hung on naked girders above the lobby. I walked up a long ramp, carrying my topcoat and my typewriter in one hand, and a small leather bag in the other. The signs led me up another ramp and finally to the coffee shop. As I went in I saw myself in a mirror, looking dirty and disreputable, a pale vagrant with red eyes. He smiled. "Chenault said there was some young guy beating up an old man on the plane with her -- was that you?" Then the stewardess arrived, followed by the co-pilot, who demanded to know what I thought I was doing. Yeamon laughed. "Chenault thought you were the lunatic -- claimed you kept staring at her, then ran amok on the old man -- you were still beating him when she got off the plane."

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The thing that makes it less than fun is that there's some physical abuse (slapping) by the friend of Kemp of the (hopeful) girlfriend, and then she dances naked in a bar one night and is gone missing for a couple days, with no real explanation of what seems to be ominous events we can only guess at. The boys don't endear themselves to the locals with their arrogance. . . I think of Graham Greene's foreign journalist stories such as The Quiet American, or Hem's drunken Pamplona novel, The Sun Also Rises. Sound bleak? I would have liked it more at 25 than I did, but Thompson reveals lots of good writing chops here that makes it engaging. Parts of the novel were published in 1990 in Thompson's collection, Songs of the Doomed. In these excerpts, it is possible to see how the manuscript was changed before its final publication. David S. Wills wrote in High White Notes: The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism that the original manuscript, as well as the 1990s excerpts, were "littered with" racial epithets and racist depictions, but that these had almost all been removed by the time it was released as a book. [7] A Southerner first, he was in thrall to Faulkner, and he thought that William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness (1951) was "without a doubt the finest book written in this country since the Second World War." He kept the first line of Joseph Conrad's preface to his 1897 novella, The Nigger of the "Narcissus," as a personal mantra while writing in Puerto Rico: "A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line." Thompson, to his credit, never lost this deep, abiding respect for the seriousness of his chosen craft no matter how many peyote buttons he would eat or vehicle floor mats he soaked in raw ether. (It's the fumes that get you.) Even so, The Rum Diary reads, from where we sit at the far side of his singular journalistic career, like someone fighting with the—writerly! not hallucinatory!—voices in his head, all sound and fury.

The cook shuffled across the patio with our drinks. "Where were you before this?" Sala asked, lifting his beers off the tray.

The main character of the novel, Paul Kemp, is a journalist in New York City who longs for adventure and excitement. Looking for something new, he moves to San Juan, Puerto Rico and gets a job at a paper there. Paul gets drunk before getting on the plane to Puerto Rico; as he boards, he notices a beautiful woman with whom he wants to talk. He attempts to entice the woman to sit next to him on the plane, but an old man takes the seat Paul had been saving for her. Paul gets into an altercation with the man, and the girl leaves in disgust. Lotterman laughed nervously. "You know what I mean, Bob -- let's try to be civil." He turned and waved at Yeamon, who was standing in the middle of the room, examining a rip in the armpit of his coat. He laughed. "Oh no -- tomorrow. I wouldn't put you to work tonight." He laughed again. "No, I want you boys to eat" He smiled down at Sala. "I suppose Bob's going to show you the town, eh?" My apartment in New York was on Perry Street, a five minute walk from the White Horse. I often drank there, but I was never accepted because I wore a tie. The real people wanted no part of me.