Hemingway, part 1: “The Writer” (Florentine Films, Hemingway Film Project, WETA, PBS-TV, 2020, aired April 5, 2021_

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I watched last night’s airing of the first episode of a three-part documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick about Ernest Hemingway. This has been heavily promoted by PBS and at first I wasn’t sure I wanted to watch it – I’m a decided non-fan of Hemingway – but I decided to because I couldn’t think of any reason not to. This opening episode took Hemingway from his childhood in a prosperous suburb of Chicago to his work as a journalist for the Kansas City Star, his work as an ambulance driver on the Italian front in World War I, the war wounds and his determination after the war to make it as a fiction writer. Hemingway got the usual round of rejections for his initial short stories but got two collections of his works printed privately in Paris under the sponsorship of Gertrude Stein, one of which contained a story called “Up in Michigan” of which even Stein disapproved. From the excerpts read as part of this program, I can see why: it’s a portrayal of a date-rape in which the author’s sympathies are entirely with the rapist – and of course he gives the all-purpose excuse of all rapists through all cultures and all times: “She really wanted it.” Hemingway even has the victim tell the rapist as he penetrates her, :”It’s so big” – he would have her say that! I remember a junior-college English teacher in the early 1970’s who told me she couldn’t stand Hemingway because “he lived his entire life from the waist down.”

Certainly one of the most dated things about him is his dick obsession – one that has led a lot of amateur psychologists to proclaim that he was “really” Gay even though he had numerous affairs with women, four of whom he married (romancing his second wife while still married to his first one and seemingly expecting both women to be happy with that arrangement – in modern terms he seems to have wanted a “thruple”). I’ve had a complicated relationship with Hemingway over the years: when I first read The Old Man and the Sea as an assigned text in seventh grade I fell in love with it. I found it an intensely moving tragedy and defended its author against criticisms from that English teacher – who obviously had read a great deal more of him than I had. Then in the 1980’s I read The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, and I had the same reaction to both books: there were occasional passages of great dignity and profundity, but through most of their texts the author was so determined to keep slapping the reader with all his half-baked notions of masculinity and his ultra-limited understanding of women I kept thinking, “Oh, please!” (At the end of Hemingway’s short story “Hills Like White Elephants” – about an argument between a man and his girlfriend over whether she should have an abortion – he has her say, “Will you please please please please please please please stop talking?” That’s probably how I would have felt if I’d been a woman with an unwanted pregnancy from Ernest Hemingway.)

The more Burns and Novick trotted literary authorities and fellow writers in Hemingway’s defense – including several women who tried to argue that Hemingway was “really” a feminist author with a sensitive attitude towards women who disguised it under all the machismo bluster, the more I became exasperated because my own experience of Hemingway has been that I can’t get beyond all the machismo bluster. Just after I read A Farewell to Arms I watched the 1932 film version, directed by Frank Borzage from a script by Benjamin Glaser and Oliver H. P. Garrett, and I was astonished at how much more I liked A Farewell to Arms the movie than A Farewell to Arms the book, largely because Borzage and his writers had cut out most of Hemingway’s masculinist posturing and cut to the romantic core of the story, even though he turned it into a “women’s picture” and had the leading lady’s death in childbirth (ill-fated pregnancies seem to have been a running theme in Hemingway ‘s writing, perhaps because his father had been a doctor who specialized in doing C-sections) depicted in a literally Wagnerian manner, with the “Liebestod” from Tristan und Isolde heard on the soundtrack as she expires.

In yesterday’s Los Angeles Times Mark Athatikis published an article called, “Is Papa’s Writing Still Relevant Today?” (one of the ironies is that Hemingway somehow acquired the nickname “Papa” even though he sucked as a father), in which he made the point that the clipped, stripped-down style he pioneered has become so much of the lingua franca of contemporary literature that it no longer seems at all innovative. He also criticizes Hemingway’s repetition as “Stein-for-dummies” and says that, “For all its vaunted simplicity, a hallmark of much of Hemingway’s work is bloat.” The promos for the Burns-Novick documentary argue that no writer since Hemingway has escaped his influence – which may be true as far as realistic story-telling is concerned, but I would argue that J. R. R. Tolkien has been equally Protean in affecting how fantasy has been written since (including shaping the demands of fantasy publishers and editors for series books instead of one-offs). Frankly, if Burns and Novick really wanted to do a big documentary about a major American writer in the first half of the 20th century, I’d have much rather seen them do F. Scott Fitzgerald (whom I love) than Hemingway; though this documentary’s writer, Geoffrey C. Ward, claimed that one of Hemingway’s themes is the death of dreams, I think Fitzgerald had more to say about that in The Great Gatsby than Hemingway did in his whole body of work (and this despite my ready concession that the plot of Gatsby is pretty simple-minded and it’s the beauty and richness of Fitzgerald’s near-poetic prose style that gives it artistic and psychological weight and power).