Taking Bearings

Part I: HEMINGWAY’S ENDURING INTIMACY

I am a scientist, an author, occasionally a journalist, and an editor of science and factual media. I’m not a literary scholar, but I have read all of Hemingway’s published works and spent many days with his personal writings and photos preserved in the Hemingway archives at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.

Spelunking in the collection donated by Mary Welsh Hemingway was always one of my favorite personal diversions when in Boston. After making a reservation with a research librarian, I’d jump on the Red Line from Harvard to the JFK/UMass exit. That being sufficient “T” time, I would take a taxi back to my room at the Harvard Club in Back Bay or to the house I rented in Cambridge, just off campus on Kirkland Place.

It would be hard to mistake the Hemingway room, adorned as it is with a mounted antelope head from his 1933 safari, a lion-skin rug, and his portrait.

Great writers have the ability to span time, distance, and differences to make their readers intimate companions. As a result, I confess to feeling an almost promiscuous voyeurism in viewing rarely seen writings and photos of someone whom I felt I already knew intimately.

Six decades after his death, Hemingway still has legions of us who think we know him. We think we understand him, and we envy and try to emulate his life, his writing, or both.

HEMINGWAY’S INTIMACY

When the storms of life or deadlines rage, many writers–no matter what their genre–embrace Hemingway’s wisdom on writing, clutching at it like a medieval monk would scripture.  We remember Papa-esque exhortations to courage, and that we are measured by how we handle adversity. When we procrastinate over writing, we remember his scoldings to work.

Before college, Hemingway’s writings sparked my interest in literature and history. They shaped my take on the world and my early opinions of what a man should be and how he should carry himself in the world. This clay of manhood was later sculpted and baked in by a fire-breathing Marine D.I. in Aviation Officer Candidate School.

I was a purist. I came to my youthful conclusions based only on Hemingway’s published work. I don’t recall reading anything biographical about him until several years later when, as a college student, I met Mary Hemingway while she was on tour with her book, How it Was. With a small group of students, I was invited to attend a lunch with her. She mostly spoke of her own experiences as a war correspondent, but her book opened me to Hemingway’s personal side and also to the myths he created.

Despite the myth making, I have always found more truth than tale in Hemingway’s writing. Whenever I have ventured into realms he wrote about–from hunting in Texas to photographing the Maasai Mara in Kenya, from boxing in the Navy to bullfights in Spain, from the solitude of being out of sight of land at sea to the thrill of running toward the sound of gunfire–I have tested Hemingway’s perceptions and rarely found them wanting.

When I lived in Paris, I took all the walks Hemingway describes in his books and spent some time hunting down the more esoteric locations. Despite the passage of time, his words often proved a better guide than modern maps.

HEMINGWAY’S CODE

Just as I have tested Hemingway’s perceptions of places throughout the course of my life, I have tested the rules, advice, and assertions contained in his writings. I embraced many and discarded some.

I still embrace the key assertion in Hemingway’s work that men should seek action and danger to test themselves. Men should train themselves to have, or at least show, courage when they are afraid and to exhibit grace under pressure.

There are other parts of the Hemingway code to be gleaned from the totality of his writings.

Men should fall on their swords for others. They should accept responsibility for the failures of subordinates and offer no excuses for their own. Reasons, perhaps, but a man never seeks to avoid ultimate responsibility.

Men should demonstrate physical skills and stamina, and seek an effective balance between stoicism and swagger.

Men should guard independence and, whenever possible, rely on their own capacity.

Men should be unafraid to venture far from home to observe, and learn from, different peoples and cultures, because it yields a worldliness and sophistication lacking artifice.

Eventually, though, I found Hemingway’s virile philosophy insufficient. While an important measure of a man is how he navigates a storm, that metric is incomplete. If we take into account only what a man braves or survives, we miss other important facets of character like humility, loyalty, and concern for others, especially those over whom we hold power or advantage.

I learned to see Hemingway’s indifference to criticism and his lack of loyalty to those who had helped him as unmanly traits.

I learned also that performative machismo alone does not prove manliness. People–both men and women–can, and do, show their courage and character in very different, and often quieter, ways.

Hemingway faced genuine danger in times of war and was not found wanting, but he also sought or lauded manufactured danger. This led many men to attempt to prove themselves by participating in manufactured proxies of danger, like the running of the bulls in Pamplona or similar stunts. A man who only tests himself against such manufactured danger has not, however, genuinely tested himself. True danger is not hard to find if one is really looking for it.

True courage requires true danger. Men and women around the world face true danger every day. They show true courage when, disregarding danger to themselves, they fight against violence, cruelty, injustice, disease, suffering, and the needless death of innocent people.

