Chink

Chink is a professional soldier and one of Ernest Hemingway’s closest friends, eventually becoming a best friend to both Hemingway and Hadley Richardson. He is remembered less through extended scenes of his own than through the journeys, conversations, and practical lessons that remain vivid to his friends. In those recollections, he represents a friendship in which Hadley is an equal participant, not an observer at the edge of Hemingway’s life.

Identity and Friendship

Chink had gone out to Mons from Sandhurst. Hemingway first met him in Italy, and Chink became his best friend before becoming, for a long time, the couple’s best friend. When he was on leave, he spent it with them. These details establish a durable relationship that crossed from Hemingway’s individual friendship into a shared intimacy with Hadley.

The language of leave also gives the friendship a recurring condition: Chink is close, but his profession takes him away. Hemingway and Hadley say that they miss him in winter and spring, and Hadley knows that he hopes to obtain leave the following spring. He had written the previous week from Cologne. The correspondence and hope of another visit keep the friendship present across his absence, without making the separation seem resolved or permanent.

A Friendship Made of Shared Journeys

The couple’s recollections of travel show how Chink belonged within their everyday life. Hadley recalls the three of them coming down the Italian side of the St. Bernard after climbing through snow, then walking all day in spring toward Aosta. Chink had given that outing its memorable, comic shorthand by calling it a crossing of the St. Bernard in street shoes. Hadley remembers her shoes as part of the story, so the shared adventure persists not as a grand expedition but as an intimate memory with a particular detail attached to it.

Another remembered scene places Chink and Hadley together in the garden of an inn at Aigle, reading while Hemingway fished. The arrangement is simple, but it makes their companionship visible: Hadley is not merely accompanying Hemingway, and Chink is not confined to a friendship conducted in his absence. The three share a journey while sometimes occupying different activities within it.

When Hadley describes how much of that trip she remembers, she emphasizes that conversations between Hemingway and Chink included her. The three argued about specific things, made fun of one another, and discussed how to make things true in writing: how to put them rightly rather than merely describe them. Hadley remembers the lights, textures, and shapes they debated. Her recollection gives the friendship an intellectual as well as social dimension, while insisting that the exchange was not a private bond from which she was excluded.

Practical Lessons and Conduct

Chink’s influence also survives in a rule Hemingway associates with him: never discuss casualties. Hemingway invokes that lesson after Hadley tells him that their manuscripts have been lost. He has reassured her that they will manage, then later tells Edward O’Brien, who is deeply affected by the loss, not to feel so bad. Hemingway offers encouragement and says he will write stories again; as he says it to comfort O’Brien, he recognizes that the promise is true. Chink’s lesson is thus recalled not as an abstract maxim but as a way of responding to distress without dwelling on damage.

The soldier’s advice carries into a civilian crisis involving work rather than a battlefield. Hemingway uses a discipline learned from Chink to manage the immediate conversation, while the loss still has real consequences: the early work is gone, and writing must begin again. The recollection links the friends’ different circumstances without claiming that Hemingway’s loss is equivalent to military casualties. What carries over is a restraint in how suffering is discussed and a resolve to continue.

Memory and Narrative Significance

Chink’s character emerges through other people’s remembrance: the shoes on the mountain crossing, the reading in the Aigle garden, the arguments about writing, the absences marked by seasons, and the instruction about casualties. These specific memories make him more than a name attached to Hemingway’s past. They show a friend whose presence shaped both the couple’s shared life and Hemingway’s conduct when confronted with loss.

Hadley’s account is especially important to that portrait. She remembers not only what she did with Chink but also how the three of them spoke together, and she distinguishes that inclusion from her experience of being a wife in Gertrude Stein’s company. In her telling, friendship is enacted through attention and participation: she was part of the conversations, the teasing, and the journey’s accumulated particulars. Chink’s significance therefore lies partly in the form of the relationship around him. He belongs to a friendship that the couple can remember together, even while his military service keeps him elsewhere and makes the prospect of his next leave something to look forward to.