Ken Burns and Lynne Novick focus on cruelty and author’s art

When modern readers criticize the American literary canon, they are probably at least partially complaining about Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway’s pictures are easy to untangle: a thrill-seeker who fetishes bullfighting and big game hunting to prove his manhood; a womanizer who was always looking for his next wife; a war spectator who co-opted the violence and trauma of the Great War to make a name for himself as a writer. To use the language of Hemingway admirer JD Salinger, the man’s uber-masculinity sometimes smelled bogus.

To his credit, the six-hour docu-series of Ken Burns and Lynn Novick Hemingway don’t dispute a lot of that. Directors use the author’s own statements, letters, photographs and other writings to verify some of our worst hypotheses. As cultural conversations about the possibility of separating an artist’s exemplary work from his problematic personal life resurface time and time again, Hemingway wades through the same muddy water and drops his anchor. The result is a docu-series that acknowledges what he doesn’t definitely know about Hemingway – his sexual experimentation has suggested questions related to his gender identity; Did all of the concussions he suffered contribute to the mental illness? – while doing his best to paint a complete portrait of the artist and the man. Hemingway seems to somehow arise as to whether his moral failures eclipse the beauty and exemplary quality of short stories like “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and novels such as The sun is also rising or A farewell to arms, but Burns and Novick also give viewers the flexibility to make their own decisions.

Hemingway traces the entirety of the author’s life, dividing it into three engaging pieces written by Geoffrey C. Ward and evocatively narrated by Peter Coyote, both longtime collaborators of Burns and Novick. The first is “A Writer”, which portrays Hemingway as a “troubled and conflicted man who belonged to a troubled and conflicted family.” Her father was a family doctor who saw many patients die during childbirth; her mother was a former opera singer who resented her children. For entertainment, she often dressed Ernest in girls’ clothes and pretended that he and an older sister were sex swap twins. Desperate to escape the sweltering and prosperous Chicago suburb he grew up in, and increasingly hostile to his mother, whom he blamed for his father’s late paranoia and instability, Hemingway began writing for Kansas City Star at 17 years old. (The journal’s style guide encouraging ‘vigorous English’ is a particularly enlightening detail.) After turning 18, Hemingway’s stint as an ambulance driver in Italy during World War I was to change his life profoundly. , and Burns and Novick masterfully use archival footage, news reels, and photographs and letters from Hemingway (the directors had access to his collection of documents at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston) to trace the horrific physical injuries he suffered on the battlefield and the heartache that followed.

Upon his return to the United States from his recovery, Hemingway relished the hero’s welcome he received, while resenting his parents’ harshness and teetotaling. Perhaps telling and embellishing the stories of his injuries was when Hemingway began to weave his own performative myth, the series suggests, and “A Writer” examines how this self-glorification helped shape his writing style. The sparse sentences shaped by his time as a journalist; the contemporary and informal dialogue that he and other young men spoke about during their stay in Europe; and his willingness to tackle difficult issues, including death, suicide and abortion, were all shaped by aspects of his own life, Hemingway valorize. His problems with his parents. His failed love affair in Italy with an older nurse who looked after him and then sent him a “Dear John” letter. All the death he saw in the trenches. Jeff Daniels is Hemingway’s voice, and the documentary builds over long stretches of time where we see the author’s edited pages, his handwriting materializing on the document, scratching out words and writing in others, while Daniels reads final versions of passages. Hemingway often modeled his protagonists on himself, and this approach built a kind of self-feedback loop. “I hate the Hemingway myth… it obscures man,” says Michael Katakis, director of Hemingway’s literary field. “And the man is much more interesting than the myth.”

While “A Writer” follows Hemingway’s rise – working as a war correspondent, marrying his first wife Hadley (voiced by Keri Russell), moving to Paris and traveling to Europe with her, fathering her first son and publishing her famous news collection In our time– the following episodes deliberately perforate the character in which Hemingway is enveloped. In doing so, Hemingway strikes a delicate balance: it allows authors, academics and biographers to extol, celebrate and develop Hemingway’s short stories, journalism and novels, while confronting them with examples of the man at his highest level. the meanest, the most abusive and the most delusional. As experts in the craft, writers like Edna O’Brien, Mario Vargas Llosa, Tim O’Brien, Abraham Verghese and Leonardo Padura are able to determine what made Hemingway so unique, going into the specific details of certain character arcs, narrative turns, and thematic considerations; fans of Hemingway’s work will especially appreciate their heartfelt appreciation. And they don’t hold back their dislikes either: O’Brien sniffs The old Man and the Sea, calling it schoolboy’s handwriting, while Llosa laughs out loud as he describes the romance between the Spanish Loyalist and Fascist characters For whom the bell rings. They admire Hemingway, but they are not fanatics.

“The Avatar” and “The Blank Page” follow the ups and downs of Hemingway’s career with the volatility of his marriages (Meryl Streep, Patricia Clarkson and Mary-Louise Parker also voice his three future wives); the inexplicable cruelty he has towards people who were once friends, like Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald; and his escape from the United States to Cuba and Africa on long safaris in which he hunted and killed dozens of animals. How did the Hemingway who so abhorred death during World War I and the Spanish Civil War become man slaughtering defenseless animals in East Africa? This is just one of the idiosyncratic contrasts Hemingway tries to explain. “I don’t know what to say about it,” admits researcher Marc Dudley after reading a terribly vitriolic and racist letter from Hemingway to a colleague; Earlier in the documentary, Dudley had explained Hemingway’s use of the n-word in his work as “a man trying to give some idea of ​​his time.” The realization that Hemingway could have been racist in his life outside of his writing shocks Dudley practically in silence. This sort of inability to reconcile Hemingway’s countless identities comes up again and again. Author Edna O’Brien seems almost reverent as she observes, “I think ordinary life was anathema to him,” but when asked to speak of Hemingway’s increasingly abusive behavior towards his people. women, she almost minimizes him by saying that he was “a bit of a controller and a bit of a bully too.” Verghese sums it up perhaps best with his somewhat resigned performance of ‘He’s Here’, a sideline that reflects the whole approach of Hemingway: Here is the man, the genius and the discipline and the sexism and racism and everything.

The forgiving runtime is mainly a boon, allowing Hemingway to offer some lesser-known details about the author: that he served as a spy for the US and Soviet governments, although he only divulges secrets on one side; that he subverted the career of third wife and fellow war correspondent Martha Gellhorn by booking a better deal for himself with Collier’s magazine, for which she also wrote; that he married a 17-year-old girl from the Kenyan Kamba tribe in a traditional ceremony while on safari there with his fourth wife, Mary Welsh. These aren’t exactly flattering details, and HemingwayDaniels ‘most unintentionally hilarious moment might be Daniels’ arrogant reply to the author’s insistence in a letter to his son Gregory: “I’m not a gin-soaked monster who ruins people’s lives.” The final meaning of Hemingwayit is rather that the life whose author was most responsible for ruin was his own. The documentary portrays the tragic figure of an author whose work remains powerful and whose complexities remain elusive.