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A New Hemingway Documentary Peeks Behind the Myth

By Hilton Als

I’m not exactly sure when I first read Ernest Hemingway, but I do remember when I first recognized Gertrude Stein’s indelible influence on his sentences. I was in my mid-twenties; a close friend turned me on to her difficult, hilarious, and unclassifiable work. I was no stranger to literary modernism, but to me Stein wasn’t part of that group so much as its mother, one who took a monstrous and roiling joy in exposing what lay underneath conventional narrative: thinking as it was thought. I’m almost certain my friend started me off with Stein’s relatively “easy” 1909 book “Three Lives,” which ends with a story titled “The Gentle Lena.” Halfway through, Stein writes:

Herman’s married sister liked her brother Herman, and she had always tried to help him, when there was anything she knew he wanted. She liked it that he was so good and always did everything that their father and their mother wanted, but still she wished it could be that he could have more his own way, if there was anything he ever wanted. But now she thought Herman with his girl was very funny.

As I read “The Gentle Lena,” I recalled the sound of Hemingway’s 1921 short story “Up in Michigan.” Near the beginning of this tale about a woman’s infatuation and the sexual violence that follows, he writes:

Liz liked Jim very much. She liked it the way he walked over from the shop and often went to the kitchen door to watch for him to start down the road. She liked it about his mustache. She liked it about how white his teeth were when he smiled. . . . One day she found that she liked it the way the hair was black on his arms and how white they were above the tanned line when he washed up in the washbasin outside the house. Liking that made her feel funny.

A year after Hemingway wrote “Up in Michigan,” the younger writer—he was twenty-two—showed it to Stein, who was then forty-eight. By that time, he was working as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star and living in Paris with his sensitive first wife, Hadley Richardson, whose trust fund did much to improve his circumstances. The starving-artist myth that Hemingway put forth in his memoir, “A Moveable Feast,” and in any number of interviews, is one of several that the filmmakers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick debunk in “Hemingway,” their careful three-part documentary, which premières on PBS on April 5th. The Hemingways were introduced to Stein and her de-facto wife, the equally formidable Alice B. Toklas, by the innovative American writer Sherwood Anderson, who considered Hemingway something of a protégé; indeed, Anderson had encouraged his literary charge to pull up stakes and head to Paris, where modernism lived. Stein and Hemingway took to each other almost at once. Mary V. Dearborn’s nuanced 2017 biography, “Ernest Hemingway,” reports that Stein found him “extraordinarily good looking,” while Hemingway said later, “I always wanted to fuck her.” Although Stein liked Hemingway’s short, declarative sentences, she didn’t admire “Up in Michigan,” which she pronounced “inaccrochable.” Still, he could learn from her. “She’s trying to get at the mechanics of language,” he wrote to a friend. “[To] take it apart and see what makes it go.”

Hemingway, who died by his own hand in 1961, nineteen days shy of his sixty-second birthday, was always interested in trying to understand what lay at the moral heart of a sentence, a paragraph—how to make it all go. Appropriately, Burns and Novick’s “Hemingway” begins with words: the familiar slow, rhythmic Burns camera moves almost fetishistically over a handwritten manuscript page, before cutting to clips of the writer Michael Katakis, who manages the Hemingway estate, talking about the legend’s universality. Katakis’s remarks are interwoven with slow-motion footage of a bullfight, of an Atget-like photograph of a Parisian café—signs and symbols we associate with “The Sun Also Rises,” Hemingway’s first novel, published in 1926, which tells the story of Americans living in Europe amid the dissolution, ennui, and recklessness of a postwar, moneyed white world. As these images scroll by, Jeff Daniels, who portrays Hemingway in voice-over, reads a passage from a letter to his father:

You see I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not just to depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful, you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way. It is only by showing both sides, three dimensions, and if possible, four, that you can write the way I want to.

Although Burns and Novick scrupulously acknowledge the efforts Hemingway made to achieve his literary goals, the documentary makes less of a case for what he did on the page than for what he was doing off the page. In the end, this is not really the filmmakers’ fault; writers and writing don’t necessarily lend themselves to cinema, which is about movement and showing. Ultimately, talking about writing is rarely as substantive as reading it. “Hemingway” is a disembodied movie about a writer who was disembowelled by depression, alcoholism, sex shame, and vanity.

Hemingway came of age as a man and an artist during a time of myth—myths about the Great American Novel, about the Great American Man. His attempts to live up to those myths were perhaps also attempts to supersede the influence of his domineering mother, Grace, an opera singer and music teacher, and his depressive father, Clarence, a well-regarded doctor. Born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1899, Ernest was the second child of six. He was doted on by his mother, who was, by most accounts, self-absorbed and self-regarding. (“My father was very devoted to my mother,” a sister of Ernest’s once said. “But she was devoted to herself.”) Ernest shared his father’s love of the natural world, which he depicted in his work as a perfect and perfectly ruined Eden. Grace had other ideas about Adam and Eve. It amused her to pretend that Ernest and Marcelline, the sister closest to him in age, were twins. Sometimes she dressed them as boys, sometimes as girls. She had their hair cut in the same style—blunt bobs with bangs—and encouraged them to play with both tea sets and air rifles.

