NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Could there be anything more subversive than turning a spotlight, in this moment, on Ernest Hemingway?
Though his influence on generations of writers is inescapable, he has come to be seen as an avatar of toxic masculinity, the chest-thumping papa of American letters, sacrificing all to the work, headstrong and volatile, serially discarding one wife for another.
And yet this contradiction is what made him interesting to documentary filmmakers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, who have worked together on in-depth series such as The Vietnam War and Baseball.
That Hemingway is a writer who has contributed so much to the form but who is also full of complexities or, to borrow another electric word from our current moment, that he is problematic only seems to have made him more of a draw.
Burns and Novicks new three-part series on Hemingway, which begins airing Monday on PBS, approaches the man and the writer without trying to tidy any of it up. The alcoholism; the womanizing; the not-so-subtle anti-Semitism and racism; the many, many shot lions and elephants its all there. But there is also reverence for his literary gifts, a desire to remind us of them and even introduce new dimensions, such as Hemingways apparent interest in gender fluidity.
In a video interview from their homes last month, Burns and Novick seemed to revel in the challenge of reviving Hemingway and allowing his mysteries, as Burns put it, to coexist alongside the enduring myth of the man. They also discussed his relationships with women, what parts of him they see in themselves and the Hemingway book they always come back to. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Q: Why Hemingway now?
KEN BURNS: Well, you know, we dont have a now. We were talking about Hemingway as early as the early 80s. I found a scrap of paper from after we decided to do the Civil War that said, Do Hemingway, Baseball, and then it showed up on lists through the end of the aughts and into the teens. We didnt know it was going to take six years to do. We dont anticipate the timing of it. We just know that every project we work on will resonate in the present, because human nature doesnt change.
Q: But you had to be aware that perhaps Hemingway wasnt the sort of historical figure with whom a 2021 public would be eager to spend time.
LYNN NOVICK: Were aware of the fact that hes a controversial figure. And that there are people who are so put off by his public persona that they havent read his work or dont want to read his work. But we are living in times when we are reevaluating all these icons from our past. And theres no better way to do that than looking at Ernest Hemingway. Some of it is very ugly and very difficult. And if youre a woman or a person of color, or youre Jewish, or youre Native American, there are going to be things in Hemingway that are going to be really, really tough. But he is so important as a literary figure and in terms of his influence that to ignore him seems to just avoid the problem.
Q: What remains most refreshing about his work was this ability he had to trust the reader so completely.
BURNS: Its a beautiful thing. And the thing I go back to often is that this is a guy whos emerging out of a modernist tradition in which everybody is complicated. Joyce and Faulkner, theyre really supercomplicated. And, as the literary scholar Steve Cushman says in the film, Hemingway dared to impersonate simplicity. What he understood is that you could use these seemingly simple sentences, and they would be as pregnant as any long Joycean paragraph or Faulknerian sentence that goes on and on. So much was below the surface. And it requires you to go searching for meaning. It isnt just how to order a French meal or fire a machine gun, its also about life and death and these fundamental human questions. And hes saying, Im not going to walk you through this. Its mesmerizing to me, when it works. Theres nothing better.
Q: The most surprising thing for me was the thread of gender fluidity that runs through the series and seems to upend everything weve come to think about Hemingway the fact that he was willing to experiment with his sexuality and take on what he thought of as a female role.
NOVICK: I think the world first got a hint of this when the family published Garden of Eden posthumously in the 1980s. But I dont think we fully appreciated what this said about him. Even when that was published. Now we have the framework to talk about it that we didnt have as a culture then. Theres a reason he never published Garden of Eden. Its a dangerous topic for him to go into. Even in an unpublished manuscript, even in his private life, given who he is. And then there were the huge problems he had with his son who was also interested in the same things. It caused an irreconcilable conflict between them, which is so sad.
BURNS: Its pretty interesting that he is pursuing this all the way through and, and not blindly, that is to say, I think theres a consciousness to it. Its in him asking all his wives to cut their hair short, in his sympathy for female characters in stories like Up in Michigan and Hills Like White Elephants. I dont think its like, Oh, I cant let this out of the bag. I think hes moving toward it. And hes exploring it all the time.
Q: The wives also punctuate the entire series, becoming a big part of the structure as he moves from Hadley Richardson to Pauline Pfeiffer to Martha Gellhorn to Mary Welsh. Its clear that he always needs a woman in his life as both an anchor and a foil.
BURNS: You got to have her and you got to leave her or you got to be bad to her. Edna OBrien [an Irish writer who appears in Hemingway] says in the opening: I love that he fell in love. But she also knows that he has to escape all of that, too, in order to provide himself new material.
NOVICK: You do feel that somehow theres some kind of arrested development or something where hes just sort of stuck in this place of needing to have this great romance. And then when ordinary life or tensions or problems come up, hes out of there. To me, the most fascinating is the relationship with Martha Gellhorn because she can hold her own with him. Its so exciting when they get together, even though hes cheating on Pauline. But theres something really interesting about their professional connections. And then he cant deal with it.
Q: If Hemingway is one of our great archetypes of the artist, is there anything you recognized of yourself in him?
BURNS: Only one thing. I think that we have, and have always had, a really strong work ethic and a discipline. And not being satisfied until its really done. And were not afraid to take a scene that is already working and dismantle it because we learn new information. Our scripts are just filled with that same sort of crossing out and emendations that Hemingway did.
NOVICK: Hemingway has you in the palm of his hand from the very first word. And you know, I feel personally I should be so lucky to ever be able to do that. So we are storytellers, and the obsession and reworking that Ken is talking about is in the service of trying to tell a good story. And thats an example that he left for us when hes at his best, with all his flaws.
Q: So have you emerged from this process with a favorite Hemingway work?
NOVICK: Its the same work that was my favorite when we started, which is surprising because I read or reread almost everything. I started with A Farewell to Arms, and I ended with it. I love the short stories, but I really love diving into a great novel. And that, that is one of the all-time great novels for me. Its pure poetry from the very first words. Its not the classic Hemingway minimalist take. Its a big epic story, and it gives you everything you need to know. And even though I know how its going to end, obviously, I love to reread it because I see different things every time I go through it. Its beautiful. Its devastating. Its epic. And its timeless for me.
BURNS: What she said. I champion the short stories, and I can list the 10 that really float my boat, like Snows of Kilimanjaro and the two parts of Big Two-Hearted River. But if its a favorite novel, then it has to be A Farewell to Arms.
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