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.
اضافة اعلان
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 that he 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 such as Jackie Robinson, Mark Twain, and Frank Lloyd
Wright, might have taken on Hemingway at any time over the past few decades.
But, now “Hemingway,” airing over three nights starting Monday on PBS, comes
along as American culture is reconsidering many of its lionized men. And there
are few authors as associated with masculinity — literary, toxic, or otherwise.
He clashed spectacularly with his third wife, 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. Gellhorn would
not sideline her ambitions for his. (You might find yourself wishing you were
watching her documentary.)
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.
“Hemingway” takes as a test case the story “Up in Michigan.”
It was controversial at the time; Gertrude Stein called it “inaccrochable,”
like a painting unsuitable to be hung. But Irish novelist Edna O’Brien unpacks
how Hemingway’s raw, tactile prose centers the woman’s thoughts. “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 MVP of a
group of literary commentators that help do the difficult work of describing a
creative process.
The resulting biography is clear-eyed about its subject but
emotional about his legacy. It celebrates his gifts, catalogs his flaws and
chronicles his decline.
The biggest compliment I can pay “Hemingway” is that it made
me pull my “Collected Short Stories” off the shelf after years. This 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.”
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