One could view these experiments in gender not only as Grace’s bid to control biological destiny, and thus behavior, but as a way for her to express her own dual nature: the masculine and the feminine, the assertive and the adored. Hemingway’s interest in androgyny began with her. Burns and Novick report that in bed with his fourth wife, the journalist Mary Welsh, he sometimes liked to pretend he was a girl, and that Mary was a boy. His unfinished novel “The Garden of Eden” also revolves around sexual ambiguity. The book’s protagonist, David Bourne, is a young writer living in France with his wife, Catherine. The couple want to be “changed,” to defy gender roles and have an affair with the same woman, but David grows more and more uncomfortable with this fluidity, just as Hemingway wasn’t comfortable with it in life. One of the more heartbreaking sections in “Hemingway” is the film’s description of the author’s excruciating relationship with his third and youngest child, Gloria, who was born as Gregory, and lived the latter part of her life as a trans woman. Perhaps Gloria recognized some of her impulses in her father, too. In one angry letter, she called him “Ernestine.”

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After high school, Hemingway went to work as a journalist for the Kansas City Star , where he paid special attention to the style guide: “Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English.” In 1918, still hungry for experience, he volunteered to work for the Red Cross and signed on to be an ambulance driver in Italy. Just over a month into his service, Hemingway was wounded by a mortar, and spent some time recovering in a hospital in Milan. While there, he fell in love with an American nurse named Agnes von Kurowsky. When he returned to Oak Park, in 1919, it was with the understanding that he and Agnes would marry. But she soon wrote to say that she planned to marry someone else. Hemingway never got over Agnes’s rejection. But he put his anguish to work. In “A Farewell to Arms,” his second novel, published in 1929, Lieutenant Frederic Henry, an American ambulance driver, falls in love with Catherine Barkley, an English nurse stationed in Italy. What do the young couple believe in besides themselves, and their love, amid all that death? Realism. Frederic observes:

If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

Gertrude Stein’s roundelay-like syntax and logic feel very present here. “A Farewell to Arms” is about perspective and perception, and what to do with life as you’re living it. Part of the sadness at the core of the film “Hemingway” is how much life we see happening to the writer that he doesn’t seem to feel, or doesn’t want to feel, protecting a self he didn’t know, or could not face.

One way that he managed to have a feeling for who he was was to tell lies. When, in 1919, he returned home to Oak Park with the goal of making, he said, “the world safe for Ernest Hemingway,” the boy played up his idea of heroism by giving talks for a fee, describing how he had carried a soldier to safety before he collapsed. That was fiction, his theatre. Whenever he hit the streets, he wore his uniform, including a black velvet Italian cape. That was his costume. He wanted to be known, and would be known. Like many writers, he began his life as an author by performing. But once you start telling whoppers like that you can’t stop, because one lie always leads to another. On the other hand, hadn’t his life—with its various cruelties and manipulations—begun with a lie? How could he know who he was if Grace had told him that he was something else and even dressed him for the part, or when Agnes promised an everlasting love that didn’t last? Were life and, more specifically, a woman’s love a fiction?

“Hemingway” is chock-full of writers. There’s Edna O’Brien on Hemingway in love, and Tobias Wolff on his influence. In the end, these opinions amount to a kind of distraction, but it’s necessary filler. It’s possible that Hemingway was a complicated shallow person, addicted to the high of being known to feed a continually diminishing self. As Stein mused in her 1933 book, “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,” “But what a story that of the real Hem, and one he should tell himself but alas he never will. After all, as he himself once murmured, there is the career, the career.” He took on the role of “Papa”—a man of genial but firm paternalism, a hunter and a drinker—the way an actor might embody Mark Antony, through study and persistence. Hemingway always seemed to be in the right place at the right time: Paris with the Steins and the Fitzgeralds, Gstaad with the Murphys, Spain with Ava Gardner. There was writing, and there was the fashionable life, and his great masterpieces—“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”—are about fashionable lives derailed by nature, by death, and by a belief in the myth of arrival, which, ultimately, gets you nowhere. Indeed, Harry, in “Kilimanjaro,” can’t go anywhere; he has gangrene, and he’s dying, and we are meant to understand that maybe Harry died a long time ago, when he couldn’t become the artist he dreamt of becoming:

Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well. Well, he would not have to fail at trying to write them either. Maybe you could never write them, and that was why you put them off and delayed the starting. Well he would never know, now.

It’s the comma before “now” that kills me. That pause before the end. Because pauses do come before the end, and with Hemingway, as with Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, I am grateful for what is left out, for what the writer has allowed me to have to myself: my imagination, prompted by his.

There’s ugliness in Hemingway, and not the kind of ugliness meant in the documentary’s opening statement about writing. Like Stein, Hemingway was not above the impulse to reduce people to types; nor did he entirely resist the pointed, class-informed racism of his time. It’s hard to get through the condescending, lousy, “sho nuff” chat in Stein’s novella “Melanctha,” and the deeply rotten race elements in Hemingway’s novel “To Have and Have Not.” Those things are as much a part of America as the myth of idealized masculinity. But why a film about Hemingway now, and not, say, Faulkner? Is Faulkner not a more vibrant figure, who prefigured in his Snopes stories and novels the age of Trump and Derek Chauvin’s trial, and the Gordian knot of race that continues to choke large portions of our country? In this context, Burns and Novick’s “Hemingway” feels a little anachronistic, and “smells of the museums,” as Stein once said of Hemingway.

