The Rum Diary: The Long Lost Novel - Hardcover

Thompson, Hunter S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684855216 ISBN 13: 9780684855219

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1998

Synopsis

The irreverent journalist-author's long-lost novel, written before his nonfiction became popular, chronicles a journalist's enthusiastic, drunken foray though 1950s San Juan, in a work that offers glimpses of the literary talent that would emerge from the chaos. 150,000 first printing. Tour.

About this title

About the Author

Hunter S. Thompson was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. His books Include Hell's Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, The Curse of Lono, Songs of the Doomed, Better Than Sex, and The Proud Highway. He is a regular contributor to various national and international publications. He now lives in a fortified compound on an island near Puerto Rico.

Reviews

When the celebrated iconoclast was a feisty kid working for an English-language newspaper in San Juan 40 years ago, he wrote, and then put aside, a novel, which is here resurrected. It is very much a young man's book, clearly based on Thompson's own situation and some of the peopleAmostly drunks and layaboutsAwho gravitated to a loosely supervised journalistic stint in the tropics. An introduction sets the scene, and the novel that follows is almost equally documentary in tone: young Kemp comes aboard at the News, gets to know its perpetually embattled proprietor and some of his feckless staff. He observes the island, as the invasion of American tourists and values is just beginning to change its lazy, sun-struck character. He gets involved in a drunken fight with the police, is thrown in jail, bailed out and goes in for a little shame-faced PR writing. He comes between a wild colleague and the equally unbuttoned young Connecticut girl he has brought out to visit him, and the end is a youth's easy-won nostalgia for a silly, drunken time. As he always has done, Thompson lays on the drinking and general hell-raising very thick (the amount of rum consumed would dry up a distillery) and indulges flashes of bad temper toward commercialism while always showing a willingness to do whatever it takes to make a buck. His style is less hallucinatory and exclamatory than it later became, but the groundwork is there. The best parts of the book are its occasional, almost grudging, acknowledgments of natural beauty; the people in it are no more than props. Author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Thompson has kept the waters of U.S. letters boiling with his hopped-up gonzo nonfiction, creating a raging, grubbily poetic, and galvanic persona who reacts to all that is rotten in the world with a compelling mix of self-aggrandizement and self-destruction. His most famous book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972), has been made into a film; most of his letters have been published (The Proud Highway [1997]); and now his only work of fiction, a dark novel predating his journalistic books, is finally seeing the light of day. Thompson was right to keep it under wraps. It isn't as potent or as well-targeted as his nonfiction, but it does reveal the early stage of his particular form of myth-making and the emergence of his distinctive voice. A bitter little tale about angry men and one angry woman, it stars Paul Kemp, a hard-drinking, peripatetic cold war^-era journalist who boosts himself out of New York for a stint in the sun in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Kemp is hoping for a tropical respite but instead wanders into a bad situation. The Puerto Ricans, fed up with greedy, prejudiced Americans, have been beating up the reporters for the News, Kemp's employer. Kemp, rarely sober, soon finds himself on the receiving end, along with his comrades, a moody photographer named Sala, and Yeamon, a guy who attracts trouble like his pretty little girlfriend attracts men. Every hyped-up scene is saturated in rum and sweat, and the action has a grindingly repetitive pattern, like a badly mounted ceiling fan on high, but Kemp's wrath and exasperation exert a near-hallucinatory fascination, and the acidity of Thompson's worldview is a fine antidote for complacency. An excerpt has been recently published in the New Yorker. Donna Seaman

Yes, Thompson has written a novel, but it got lost many years ago and has just resurfaced. Not surprisingly, it's autobiographical, so expect some pretty wild antics as its journalist hero carouses through the tropics.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

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.

I did some drinking there on the night I left for San Juan. Phil Rollins, who'd worked with me, was paying for the ale, and I was swilling it down, trying to get drunk enough to sleep on the plane. Art Millick, the most vicious cab driver in New York, was there. So was Duke Peterson, who had just come back from the Virgin Islands. I recall Peterson giving me a list of people to look up when I got to St. Thomas, but I lost the list and never met any of them.

It was a rotten night in the middle of January, but I wore a light cord coat. Everyone else had on heavy jackets and flannel suits. The last thing I remember is standing on the dirty bricks of Hudson Street, shaking hands with Rollins and cursing the freezing wind that blew in off the river. Then I got in Millick's cab and slept all the way to the airport.

I was late and there was a line at the reservations desk. I fell in behind fifteen or so Puerto Ricans and one small blonde girl a few places ahead of me. I pegged her for a tourist, a wild young secretary going down to the Caribbean for a two week romp. She had a fine little body and an impatient way of standing that indicated a mass of stored-up energy. I watched her intently, smiling, feeling the ale in my veins, waiting for her to turn around for a swift contact with the eyes.

