The Hemingway Log: A Chronology of His Life and Times, by Brewster Chamberlain, just out from the University Press of Kansas, is one of those books that appears designed to turn a major literary career into a mere cottage industry.  Nearly everything and anyone that could be related to Hemingway’s life and work, however distantly, is jotted here in daily chronological sequence.  The result, though it makes one wonder whether any mere human being is really worth such a lavish outlay of time and attention, is nevertheless not without interest.  It is a book to be grazed through, like an elk snatching more or less aimlessly among forbs.

I have just begun to look through Boswell’s Enlightenment, by Robert Zaretsky and published by the Belknap Press imprint of Harvard University Press.  The book turns on Boswell’s time in Europe between 1763 and 1765, when he met Voltaire and Rousseau.  Boswell’s was an unsettled and unfinished personality; he was terrified all his life of death and what lay beyond, but unable to agree with himself on what his religious beliefs really were.  “That creature was its own tormentor,” said Dr. Johnson, “and I believe its name was BOSWELL.”  The glimpses of the great man are well rendered, but the book suffers somewhat from self-consciously pretty writing.  Still, it seems a worthy effort.

While staying with friends in Tuscany last fall I met David Mayernik, who was kind enough to send me afterward a copy of his wonderful book Timeless Cities: An Architect’s Reflections on Renaissance Italy, published a dozen years ago, in which he investigates what he calls the development of “the city as idea,” which prevailed from ancient times until the Industrial Revolution, when Western cities became mere manufacturing and financial centers, formless jerry-built machines for mechanical living and lap dining in automobiles at 70 mph.  I only wish I could have read the book before the trip, rather than after it.

I must have missed the book as a boy, because I recall literally nothing of Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, which I’m halfway through in French.  What compelling storytellers the great Romantic novelists were.  The pace and constantly unfolding ingenuity of this novel have real genius behind them.  Novelists aren’t capable of this sort of thing anymore, and Hollywood screenwriters and adapters only think they are. 

        —(CW)

William Peter Blatty is best known as the author of The Exorcist, but he first made his name writing humorous novels and, later, comedic screenplays for Blake Edwards (among others).  Long a fan of both The Exorcist and its sequel, Legion, I’ve been making my way through the rest of his work over the last year, and greatly enjoying what I have found.

At the moment, I’m reading his first novel, Which Way to Mecca, Jack?, published when he was 31.  Blatty’s style in this book is as witty as it is dated (it was published in 1959, and serves as proof that the era of the 60’s began before the decade did), but the most fascinating part of Mecca for me is that Blatty has essentially rewritten the book twice since then, or at least recycled the source material.  The first rewrite became his autobiography, I’ll Tell Them I Remember You (1973); the second is his most recent novel, Crazy (2010), which it might be more fair to say is “inspired by” both Mecca and I Remember You.

Completely accidentally, not realizing the connections between these three volumes, I have read them in reverse order—and I’m very glad I did.  Crazy is the best of the three, but in this case there’s something to be said for not saving the best for last.

Those who want to gain some understanding of how writers continually rework the raw material of their own lives into narratives both fictional and nonfictional (which is not to say unimaginative) can enter through these three books into the workshop of a master craftsman.  Reading the same event recounted twice as fiction (though a half-century apart) and once as autobiography sandwiched in between might sound mind-numbingly boring, but it’s quite the opposite: The familiarity of the underlying material allows the intricacies of Blatty’s artistry to shine through and lets us glimpse the connections among imagination, age, and wisdom.

        —(SPR)