BOSTON (AP) – A new documentary about Ernest Hemingway – powered by large but little-known archives preserved in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston – sheds new light on the award-winning novelist.
‘Hemingway’, by longtime collaborators Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, which airs on PBS on three consecutive nights on April 5, looks at the author and his years-long reputation as an alcoholic, adventurer, outdoorsman and bullfighting loving misogynist who struggled with internal unrest that eventually led to his death by suicide at the age of 61.
The truth about the man who is considered by many to be America’s greatest novelist of the 20th century – whose concise writing style made him an extraordinary celebrity who became a symbol of an unrepentant American masculinity – is much more complicated, Novick said. said.
“We hope this film provides opportunities to look at Hemingway in different ways,” Novick said. He has also co-directed several other documentaries with Burns, including ‘The Vietnam War’ and ‘Prohibition’. “There’s a complexity beneath the surface.”
That complexity would have been almost impossible to describe without the largest Hemingway collection that ended up in the JFK library, thanks to the widows of Hemingway and Kennedy.
Although the two men never met, they admired each other and corresponded briefly. Hemingway was even invited to Kennedy’s inauguration but was unable to attend due to illness, said Hilary Justice, the Hemingway scholar in the library.
When Hemingway’s fourth wife, Mary Hemingway, determined what to do with the consequences of her late husband, she asked Jackie Kennedy if it could be housed in the JFK library.
The archives contain Hemingway’s manuscripts – including “The Sun Also Rises” and “For Who the Bell Tolls” – personal correspondence and about 11,000 photographs.
Much of the material used in the documentary has not been seen in public at all, Novick said.
Burns has been to the JFK library several times for various functions, but had no idea of the scope of the Hemingway archives before they began investigating the film, which has been going on for years.
“The Hemingway collection was central to the process,” Burns said. “It helped us understand what a disciplined writer he was.”
Much of the documentary is about Hemingway’s complicated relationship with the women in his life, from his mother and sisters to the nurse he fell in love with when he recovered from wounds he sustained in his First World War to his four women.
“So much of what he did in life was about love: running there, running out of it and destroying it,” Burns said.
Although considered the archetype of American masculinity, the truth about Hemingway’s masculinity was more complicated, the filmmakers found.
As a child, Hemingway’s mother treated him and one of his sisters as twins and often dressed in identical outfits, sometimes as boys, sometimes as girls. He researched genital fluid in his books as well as in life and let his hair grow as his wives cut them short.
“We wanted to push back against the idea that Hemingway does not like women,” Novick said.
Novick’s favorite part of the collection was Hemingway’s manuscripts, many handwritten on in-store notebooks. They show in detail his thought process when he wrote, rewrote, edited and edited his works by means of crossbars, scribbles and notes in the margin.
Hemingway, for example, wrote dozens of endings to ‘A Farewell to Arms’ – as many as 47, according to one count.
“You can track how each work evolved, from first draft to final manuscript,” she said.
For Burns, the most striking of the collection is the pieces of scrap metal dug out of Hemingway’s body after he was nearly killed as a teenager driving an ambulance in the Red Cross during World War I. Burns could not help but think that such a profound near-death experience had a profound effect on the rest of Hemingway’s life, and contributed to his death.
Whether you’re a Hemingway lover or know virtually nothing about him, there’s something in the series for you, Novick said.
“There’s a lot to learn and new interpretations of his work and life in here,” she said.