The Hemingway Log: A Chronology of His Life and Times by Brewster Chamberlin (review)

“Friendship is what we have,” Stanley Plumly writes, in his exuberant new book about the immortal dinner hosted in London in 1817 by painter Benjamin Haydon and attended by friends Wordsworth, Keats, Lamb, and other persons long since forgotten by history. The sentence came to mind when Stanley—his office is next to mine in Tawes Hall at the University of Maryland—informed me that he was listening to the audio book of Seán Hemingway’s “Restored” edition of A Moveable Feast, a book he admitted to having read in its original form “at least ten times.” The obvious pleasure Stanley was taking in revisiting Hemingway’s memoir of the days of awe in Paris struck me as touching, and a little counterintuitive, since one moral of Hemingway’s story is that friendship is what we lose.

If love and work are the central concerns when telling the story of any great writer’s life—in Hemingway’s case, the four marriages and the ever-increasing count of “works” (as of this writing, the number stands at thirty-five, eighteen of which have been published posthumously)—then friendship is a kind of third force, a barometer measuring where the writer thinks he stands in relation to the men he has allowed to get close to him. At the heart of male friendship, Hemingway’s story reveals, lies something deeply competitive, and, in Hemingway’s case, the intensity of the ambition, as well as the moodiness induced by his psycho-chemical make-up, made the effort of maintaining enduring friendship a challenging thing.

These thoughts are induced by a reading of Brewster Chamberlin’s The Hemingway Log, an almost day-by-day chronology of “where he was and with whom.” What one looks for in a book of this kind are the long structures, and the one that stands out most, apart from the deepening mystery of the marriages, is the making and breaking of friendships.

Bill Smith provides the first major instance. On page 8, under the year 1895, Chamberlin writes: “August 20: William Smith (Kate’s brother) is born in Saint Louis, Missouri.” Smith and EH meet on page 16, in July, 1916, at Horton Bay. They spend summers together and Ernest falls half in love with Bill’s older sister Kate. Bill is on hand for the summer of 1920, when Ernest, clearly at sea after his return from the wars in Italy, is ejected by his mother from the Windemere cottage after sneaking “out of the house for a midnight picnic.” Moving to Chicago, Ernest bunks with Bill’s brother Y. K., only to discover that Y. K. has a common-law wife named Doodles. Shocked by the arrangement, Ernest very explicitly uninvites Y. K. from his parent’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary party. Four months later Bill sends “a letter to EH breaking off their friendship.”

It is February 1922 now, and the newly-married Hemingway has moved to Paris. Bill and Ernest have ceased to correspond. Then, in April 1924, Y. K.’s “probable lover” shows up at his residence, fires a gun at Doodles, and kills Henry Manning, “an elderly building caretaker.” The shooter—a former Chicago assistant US attorney named Wanda Stoper— then poisons herself at the Hotel Statler in Detroit. On April 25, Ernest reads in a French newspaper about Stoper’s attempt on Doodles’s life. In December, “realizing that much of what EH said about his brother Y. K.’s quasi-marriage to Doodles was true, BS writes a reconciliation letter to his best friend.” Ernest writes at length to Bill in response and the friendship is resumed.

In the next act in the story, Hemingway convinces Smith to travel to Paris where he promises to find him editing work. Bill referees a boxing match between Ernest and Jean Prévost but not before his friend asks him to shorten the rounds “in which he tired and Prévost...