The top was down and it was a fine, fast ride along the Boulevard to Condado." (So Hemingway right now!) "Most people who deal in words don't have much faith in them and I am no exception-especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong. Listen: "We paid our bill and went out to Sala's car. (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. Their similarities, beyond Thompson's early penchant for sloe gin, end there.)Ī 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. The two writers shared this, and an editor: Jim Silberman of Random House was famously Thompson's editor for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Ellison's for his essay collection, Shadow and Act. (Ralph Ellison was also known to copy entire stories from Hemingway for the same reason. Mencken and harbored dreams of being "universally hailed as the new 'Granny' Rice." Later, while he had a "plum" job as a copyboy at Time, he would type The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms in their entirety in order to study their sentence structures. Years earlier, while still "Airman Thompson" of the Air Force (and sports editor of his base's newspaper), he wrote letters in the style of H.L. The young man in Puerto Rico was one still beholden to his literary heroes and still speaking in their voices-in his fiction, anyway. He never would’ve published that twenty years before.” The book sold well but Thompson was disappointed, calling it "the sloppiest job of Book Publishing I've ever seen.But the author of The Rum Diary was then, despite his virtuosic talent for the picturesque threat and brutal insult, the same as that of the Fear and Loathing books in name only. ![]() His assistant, Lynn Nesbit, explained: “ The Rum Diary came out when it did because he needed money, absolutely. Thompson had always felt it was too weak to sell, but now he needed money. When it was published in 1998, The Rum Diary was billed as "The Long Lost Novel" but it had never in fact been lost. Wills explains 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. In these excerpts, it is possible to see how the manuscript was changed before its final publication. Parts of the novel were published in 1990 in Thompson's collection, Songs of the Doomed. After missing various deadlines, he gave up on The Rum Diary until 1998, when it was finally published. However, he felt that the more time passed, the more difficult it was to write about an increasingly distant era. Thompson finished a draft of The Rum Diary in the early sixties but continued to work on it throughout that decade, ultimately selling it to Random House after they agreed to publish his first book, Hell's Angels. "I still can't beat that goddamn Gatsby." ![]() Thompson himself stated that he wanted to write the Great American Novel. The narrative uses a highly paced and rather exciting style, also typical of Thompson's oeuvre. The prominent characters are typical of Thompson's work: violent, maniacal and alcoholic, stumbling through life. While in Puerto Rico, Thompson befriended many of the writers at the Star, providing the context for The Rum Diary 's fictional storyline.Īlthough Thompson wrote his narrative at the age of 22, it deals extensively with a fear of "going over the hill" and growing old. Thompson had unsuccessfully applied to work at the larger English-language daily called The San Juan Star which novelist William J. Thompson himself travelled from New York to San Juan in 1960 to write for an ill-fated sports newspaper on the island of Puerto Rico. Set in the late 1950s, the novel encompasses a tangled love story involving jealousy, treachery and violent alcoholic lust among the Americans who staff the newspaper.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |