Movie Review: Hemingway, a documentary Directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick (2021)

 

Poster for Hemingway, directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, 2021.

Ernest Hemingway! Papa! The beard! The wives! The drinking! Key West! Cuba! Spain! The bullfights! Cocktails in Paris with Scott and Zelda! Oh, and in between all of that, I think he wrote some books, too, didn’t he? Something about an old man and a fish, right?

Ernest Hemingway’s enormous fame and celebrity have long overshadowed his actual accomplishments as a writer. His very name became synonymous with “writer,” the same way that Picasso was shorthand for “painter,” or “artist.” It isn’t Hemingway’s fault that he became such an icon. He didn’t ask to become one. But for whatever reason, he became the default “Great American Writer.”

Even now, as we approach the 60^th anniversary of Hemingway’s death, it’s difficult to separate the myth from the man, and the work that he left behind. Directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, Hemingway is a 6-hour documentary that aired on PBS earlier in April and attempts to get past the myth of Hemingway. It’s a fascinating look at a gifted artist and a deeply troubled man.

I explored some of my mixed feelings towards Ernest Hemingway in a 2017 essay. To sum it up, I understand Hemingway’s importance as a major American writer of the 20^th century, but he’s certainly not my favorite American writer of the 20^th century. I prefer F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tom Wolfe (white suit Tom Wolfe, not You Can’t Go Home Again Tom Wolfe) John Updike, and Truman Capote, to name a few of my favorites.

Unlike most other authors whose work I admire, should I acquire a time machine, I would have no desire to meet Ernest Hemingway. Sure, I suppose it might be entertaining to be in his company to observe the effect he had on people, tossing back cocktails at the Ritz bar or whatever. (I’ll pass on the bullfight, thanks.) While I admire Hemingway’s gifts as a writer, his personality is totally unappealing to me. 

It’s always a challenge to bring the creative arts to life on film, since so often, especially with writers, the real work of the art happens alone, with a writer hunched over a typewriter or a notepad, pounding the sentences into shape. Obviously, this is not the stuff that riveting documentaries are made of. But Hemingway does an excellent job of letting us in, through seeing drafts of Hemingway’s work, and through Jeff Daniels’ excellent narration of Hemingway’s writing.

Speaking of narration, Hemingway features an all-star cast as Ernest’s four wives: Keri Russell as Hadley Richardson, Patricia Clarkson as Pauline Pfeiffer, Meryl Streep as Martha Gellhorn, and Mary-Louise Parker as Mary Walsh. Personally, I found Meryl Streep’s mid-Atlantic accent a bit distracting and over the top, but that’s just me.

Like every Ken Burns documentary I’ve seen, Hemingway is a superbly crafted film, with a mixture of archival photographs, talking heads, and footage of places important in Hemingway’s life. Burns and Lynn Novick know how to capture and hold an audience’s attention. There’s never a time when you’re like, “Oh man, not this same Hemingway expert again,” or where you’re thinking, “Ah, geez, not more footage of Hemingway’s house in Cuba.”

Hemingway is okay with experts disagreeing about his writing. While the late Senator John McCain waxes rhapsodic about For Whom the Bell Tolls, Nobel Prize-winning author Mario Vargas Llosa says it’s “probably his worst novel.” Llosa even gets the giggles when he’s describing the passage where Maria feels the earth move as she makes love with Robert Jordan. In a similar vein, Llosa has lots of praise for The Old Man and the Sea, while Edna O’Brien dismisses it as “schoolboy writing.”

It’s difficult sometimes to show how artists are different from those who have come before them. Hemingway might have benefited from a specific stylistic comparison between Hemingway and acclaimed American authors who came before him. I can’t think of a perfect example to compare Hemingway with, but generally speaking, 19^th century writing was just more florid and descriptive, whereas Hemingway wrote like he was at a Western Union office, conscious of not wasting a word.

