In the autumn of 1930 Ernest Hemingway spent a night in Yellowstone, got into a car with John Dos Passos, and was in an accident that broke his arm badly enough to need surgery and most of November and December in hospital.
Here is the entry in his Hunting Book:
Broke right arm November enroute to Piggott Ark[ansas]
That is the whole of it. The bracketed expansion of Arkansas is the archivist’s, not his.
Stacey Flores Chandler, the reference archivist who wrote the JFK Library archives’ account of conserving these notebooks, puts it better than I could: the explanation “turns out to have been quite an understatement.”
What These Documents Are
The Ernest Hemingway Personal Papers are at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. Alongside the letters and the manuscript drafts, in a catch-all series called “Other Materials”, sit “the fishing, hunting, and boating logs he kept all his life”.
Twelve of them were recently conserved and imaged, and the archives published the list: box numbers, spans, page counts, media. A fishing book and a hunting book covering 1930 to 1934. Fishing logs from 1932. Boating logs from 1933. The log of the Pilar for 1934 to 1935, for 1942, and for 1945 to 1949. Two pages of notes from 1955 about renting boats for a film.
Every one of the twelve is a log.
One thing I should be straight about before going further. The library’s own finding aid could not be read for this article, because jfklibrary.org refuses automated requests. So this is a description of the notebooks the archives themselves chose to describe, and not a claim about everything the collection holds. Where the popular idea of a writer’s notebook is concerned, that turns out to be enough.
Chandler’s description of what the logs actually record is the best short definition of the form I have found anywhere:
where he went and who came along, what he caught and how much it weighed, and even what the weather conditions were like, down to the direction of the wind
He Never Seems to Have Bought a Notebook
Look at what the twelve are, physically.
The spring 1933 boating log is a Warner’s Calendar of Medical History, described in the archives’ list as “a commercially-produced planner with medical facts on each page”. He used a medical-trivia diary as a fishing log.
One 1932 fishing log is a Western Union Cable Blanks pad, written in by both Ernest and Pauline Hemingway. Another is a school exercise book. The 1942 log of the Pilar is a leather-bound calendar for 1941, with his name on the front, used a year late. The 1934 to 1935 log is not in his handwriting at all: it is a carbon of a typescript that Arnold Samuelson prepared from Hemingway’s dictation. One of the later logs has entries from three different people.
He wrote in whatever was aboard.
Anyone who has spent an evening choosing the right format before starting a notebook should sit with that. The most consistently kept written record by a major twentieth-century novelist is a stack of repurposed calendars and telegraph stationery, some of it filled in by other people.
The Writing Appears Three Words at a Time
The 1933 planner is where you can watch a novelist working, if you are willing to accept the resolution.
Between the fishing entries, on 7 February, is this:
wrote story – finished it
And towards the back, a scribble: “Titles: The Twelve New Joys / The Light of the World.” The 1939 fishing log carries the note “worked on novel.”
That is it. Chandler observes that these fit into a scholar’s existing timeline of when Hemingway was working on what, and I am going to leave it there, because that is as far as the source goes.
But consider the ratio. A man is composing the work that will make him one of the most examined writers alive, and in his own running record it occupies three words between a wind direction and a weight.
What a Log Does That a Journal Cannot
Here is the argument, and it is the reason this article exists rather than a piece about famous manuscripts.
A reflective journal entry has an entry requirement: you must have something to say. On a day when you are exhausted, or nothing has resolved, or you are too far inside a situation to describe it, that requirement is not met, and the page stays empty. This is the ordinary way notebooks die.
A log has almost no entry requirement. Something happened, and it can be counted. That is the whole bar.
The consequence is that logs get kept on precisely the days journals do not, which happens to be the stretch you would most want a record of afterwards. The site’s advice on writing through a bad stretch is mostly about lowering the bar, and the log is the lowest bar there is.
The reason most journals stop is that they ask you to have something to say. The archives are full of people who solved that by not asking. I write a short email about what those records actually look like on the page. You can subscribe here.
How a Log Holds a Bad Year
Go back to the broken arm and read the surrounding entries as a set.
November and December 1930: nothing, and a five-word line explaining why. January 1931, back at Key West: an attempt to hunt “left handed”, which yielded one snipe. The Fishing Book: no fishing until the end of March.
There is not one word about pain, frustration, or fear in any of that. What there is, dated at both ends, is the exact shape and length of the interruption. Five months. One snipe. You can reconstruct a ruined winter from a hunting count.
By the standards this site normally applies, that is a bad entry. What a good entry is supposed to contain is a specific and a reflection, and these have the first and none of the second. I still think they are worth more than most of the reflective entries written that year by anybody, because they are the ones that got written.
The Tradition It Belongs To
The site has been circling this form for a while without naming it.
A journal kept because the record was required is the same instrument at an institutional scale, with the same properties: countable, dated, kept on days nobody felt like keeping it. The most exhaustive version of the same instinct is Buckminster Fuller’s, and the reason his is unusable as a model and Hemingway’s is not comes down to volume. And the site’s guide to keeping a travel journal already teaches the log without calling it one: where you went, who with, what it cost, what the weather did.
Eighty Years Later, the Logs Are Data
This is the part I did not expect and it is the strongest practical argument for logging I have come across.
Chandler describes who uses these notebooks now:
from literature buffs exploring Hemingway’s inspiration for works like Old Man and the Sea, to scientists looking for historical data about weather patterns and wildlife populations
Wind directions written down in 1933 to please nobody are now evidence about the climate. Catch weights recorded because he liked recording them are now evidence about fish populations in the Gulf.
I want to be careful about what that does and does not argue. It is not a reason to keep a log. Nobody should write for hypothetical scientists eighty years out, and a notebook kept for posterity is usually a worse notebook. What it does show is which half of a record survives its own moment. The interpretive parts of any journal age badly and are rarely worth rereading, including your own. The countable parts do not age at all. A weight is a weight.
Of all the notebooks this site keeps track of, these are the only ones being read by people with no interest whatsoever in the person who wrote them.
The Conservation Decision
One last thing, because it is the most quietly instructive line in the whole source.
When the notebooks went to the lab, making them look new was explicitly not the goal:
Because imperfections in an historical item can tell us a lot about how its owner used it, making the notebooks look brand new again wasn’t the goal of this conservation project.
The salt damage, the mud, the corroding iron-gall ink, the binding that had warped so the left margin could not be read: these are not flaws in the record. They are part of it. They are how you know the book was on the boat.
So if you have ever looked at your own notebook and concluded it was too scrappy to count, here is the state of the evidence. The twelve most carefully conserved notebooks in one of America’s presidential libraries are a hunting book, a boat calendar, a telegraph pad and a typed carbon somebody else prepared. Most of them are stained. The entry an archivist chose to lead with is five words about a broken arm.
Keeping a practice going is easier when the practice does not require you to be interesting. He wrote down the wind.
If your journal keeps dying because you have nothing to say on the days you most want to write, the fix may be to stop writing sentences and start writing counts. A date, a number, a name. I write about what the famous notebooks actually contain, which is usually less and better than you would guess. The email goes out from here.
