They are too elusive and far too relative when you compare them to sharp, mean little words like Punk and Cheap and Phony." (Mr.
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. 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.
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