The Rum Diary: A Novel

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I have a fascination with Hunter S Thompson. To me, he is the quintessential bad boy of the late 60s and onward. In your face, always high, and getting away with it. I used to fall for guys like that. I even married one but it didn't last. Still, I have a romantic remnant that attracts me to such rebels. Dale Carnegie was not the only evil American. How many people did Carnegie save? How many lives did Hunter destroy? Nobody has a clue. Nobody knows anything.

In exchange for Sanderson's help in court, Paul takes on several writing assignments for a couple of Sanderson's clients. One of these requires Paul to travel to a small nearby island where a businessman is preparing to put up a resort. Afterward, Paul goes to St. Thomas to meet Yeamon and Chenault at carnival. Carnival is a loud and out of control party in town, so Paul and his friends go out to the pier to find a quieter party among the yachts. Someone suggests they go to a party at a house on the outskirts of town. When they arrive, Chenault goes off to dance with some of the locals. Before Paul and Yeamon know what is happening, Chenault is whisked off with some men who clearly have perverted intentions. Paul and Yeamon try to rescue Chenault, but are stopped by the locals. The next day, they go to the police, but find little help there. Paul and Yeamon decide to go home and hope for the best. Paul's perspective is too depressing because he finds nothing beautiful - everything is grey and flat. Besides his passive attitude, he's a pretty flat character with no particular ambitions except getting drunk and getting laid. Somewhere through halfway, it became repetitive to read about his monotonous days.Finally I gave up. There seemed to be no restaurants in the Old City. The only thing I saw was called the New York Diner, and it was closed. In desperation, I hailed a cab and told him to take me to the Daily News. The film opens as the ambitious young hero Paul Kemp (Depp), sporting a white suit, a straw hat and the dark glasses Thompson would wear for a lifetime, applies for a reporting job at the Star. It doesn't appear to be the kind of paper that attracted the ambitious in those days. Lotterman ( Richard Jenkins), the editor, spots him for trouble and immediately asks him how much he drinks. "The high end of social." The waiter appeared with the beers and Sala snatched them off the tray. "No girl with any brains would come here," he said. "Just virgins -- hysterical virgins." He shook his finger at me. "You'll turn queer in this place, Kemp -- mark my words. This place will turn a man queer and crazy." 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."

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?" With its large amount of disrespect for women, I find the book disappointing and outdated. I didn’t connect with the main character because he did nothing. The most memorable scenes in the book contain Al’s burgers because the description of Puerto Rico falls short of any exotic glamour. I kept waiting for something exciting to happen and before I knew, the book was finished. The characters are unconvincing and as I said, there is no plot going on. 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.He laughed. "Dysentery, crabs, gout, Hutchinson's Disease -- you can get anything here, anything at all." He looked at his watch. "Wait about ten minutes and I'll take you up to Al's." 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?"

He's been beating that old man ever since we left New York," said the stewardess. "He must be a sadist." The baggage room was empty. I found my two duffel bags and had a porter carry them out to the cab. All the way through the lobby he favored me with a steady grin and kept saying: "Sí, Puerto Rico está bueno...ah, sí:, muy bueno...mucho ha-ha, sí..."Allegedly autobiographical, The Rum Diary is an accounting of newspaper journalist Paul Kemp's alcohol induced misadventures in Puerto Rico, circa 1959(ish). Aptly titled with a plethora of boozy contrivances and catastrophes, it is surprisingly coherent and readable. I kept thinking that this is what William S. Burroughs could have been if his drug of choice had been rum instead of hallucinogenic narcotics. Thompson, when in control of his faculties, was one hell of a writer. I walked for thirty minutes, looking into windows of stores that sold "Ivy Liga" clothes, peering into foul bars full of whores and sailors, dodging people on the sidewalks, thinking I would collapse at any moment if I didn't find a restaurant. I put the book on the 1961 list for My Big Fat Reading Project. I saw the movie last year and it was good. Depp spiffed it up for the 21st century but the book is better; less flashy, more sunk in youthful despair, and the female character is unrecognizable. She is not the one in the movie, she is more pathetic, but most of all she fits right in with the way bad girls were portrayed by male novelists in the early 60s. Hemingway would have approved. The fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants, care-free living, drinking and nearly dying flowing through out the narrative is very Beat Generation. There's no real goal, no protagonist with any particular object to obtain or obstacle to hurdle. This is not genre writing. This is what was en vogue in the mid 20th century. It's what most of my crusty old writing professors muddled my brain with. "Get with the times! Genre writing is finish, maaan!" I bought it, hook, line and stinker, and so I struggled to come up with novel ideas. Ah, but I'm grudge-grinding and getting off topic. The Rum Diary is a book dripping with legend and lore: that Thompson wrote it in 1960 when he was a Hemingway worshipper but couldn't get it published, that Johnny Depp found the manuscript among Thompson's papers and got it published in 1998, that Depp finally got it made as a movie in 2011, six years after Thompson's death. When it comes to Hunter S Thompson, the truth is deeply buried in his outrageous persona.