Hemingway’s sentences can make his fiction seem so artless. Let me explain what I mean. He’s most famous for writing choppy, blocky short sentences. And you want to buy him that sentence combining workbook I had in high school. Or else he’s running the sentences on and on and on, combining them in a seemingly artless way of just using and—like the famous passage at the beginning of A Farewell to Arms. Both styles were deliberate, but it can be hard to see the artistry in them. It’s easy to assume he just wrote it that way in 10 minutes and then went to a bullfight. Of course, he didn’t. Hemingway worked hard on his craft, but his style can certainly fool you into thinking it was easy.

I wish Hemingway had spent a little more time on The Sun Also Rises. The film makes a much bigger deal out of A Farewell to Arms, and clearly pushes it as being Hemingway’s masterpiece. It’s been a very long time since I’ve read both those novels, so I can’t offer much of a comparison, but The Sun Also Rises was the book that made Hemingway a big name, so I was surprised it didn’t receive more attention in the film.

Ernest Hemingway is just the poster boy for toxic masculinity, isn’t he? The four wives, always having to prove how big his dick was, constantly playing the expert on every subject. To me, it seems so clear that Hemingway must have been incredibly insecure about every aspect of his life. What else could possibly explain the constant masculine, macho pursuits? All the hunting, fishing, bullfighting, boxing, searching for Nazi submarines off the coast of Cuba. I have no doubt that Hemingway did enjoy these pursuits, but at some point, it just became part of the myth, part of how he was supposed to behave. As Mary Karr says in the film, “It does seem a little wearying.” Amen.

Hemingway also had this dumb, competitive relationship with other authors. The film highlights this by quoting from an extremely obscene letter Hemingway wrote to his own publisher in 1951 about James Jones’ debut novel, From Here to Eternity. I’ll spare you all of the grim detail, but in the letter, Hemingway completely trashes the novel and expresses his hope that Jones will commit suicide. Here’s the most famous writer in America writing a letter excoriating an unknown writer publishing his first novel. What was the point in being so toxic? Why did Hemingway feel the need to be so competitive with Jones? Insecurity. Ego. Whatever you want to call it, this negative quality tarnishes Hemingway, as he seemed unable to admit that other authors might actually be talented too.

Hemingway’s relationship with F. Scott Fitzgerald fell prey to this same competitiveness as well. As Scott Donaldson shows in his excellent 1999 book Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald, every time Fitzgerald’s posthumous reputation rose, Hemingway felt the need to attack and belittle his former friend. These episodes reflect poorly on Hemingway’s character.

Fame did not help Hemingway, or the demons he was battling. John Updike warned of the dangers of fame for an author in his 1989 memoir Self-Consciousness:

“Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being ‘somebody,’ to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his overanimation. One can either see or be seen. Most of the best fiction is written out of early impressions, taken in before the writer became conscious of himself as a writer.” (Self-Consciousness, p.266)

That’s certainly the trajectory of Hemingway’s career, and indeed, of many American writers.

Hemingway makes it seem as though the writer’s creative drive left him after his experiences during the Spanish Civil War, which provided the inspiration for his 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. That certainly fits with my own thoughts about Hemingway. I remember as a teenager reading Hemingway’s preface to The First Forty-Nine Stories. It begins: “The first four stories are the last ones I have written.” What? The last ones? You’re not writing any more short stories, ever? Did you retire? No, he just means “latest.” Hemingway closes the preface with, “I would like to live long enough to write three more novels and twenty-five more stories. I know some pretty good ones.” And you think, is this guy sick, does he have some disease that might shorten his life? And then you look over at the date underneath the preface, which reads “1938.” And you figure out he was only 39 years old, and he was seriously worried that he might not live another ten years? Yikes, that’s some serious fatalism. And how many more novels did Hemingway publish from 1938 until his death in 1961? Three: For Whom the Bell Tolls, Across and River and into the Trees, and The Old Man and the Sea. And how many more short stories did Hemingway write from 1938 until 1961? He only published 9. Of course, since Hemingway’s death, his estate has flooded bookstores with numerous posthumously released works that were in varying stages of completion at the time of Hemingway’s death.

