In new PBS doc, Hemingway’s craft should shine
Long in production, Ken Burns’ and Lynn Novick’s documentary on Ernest Hemingway will finally debut in three two-hour episodes starting Monday on PBS. The Nobel laureate will, once again, be center stage in the public eye as the two acclaimed documentarians tackle one of the towering figures in American letters.
With a crisp, unadorned, muscular style, Hemingway captured the imagination and admiration of readers around the world. He was a cultural phenomenon early in his career, something unheard of today for a serious writer of fiction. While his fame became a burden — soon enough more about the man than the work — his influence on generations of writers can hardly be overstated.
While the documentary will undoubtedly focus on many important aspects of Hemingway’s life and work, it is my hope that it will spend sufficient time emphasizing something that gets lost in Hemingway hagiography and myth-spinning — his tireless discipline with the craft of writing. To appreciate clear, clean prose, my father the literature professor advised me to start with Hemingway and go from there. Dad knew what he was talking about.
In 1999, to mark 100 years since Hemingway’s birth, the National Archives placed on display portions of an early draft of “The Sun Also Rises.” Visitors could view the extensive line-outs and rewrites on each page, and a discarded opening chapter. In 2012, Scribner’s released a new edition of A Farewell to Arms containing an appendix with the 47 alternative endings Hemingway had written. All of this and more can be seen at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston.
A few Aprils ago, while sitting with my wife at La Closerie des Lilas, one of Hemingway’s Paris Left Bank haunts, I shared what no longer seems well appreciated about Hemingway — that even during the most turbulent parts of his life he spent long, hard hours writing and rewriting, boiling down overwrought paragraphs to the bare essentials necessary for the reader to feel the scene. Relentlessly searching for just the right sentence, just the right word. This is what it took to make a spare, taut style look easy. Yet, saying a lot with a little is not easy.
Early in “A Moveable Feast,” we are treated to this lovely passage:
“When we came back to Paris it was clear and cold and lovely. The city had accommodated itself to winter, there was good wood for sale at the wood and coal place across our street, and there were braziers outside many of the good cafes so that you could keep warm on the terraces. Our own apartment was warm and cheerful. We burned boulets which were molded, egg-shaped lumps of coal dust, on the wood fire, and on the streets the winter light was beautiful. Now you were accustomed to see the bare trees against the sky and you walked on the fresh-washed gravel paths through the Luxembourg gardens in the clear sharp wind. The trees were sculpture without their leaves when you were reconciled to them, and the winter winds blew across the surfaces of the ponds and the fountains blew in the bright light.”
In 148 words we get an exquisite depiction of Paris in the winter. It resonates with authenticity — this is a writer who really knows Paris. The writing is deceptively simple. The adjectives “warm” and “clear” appear twice, and the nouns “wood” and “winter” three times. Hemingway delicately layered his prose, repeating words for effect while removing entire passages if he felt the reader could still “feel” the scene.
I reread Hemingway often. I need to drink in those incredible paragraphs and their perfect simplicity. Hemingway liberated the English language, and he did it with pencils and blue-backed notebooks in cafes along the rue Notre-Dames-desChamps and boulevard du Montparnasse. That alone is plenty for an interesting documentary.