Hemingway, part 2: “The Avatar” (Florentine Films, Hemingway Film Project, WETA, PBS-TV, 2020, aired April 6, 2021)

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

Last night I watched the second episode in the three parts of the Ken Burns-Lynn Novick documentary on Ernest Hemingway, which at first (with my eyes going the way they are) I thought was called “The Aviator” but it turned out the real title was “The Avatar.” The thesis of this show was that Ernest Hemingway worked so hard at becoming ERNEST HEMINGWAY – big-game hunter, bullfighting aficionado, overall “man’s man” – he lost himself as an artist in working so hard to maintain himself as a celebrity even though he maintained his artistic discipline, working at his typewriter from 8 a.m. to noon and then knocking off work for the rest of the day and having fun. Hemingway’s son Patrick says he got to accept that his dad effectively didn’t exist to him and his brothers in the morning because he was around all afternoon – he was essentially working from home before working from home was cool, and like a lot of modern-day workers from home he adopted as tight a schedule as a worker in an office to make sure the work got done. Whether the work was any good or not is another matter; for the last years of his life Hemingway trooped to his room in the morning and cranked out stuff, but he accumulated so many unpublished manuscripts “new” Hemingway books kept coming out for nearliy three decades after his death. I remember the publication of a late Hemingway book called True at First Light in 1999 and the enormous amount of publicity hype that surrounded it, and I had to cut through the B.S. to realize that this was not a book tragically left unfinished by Hemingway’s death. It was a book he had got as far as a first draft on and then decided wasn’t worth putting any more effort into to make it truly ready for publication.

The “Avatar” episode of Hemingway covered the years 1930-1944: his forays into nonfiction with his books Death in the Afternoon and Green Hills of Africa (about bullfighting and safari hunting, respectively), and it seems ironic that a man who’s credited with so many innovations in fiction writing doesn’t get the credit (or the blame) for inventing the so-called “New Journalism” Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe were credited with inventing in the 1960’s: the application of the techniques of novel-writing to nonfiction and the insertion of the author and his (or her) point of view into the story. It also charts Hemingway’s politics from a trendy isolationism and conservatism in the mid-1930’s to his outspoken Leftism later in the decade. Apparently the turnaround came when Hemingway’s home town of Key West, Florida (in a slavery-era mansion bought with his second wife’s money) was struck by one of the worst hurricanes of all time in 1935. Among the people killed were a corps of about 200 World War I veterans who’d been sent there by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to work on expanding Key West’s roadways to make the place more of a tourist attraction and thereby develop the local economy (itself something that upset Hemingway because the whole reason he’d wanted to live there was its relative isolation). Hemingway blamed their deaths on the Roosevelt administration and published an article about them in the Communist magazine New Masses (a publication that had previously excoriated him, especially for an isolationist article he’d done in which he warned of the dangers of European fascism but also opposed the U.S. doing anything militarily to stop them).

Then the Spanish civil war broke out in 1936 and Hemingway got an assignment to cover it as a war correspondent; he identified with the Loyalists and saw their battle as the first and earliest opportunity to stop the fascists before they could start the second world war Hemingway feared. Oddly, the show doesn’t mention the play Hemingway wrote in Spain, The Fifth Column (the title came from the boast of one of Franco’s generals that he had four columns of men marching on Madrid and a fifth column of saboteurs and fascist sympathizers in the city undermining its ability to resist – indeed that was the origin of the phrase “The Fifth Column,” which became a standard term during World War II for spies and saboteurs in general). In an interview he gave for Aaron Latham’s book Crazy Sundays, about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s attempts to make it as a movie writer, he quotes an interview he did with Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who said that neither Fitzgerald nor Hemingway could write dialogue to save their souls. They could write dialogue well enough so when you read it in a novel, you would believe people were saying these things, but when they tried to write entire play or movie scripts and actors tried to speak those lines, they just became ridiculous.

To maintain his standing as a fiction writer Hemingway threw together a pastiche of three short stories called To Have and Have Not (which became a hit movie in 1945, 10 years after its publication, out of a bet director Howard Hawks made with Hemingway that he could turn Hemingway’s worst novel into a major movie; Hawks admitted later that all he took from the book was the central character, Harry Morgan, an American fisherman who lived in the Caribbean: the film was a success largely because it introduced Lauren Bacall both to the movie audience and to the male lead, Humphrey Bogart, whom she married). Then in 1940 Hemingway brought out his Spanish Civil War novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, which got him both the best reviews and the biggest sales of anything he’d written since A Farewell to Arms in 1929.It got attacked by the Left-wing press for exposing the war atrocities on both sides – the Loyalists as well as Franco’s Phalange – and a lot of reviewers thought the sex scenes were silly (Fitzgerald saw Hemingway working on one of them – according to Latham’s book, Hemingway had tried to break into Hollywood and Fitzgerald had invited him as a house guest, and one day he saw Hemingway working on For Whom the Bell Tolls on a writing table he’d set up at Malibu Beach; Fitzgerald told his then-girlfriend Sheilah Graham, “He’s just waiting for someone to come along and see him writing that way,” and the page Hemingway was working on was one of the sleeping-bag scenes, which he was literally writing as an inverted pyramid with the point of the pyramid representing the orgasm) – but it became the second work of Hemingway’s to be filmed (ironically with Gary Cooper in the male lead – he’d also starred in the first film of a Hemingway work, the 1932 A Farewell to Arms directed by Frank Borzage).

The rest of the episode dealt with the relationship of Hemingway with his third wife, writer and correspondent Martha Gellhorn, whom he fell in love with when they were both covering Spain while wife number two (whose wealthy family had supported Hemingway for years) was back home in Key West. Gellhorn had been infatuated with Hemingway – or at least with the idea of Hemingway (in her dorm room at Bryn Mawr she’d hung his photo on her wall) – for years before they actually met, but their sorry marriage is an all-too-typical example of a macho boor falling in love with a genuinely independent and talented woman and then trying to “break” her and turn her into a stay-at-home wife. The petty sabotage he wreaked on her career as a war correspondent when they both went to cover the imminent Allied invasion of France in 1944 (he bounced her out of the military plane that was supposed to fly them to Britain and she had to go on a ship instead, a Norwegian freighter that was ferrying supplies for the invasion – and therefore would have been a legitimate military target for the German navy – and which had no other passengers) shows him in an all-too-typical unattractive light. So was the speed with which he dumped Gellhorn when he realized she wasn’t and would never be a submissive wife – and true to his usual pattern, just as he’d started his romance with wife number two while still married to wife number one, and started with Gellhorn while still married to wife number two, he took up with wife number four while he and Gellhorn were still together (more or less). I’ve written a great deal over the years about how artists should be judged by their work and not by their dubious personal lives or political choices – it’s one of my main arguments against the witchhunt all too much of the “#MeToo” movement has turned into – but I just don’t respond to Hemingway’s work as an artist the way I do to Richard Wagner’s or Charlie Parker’s (to name two other artistic geniuses who were also terrible human beings) and therefore I’m far less inclined to overlook or forgive his failings as a man.