One of the most interesting commentators in Hemingway is Patrick Hemingway, Ernest’s son that he had with Pauline Pfeiffer. I had seen Patrick Hemingway on screen before, in the excellent 2013 documentary Cooper and Hemingway: The True Gen, which documents Hemingway’s friendship with the screen icon Gary Cooper. But since Cooper and Hemingway features interviews with lots of people who died before the documentary was released, I didn’t really think much of Patrick Hemingway’s participation. But when I saw him in Hemingway, I Googled Patrick Hemingway and discovered that he’s still alive! He’s 92 years old! It’s just kind of crazy to think of someone that closely related to Ernest Hemingway still being alive. And Patrick Hemingway proves to be an insightful commentator on his father. Whatever bad blood had passed between them has long since been forgotten, and it’s Patrick who provides us with one of the few examples of Ernest Hemingway acting unselfishly. In 1947, Patrick had a mental breakdown, and it was his father who slept outside of Patrick’s room and helped get him back to a healthy mental state.

At the very end of Hemingway, we get to see one of the original Hemingway experts: A.E. Hotchner, who died in 2020 at the age of 102. Hotchner hung out with Hemingway a lot in the 1950’s, and his 1966 biography Papa Hemingway was one of the first books about Hemingway. (Hotchner also was a co-founder of Newman’s Own, with his good friend, the brilliant actor and all-time hunk Paul Newman.) Hotchner sheds some light on Hemingway’s sad last days.

Hemingway doesn’t interview Andrew Farah, author of the 2017 book Hemingway’s Brain, in which he puts forth the theory that Hemingway suffered from CTE, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a brain disease usually associated with NFL players and others who have suffered numerous concussions and major head trauma. However, the film makes much of the many head and brain injuries that Hemingway suffered throughout his life—including accidentally pulling a skylight down on his own head and battering his head against an airplane door in order to escape from his second airplane crash. The film doesn’t mention this, but in 1944, during Hemingway’s only meeting with John Steinbeck, Hemingway broke John O’Hara’s walking stick over his own (Hemingway’s) head. Hiroshima author John Hersey was also present during that evening. That’s a lot of literary talent around one table.

Suicide casts a pall over the life of the victim in a way that few other forms of death do. It’s hard not to read every work of art through the lens of knowing that the creator ultimately took their own life. We don’t do that for people who die in other ways. No one reads John Steinbeck and looks for premonitions of heart disease. We don’t scour John Updike’s writing and search for hints of lung cancer. With Hemingway, there’s much to read through the lens of his suicide. The discussion about suicide between a doctor and his son at the end of the short story “Indian Camp,” is made more poignant by the heartbreaking knowledge that both real people that these characters are based on, Ernest and his father, Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, known by his nickname Ed, will both commit suicide. Then there’s the ending of For Whom the Bell Tolls, with Robert Jordan’s inner dialogue about whether to commit suicide or not.

The film doesn’t talk about how Hemingway’s widow Mary claimed his death was accidental rather than a suicide. In an interview to Associated Press reporters on July 8, 1961, a week after Ernest’s suicide, Mary was still insisting that Ernest had been in such good spirits that he couldn’t possibly have committed suicide. The story that Mary had first put out was that Hemingway had been cleaning his gun when it accidentally discharged. Since no gun cleaning equipment had been found nearby, Mary backpedaled and said that he was just looking at the gun when it had gone off. Mary deferred questions about Ernest’s health to Dr. Hugh Butt of the Mayo Clinic. I’m sure she was serious, but that really sounds like a joke.

Hemingway is a powerful documentary, and you can’t help but have sympathy and empathy for this great artist who was obviously in pain so much of his life. Hemingway has done what all good works of biography and criticism should do—it’s sent me back to the source material, as I finally started reading A Moveable Feast, which has been on my list of books to read for a long time.