The Kentucky Derby

Sorry, I haven’t started to read my next book yet. It just arrived at the library today and I didn’t have time to pick it up. But I did read one of Thompson’s articles, The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved (Scanlan’s Monthly, June 1970). The article was the earliest example of Thompson’s “Gonzo” journalism.

The story starts when Scanlan’s assigns Thompson to write a story covering the Kentucky Derby. One would assume that this would entail interviewing trainers and jockeys and paying careful attention to the race itself. However, Thompson had different ideas. He wanted, “to watch the real beasts perform”; that is, he is more interested in the people watching the race than the race itself. Along with his British illustrator, Steadman, Thompson attempts to strike at the very core of what makes the Kentucky Derby so despicable—“a pretentious mix of booze, failed dreams and a terminal identity crisis,” as Thompson puts it. Thompson describes the people he saw, criticizing each group heavily, and what he did that day in an effort to get the story. This includes a brief description of the race itself (Thompson devotes a full 5 sentences to it). The article ends with Thompson waking up the day after the race, looking in the mirror at his own desperate and drunken face, and realizing that he embodies everything he hates about the Derby.

This terrible revelation likely reflects the depression and hopelessness Thompson was experiencing at the time. Thompson, as we have seen various times in The Rum Diary, is often haunted by a feeling that his life is being wasted. When Thompson criticized those, “Failed dreams” of the Kentucky Derby, he was really criticizing his own inability to make his dreams reality. Thompson was also likely suffering from a “terminal identity crisis” at the time. He was not sure whether or not his life was on the right track, just as Kemp wasn’t sure if selling out by working with the developers was a move in the right direction.

It was really interesting to read this early example of Thompson’s journalism. I’ll read a load more when I get to Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, which should be an adventure.

Biography

Hunter S. Thompson’s career in journalism started while he was in the US Air Force in 1956. Thompson became the sports editor of The Command Courier, the newspaper of the Eglin Air Force Base. After leaving the Air Force (he resented the lack of freedom), Thompson began migrating from city to city and newspaper to newspaper for several years. During this time, he accepted a job in Pennsylvania, and then moved to New York where he worked for Time Magazine and a small New York newspaper. He was fired from both jobs for insubordination. He then moved to San Juan, Puerto Rico where he wrote for several English-Language newspapers. His experiences there were the inspiration for The Rum Diary. Like Thompson, Kemp is a nomadic journalist whose exploits and independent mindset often led to trouble. After that, he moved to Brazil, then to San Francisco. During this time, he married Sandra Conklin and became a part of the hippie counter-culture of the 1960s.

Thompson had his first literary success with the novel, Hell’s Angels, in 1966. He had been living with the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang for several years leading up to the publishing of the book. Hell’s Angels was a success and brought Thompson’s writing to a wider audience. By the late 1960’s, Thompson’s articles were being published in high-profile newspapers and magazines.

By the 1970’s, Thompson had become disenchanted with the increasing lack of political resolve of the hippies and became increasingly pessimistic about the American dream. Thomson moved to Aspen, Colorado where he ran for sheriff in 1970. Among his campaign promises were the legalization of drugs, outlawing the construction of all buildings tall enough to block the view of the Rocky Mountains, and destroying all the streets in Aspen to be replaced by grassy parks. Thompson narrowly lost the election, but used the experience to gain a job writing for Rolling Stone magazine, a job which lasted him much of his life.

While on assignment in to write a magazine article about a motorcycle race in Las Vegas, Nevada, Thompson began writing the novel, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a book which paralleled Thompson’s own life in much the same way The Rum Diary had. The book was published in a series of Rolling Stone magazines in 1972. The book focused on the failure of the 1960’s hippie counter-culture and the death of the American Dream. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was representative of Thompson’s new form of journalism: Gonzo Journalism. Gonzo Journalism is intentionally subjective and focuses as much on the process of getting a story as it does on the story itself. For example, a 1970 article about the Kentucky Derby did not focus on the races themselves, but on the corruption of the people attending the event and on Thompson’s actions that day.

Thompson continued to employ this style as he wrote a series of articles for Rolling Stone which described the 1972 presidential campaign of Senator George McGovern. McGovern ultimately won the Democratic nomination, only to lose the presidential election to Richard Nixon. Thompson was a sharp critic of Nixon, seeing him as the embodiment of everything that was wrong with America. These articles were later published in the collection, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, 1972.

That’s essentially everything you need to know to follow the books I will be covering in this blog. If I have time after finishing Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, 1972, I’ll explain Thompson’s later career.

BTW: Yep, that's an ad. I've sold out.