As I watched, I kept returning to Dearborn’s biography to fill in details I felt I was missing, such as the observation that the ample-fleshed, boasting Grace was not unlike Gertrude Stein in body, attitude, and work ethic. Every writer is every writer they’ve loved and quarrelled with who came before, as every parent is every parent they loved and quarrelled with. Hemingway was Stein and Grace and his father, too. The drama was always which person would win out.

Revisiting his writing, I remembered it was its movement that touched me—how he gets characters from one part of the room to another. Easier said than done, and one of the ways in which he separated himself from Stein. He replaced thinking with action—which Stein considered an affront to modernism. “Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson are very funny on the subject of Hemingway,” Stein wrote in “Alice B. Toklas.” “They both agreed that they have a weakness for Hemingway because he is such a good pupil. He is a rotten pupil, I protested. You don’t understand, they both said, it is flattering to have a pupil who does it without understanding it.” Stein’s voice and her experiments with sound are part of the spine of his work, and how gripping is that? To realize that Hemingway’s famously muscular prose was born of admiration for a middle-aged lesbian’s sui-generis sentences and paragraphs? Absorbing Stein’s influence, and admitting to his attraction, was one way of getting at what he always longed for: to be a girl in love with a powerful woman. ♦

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By Maya Binyam

By Lauren Michele Jackson

Biography of Ernest Hemingway, Pulitzer and Nobel Prize Winning Writer

Famous Author of Simple Prose and Rugged Persona

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Becoming a writer, life in paris, getting published, back to the u.s., the spanish civil war, world war ii, the pulitzer and nobel prizes, decline and death.

• B.A., English Literature, University of Houston

Ernest Hemingway (July 21, 1899–July 2, 1961) is considered one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Best known for his novels and short stories, he was also an accomplished journalist and war correspondent. Hemingway's trademark prose style—simple and spare—influenced a generation of writers.

Fast Facts: Ernest Hemingway

• Known For : Journalist and member of the Lost Generation group of writers who won the Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize in Literature
• Born : July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois
• Parents : Grace Hall Hemingway and Clarence ("Ed") Edmonds Hemingway
• Died : July 2, 1961 in Ketchum, Idaho
• Education : Oak Park High School
• Published Works : The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, Death in the Afternoon, For Whom the Bell Tolls, the Old Man and the Sea, A Moveable Feast
• Spouse(s) : Hadley Richardson (m. 1921–1927), Pauline Pfeiffer (1927–1939), Martha Gellhorn (1940–1945), Mary Welsh (1946–1961)
• Children : With Hadley Richardson: John Hadley Nicanor Hemingway ("Jack" 1923–2000); with Pauline Pfeiffer: Patrick (b. 1928), Gregory ("Gig" 1931–2001)

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, the second child born to Grace Hall Hemingway and Clarence ("Ed") Edmonds Hemingway. Ed was a general medical practitioner and Grace a would-be opera singer turned music teacher.

Hemingway's parents reportedly had an unconventional arrangement, in which Grace, an ardent feminist, would agree to marry Ed only if he could assure her she would not be responsible for the housework or cooking. Ed acquiesced; in addition to his busy medical practice, he ran the household, managed the servants, and even cooked meals when the need arose.

Ernest Hemingway grew up with four sisters; his much-longed-for brother did not arrive until Ernest was 15 years old. Young Ernest enjoyed family vacations at a cottage in northern Michigan where he developed a love of the outdoors and learned hunting and fishing from his father. His mother, who insisted that all of her children learn to play an instrument, instilled in him an appreciation of the arts.

In high school, Hemingway co-edited the school newspaper and competed on the football and swim teams. Fond of impromptu boxing matches with his friends, Hemingway also played cello in the school orchestra. He graduated from Oak Park High School in 1917.

Hired by the Kansas City Star in 1917 as a reporter covering the police beat, Hemingway—obligated to adhere to the newspaper's style guidelines—began to develop the succinct, simple style of writing that would become his trademark. That style was a dramatic departure from the ornate prose that dominated literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

After six months in Kansas City, Hemingway longed for adventure. Ineligible for military service due to poor eyesight, he volunteered in 1918 as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross in Europe. In July of that year, while on duty in Italy, Hemingway was severely injured by an exploding mortar shell. His legs were peppered by more than 200 shell fragments, a painful and debilitating injury that required several surgeries.

As the first American to have survived being wounded in Italy in World War I , Hemingway was awarded a medal from the Italian government.

While recovering from his wounds at a hospital in Milan, Hemingway met and fell in love with Agnes von Kurowsky, a nurse with the American Red Cross . He and Agnes made plans to marry once he had earned enough money.

After the war ended in November 1918, Hemingway returned to the United States to look for a job, but the wedding was not to be. Hemingway received a letter from Agnes in March 1919, breaking off the relationship. Devastated, he became depressed and rarely left the house.

Hemingway spent a year at his parents' home, recovering from wounds both physical and emotional. In early 1920, mostly recovered and eager to be employed, Hemingway got a job in Toronto helping a woman care for her disabled son. There he met the features editor of the Toronto Star Weekly , which hired him as a feature writer.

In fall of that year, he moved to Chicago and became a writer for  The Cooperative Commonwealth , a monthly magazine, while still working for the Star .

