Reevaluating Toxic Genius in Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's Hemingway Documentary
Back Row Exclusive: Listen to Jenna’s interview with director Lynn Novick about toxic masculinity, Ernest Hemingway, and the joys of collaborative filmmaking on the Notes From the Back Row podcast
When I was growing up, rumor 'round the schoolyard was that Ernest Hemingway shot himself because he could no longer get it up. Even as a teenager this felt like an overly simplistic explanation of any person's decision to commit suicide, but at the same time it didn’t sound wildly impossible either. Between his reputation as a man’s man, his love of bullfighting and big game hunting, plus his multiple broken marriages, I made a point early on to avoid learning too much about Hemingway's personal life. In part because, I felt, who needs to perpetuate that kind of bull even in their own minds? But mostly it was because I loved his writing too much. His masterfully succinct prose, layered and textured without ever giving into pretentious overindulgence, was and remains hugely influential to me. Beyond his compelling descriptions of bohemian Paris and romantic Spain, I was mostly drawn in by his seemingly otherworldly characters. His leading men, typically loners who prioritize nature and love above all else, felt uniquely disconnected from the traditional gender roles one might presume an author so cloaked in machismo would have valued.
At a time when giving toxic male personalities a second look may feel almost like a step backwards, Lynn Novick and Ken Burns' latest collaboration, Hemingway (2021), makes a strong case for the importance of doing just that. Within this three part, six-hour long documentary (streaming on PBS Documentaries Prime Video Channel), Novick and Burns rethink Hemingway's troubled legacy through both modern and historic perspectives; working to separate myth from the decidedly more interesting man. In a traditional Ken Burns fashion, the documentary showcases a trove of invaluable primary sources and celebrity voice talent by Jeff Daniels, Meryl Streep and more. There are also multiple interviews from a refreshingly diverse mix of historians, authors, professors and even one unexpected (but not wholly surprising) politician.
The Hemingway we meet throughout the documentary is a man driven by a desire to love and be loved. Author Edna O’Brien, who offers many memorable and illuminating insights throughout the film, puts it succinctly: “Ordinary life was anathema to him. It had to be a life of adventure, and that adventure was in lieu… of a deep-seated loneliness and depression.” Behind that roughhousing hunter, who seeks out war for fun, is a man haunted by fear of losing control. Fueled in part by resentment towards his parents, as well as an early brush with heartbreak, he allowed fear and avoidance to influence his decision making from a fairly young age. Dressed up in the smoke screen of masculinity, that fear became indecipherable from courage.
Hemingway bought hard into the myth of a heroic masculine ideal, convincing himself that anything less was an indication of moral failure. Whether he was attempting to conquer nature or pursuing all encompassing young love, he took great joy in establishing dominance over the untamable. As his fame grew, so did his cult of personality; fueled largely by a series of traumatic head injuries, a near lifelong dependency on alcohol, and a genetic predisposition to manic depressive episodes. Approaching the height of his fame, The New Republic denounced the clear shift in his focus and image: “He appears to have turned into a composite of all those photographs… the handsome stalwart hunter, crouched smiling over the carcass of some dead beast. Such a man could not have written Hemingway’s early books. It is hard not to wonder if he has not, hunting, brought down an even greater victim.”
While I found this documentary to largely be an empathetic and nuanced portrait, it certainly does not shy away from some of the man's more horrendous offenses. Novick and Burns keep a tight focus on dispelling much of the mythos that surrounded the man, both in life and after death, and they do so in part by concentrating on the women Hemingway shared his life with. It's through these combustible relationships with his wives that we truly see the best and the worst of Hemingway. He could write passionate and sentimental love letters in one turn, and the next wantonly crush hearts in a fit of selfishness. As time drags on, and his fame and head injuries mount, he dissolved into a full on wife-beating monster – eventually repelling nearly every friend and family member.
His relationship to his third wife, Martha Gellhorn, felt particularly revealing. It was his first romantic entanglement with a woman who was as equally ambitious and driven as he was. Gellhorn idolized Hemingway from a young age, and made a living in her own right as a war correspondent. He was quickly head over heels after meeting her, eventually leaving his second wife for her despite Martha’s reluctance towards marriage as an institution. As Hemingway’s romantic feelings predictably curdled into jealous rivalry, resulting in her leaving him to further pursue her career, he found new inspiration in purposefully undercutting her. In one particularly cruel turn during World War II, he lied to her about available seating on an airplane, forcing her to take a cargo ship across the Atlantic to reach Europe. When she finally arrived, dutifully reporting from the front lines where he hadn’t even been, Hemingway used his fame to overshadow her article by publishing one of his own in the same publication.
It’s also through his wives that we learn more about Hemingway’s surprisingly complex relationship to gender. According to this documentary, he encouraged a sort of gender fluidity between the sheets. Beyond asking his wives to cut their hair extremely short, he enjoyed pretending to be a woman himself during sex while encouraging his partners to pretend to be the man – in order to “do every sort of thing which pleases her and which pleases me.” It’s the sort of rubbernecking information that scratches a certain Freudian itch, but in the end I’m not sure it amounts to too much other than just another contradiction to throw on the pile. These sexual revelations are also less surprising if you’ve read or heard of his posthumous novel "The Garden of Eden,” which deals pretty explicitly with sexual role reversals.
While there’s no shortage of interesting personal material, Hemingway still can leave us wanting a bit more. His son Patrick chimes in multiple times to deliver intriguing first-hand anecdotes – apparently Hemingway started out as a great dad – but we hear decidedly less about his elder son Jack and nothing about his surviving extended family. The 'Hemingway curse' is only touched upon briefly within the film, mentioning that seven members of his family died by suicide. Then there’s the relationship between Ernest and his child Gregory, whose own struggle with gender dysphoria lead to a handful of blowouts with his less than understanding father. Their fraught relationship lends to one of the more memorably heartbreaking exchanges in the film, in which Gregory is stands up to the elder Hemingway within a scathing letter, calling him “sick in the head and too fucking proud and scared to admit it.” Continuing to slam his latest novel as “a sickly bucket of sentimental slop as was ever scrubbed off a barroom floor.” A truce is eventually called but how their relationship fared after is left unsatisfyingly open-ended.
There's a reason this towering literary figure has persisted for over a hundred years, in spite of his overt personal flaws. Hemingway makes a strong point for the man’s relevance as not only an extremely talented author, but almost as ‘How Not To Act’ guide at a time where public pressure to ‘return’ to strict gender roles has been flaring up again. It’s genuinely depressing to wonder what Hemingway could have accomplished if he hadn’t been so hell-bent on pursuing an impossible masculine standard – the likes of which became a prison for him and did essentially rob him of his life. Decades of severe head trauma and alcoholism inevitably lead to his declining health, impotence and finally his inability to write. In the end he could no longer keep up with himself, and succumbed to the one fate he feared the most: a loss of control.
Watch Hemingway now on PBS Documentaries Prime Video Channel.
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