The Rum Diary, in Summary

what is the significance of power? You say that Yeamon was very controlling of Chenault. I think he was control because he had no control over his own life, so to escape he used Chenault.

I definitely agree. Yeamon is a very individualistic character. This suggests inner strength, but also a mistrust and fear of the outside world, which is why he strives to be so individualistic. That fear of the outside world springs from his inability to control others, though he attempts to do so by fighting them and by treating Chenault like a slave. Of course, no matter how much of an individual he thinks he is, his life is impacted by factors beyond his control and that really frightens him.

The Rum Diary ends on chapter 21. Anthony Burgess, in a foreword to his famous novel, A Clockwork Orange, once wrote of his choice to include 21 chapters in that book, “21 is the symbol of human maturity…The number of chapters is never entirely arbitrary,”(Burgess, A Clockwork Orange Resucked,vi). The 21 chapters of The Rum Diary have a similar meaning: the book is about Kemp’s realization of his maturity and his growing readiness to take on responsibility.

A Clockwork Orange contains 3 separate sections, each 7 chapters long. It seems that Thompson has done the same thing, though he did not make the separation as obvious as Burgess did. The first part of the book saw a Kemp who was unsure of what he wanted from life. He lived nomadically, migrating from place to place to seek happiness. In many ways he reminded me of Chris McCandless, seeking individuality and truth. However, Kemp realizes that he is getting older, and he fears that change. He sees that the next stage of his life is coming, and fast. In the second section, Kemp has his run-in with the law, landing him in prison. This makes him realize that he’s not young enough to get away with partying and fighting and that it’s time to grow up and gain some stability; that is why he bought the house and car and got a well paying job from Sanderson. The final part of the book begins when Kemp, Yeamon, and Chenault arrive in St. Thomas. In this section, Kemp watches Yeamon’s life fall apart: he loses his girl, his home, and is made into an outlaw after participating in the murder of his old boss, Lotterman. Kemp, on the other hand, gains a woman and decides to return to New York to live with her. We cannot know what Kemp will do upon reaching New York. We do not know whether he will he continue to live recklessly or begin to settle down. However, we do know that during the second part of the book, Kemp was turned off of his youthful troublemaking and that in the third section, he saw Yeamon’s rebelliousness destroy him. It is safe to suppose that he is finished with that way of life and ready to move on; his journey to maturity is complete.

Rum

In The Rum Diary, Kemp and the others are drinking almost constantly. The recurring presence of rum is significant because for the characters of this novel, rum is an escape from the troubles of life. One thing that Kemp accentuates over and over is the mixed nature of life in San Juan: the hope and beauty of the place at the beginning of a day can be replaced by crushing heat which destroys all joy by midday. As Kemp recalls of his days in San Juan, “Sometimes at dusk, when you were trying to relax and not think about the general stagnation, the Garbage God would gather a handful of those choked-off morning hopes and dangle them somewhere just out of reach…It was a maddening image, and the only way to whip it was to…banish the ghosts with rum,” (191). It is, then, not only the hopelessness of the place which drives the men to drink, but the fact that hope is always tantalizingly present, but it is tortuously wrenched away.

What are these unfulfilled hopes? Yeamon, in the beginning, hoped to live on an island paradise and to have a beautiful woman, Chenault, to control. However, Yeamon had that dream wrenched away when Chenault, rebelling against Yeamon’s dominating ways, ran away with another man after a wild party and never came back to him, eventually finding her way to Kemp who she apparently hopes to have a relationship with. For her part, Chenault wanted to live on an island paradise with a man and live an exciting, romantic life. This dream is crushed by Yeamon’s control. Kemp also had various hopes which were crushed. His hope for wealth in the booming Caribbean region was dashed by the reality of the immorality necessary to conduct business there. He had hoped to make money off the developers of Vieques, but ultimately realizes that his own hopes were in fact evil since they led him to destroy the island’s beauty. It is a key part of the death of these dreams that the characters not only fail to realize their hopes, but also that they realize the hopes themselves were immoral: Just as Kemp realized that his hopes were actually immoral, Yeamon ultimately realizes that his attempts to control Chenault were wrong. It is a process which breeds uncertainty; life’s goals on one day become despicable the next day. As Kemp remarks at the peak of his self-disgust over aligning himself with Lotterman (the newspaper owner) and Sanderson (a powerful economic and political figure), “‘I’m tired of being a punk—a human suckfish,’”(185). It is no wonder that these characters are so angry at the world and at themselves. It is even less of a wonder that they kill this pain with rum.

Next week I’m going to do a conclusion for The Rum Diary, then as I wait to get a copy of Hell’s Angels, I’ll give some background info on Hunter S. Thompson, then the week after that, I’ll get right into Hell’s Angels.