Hemingway, however, longed to write fiction. He began submitting short stories to magazines, but they were repeatedly rejected. Soon, however, Hemingway had reason for hope. Through mutual friends, Hemingway met novelist Sherwood Anderson, who was impressed by Hemingway's short stories and encouraged him to pursue a career in writing.

Hemingway also met the woman who would become his first wife: Hadley Richardson. A native of St. Louis, Richardson had come to Chicago to visit friends after the death of her mother. She managed to support herself with a small trust fund left to her by her mother. The pair married in September 1921.

Sherwood Anderson, just back from a trip to Europe, urged the newly married couple to move to Paris, where he believed a writer's talent could flourish. He furnished the Hemingways with letters of introduction to American expatriate poet Ezra Pound and modernist writer Gertrude Stein . They set sail from New York in December 1921.

The Hemingways found an inexpensive apartment in a working-class district in Paris. They lived on Hadley's inheritance and Hemingway's income from the Toronto Star Weekly , which employed him as a foreign correspondent. Hemingway also rented out a small hotel room to use as his workplace.

There, in a burst of productivity, Hemingway filled one notebook after another with stories, poems, and accounts of his childhood trips to Michigan.

Hemingway finally garnered an invitation to the salon of Gertrude Stein, with whom he later developed a deep friendship. Stein's home in Paris had become a meeting place for various artists and writers of the era, with Stein acting as a mentor to several prominent writers.

Stein promoted the simplification of both prose and poetry as a backlash to the elaborate style of writing seen in past decades. Hemingway took her suggestions to heart and later credited Stein for having taught him valuable lessons that influenced his writing style.

Hemingway and Stein belonged to the group of American expatriate writers in 1920s Paris who came to be known as the " Lost Generation ." These writers had become disillusioned with traditional American values following World War I; their work often reflected their sense of futility and despair. Other writers in this group included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and John Dos Passos.

In December 1922, Hemingway endured what might be considered a writer's worst nightmare. His wife, traveling by train to meet him for a holiday, lost a valise filled with a large portion of his recent work, including carbon copies. The papers were never found.

In 1923, several of Hemingway's poems and stories were accepted for publication in two American literary magazines, Poetry and The Little Review . In the summer of that year, Hemingway's first book, "Three Stories and Ten Poems," was published by an American-owned Paris publishing house.

On a trip to Spain in the summer of 1923, Hemingway witnessed his first bullfight. He wrote of bullfighting in the Star , seeming to condemn the sport and romanticize it at the same time. On another excursion to Spain, Hemingway covered the traditional "running of the bulls" at Pamplona, during which young men—courting death or, at the very least, injury—ran through town pursued by a throng of angry bulls.

The Hemingways returned to Toronto for the birth of their son. John Hadley Hemingway (nicknamed "Bumby") was born October 10, 1923. They returned to Paris in January 1924, where Hemingway continued to work on a new collection of short stories, later published in the book "In Our Time."

Hemingway returned to Spain to work on his upcoming novel set in Spain: "The Sun Also Rises." The book was published in 1926, to mostly good reviews.

Yet Hemingway's marriage was in turmoil. He had begun an affair in 1925 with American journalist Pauline Pfeiffer, who worked for the Paris Vogue . The Hemingways divorced in January 1927; Pfeiffer and Hemingway married in May of that year. Hadley later remarried and returned to Chicago with Bumby in 1934.

In 1928, Hemingway and his second wife returned to the United States to live. In June 1928, Pauline gave birth to son Patrick in Kansas City. A second son, Gregory, would be born in 1931. The Hemingways rented a house in Key West, Florida, where Hemingway worked on his latest book, "A Farewell to Arms," based upon his World War I experiences.

In December 1928, Hemingway received shocking news—his father, despondent over mounting health and financial problems, had shot himself to death. Hemingway, who'd had a strained relationship with his parents, reconciled with his mother after his father's suicide and helped support her financially.

In May 1928, Scribner's Magazine published its first installment of "A Farewell to Arms." It was well-received; however, the second and third installments, deemed profane and sexually explicit, were banned from newsstands in Boston. Such criticism only served to boost sales when the entire book was published in September 1929.

The early 1930s proved to be a productive (if not always successful) time for Hemingway. Fascinated by bullfighting, he traveled to Spain to do research for the non-fiction book, "Death in the Afternoon." It was published in 1932 to generally poor reviews and was followed by several less-than-successful short story collections.

Ever the adventurer, Hemingway traveled to Africa on a shooting safari in November 1933. Although the trip was somewhat disastrous—Hemingway clashed with his companions and later became ill with dysentery—it provided him with ample material for a short story, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," as well as a non-fiction book, "Green Hills of Africa."

While Hemingway was on a hunting and fishing trip in the United States in the summer of 1936, the Spanish Civil War began. A supporter of the loyalist (anti-Fascist) forces, Hemingway donated money for ambulances. He also signed on as a journalist to cover the conflict for a group of American newspapers and became involved in making a documentary. While in Spain, Hemingway began an affair with Martha Gellhorn, an American journalist and documentarian.

Weary of her husband's adulterous ways, Pauline took her sons and left Key West in December 1939. Only months after she divorced Hemingway, he married Martha Gellhorn in November 1940.

Hemingway and Gellhorn rented a farmhouse in Cuba just outside of Havana, where both could work on their writing. Traveling between Cuba and Key West, Hemingway wrote one of his most popular novels: "For Whom the Bell Tolls."

