Daddy Hemingway

This spring, nearly 140 filmmakers signed an open letter to PBS echoing Lee’s accusation. The public broadcasting network defended itself, noting that in the last five years, it has released 58 hours of content by Burns and 74 by black scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., but the damage seemed done. A pall hung over the Hemingway documentary, made worse by the fact that Burns and co-director and co-producer Lynn Novick chose as their subject not only a white male, but one of the most white, male, and capital P “problematic” of all time: a safari- and bullfight-loving alcoholic war correspondent with four wives who killed himself in rural Idaho, in 1961, with a double-barreled shotgun.

There’s also the question of significance. Despite Hemingway’s considerable fame, his actual cultural influence seems, like Burns’s earlier subject, baseball, to wane a little every year. Only one of his books, 1952’s The Old Man and the Sea, is still occasionally taught in schools. “Even in Hemingway’s hometown of Oak Park, Illinois, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby alone outsells all of Hemingway’s work combined,” the journalist and critic Laura Miller recently noted in Slate, adding that “the Hemingway Foundation had to launch a GoFundMe campaign to keep the museum at his birthplace open.” But all of this is also an argument that, as Burns and Novick suggest, the time is right for a probing and revisionist portrait of a writer who fiercely cultivated his own myth.

The result is a very conventional, engrossing, but overlong documentary with a slight tendency to, as journalists say, bury the lede. For their mission of literary forensic investigation, Burns and Novick marshal an impressive panel of notables. The memoirist Mary Karr, who has written of her own struggle with alcoholism, provides perspective on Hemingway’s. The Irish novelist Edna O’Brien, exuding her trademark charisma and speaking in a mannered brogue that sounds almost more Scottish than Irish, rides to Hemingway’s defense against charges of misogyny, arguing that “Up in Michigan,” his 1923 short story about a rape, demonstrates as perceptive and sympathetic an understanding of women as that of any male writer. Hemingway biographer Mary Dearborn offers insights on Hemingway’s sex life and what she calls his “thing about androgyny” (more on that momentarily). The writers Abraham Verghese, Tim O’Brien, and Mario Vargas Llosa, among many others, are also present as talking heads; Vargas Llosa, although greatly admiring of Hemingway, bursts into laughter describing the scene in For Whom the Bell Tolls in which the protagonist has sex with his love interest and feels the Earth move beneath her. The late Sen. John McCain, a Hemingway buff who described the writer’s work as an intense personal moral influence, even makes a cameo.

Oddly, and perhaps because of the documentary’s determination to avoid indulging the writer’s self-mythologizing, Hemingway undersells its subject a bit. When writing a reported profile, a good journalist would generally front-load the profile with the subject’s most vivid, controversial, and charismatic aspects, and then, as the profile unfolds, backtrack to fill in biographical information and perhaps expose the subject to more critical examination. Yet we are not given, at least initially, much sense of Hemingway’s then-groundbreaking literary style and why it was so influential, nor of his swashbuckling, globe-trotting life — the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, Cuba, the liberation of Nazi Europe, late-colonial Africa. But notwithstanding a few allusions to Hemingway’s literary stature and his hyper-masculine image, the opening seems to take Hemingway’s significance, and the viewer’s interest, for granted and as a license to move to conventional biography. An archival clip on YouTube in which Orson Welles recounts his interactions with Hemingway leaves a more vivid impression of both men than some stretches of this documentary.

As a psychoanalytic investigation, some of Hemingway’s revelations are interesting but not exactly surprising: Hemingway’s hero was Teddy Roosevelt, another fiercely masculine adventurer who expressed his love of nature largely by murdering it. Other disclosures are more eyebrow-raising: Hemingway’s mother liked to dress him as a girl when he was a child, very deliberately and often twinned with his older sister. This insight — paging Dr. Freud — seems to explain rather thunderously Hemingway’s obsession with masculinity, and it is further complicated when we learn, in a detail buried several hours in, that Hemingway enjoyed gender-bending in bed and asked his wife to call him by a girl’s name while making love. Although this is not strictly a new finding (biographers and literary critics have discussed it), it is probably news to most people who will view the documentary, which makes it puzzling that it isn’t signposted a bit more.

Burns and Novick are careful to chart Hemingway’s moral inconsistencies and contradictions. When, in 1935, a hurricane killed more than 200 homeless First World War veterans stationed in the Florida Keys by the Works Progress Administration, Hemingway rushed to the scene to assist and to write a devastating dispatch. But for all his bravery and occasional intensely felt empathy, he was at times lacking in a spine. In Spain, he suppressed information that would be damaging to the Republican cause and, when his friend, the novelist John Dos Passos, wanted to alert the world that Stalinist secret police were abducting and executing their political opponents within Republican ranks, Hemingway talked him out of it on the grounds that it would hurt his standing in literary circles. Consider, in contrast, the greater moral consistency of George Orwell, a socialist whose frank memoir of the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia, infuriated much of the international Left. During the Second World War, Hemingway initially resisted the entreaties of his third wife, the journalist Martha Gellhorn, to join her as a foreign correspondent in Europe, instead preferring to drink and pal around on dubious “U-boat patrols” on his fishing vessel, though by late 1944 he had made his way to the front.

The documentary also probes Hemingway’s mental illness in heartbreaking detail. His depression was probably partly hereditary — his father also killed himself — and may have been compounded by the numerous head injuries he suffered, including in back-to-back plane crashes in Africa, by his alcohol abuse, and by electroshock treatments that temporarily helped him but caused humiliating short-term memory loss and basically ended his ability to write. Yet Hemingway, for all his seeming bon vivantism, had a morbid streak throughout his life: Years before his mental decline, he was known, at parties, to delight in “rehearsing” his own suicide in the exact manner in which he later did it.

The most interesting supporting character, by far, is Gellhorn, a great writer in her own right and a war correspondent whose reporting was arguably far more intrepid than her husband’s, despite his attempts to undermine her. During her life, she reported from at least eight different conflicts or theaters of war and was, among other things, the only woman present during the D-Day landings, having hidden in the bathroom of a hospital ship and then plunged ashore disguised as a stretcher-bearer. If PBS is casting about for someone to profile after finishing with Muhammad Ali and the American buffalo, I would gladly watch a documentary on her.

J. Oliver Conroy’s writing has been published in the Guardian, New York magazine, the Spectator, the New Criterion, and other publications.