Hemingway, part 3: “The Blank Page” (Florentine Films, Hemingway Film Project, WETA, PBS-TV, 2020, aired April 7, 2021)

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

At 8 p.m. last night I turned on KPBS and watched the third and last episode of the Ken Burns-Lynn Novick documentary on Ernest Hemingway, “The Blank Page” – reflecting how much harder it got for him to write as he lived his life and sank deeper into what probably should have been diagnosed as bipolar disorder. It seems to have run in Hemingway’s family because his father, Dr. Patrick Hemingway, also showed signs of bipolarity and also committed suicide (in fact, one grim point made in the documentary by writer Geoffrey C. Ward was that of Hemingway’s parents and their six kids, half of them committed suicide). “The Blank Page” covered what was probably the bleakest period of Hemingway’s life, the period between 1944 (when he went as a war correspondent for Collier’s magazine to cover the D-Day invasion – as did his third wife, Martha Gellhorn, who left him when the career competition between them got too much for her) and his death in 1961. He met his fourth wife, Mary, in London during the war when she was having affairs with a number of American writers, including Irwin Shaw, though she was also still married – and both she and Hemingway had to shed their previous spouses to get married.

She tried to get him to stop drinking, which was about as likely as getting Niagara Falls to stop falling, and Hemingway’s later years seem to have been a long, slow descent into early-onset senility. His incipient mental illnesses got worse, he and Mary got physically abusive towards each other (when they weren’t playing sex games in the bedroom, where supposedly she took the male role and he took the female – though exactly how that worked out in practice seemed to flummox Burns, Novick and Ward). During this period Hemingway wrote Across the River and Into the Trees (a World War II novel in which yet another disillusioned and fatally ill Hemingway protagonist falls in love with an 18-year-old Italian girl in Venice – as Hemingway himself had done; he was so used to women just falling into bed with him whenever they wanted to he seemed confused when she didn’t; the fact that he was old, bloated and ugly didn’t occur to him – that got Hemingway the worst reviews of his career) and The Old Man and the Sea (a short novel Hemingway originally intended as an epilogue to a much longer novel called Islands in the Stream, which like most of Hemingway’s first-draft manuscripts got published after his death, but which was published as a stand-alone, first in Life magazine and then as a book: Mario Vargas Llosa proclaims it in this show as Hemingway’s finest book, but another interviewee thinks it’s just another piece of unreadable crap from Hemingway’s later years), along with the manuscript for A Moveable Feast, his late-in-life memoir about his years in Paris in the 1920’s that appears to be the last thing he ever wrote even though other manuscripts written earlier came out after it.

Ward’s commentary, delivered as usual in a Burns documentary by actor Peter Coyote, calls A Moveable Feast “a bit of score-settling” and noted in particular his attacks on F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein, both of whom had given Hemingway major career help in those early days. (I felt like I wanted to take Hemingway aside and say, “Ernie, you weren’t one-tenth of the writer Fitzgerald was!”) The final episode of Hemingway was for me the saddest of the three, as a not particularly talented writer who had long since made his contribution lived out his days as he always had despite his pattern of both physical and mental self-abuse – not only his drinking but his penchant for getting into accidents and suffering concussions (including the two plane crashes in a few days he went through on the disastrous 1953-1954 African safari that was the subject of the last published Hemingway manuscript, True at First Light) that also seem to have made him less acute mentally and dulled his talents as a writer (such as they ever were, since I remain convinced Hemingway is ridiculously overrated). One interviewee said that it gets harder for any writer as he (or she) ages to keep the flame going and face that blank page on the writing table or in the typewriter (or, more likely today, the blank screen on a computer) and actually mobilize one’s energy to create. Then again, Shakespeare wrote The Tempest at the end of his career and created a beautiful summing-up of his life’s work: “We are such stuff as dreams are made of,” indeed!

As an artist, Hemingway seems to be the sort of person who blazes a trail – in his case, the use of simple language and straightforward dialogue instead of flowery description to tell a story – that seems unremarkable because it’s become just the standard way people write fiction now. He may have blazed that trail but others who came after him did more with that style – while Hemingway himself trailed off into run-on sentences with plenty of “ands” that would probably take you aback if your idea of Hemingway was as the guy who invented the short, simple sentence. Hemingway is ultimately a tragic story, though the tragedy is that an artist who was never as great as his advocates said he was found the legend he created around himself harder and harder to live up to until the man and the legend essentially destroyed each other – and despite the promises in PBS’s promos that the show would enable us to see past Hemingway the legend into Hemingway the man, the problem is the two were pretty much the same and, as I commented after watching episode two, for me the reason I can’t disentangle Hemingway the artist from Hemingway the creep (the way I can with Wagner even when he wrote anti-Jewish prejudices into his operas, notably in characters like Beckmesser in Meistersinger and Mime in Siegfried) is they are too much of a piece: the macho obsessions that make him such an unattractive figure as a human being are part and parcel of his writing as well.