The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Another side of being Ernest
Ken Burns’ documentary ‘Hemingway’ posits an overlooked dimension of the machismo-drenched author: femininity
It is not a fast or easy thing to make a documentary, filmmaker Ken Burns says, though the arrival of his new, three-part series on writer Ernest Hemingway came more slowly than most.
“I found a scrap of paper from the early or mid’80s about things to do, and Hemingway was on a very, very short list,” Burns says. “It said, ‘Baseball’ after ‘Civil War,’ which happened.”
But after the huge success of his documentaries on those two subjects, Hemingway remained an elusive target as Burns and longtime collaborators such as co-director Lynn Novick, writer Geoffrey Ward and producer Sarah Botstein teamed on other projects, about jazz and World War II, Prohibition and the Vietnam War.
Until eight years ago, when the time felt right and Burns, Novick, Ward and Botstein got to work on “Hemingway,” which premieres April 5 on PBS stations around the country.
“He is a protean figure in American literature,” Burns says of the author of such novels as “The Sun Also Rises,” “A Farewell to Arms” and “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” “And there’s been enough new scholarship that has revealed such interesting sides to him that it isn’t just this, you know, good writer with this toxic masculinity.
“You begin to see the way in which that was a facade, that masked a great deal of vulnerability and anxiety and all sorts of things,” he says. “I think that’s the great gift of historical exploration, that as you dig more, you find out more. Different kinds of people are asking questions, and you’re getting different kinds of answers.
“And that means Hemingway, you can’t just say, ‘Oh, well, he’s just [a jerk]; I don’t like him.’”
Instead, Burns and Novick say, they hope and believe viewers will come away from the three chapters of “Hemingway” with a more nuanced appreciation of the man in all his glories and flaws.
“Our film holds his feet to the fire and never lets him off the hook,” Burns says. “But at the same time, the writing is undeniably great. The discipline as a writer is impressive. The tragedy is Shakespearean in its dimensions, and the demons that pursued him to the end are so interesting and so varied that you can never say it was one thing that did it.”
A feminine spirit
One of the new lenses through which “Hemingway” is viewed is the idea that despite the masculine bluster — big game hunter, womanizer, war correspondent — there is a fluidity of gender in Hemingway’s work. Burns says Novick and Botstein first witnessed this when they attended a conference on the writer a few years back.
“Half the people were kind of middle-aged white guys who were probably dreaming of a beard and a pipe and a safari jacket,” he says of his collaborators’ report. “And the others were younger women scholars who were extremely interested in the nuances.”
Irish writer Edna O’Brien, as well as several female scholars, make the point that in some of Hemingway’s work, including short stories such as “Up In Michigan” and “Hills Like White Elephants,” he writes so convincingly from the point of view of his women characters that it argues against the standard beliefs about Hemingway’s machismo and misogyny.
“From day one, it felt really important to give our audience the opportunity to think about Hemingway beyond the sort of hypermasculine persona, and to see the work may be in conversation with that persona,” Novick says.
“When I reached out to Edna O’Brien, she said, ‘I would love to be involved in this because I think Hemingway is misunderstood and I would like to set the record straight from where I sit,’ “Novick says. “So we knew we had the potential to strike gold with her because she doesn’t owe Hemingway anything.”
O’Brien, 90, came to the interview prepared with several well-thumbed texts, including “Up In Michigan,” a 1921 short story that describes what today would be considered date rape. Novick says the first draft of the documentary hadn’t intended to include that work, but after O’Brien read from it and talked about its revelation of Hemingway’s feminine aspect, the filmmakers rewrote the film to give it new prominence.
“What she said was so important, clearly we had to put it in,” Novick says.
A trove of treasures
Early on, Novick and Burns approached Patrick Hemingway, 92, the author’s second-born son, and other family members to seek their cooperation with the documentary.
“We told them we were going to do it warts and all, and they could have no control over the film, and they just gave us extraordinary access,” Burns says.
Given that Hemingway’s success and public profile made him what Burns describes as “arguably the most famous writer of the 20th century,” there were already photographic riches from which to choose. Even so, there were fresh treasures in the archives, including images from a longlost suitcase of photo negatives shot by Robert Capa and others during the Spanish Civil War.
Because Hemingway was shy about speaking on film, there’s little of his own voice in the documentary, so actor Jeff Daniels reads from the author’s works and letters, and powerhouse performers Meryl Streep, Patricia Clarkson, Keri Russell and Mary-Louise Parker provide the voices of his four wives.
The letters, in particular, helped Novick come to a deeper understanding of Hemingway as author, father, friend, she said.
“That was really the most revelatory in terms of truly getting to know him,” she says. “Because in those letters you can eavesdrop on his conversations. His children, his family, his editor, his friends, his enemies.
“It’s incredible access to him from his youngest age, when he leaves home at 17, up until the end of his life. You see his sense of humor, his meanness. You see his capacity to be incredibly devoted and warm and loving and romantic.
“And my god, some of those love letters — who wouldn’t give anything to receive a letter like that.”
In the film, Burns and his team — and in turn, viewers — bear witness to a man whom Burns describes as one of the truly great observers of the world, of life, of nature and human nature alike. And, Burns says, a figure whose life and works remain relevant and modern today.
“In a funny way, at a time when you’d think that someone like Hemingway, we’d be sort of putting on the shelf and letting him collect dust, he’s actually speaking to us so directly now,” Burns says. “The drama of his life and the greatness of his work are contemporary.”