Columnist Scott Dickensheets: Thompson can ‘Rum’ but he can’t hide

Scott Dickensheets

Friday, Oct. 2, 1998 | 9:24 a.m.

YOU CAN practically hear the papers rustling as Hunter S. Thompson tidies up his place in American letters. He must know the end will come eventually -- whatever strange motor keeps him upright in the face of his legendary self-abuse is bound to give out sooner or later. It's time to get the affairs of posterity in order. He's always wanted to amount to more, in the end, than some gonzo journalist.

Last year saw the release of "The Proud Highway," Volume 1 of his collected correspondence, with two more supposedly in the offing. Now comes "The Rum Diary," one of his very earliest efforts, dusted off and served up as "the long lost novel." There's a sense both of summation and drawer-cleaning about all this, as if he's controlling the release of his literary miscellanea to avoid a Hemingway-like dribble of posthumous embarrassments (and make a little money at it).

Thompson -- author of the classic "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" -- wrote "The Rum Diary" in the early '60s. He had youthfully high hopes for it. " 'The Rum Diary' is the potential high-water mark of 20th century literature," Thompson mock-boasted to a friend in 1961. "It is a novel more gripping than 'The Ginger Man,' more skillfully rendered than 'The Sergeant,' more compassionate than 'A Death in the Family,' and more important than 'Lie Down in Darkness."'

It turns out to be none of those things, but it is a curious book. "The Rum Diary" is the fictionalized account of a period he spent in Puerto Rico, drunk and reckless in a strange place during a strange time among some very strange people. His alter ego is Paul Kemp, a rootless reporter who joins the raffish, debauched crew of an English-language daily newspaper.

Essentially plotless, the book's scenes -- sour parties, bar-hopping, police beatings -- are connected largely by rum consumption and Kemp's growing pains as he reluctantly sheds the fecklessness of his youth. Thompson once referred to "The Rum Diary" -- I don't know whether he was kidding -- as "the great Puerto Rican novel."

Perhaps it is; I'm not especially familiar with that wing of the library. It's certainly not a great novel. You never really get a handle on Kemp, in part, of course, because he can't get a handle on himself. He's a vagabond; with nothing to carry, he has nothing to hold onto. His life is a clip file and a storehouse of memorable drinking binges. But defining a character by his emptiness is a tough trick, and ultimately Kemp is a portrait in erased lines. He's a 2 1/2-dimensional character, close, but not fully there.

While "The Rum Diary" lacks the gonzo crackle of Thompson's signature writings, there are still touches of the epigrammatic intensity that would make him the wealthy, famous, cult writer he would become. Also, the book is utterly conventional, very much the work of a young writer trying to elbow into the mainstream. His later fabrications are all about the mad romp and zoom of language. You weren't meant to "believe" them, just enjoy the ride. "The Rum Diary" has very little of that inventiveness.

None of which is to say the novel is a failure; it's not terrible. Yet it was partly his disappointment with this book that sent him headlong into the glorious bigfoot journalism of the '70s, the work that will define his real place in American letters. For that, I'm grateful "The Rum Diary" isn't a better book.