A fictionalized account of the Spanish Civil War, the book was published in October 1940 and became a bestseller. Despite being named the winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1941, the book did not win because the president of Columbia University (which bestowed the award) vetoed the decision.

As Martha's reputation as a journalist grew, she earned assignments around the globe, leaving Hemingway resentful of her long absences. But soon, they would both be globetrotting. After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941, both Hemingway and Gellhorn signed on as war correspondents.

Hemingway was allowed on board a troop transport ship, from which he was able to watch the D-day invasion of Normandy in June 1944.

While in London during the war, Hemingway began an affair with the woman who would become his fourth wife—journalist Mary Welsh. Gellhorn learned of the affair and divorced Hemingway in 1945. He and Welsh married in 1946. They alternated between homes in Cuba and Idaho.

In January 1951, Hemingway began writing a book that would become one of his most celebrated works: " The Old Man and the Sea ." A bestseller, the novella also won Hemingway his long-awaited Pulitzer Prize in 1953.

The Hemingways traveled extensively but were often the victims of bad luck. They were involved in two plane crashes in Africa during one trip in 1953. Hemingway was severely injured, sustaining internal and head injuries as well as burns. Some newspapers erroneously reported that he had died in the second crash.

In 1954, Hemingway was awarded the career-topping Nobel Prize for literature.

In January 1959, the Hemingways moved from Cuba to Ketchum, Idaho. Hemingway, now nearly 60 years old, had suffered for several years with high blood pressure and the effects of years of heavy drinking. He had also become moody and depressed and appeared to be deteriorating mentally.

In November 1960, Hemingway was admitted to the Mayo Clinic for treatment of his physical and mental symptoms. He received electroshock therapy for his depression and was sent home after a two-month stay. Hemingway became further depressed when he realized he was unable to write after the treatments.

After three suicide attempts, Hemingway was readmitted to the Mayo Clinic and given more shock treatments. Although his wife protested, he convinced his doctors he was well enough to go home. Only days after being discharged from the hospital, Hemingway shot himself in the head in his Ketchum home early on the morning of July 2, 1961. He died instantly.

A larger-than-life figure, Hemingway thrived on high adventure, from safaris and bullfights to wartime journalism and adulterous affairs, communicating that to his readers in an immediately recognizable spare, staccato format. Hemingway is among the most prominent and influential of the "Lost Generation" of expatriate writers who lived in Paris in the 1920s.

Known affectionately as "Papa Hemingway," he was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize in literature, and several of his books were made into movies. 

• Dearborn, Mary V. "Ernest Hemingway: A Biography." New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2017.
• Hemingway, Ernest. "Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition." New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014.
• Henderson, Paul. "Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934–1961." New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2011.
• Hutchisson, James M. "Ernest Hemingway: A New Life." University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016.
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Movie Interviews

New documentary examines ernest hemingway's complicated life.

NPR's Steve Inskeep talks to directors Ken Burns and Lynn Novick about their new PBS documentary Hemingway . Actor Jeff Daniels reads from Hemingway's private letters and other writings.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

There will be few adjectives in this story. Ernest Hemingway avoided them. Hemingway was the writer who said he was looking for one true sentence. He wrote stories of war and love, bullfighters and boxers and fishermen. A PBS documentary argues Hemingway influenced all writers who followed, even those who hate him. The documentary features Jeff Daniels reading Hemingway's prose, like the ending of "The Sun Also Rises," where the narrator shares a taxi in Madrid with a woman who can't be in a relationship with him.

(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "HEMINGWAY")

JEFF DANIELS: (Reading) We turned out on to the Grand Via. Oh, Jake, Brett said, we could have had such a damned good time together. Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton, the car slowed, suddenly pressing Brett against me. Yes, I said. Isn't it pretty to think so?

INSKEEP: The documentary "Hemingway" traces his life. He was wounded in World War I, lived in Paris in the 1920s and traveled through sub-Saharan Africa, all of which became settings for his stories. Co-directors Ken Burns and Lynn Novick say he also invented myths about his heroism in combat and falsely suggested he'd once been a starving writer.

KEN BURNS: I think insecurity makes liars of us all at a petty, tiny, minuscule level and in grandiose ways. And Hemingway is guilty of the entire spectrum.

INSKEEP: One of the more troubling aspects of Hemingway's life is his treatment of women, both on and off the page. He was married four times and could be abusive or bullying. But Burns and Novick say his image as a man's man was part of his facade.

LYNN NOVICK: His whole code of conduct and the hunting and the fishing and the boxing and everything he seemed to stand for could be very problematic for us today. And it was problematic for some people, you know, back when he was alive. But what we found in working on the film was that it doesn't take too much to penetrate through that and to see inside or behind that persona a much more vulnerable, complicated person who has great empathy for women, has relationships with women in his life that are problematic and complicated in some ways. But in his depictions of how men and women get along and don't get along, it's quite revelatory and quite different than the public persona of Ernest Hemingway.

INSKEEP: You said he was vulnerable. In what way was Ernest Hemingway vulnerable?

BURNS: I think he doubted himself all the time. I think he was always worried. You can hear it in the letters. You can hear it even in the prose that here is a boy born into a family with a history of mental illness. He's exposed with his father, who's a doctor, to unbelievable things happening in the doctor's office and in home visits. He is nearly blown up as an 18-year-old and clearly suffering from PTSD, has a series of at least nine major concussions. He's an alcoholic. There is a lot of stuff going on, and all of that permeates his work.

