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

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Hemingway Log: A Chronology of His Life and Times by Brewster Chamberlin Donald A. Daiker Brewster Chamberlin, The Hemingway Log: A Chronology of His Life and Times. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015. 395pp. $39.95. As its subtitle states, Brewster Chamberlin’s The Hemingway Log is a chronological record of the people and events in the life of Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961). It begins in 1835 with the birth of Mark Twain, from whose Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Hemingway claimed “all modern American literature comes,” and extends to 2013, when Cambridge University Press published the second of a projected seventeen volumes of The Letters of Ernest Hemingway. In between there is a lot of information and occasional commentary. The Log is a welcome and useful addition to Hemingway studies. Although Chamberlin acknowledges that his chronology is neither complete nor exhaustive, it goes far beyond, in both detail and scope, Michael Reynolds’s Hemingway: An Annotated Chronology (Detroit: Omnigraphics, 1991), and it corrects dozens of biographical errors. Chamberlin contextualizes each year’s entries by listing the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature; the winners of the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, poetry, and drama; and the publication of significant books in various fields as well as the premiere performance of plays, operas, and orchestral works. Then, drawing on letters written by and to Hemingway, the biographies of Carlos Baker, Kenneth Lynn, James Mellow, Jeffrey Meyers, and Reynolds, as well as on biographical works by Scott Donaldson, Ruth Hawkins, Paul Hendrickson, Peter Moreira, Amanda Vaill, and others, Chamberlin provides readers with a blow-by-blow account of Hemingway’s travels within the country and around the world; he lists activities like hiking, skiing, fishing, and bull-fighting; he records meetings with friends, colleagues, and editors; and he notes the writing, revising, and publishing of his major works. The Log is especially helpful with the years 1928 through 1961, the Key West and Havana years, when we learn not only about Hemingway’s travels and writings but also who accompanied him on daily fishing trips and what they caught. But the earlier years, the Illinois and Michigan years when Hemingway is growing up in Oak Park and summering in Petoskey, are under-reported. We learn nothing, for instance, of young Hemingway’s important relationships with Irene Goldstein, whom Hemingway’s fourth wife Mary called Ernest’s “true love,” and with Grace Quinlan, to whom Hemingway wrote “I love you very much” in August 1921, less than a month before he married Hadley Richardson. Yet many entries seem largely irrelevant—the [End Page 119] birth of Margaret Mitchell, the detail that Eugene O’Neill’s Bound East for Cardiff was first performed “in a small makeshift theater at the end of a wharf in Provincetown on Cape Cod, Massachusetts” (14), or that on November 29, 1924 “Giacomo Puccini dies of a heart attack at the age of sixty-three in Brussels, where he has been receiving radiation treatment for throat cancer, and is buried for a while in the Toscanini family tomb until 1926, when the son has the remains transferred to the chapel in the Puccini family villa at Torre del Lago” (61–62). Such lengthy irrelevancies would be less disappointing had Chamberlin not neglected more germane material. He says nothing, for example, of the affectionate letter that Hemingway’s father, Dr. Clarence Hemingway, wrote to his son in March 1925 when, by accident, he had come across “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife” in the Transatlantic Review. Hemingway wrote back immediately with his thanks and with commentary both about that story and the aims of his fiction: “not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive.” None of this appears in the Log. Nowhere does Chamberlin enunciate his principles of selection, his criteria for including or excluding data. The Log could have been better, even more useful, had Chamberlin, who is not a published Hemingway scholar, known the fiction and especially the short stories better. He has next to nothing to say about what Paul Smith calls Hemingway’s “miraculous year,” the year 1924 when Hemingway wrote the brilliant Nick Adams stories...