Hemingway, review: was Papa really a macho man – or a 'woke' softie?
Ken Burns does not pick mere subjects for his documentaries, he picks monuments. Huge, towering, undeniable American monuments. A list of his past films reads like a Billy Joel song: Jefferson, baseball, Brooklyn Bridge, Vietnam, Mark Twain, prohibition, country music, the Civil War, jazz. He is not one for the minutiae of United States history. He takes these A-grade all-American symbols, puts them on a pedestal and then, slowly, asks you to consider what the pedestal itself is made from. Burns didn’t start the fire, but he wants you to know who did.
And so, to Hemingway (BBC Four), a six-part dissection of America’s 20th-century literary alpha papa, a man whose terse, gutsy prose still haunts almost every English-language novelist to this day. It’s possible that Ernest Hemingway haunts Burns too, give how much this series, co-created, as ever, with film-maker and long-time collaborator Lynn Novick, feels like an exorcism. “You can’t begin to write until you kill his ghost in you,” says the writer Abraham Verghese, “or embrace it”. Over six hours, Burns and Novick kill that ghost. Not for them, Hemingway’s sweaty, macho embrace.
If you’ve seen Burns’s work before, you’ll know the drill – the camera slowly zooming in on a parade of grainy, black and white photographs, while Peter Coyote’s stately narration envelops you in a warm fug of authoritative biography. If the Library of Congress had a voice, it would be Coyote’s. Even his name fits the bill. Burns’s documentaries make you feel as if you are in a very refined, very expensive, very straightforward museum in Manhattan. Burns doesn’t do frills. He doesn’t put himself in the picture. You come here to learn about Hemingway, not admire the architecture.
Burns and Novick, however, have a mission. And that is to tear down the myth of Hemingway, to get under that tough, gnarled skin, and find the real man underneath. We think we know him, we’re told in the opening exchanges: “wounded veteran and battlefield correspondent; big game hunter and deep sea fisherman; bullfight aficionado; brawler and lover and man about town.” But the Hemingway of legend, the brawny, boozy, blokey, misogynistic author of For Whom the Bell Tolls, A Farewell to Arms and The Old Man and the Sea, is just that – legend, myth, storytelling.
Early on, Burns and Novick make merry with the psychology, highlighting Hemingway’s domineering mother, who would often dress little Ernest up as a girl, and his “weak”, troubled, great outdoors-loving father. For all his reputation as an unreconstructed, 20th-century man’s man, Burns and Novick make a good claim for Hemingway being – steady yourselves – “woke” (not that he uses that word). As a child he would play with tea sets, while his sisters played with air rifles. All his life, we’re told, he was “intrigued by the blurred line between male and female”. He would call his lovers “Pete”. Yes, his father taught him to fish, but he was also a choirboy and a cellist, who loved Bach. As a teenager, he was shy with girls. His heterosexuality is questioned. What a turnaround, Ernest.
There is more, in other words, to Hemingway than we might think. His first wife said of him that he “had so many sides, he defied geometry”. Burns and Novick, however, find the nub of it at war, with Hemingway, 18 years old, desperate to join the fighting in Europe. In 1917, he finds himself in Italy with the Red Cross, scooping up body parts and changing bandages, and, soon, he's a hero. Struck by a mortar blast, with 220 pieces of shrapnel embedded in his legs before taking bullets to the knee and foot, Hemingway displays impressive, manly grit – he refuses treatment until his worse-off comrades have been seen to; he has the shrapnel removed without anaesthetic; he writes a cheery letter to this parents, claiming his injuries are delightful.
Burn and Novick make it clear that the Great War changed Ernest – how could it not? – but reminds us that it also precipitated Hemingway’s first attempts at legend-building. Hemingway would claim he later returned to the front and took part in fierce fighting. His efforts thereafter to become a writer, flying in the face of his pious parents, take on the air of a spoilt, rich boy trying to make his mark on the world. When he moves to Paris to join the Left Bank intellectuals, Burns and Novick make it feel like a petulant gap year. We’re reminded that the “penniless” Hemingway enjoyed regular skiing trips. When Hemingway’s first child is born, the young man sulks and pouts, “bitterly” griping to Gertrude Stein that he was too young. He moves to Spain to watch bullfights. This, too, is stripped of romance, with Hemingway’s wife, Hadley, forced to watch the bloody spectacle, while stitching baby clothes. The series determinedly unpicks the knots tied by Hemingway.
It is, of course, 2021, and we no longer worship at the altar of great, troubled men. Later episodes dig into far worse behaviour of Hemingway’s, though we are never left in doubt of the greatness of his works. Burns and Novick seem to find Hemingway’s brand-building distasteful, comical even, though he has assembled a fine gaggle of talking heads to talk up and defend the author (in the main). The myth is stripped away, the pedestal has the legs sawn off and Burns and Novick present to us Hemingway the man, warts and all. Another great American monument, seen through Burns and Novick’s crystal clear eyes.