NOVICK: Hemingway, perhaps in an act of supreme hubris, saved every letter that he ever wrote. He made carbon copies. And so you can hear him writing to his parents when he's in World War I, writing to his - the women that he loved, the women that he fell out of love with, to his children, his publisher, his editor, his friends, his enemies over the course of his life. You really see a man who is working very hard to present this public persona. And right below the surface, there's a lot of anxiety and vulnerability.

INSKEEP: You note that when Hemingway was very young, his mother used to dress him and his sister alike, sometimes both as boys and both as girls. How does that emerge as a significant event?

BURNS: It's hard to exactly calibrate what it is. Twinning, as it was called, was not uncommon in the Victorian era and even extending beyond that. And so we do begin to see a gender fluidity and a curiosity in all of his sexual relationships and in a larger artistic sense. I mean, he is empathetic to the extreme in unbelievable stories, like "Up In Michigan" or "Hills Like White Elephants," sympathetic to the extreme for the woman's point of view,

INSKEEP: I was surprised to hear you make the argument that Hemingway, as a writer, got women and wrote from women's perspectives. But you mentioned the one story where there is what appears to be perhaps a sexual assault. You mentioned another story where a woman is being pressured to have an abortion, yet his image toward women is something very different.

NOVICK: Yes. I mean, right there, you put your finger on it. That's sort of a paradox, if you will, you know, that his image and the treatment of women in his life, especially his later marriages, could be abusive and he could be a bully. But, you know, we found in looking at the work and especially in talking to the writer Edna O'Brien, who is in her 80s and has been admiring and studying Hemingway for most of her life as a writer, she wanted very much to speak about how he has been misunderstood through a misogynistic lens, and that if you go below the surface, like Ken was saying, there's great empathy and understanding of what happens to women and what women's experiences are when they are presented with masculine assertion, masculine control, masculine desire to dominate all those things that we might see in Hemingway's life. But in his work, it's more complicated and more nuanced. And, you know, to me, it seems there's sort of an implicit critique of himself, of the culture and an understanding of what women go through or at least a very serious and sincere and determined attempt to represent that on the printed page.

BURNS: Well, I think that's exactly right. It doesn't excuse in any way - and I don't think Lynn or I would ever go to any place where we would want to excuse it or say that makes up for it. But we wanted to say in an era where we all are so reductionist or we wish to move towards a reductionist posture where we can find a good or bad or an on-off switch, we don't have to deal with Hemingway, we are permitted in public broadcasting to go out, to complicate, to tolerate contradiction, to try to come to terms with the fact that nothing will ever fit into a nice black-and-white box, that it is all very dizzying shades of gray. And with Hemingway, for us, it was the most complicated of processes to try to calibrate all of those different things without, A, letting him off the hook but also at the same time permitting his genius, his art and sometimes those moment when he transcended the petty to obtain. And that happens often.

INSKEEP: Well, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, thank you so much.

BURNS: Thank you.

NOVICK: Thank you.

INSKEEP: Their documentary, "Hemingway," begins tonight on many PBS stations.

(SOUNDBITE OF DJANGO REINHARDT'S "MINOR SWING")

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Review: ‘Hemingway’ Is a Big Two-Hearted Reconsideration

Ken Burns’s latest documentary, premiering Monday on PBS, traces the complicated connections between the person, the persona and the stories

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By James Poniewozik

One of the more unsettling moments in “Hemingway,” the latest documentary from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, finds Ernest Hemingway, big-game hunter, chronicler of violence and seeker of danger, doing one thing that terrified him: speaking on television.

It is 1954, and the author, who survived airplane crashes (plural) earlier that year in Africa, had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He agreed to an interview with NBC on the condition that he receive the questions in advance and read his answers from cue cards.

The rare video clip comes after we’ve spent nearly six hours seeing the author create an image of virile swagger and invent a style of clean, lucid prose. But here Hemingway, an always-anxious public speaker still recuperating from a cerebral injury, is halting and stiff. Asked what he is currently writing about — Africa — his answer includes the punctuation on the card: “the animals comma and the changes in Africa since I was there last period.”

It’s hard to watch. But it is one of many angles from which the expansive, thoughtful “Hemingway” shows us the man in full, contrasting the person and the persona, the triumphs and vulnerabilities, to help us see an old story with new eyes.

Burns, whose survey of American history is interspersed with biographies of figures like Jackie Robinson, Mark Twain and Frank Lloyd Wright, might have taken on Hemingway at any time over the past few decades. But there is an accidentally timely aspect to many of his timeless subjects. His “National Parks” in 2009, for instance, came in time to echo the Obama-era battles over the role of government.

Now “Hemingway,” airing over three nights starting Monday on PBS, comes along as American culture is reconsidering many of its lionized men, from figures on statues to Woody Allen. And there are few authors as associated with masculinity — literary, toxic or otherwise — than the writer who loved it when you called him Papa.

It’s tempting to say that Hemingway’s macho bluster doesn’t hold up well in the light of the 21st century, but it didn’t go unnoticed in the 20th either. He embraced manliness as a kind of celebrity performance. He fought with his strong-willed mother, who accused him of having “overdrawn” from the bank of her love. He married four times, finding his next wife before leaving the previous one, wanting each to give herself over to supporting him.

