Hemingway | A Writer (1899-1929) a film by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Available on PBS streaming. *****
Hemingway was the first writer I loved and the primary inspiration for my becoming a writer. When I was fifteen years old my English teacher told us to read a biography of a writer, and I chose a cheap paperback life of Hemingway that was sitting around our house. I really just picked it because it looked like a quick read. But I was enthralled by the story I found there, not just that Hemingway was the son of a doctor (as I was) and grew up in an upper middle class neighborhood, not just that he was a sportsman and a he-man and a big drinker and the lover of many women, but that this overwhelmingly masculine man[1] went to enormous pains to perfect his writing and considered the practice of his art the most important thing he did. He wrote the final page of A Farewell to Arms, for instance, forty-seven[2] times. I felt a strong connection to him.
I had discovered the magic of rewriting a few years before, when I was eleven. I’d written a sloppy composition for my sixth grade English class, and my mother did a mild copy edit and made some corrections. I resented the fact that she did that, because it meant I was going to have to write it out again, and I was a lazy student in those days. But when I picked up the edited copy I was astounded by what I saw. Her simple corrections made the writing sound much better. It didn’t sound like me. It sounded like an adult. She didn’t just phrase my ideas better; she actually said some new things, more intelligent than what I’d written.
And yet I could see that I could have made the same changes, if I’d just sat there and fiddled with the language. I could have sounded like an adult. I could have said things I hadn’t previously known. It seemed somehow that language was alive, it had a separate existence, and by engaging with it I could learn something. That didn’t make rational sense, but it was what I was seeing on the page. From then on, I never wanted anyone to help me with my writing. I wanted to make the discoveries myself. I remained a lazy student, but took great care with my writing. I spent hours on it. It was my favorite thing to do.
But it wasn’t until I read that biography that I decided to be a writer. It was a secret ambition. I told almost no one.
I set out to own and read Hemingway’s entire oeuvre¸ and over the years managed to do that, buying the Scribner hardbacks in their uniform editions. There was plenty I didn’t understand, but I loved the way the man wrote. When A.E. Hotchner’s Papa Hemingway came out in 1966, I read it as a corrective to that earlier cheap biography, and though Hotchner revealed many flaws in the man, I still worshiped him. I didn’t read every biography through the years, but I read plenty; the best—a five-volume job—is by a UNC professor, Michael S. Reynolds.
So I didn’t expect to discover a lot that was new in this Ken Burns documentary—I’ve now watched just the first of three episodes—and I didn’t. But by dividing the life in two in this way—the first episode takes in the first thirty years, the next two cover the second thirty—Burns emphasized the man’s early life, and what we see here is astonishing. Forget the famous Papa Hemingway persona, the self-styled “strange old man” (he was calling himself that in his early fifties), all the posing, the bluster, the boxing matches with weaker opponents (let’s duke it out, Ezra Pound), the stupendous alcohol consumption. What Hemingway did before the age of thirty is astounding. It includes most of his best work.
He had the good sense to marry wealthy women, so he never had to worry about money. But after forgoing college, working as a reporter at the Kansas City Star, getting into World War I as an ambulance driver and getting badly wounded, then falling in love with the nurse who cared for him, he befriended Sherwood Anderson and—apparently at that man’s suggestion—moved to Paris, where he continued to work as a journalist for a Toronto paper but also (under the influence of Anderson and Gertrude Stein) set about creating a new kind of fiction, a new way of seeing things, first in the short pieces of in our time, then in the longer volume by the same name. He was still in his early twenties when he did that. The man’s nerve was colossal.
In a way I think he never surpassed those early stories. They have a freshness and originality that nothing else does. He decided to write a novel as a career move, and produced The Sun Also Rises, which may be his best novel. He wrote a parody of Sherwood Anderson, The Torrents of Spring, to get out of a contract with Horace Livewright; a second book of stories, Men Without Women; and a third[3] novel, A Farewell to Arms, the other candidate for his best.[4] He made a great deal of money and was world famous, all before the age of thirty. It’s an astonishing achievement, and I’d never seen it quite that way.
He was apparently a charismatic person, who lit up a room when he walked into it, and was a great companion who took enormous pleasure in a wide range of favorite activities. The strange thing is that his books are such downers. The hero of The Sun Also Rises is impotent because of a war wound and can’t consummate his affair with the entrancing Lady Brett Ashley; the hero of A Farewell to Arms has a more successful love affair, but then his lover dies in childbirth (which isn’t what happened in real life; his nurse-lover was several years older than he, and left him for an older man). He also had a way of betraying his friends in his novels. A man named Robert Loeb had considered Hemingway a great friend, and was startled by the way he was portrayed (anti-semetically, among other things) in The Sun Also Rises.
Hemingway also made mistakes with women. His first wife Hadley famously lost some of his early manuscripts, but he managed to piece them back together, and she had his first son and was completely devoted to him. Pauline Pfeiffer was supposedly her friend, but made an obvious play for Hadley’s husband and then rather shamelessly made off with him. The same thing would happen two more times. He seemed to keep falling in love, which is forgivable (I honestly think it was just ego gratification), but he should have let the affair run itself out and stayed with Hadley (you don’t have to marry all your lovers, Elizabeth Taylor to the contrary).
He also should have taken it easy on the booze, but that problem will doubtless show up in the next segment. What this young man did was a marvel. I’m fifty-eight years older than I was when I came across that biography, and I’ve read and loved countless other writers. But I don’t know of another who can match this early career. You can argue that his fame ruined him, but it’s hard to argue that it was undeserved.
[1] So we thought at the time. Turned out to be not so true.
[2] That’s the number reported in this doc. In my memory that number was somewhat lower. Anyway, he rewrote a lot.
[3] Really a second. People don’t regard The Torrents of Spring as serious work.
[4] Everybody has their favorites, of course. For Whom the Bell Tolls seems more “major” than the early novels, but it was the beginning of Hemingway’s self-mythologizing, and his rendering of Spanish dialogue is awkward to say the least. The Old Man and the Sea is really just a long story. To Have and Have Not is a good book, but a better movie. Across the River and Into the Trees is an embarrassment. The wise old man persona had become an albatross.
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