‘The Rum Diary was begun in 1959 by then twenty-two-year-old Hunter S. Thompson. It was his first novel, and he told his friend, the author William Kennedy, that The Rum Diary would "in a twisted way . . . do for San Juan what Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises did for Paris." In Paul Kemp, the novel's hero, there are echoes of the young Thompson, who was himself honing his wildly musical writing style as one of the "ill-tempered wandering rabble" on staff at the San Juan Daily News at the time. "I shared a dark suspicion," Kemp says, "that the life we were leading was a lost cause, we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles - a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other - that kept me going."’

A little grandiose, I thought at first, the comparison to Hemingway, but then I’ve learned to take some of Thompson’s declarations with a grain of salt. Instead, as a long time fan of Thompson’s work, I was fascinated by the prospect of reading some of his earliest writing. I have to say at the outset that ultimately, the novel itself was not the ‘breakout piece’ that he billed it as - several plot strands were left unresolved and characters hanging but a bit more on that later. What was actually more important to me was the fact that it offered a chance to see the beginnings of Thompson’s style, pre-gonzo, if you will, and also functioned as a cultural artifact – a first-hand account of the scene and lifestyle that was San Juan in the 50s. On yet another, unintentional level, it was a depiction of Americans behaving badly in another culture – a sort of post-colonial angle. In that spirit, I found myself comparing it to another recently read book, ‘The Sheltering Sky’, by beat era writer, Paul Bowles, in which three Americans travel across a portion of North Africa in the post-war (WWII) years, ca.1945. The common thread between these two books is the self-perception of these characters, deluded perhaps, of being set apart from the average tourist and of fitting in with the indigenous native culture, but in reality, feeling themselves to be superior to both locals and tourists. This is a bit of a digression on my part, but I think Thompson’s novel, looked at in this light, both illustrates and reinforces that dynamic. Here is the premise, set out nicely by Bowles:

‘He did not think of himself as a tourist; he was a traveler. The difference is partly one of time, he would explain. Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another.’

Thompson also subscribes to this viewpoint, seeing himself differently from the journalistic mainstream. Here, in talking about his co-workers on the San Juan Daily News, he describes the basic transient journalist scenario:

‘Some of them were more journalists than vagrants, and others were more vagrants than journalists – but with few exceptions they were part-time, freelance, would-be foreign correspondents who, for one reason or another, lived at several removes from the journalistic establishment….. Puerto Rico was a backwater and the Daily News was staffed mainly by ill-tempered wandering rabble. They moved erratically, on the winds of rumor and opportunity, all over Europe, Latin America and the Far East.’

Without belaboring the point, there are other incidents in both books that illustrate the particular postwar attitude of a group of Americans on the loose in foreign ethnic cultures. This attitude embodied both a global awareness of and legitimate curiosity for these cultures but also in that postwar beat/hipster mindset lay a jaded and condescending view of the ‘other’, which could include not only the tourists and squares but also indigenous peoples. The importance of ‘The Rum Diary’ is that it exists between the cool postwar 50s and the explosive psychedelic 60s.

There is a freshness here, Thompson is living that classic vagabond journo lifestyle, drinking and carousing at all hours but still getting the pieces in. Thompson is represented by the character of (and narrator) Paul Kemp, a wandering writer who ends up in San Juan to take a job on an English language paper called the San Juan Daily News. He spends his time hanging out with some of his co-workers at Al’s Backyard, a little dive that serves only beer, rum, and hamburgers.

‘It was a pleasant place to drink, especially in the mornings when the sun was still cool and the salt mist came up from the ocean to give the air a crisp, healthy smell that for a few early hours would hold its own against the steaming, sweaty heat that clams San Juan at noon and remains until long after sundown.’

There is an entertaining cast of characters, Sala, the glum photographer, Lotterman, the conniving owner of the paper, the besotted psychotic Moberg, dangerous Yeamon, who always seems to be inches away from trouble and Chenault, a wildly attractive but slightly repressed young woman, who has come down to be with Yeamon but finds herself in over her head. There are others and Thompson writes them all in his soon-to-be trademark style.

‘The Rum Diary’ functions as a novel in that there is somewhat of a plot involving the pending real estate development (and despoiling) of San Juan and plenty of behind-the-scenes political wheeling and dealing that Thompson is so good at describing (you can see the prototype of the ‘Fear and Loathing’ series). There is also sometimes an innocence about the Kemp/Thompson character that you don’t see in his later writing. At one point, Kemp is hired by developers to write a brochure about beautiful Vieques island ‘aimed at investors’ to sell the place and he questions it for a minute:

‘I was being paid twenty-five dollars a day to ruin the only place I’d seen in ten years where I’d felt a sense of peace. Paid to piss in my own bed, as it were, and I was only here because I’d got drunk and been arrested and had thereby become a pawn in some high-level face-saving bullshit.’

That sentiment only lasted for the evening – in true Hunter fashion, by the next morning on his way to St. Thomas it was a hazy memory:

The day was bright and blue, and we had a good crossing. By the time we came into the harbor of Charlotte Amalie, I’d forgotten Vieques and Zimburger and everything else.

The Rum Diary reads more like a memoir (but then so do the ‘Fear and Loathing’ books); Alcohol fueled, Kemp drifts into an affair with Chenault as Yeamon gets more and more crazed - the island development heats up and the newspaper is inches away from shutting down. By the end, the reader is wondering what became of this character or what happened to that plot line – but then, it’s a more realistic slant. Life works out like that - friends and acquaintances disappear, plans trail off with no resolution. The hype in the book’s blurb gets pretty sensationalistic:

‘When Chenault becomes ensnared in a genuinely savage love triangle with Kemp, the police and the brutal drunkard Yeamon, a voodoo orgy of murder, sex, and craziness explodes.’