The Rum Diary

‘I think crime pays. The hours are good and you travel a lot.’
Woody Allen

Thompson wrote most of The Rum Diary when he was twenty-two and didn’t push it upon publishers till much later after his Hell’s Angels and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas days. It is for the same reason that in this debut effort of the talented writer, there is no fierce gonzo typing of the drugged wreck that he became but rather the calm of the hopeful man he wished to be. This travelogue/memoir is a great way of understanding that hopeful young man with new ground under his feet.

Fed up with the chills of New York, Paul Kemp, a journalist, moves to San Juan, Puerto Rico. He has come here to work for the The Daily News, a small newspaper in the Caribbean boomtown. What follows this move is not merely a physical adaptation to the tropical climate and beaches but a shift from his past to a future he wants to construct.

All around him, Paul Kemp is surrounded by characters that one would expect from a typical Thompson reportage: the erratic boss, crazed photographers, alcoholic journalists…in short, the common animals found in the publishing jungle. Together, these people are easily intertwined in the small town and struggle to keep the paper going. This struggle does have a sad end but it is the fate of gypsies in a foreign land.

What got to me and to other people as well, (I hope), was the nostalgia Thompson displays for his past, no matter how disheartening or dull it may have been. There is a sense of him taking you away from all that you know about him to some new land where he had once lived. Putting two and two together, it is a very good read because one sees that even though Paul Kemp lived in the 1950s with the hustler crowds of businessmen and journalists; each trying to sell something or the other in order to get ahead…his own failure was perhaps a consequence that was inevitable due to his not doing the same. He chose to extinguish his own fires by copious amounts of rum and tequila for his three year stay there. There is a boozy charm of a man lost to cause but not to purpose and it is this purpose that shows him the exit out of the ex-paradise that became San Juan.

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