She got her ticket and walked away toward the plane. There were still three Puerto Ricans in front of me. Two of them did their business and passed on, but the third was stymied by the clerk's refusal to let him carry a huge cardboard box on the plane as hand baggage. I gritted my teeth as they argued.

Finally I broke in. "Hey!" I shouted. "What the hell is this? I have to get on that plane!"

The clerk looked up, disregarding the shouts of the little man in front of me. "What's your name?"

I told him, got my ticket, and bolted for the gate. When I got to the plane I had to shove past five or six people waiting to board. I showed my ticket to the grumbling stewardess and stepped inside to scan the seats on both sides of the aisle.

Not a blonde head anywhere. I hurried up to the front, thinking that she might be so small that her head wouldn't show over the back seat. But she wasn't on the plane and by this time there were only two double seats left. I fell into one on the aisle and put my typewriter on the one next to the window. They were starting the engines when I looked out and saw her coming across the runway, waving at the stewardess who was about to close the door.

"Wait a minute!" I shouted. "Another passenger!" I watched until she reached the bottom of the steps. Then I turned around to smile as she came on. I was reaching for my typewriter, thinking to put it on the floor, when an old man shoved in front of me and sat down in the seat I was saving.

"This seat's taken," I said quickly, grabbing him by the arm.

He jerked away and snarled something in Spanish, turning his head toward the window.

I grabbed him again. "Get up," I said angrily.

He started to yell just as the girl went by and stopped a few feet up the aisle, looking around for a seat. "Here's one," I said, giving the old man a savage jerk. Before she could turn around the stewardess was on me, pulling at my arm.

"He sat on my typewriter," I explained, helplessly watching the girl find a seat far up at the front of the plane.

The stewardess patted the old man's shoulder and eased him back to the seat. "What kind of a bully are you?" she asked me. "I should put you off!"

I grumbled and slumped back in the seat. The old man stared straight ahead until we got off the ground. "You rotten old bastard," I mumbled at him.

He didn't even blink, and finally I shut my eyes and tried to sleep. Now and then I would glance up at the blonde head at the front of the plane. Then they turned out the lights and I couldn't see anything.

It was dawn when I woke up. The old man was still asleep and I leaned across him to look out the window. Several thousand feet below us the ocean was dark blue and calm as a lake. Up ahead I saw an island, bright green in the early morning sun. There were beaches along the edge of it, and brown swamps further inland. The plane started down and the stewardess announced that we should all buckle our safety belts.

Moments later we swept in over acres of palm trees and taxied to a halt in front of the big terminal. I decided to stay in my seat until the girl came past, then get up and walk with her across the runway. Since we were the only white people on the plane, it would seem quite natural.

The others were standing now, laughing and jabbering as they waited for the stewardess to open the door. Suddenly the old man jumped up and tried to scramble over me like a dog. Without thinking, I slammed him back against the window, causing a thump that silenced the crowd. The man appeared to be sick and tried to scramble past me again, shouting hysterically in Spanish.

"You crazy old bastard!" I yelled, shoving him back with one hand and reaching for my typewriter with the other. The door was open now and they were filing out. The girl came past me and I tried to smile at her, keeping the old man pinned against the window until I could back into the aisle. He was raising so much hell, shouting and waving his arms, that I was tempted to belt him in the throat to calm him down.

Then the stewardess arrived, followed by the co-pilot, who demanded to know what I thought I was doing.

"He's been beating that old man ever since we left New York," said the stewardess. "He must be a sadist."

They kept me there for ten minutes and at first I thought they meant to have me arrested. I tried to explain, but I was so tired and confused that I couldn't think what I was saying. When they finally let me go I slunk off the plane like a criminal, squinting and sweating in the sun as I crossed the runway to the baggage room.

It was crowded with Puerto Ricans and the girl was nowhere in sight. There was not much hope of finding her now and I was not optimistic about what might happen if I did. Few girls look with favor on a man of my stripe, a brutalizer of old people. I remembered the expression on her face when she saw me with the old man pinned against the window. It was almost too much to overcome. I decided to get some breakfast and pick up my baggage later on.

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.

On top of my slovenly appearance, I stank of ale. It hung in my stomach like a lump of rancid milk. I tried not to breathe on anyone as I sat down at the counter and ordered sliced pineapple.

Outside, the runway glistened in the early sun. Beyond it a thick palm jungle stood between me and the ocean. Several miles out at sea a sailboat moved slowly across the horizon. I stared for several moments and fell into a trance. It looked peaceful out there, peaceful and hot. I wanted to go into the palms and sleep, take a few chunks of pineapple and wander into the jungle to pass out.

Instead, I ordered more coffee and looked again at the cable that had come with my plane ticket. It said I had reservations at the Condado Beach Hotel.

It was not yet seven o'clock, but the coffee shop was crowded. Groups of men sat at tables beside the long window, sipping a milky

Edition details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0684855216
• ISBN 13: 9780684855219
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 204