He clashed spectacularly with his third wife, the writer Martha Gellhorn (played in voice-over by Meryl Streep), who matched him well, maybe too well to last. A free spirit who resisted marriage at first, saying “I’d rather sin respectably,” Gellhorn would not sideline her ambitions for his. (You might find yourself wishing you were watching her documentary.)

Eventually he found a fourth wife, Mary Welsh, who wrote in her diary that he wanted his wives to be “completely obedient and sexually loose.” Hemingway wrote to his son about Gellhorn, “I made a very great mistake on her — or else she changed very much — I think probably both — but mostly the latter.” The journey that sentence takes is a short story in itself.

But “Hemingway” also complicates the popular image of Hemingway as he-man woman-hater (or, at least, woman-dismisser) in his life and his work. Starting with his early childhood, when his mother enjoyed “twinning” him and his sister, dressing them identically as boys or as girls, the film argues that Hemingway had an “androgynous” mind-set that disposed him to inhabit male and female perspectives in his work. (He also, the film says, experimented with gender-switching role-play with his lovers.)

“Hemingway” takes as a test case the story “Up in Michigan,” which ends with a date rape. It was controversial at the time; Gertrude Stein called it “inaccrochable,” like a painting unsuitable to be hung. But the Irish novelist Edna O’Brien unpacks how Hemingway’s raw, tactile prose centers the woman’s thoughts and sensations. “I would ask his detractors, female or male, just to read that story, and could you in all honor say this was a writer who didn’t understand women’s emotions and hated women?” she asks. “You couldn’t.”

O’Brien is no one-sided Hemingway booster. (She dismisses “The Old Man and the Sea” as “schoolboy writing.”) But she is the M.V.P. of a group of literary commentators here that also includes Mario Vargas Llosa, Mary Karr and Tobias Wolff, all of whom help “Hemingway” do the difficult work of describing an internal creative process from the outside.

The series lays out how Hemingway stripped away excess from his language so that the reader would supply the emotion and thus feel it more deeply. He was inspired by Paul Cézanne, who would repaint the same view to find new ways of seeing it. He admired Bach for his mastery of repetition and used the device to rhythmic, incantatory effect in his prose.

To the usual Burns toolbox of photo pans and archival film, “Hemingway” adds typewriter imagery — keys hammering on pages like irons in a smithy — and animations of manuscript editing.

Its most powerful device, though, is the author’s own words. As sometimes happens with Burns’s celebrity voice casting, I found Jeff Daniels as Hemingway distracting at times for his recognizable voice. But Daniels (like Hemingway, a Midwesterner) gives the passages of fiction and memoir a velvet punch.

You have to convey the power of the writing, after all, to show how literature is still shaped by Hemingway’s ideas of clarity, of mortality, of gender. “He changed all the furniture in the room,” Wolff says. “And we all have to sit in it.”

This is true whether we sit easily or not. “Can you separate the art from the artist?” is a heated and dogmatic argument these days. You must sever the two, in a spirit of see-no-evil, to preserve the precious product; or you must handcuff them together, so that any judgment of a life becomes the judgment on the work, and the work a forensic rap sheet against its creator.

“Hemingway” doesn’t separate art and artist. Hemingway didn’t either. He created a public “avatar” that sometimes overshadowed his work (and threatened to make him a self-caricature) and wrote his life into his art (sometimes with cruelty toward friends and peers). But the documentary also recognizes that life and art don’t always correlate neatly or simply.

The resulting biography is cleareyed about its subject but emotional about his legacy. It celebrates his gifts, catalogs his flaws (which included using racist language in his correspondence) and chronicles his decline with the tragic relentlessness its subject would give to the death of a bull in the ring.

The biggest compliment I can pay “Hemingway” is that it made me pull my “Collected Short Stories” off the shelf after years, to read his piercing, full-feeling work in a new light. This life story is not entirely a pretty picture. But to quote its subject, “If it is all beautiful you can’t believe it. Things aren’t that way.”

James Poniewozik is the chief television critic. He writes reviews and essays with an emphasis on television as it reflects a changing culture and politics. He previously spent 16 years with Time magazine as a columnist and critic. More about James Poniewozik

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Ernest Hemingway

Nobel Prize winner Ernest Hemingway is seen as one of the great American 20th century novelists, and is known for works like 'A Farewell to Arms' and 'The Old Man and the Sea.'

(1899-1961)

Who Was Ernest Hemingway?

Ernest Hemingway served in World War I and worked in journalism before publishing his story collection In Our Time . He was renowned for novels like The Sun Also Rises , A Farewell to Arms , For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea , which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. In 1954, Hemingway won the Nobel Prize. He committed suicide on July 2, 1961, in Ketchum, Idaho.

Early Life and Career

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Cicero (now in Oak Park), Illinois. Clarence and Grace Hemingway raised their son in this conservative suburb of Chicago, but the family also spent a great deal of time in northern Michigan, where they had a cabin. It was there that the future sportsman learned to hunt, fish and appreciate the outdoors.

In high school, Hemingway worked on his school newspaper, Trapeze and Tabula , writing primarily about sports. Immediately after graduation, the budding journalist went to work for the Kansas City Star , gaining experience that would later influence his distinctively stripped-down prose style.

