Hem II

Hemingway: The Avatar (1929-1944)  A film by Ken Burns and Kim Novick.  Available on PBS Streaming.  *****

Once again, in this second episode, I was stuck by Hemingway’s youth (he was already calling himself Papa in 1929, at the age of thirty).  By the end of this episode he’s just 45 years old, and he’s already written Death in the Afternoon, The Green Hills of Africa, To Have and Have Not, and For Whom the Bell Tolls.  His best work was behind him, except for The Old Man and the Sea, and he’s already gone through three wives.  He seems already to have started unravelling, a process which will continue in the third episode.

In my youthful enthusiasm for his greatness as a writer, I ignored how out of touch he was with the culture as a whole.  While the rest of the country was going through the Great Depression, Hemingway was writing about his travels through Spain to see the bullfights, and his extremely expensive safari to Africa, which was actually financed by his father-in-law (something I hadn’t realized).  To Have and Have Not is a half-assed attempt at a more proletarian novel, and For Whom the Bell Tolls at least engages with the international political reality, as he takes on the Spanish Civil War, but Hemingway was living on the fringes of the country (in Key West and increasingly in Cuba) and ignoring political realities at home.  He supposedly engaged in World War II by patrolling the Gulf Stream in his fishing boat, the Pilar, but mostly he was out there drinking and fishing with his buddies.  He never saw any action.

That brings up the subject of death—a major theme in the man’s work—and, more specifically, the subject of killing.  I realize I’m almost a caricature of a bleeding heart liberal, but I’m sorry, I don’t understand how someone who supposedly loved the continent of Africa, the landscape and the abundant wildlife—wanted to go there and kill those animals.  I understand killing if you need the meat, if you’re hunting to subsist, but why would you kill a rhino, or a lion, or any of the multiple animals that Hemingway is reported killing in The Green Hills?[1]  Why, for that matter, would you go to a public spectacle in which no less noble an animal than a bull is ritually slaughtered for the entertainment of the people watching?  I realize that a man is exhibiting courage in these situations, but is that the whole point, to observe courage or let people know you’re courageous?  Why don’t two men just fight each other to the death?  Would people pay to watch that?

Burns and Novick spend some time on a famous short story, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, in which a man is off hunting in Africa and his wife not only accuses him of cowardice, but is having an affair with the guide (kind of difficult to hide that from your spouse), so in a later hunting incident Macomber holds his ground and winds up being killed.  We have to wonder where Hemingway was in all that?  Was he trying to prove his courage to somebody?  To some woman?  There’s no evidence that his then-wife—Pauline Pfeiffer—had anything but huge admiration for him.  So who was he proving himself to?  His father (who by that time had committed suicide)?  His mother, whom he detested and who had once dressed him in girly clothes, making him look like a twin to his sister?  Himself?

Someone—I can’t remember who—said Hemingway spent his whole life killing animals and fish so he wouldn’t kill himself, then finally he killed himself.

I was fascinated to see how many people were inspired by For Whom the Bell Tolls, including no less notable a talking head than John McCain, and various astute critics praised this or that part of it, but I would have to agree with Mario Vargas Llosa, who thought the book was laughable in some places—especially the famous occasion where Robert Jordan (the Hemingway stand-in) makes love to Maria and she feels the earth move—and was his least successful novel (I would reserve that position for Across the River and Into the Trees).  Part of the problem is that Hemingway creates this brave and selfless hero who seems obviously to be one more stand-in for himself, Nick Adams all grown up.  Another problem is that this man who so often wrote about death, who seemed to court it in his accident-filled life, who even in this novel kills the protagonist off in the end, didn’t face the fact of death in a mature way.  He didn’t engage with the mystery of life, and of death.

Hemingway created a method of writing that was famous and instantly recognizable, ideal for the stories he created it for, those about a young man returning from war, obviously suffering from PTSD, trying to live deliberately and pull himself together.  As a simple description of a man going fishing, you can’t beat “Big Two-Hearted River.”  But while that style works for the description of simple physical action—something he was good at all his life, as he would show in The Old Man and the Sea—it isn’t good for everything.  And Hemingway to some extent was trapped by his style.  He created it, then he had to do it.  He had to sound like Hemingway.

That’s why I think the title of this episode is brilliant.  Hemingway had created an avatar—the writing style was a part of it—the grinning ebullient macho man who hunted and fished and boxed and followed bullfights and loved many women and could hold any amount of liquor[2] (call me Papa!) and now he had to live up to it.  He had created a monster.  Now he had to be that monster.

There was actually a much more interesting person inside that creation.  If you read the Selected Letters (a must-read for Hemingway fans) you’ll find what he was like when he threw away the carefully-crafted style aside and let it rip.[3]  It makes you wish he had written a book that way.  If you read The Garden of Eden you see a man who gave up the macho pose for a while and did some gender switching with his lover (he seems to project that activity back on one of the earlier wives, and maybe they did fool around that way, but he also did it with Mary, his fourth wife.  She wrote about it in her memoir).  In the final years of his life he was working on a vast epic of land, sea, and air, from which The Old Man and the Sea and the posthumous novels were created.  It could have been an epic.  But not if he kept trying to sound like Hemingway.  Old Baby Sentences, as my brother used to call him.

It’s unfair to compare anyone to one of the greatest artists of all time, Pablo Picasso[4], but there was a man who in certain superficial ways was like Hemingway—he was a world famous celebrity, and made Hemingway look monogamous—but who never limited himself to a style, or a reputation.  If he wanted to say something new, he found a new way to say it.  He didn’t care of people like his new period.  He followed the creative process where it took him.

Hemingway was trapped by the persona he created.

[1] He apparently had a running competition with the guide about who could kill more.

[2] He was contemptuous of men he called “rummies” all his life, but in the end he was one of the worst rummies in the history of American literature.

[3] He couldn’t spell worth shit, among other things.

[4] This comparison, and various other ideas in this piece, came up in a long discussion with my wife, which we had on a walk the morning after watching the film.