Ernest Hemingway: the man, the myth, the legend

ERNEST HEMINGWAY was a “man’s man”. He was a battle-hardened war veteran. A bullfighting aficionado. A lion-hunter. A deep-sea fisherman. A boozer. A brawler. A seducer of women (the women served more or less the same function for his ego as the bulls, the lions and the fish). His public persona as a kind of action hero, ever seeking adventure, was evoked in his writing, with its famously “muscular” prose. Yet as “Hemingway”, a new three-part documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, shows, the macho persona was largely contrived.

“I hate the myth of Hemingway,” Michael Katakis, the manager of Hemingway’s literary estate, declares in one episode. “It obscures the man. And the man is much more interesting than the myth.” Hemingway himself did much of the image-making. When he returned to Oak Park, Illinois, from the Italian front in 1919, not yet 20 years old, he was welcomed home as a hero. He had received the Italian Silver Medal of Bravery; an article in the New York Sun reported that he bore “227 marks” on his “battered person” from Austrian shrapnel. Hemingway courted that attention, wearing his full uniform, including a black velvet Italian cape, whenever he left his parents’ home. He appeared before local groups to regale them with tales of his courageous exploits—for a fee.

His weakness, observes Edna O’Brien, an Irish writer, was that he loved an audience. Newspapers and magazines would show him hunting in Africa, fishing off the Florida Keys, carousing with soldiers during the second world war, always glamorously virile. His stories and novels—about hunting and fishing, bullfighting and battle-fighting—fused him with his characters in the public imagination. But his most memorable and enduring character is not Nick Adams, the midwestern boy of “In Our Time”, a short-story collection, or Jake Barnes, the impotent veteran in “The Sun Also Rises”. It’s Ernest Hemingway—or “Papa” Hemingway, as he came to be known—American masculinity incarnate.

In the end, the documentary suggests, he destroyed himself “trying to remain true to the character he invented”. The private man behind the character suffered from depression, insecurity and war-induced terrors. He leaned on women to soothe and support him, always having the next one lined up before he left the last, seemingly incapable of fending for himself. He flirted with gender reversal, asking his wives to cut their hair short and dominate him in the bedroom.

If the macho myth concealed the man, the macho prose conceals, too. It stays on the surface of the narrative, refusing to drop into exposition, reflection or embellishment. Literary critics often describe Hemingway’s style as one of omission, of things left out or left unsaid. His writing doesn’t leave things out, though, so much as it veils them. This is what he suggested in his iceberg theory: that stories, like icebergs, may derive their heft from things submerged or unseen. “If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them,” he explained. “The dignity of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.”

The documentary repeats what is often said about Hemingway, that he “remade American literature”. He did so partly by subverting readers’ expectations about how much a story should tell, and much of his work is about things concealed. In “Big Two-Hearted River”, for example, Adams returns to his old fishing ground. “He stepped into the stream. It was a shock. His trousers clung tight to his legs. His shoes felt the gravel. The water was a rising cold shock.” The war is never mentioned, but it looms in the margins. The reader feels that something is wrong, something that cannot be discussed: Adams’s trauma, which becomes more unspeakable precisely because it goes unspoken. Likewise in “Hills Like White Elephants”, a couple sitting at a train station discuss an operation. But only when looking between the lines, in careful rereading, do you realise they mean an abortion:

“Well,” the man said, “if you don’t want to you don’t have to. I wouldn’t have you do it if you didn’t want to. But I know it’s perfectly simple.”
“And you really want to?”
“I think it’s the best thing to do. But I don’t want you to do it if you don’t really want to.”
“And if I do it you’ll be happy and things will be like they were and you’ll love me?”

The documentary works best when it shows how Hemingway’s direct, hard and spare style swept the literary world. It became a new creed; it is the way many write still. Of the man, the documentary doesn’t show viewers much that they might not already know from biographies. It has a timeliness nonetheless—if only because masculinity itself has become a subject of re-evaluation.

“Hemingway” is streaming via PBS now