He once said, "On the Star you were forced to learn to write a simple declarative sentence. This is useful to anyone. Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and could help him if he gets out of it in time."

Military Experience

In 1918, Hemingway went overseas to serve in World War I as an ambulance driver in the Italian Army. For his service, he was awarded the Italian Silver Medal of Bravery, but soon sustained injuries that landed him in a hospital in Milan.

There he met a nurse named Agnes von Kurowsky, who soon accepted his proposal of marriage, but later left him for another man. This devastated the young writer but provided fodder for his works "A Very Short Story" and, more famously, A Farewell to Arms .

Still nursing his injury and recovering from the brutalities of war at the young age of 20, he returned to the United States and spent time in northern Michigan before taking a job at the Toronto Star .

It was in Chicago that Hemingway met Hadley Richardson, the woman who would become his first wife. The couple married and quickly moved to Paris, where Hemingway worked as a foreign correspondent for the Star .

Life in Europe

In 1925, the couple, joining a group of British and American expatriates, took a trip to the festival that would later provide the basis of Hemingway's first novel, The Sun Also Rises . The novel is widely considered Hemingway's greatest work, artfully examining the postwar disillusionment of his generation.

Soon after the publication of The Sun Also Rises , Hemingway and Hadley divorced, due in part to his affair with a woman named Pauline Pfeiffer, who would become Hemingway's second wife shortly after his divorce from Hadley was finalized. The author continued to work on his book of short stories, Men Without Women.

Critical Acclaim

Soon, Pauline became pregnant and the couple decided to move back to America. After the birth of their son Patrick Hemingway in 1928, they settled in Key West, Florida, but summered in Wyoming. During this time, Hemingway finished his celebrated World War I novel A Farewell to Arms , securing his lasting place in the literary canon.

When he wasn't writing, Hemingway spent much of the 1930s chasing adventure: big-game hunting in Africa, bullfighting in Spain and deep-sea fishing in Florida. While reporting on the Spanish Civil War in 1937, Hemingway met a fellow war correspondent named Martha Gellhorn (soon to become wife number three) and gathered material for his next novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls , which would eventually be nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

Almost predictably, his marriage to Pfeiffer deteriorated and the couple divorced. Gellhorn and Hemingway married soon after and purchased a farm near Havana, Cuba, which would serve as their winter residence.

When the United States entered World War II in 1941, Hemingway served as a correspondent and was present at several of the war's key moments, including the D-Day landing. Toward the end of the war, Hemingway met another war correspondent, Mary Welsh, whom he would later marry after divorcing Gellhorn.

In 1951, Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea , which would become perhaps his most famous book, finally winning him the Pulitzer Prize he had long been denied.

Personal Struggles and Suicide

The author continued his forays into Africa and sustained several injuries during his adventures, even surviving multiple plane crashes.

In 1954, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Even at this peak of his literary career, though, the burly Hemingway's body and mind were beginning to betray him. Recovering from various old injuries in Cuba, Hemingway suffered from depression and was treated for numerous conditions such as high blood pressure and liver disease.

He wrote A Moveable Feast , a memoir of his years in Paris, and retired permanently to Idaho. There he continued to battle with deteriorating mental and physical health.

Early on the morning of July 2, 1961, Hemingway committed suicide in his Ketchum home.

Hemingway left behind an impressive body of work and an iconic style that still influences writers today. His personality and constant pursuit of adventure loomed almost as large as his creative talent.

When asked by George Plimpton about the function of his art, Hemingway proved once again to be a master of the "one true sentence": "From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality."

In August 2018, a 62-year-old short story by Hemingway, "A Room on the Garden Side," was published for the first time in The Strand Magazine . Set in Paris shortly after the liberation of the city from Nazi forces in 1944, the story was one of five composed by the writer in 1956 about his World War II experiences. It became the second story from the series to earn posthumous publication, following "Black Ass at the Crossroads."

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Ernest Hemingway
• Birth Year: 1899
• Birth date: July 21, 1899
• Birth State: Illinois
• Birth City: Cicero (now in Oak Park)
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Nobel Prize winner Ernest Hemingway is seen as one of the great American 20th century novelists, and is known for works like 'A Farewell to Arms' and 'The Old Man and the Sea.'
• Writing and Publishing
• Astrological Sign: Cancer
• Oak Park and River Forest High School
• Death Year: 1961
• Death date: July 2, 1961
• Death State: Idaho
• Death City: Ketchum
• Death Country: United States

We strive for accuracy and fairness.If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us !

CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Ernest Hemingway Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/writer/ernest-hemingway
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E Television Networks
• Last Updated: May 7, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 3, 2014
• Never confuse movement with action.
• There is no friend as loyal as a book.
• Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
• Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. It will teach you to keep your mouth shut.
• An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with fools.
• The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.
• Write drunk, edit sober.
• All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.
• All thinking men are atheists.
• It's good to have an end to journey to; but in the end it's the journey that matters.
• Never that think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.

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Explore the painstaking process through which Hemingway created some of the most important works of fiction in American letters. Explore the painstaking process through which Hemingway created some of the most important works of fiction in American letters. Explore the painstaking process through which Hemingway created some of the most important works of fiction in American letters.

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• Ernest Hemingway

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• Trivia In an interview with Yahoo Finance, Ken Burns stated that he was given six and a half years to make this series. "They gave me six and a half on Ernest Hemingway."

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