I still recognize the brilliance of Hemingway’s writing, but as I age, I more clearly see his limitations and flaws, just as I more clearly see my own.

Hemingway wanted to be great writer and a good man. He failed at the latter. As Jeff Daniels, who voiced Hemingway for the Burns and Novick documentary, aptly put it during a pre-release interview, “Lucky for him, he could write.”

CULTURAL ICON AND TOUCHY TOUCHSTONE

Hemingway is an icon and a cultural touchstone. Arguments about either the man or his work can heat up quickly. That we still talk so passionately about Hemingway and his writing speaks to both his talent and influence.

In addition to being a keen observer and quick study, Hemingway was a two-way bridge between journalism and fiction. His simplicity of style, using short declarative sentences, made him accessible. Hemingway’s genius is manifest in his word-by-word decisions about what was essential or superfluous in his writing. He was a master of what to leave in and what to leave out. The style he developed was unmistakably his own.

Those of us who appreciate Hemingway’s talent and contributions usually look down with pity on those who disdain his work or can’t see past his flaws as a man to recognize his greatness as a writer. There is something lacking in them. There is some hollowness in intellect or soul that blinds them. Hemingway’s detractors often buy too deeply into the myth and simply want to tear down what they are unable to measure up to themselves.

Personally, I feel about those who judge Hemingway and his work based on superficialities, or those who judge him by contemporary standards, about the same way I feel about visitors to the Louvre who pass by Delacroix‎’s La Liberté and pause only briefly to titter about bare breasts before moving on to the next exhibit highlighted in their Denon brochure.

I feel about those who insist on inserting their own politics or projecting their own opinions onto Hemingway’s writing like I feel about people who put beans in chili.

There is no need to add to Hemingway. He had no problem expressing views he cared about with full-throated eloquence.

Only the most intentionally provocateur of critics would not place Hemingway in the pantheon of the most talented and influential authors in the English language. Who is the greatest or most influential writer in that pantheon is, however, a silly undergraduate argument.

There are many great writers, each with a unique voice, who offer us enjoyment and enlightenment. When my own life wanes, if I am not in a position to end it on my terms, I wish only that someone sit by my side and read aloud Crane’s ‘The Open Boat,’ Joyce’s ‘The Dead,’ and Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast.

PART II: BURNS AND NOVICK’S HEMINGWAY

I first learned several years ago from archivists at the JFK that producers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, along with their respected screenwriter Geoffrey Ward, were working on a film about the life and work of Hemingway. I felt the same apprehension I remember feeling before visiting a teacher who I thought might reveal something about my child that I did not know but which was apparent to the rest of the world.

As much as I admire Burns’ exquisite films on topics ranging from the Civil War to jazz, I  feared that Burns and Novick  would discover things I did not know along with things I did not want to know.

Some of my fear was allayed when I learned that Burns et al. were tapping the same Hemingway materials I had viewed in Boston. Also, deep scholarship and years of research went into every frame of the film. In addition to Novick’s extensive archival research experience, the production team relied on the scholarly advice of Sandra Spanier, a professor at Penn State, and Verna Kale, an assistant research professor of English, also at Penn State. Both were editors of the Hemingway Letters Project. Spanier and Kale joined a cast of voice talent, noted writers, literary critics, Hemingway biographers, and other experts who appear as commentators in the film.

Despite their past courage in producing documentary films, I envisioned Burns and Novick besieged by mobs bent on viciously judging the past only through the lens of contemporary standards and sentiments.

My fears were unfounded.

The Burns and Novick production of Hemingway is wonderful, truly a work of both scholarship and art. The film, presented in three episodes that first aired on PBS, is a well-balanced portrayal of Hemingway’s life and work as a writer. It is written and refreshingly presented in a classic journalistic style that covers controversial points with accuracy, elegance, and respect for an audience’s ability to decide.

As usual, what has become known as the Ken Burns effect is put to powerful use. Burns long ago mastered techniques of animatics that predate his work. (See, for example, a 1957 documentary about the Klondike gold rush titled City of Gold.)

In The Civil War and subsequent documentaries, Burns elevated the technique, adding authentic ambient background sound and period music to create his signature aesthetic. Akin to Hemingway’s use of short declarative sentences, Burns’ technique is both instantly recognizable and highly influential.

Burns and Novick obviously worked to integrate digitally restored vintage film. That process usually starts with a laborious hunt for the most original copy of footage one can find. A tedious, and sometimes technical, process of identifying copies of copies ensues before the restoration can begin. The technology of restoration, including the removal of scratches and other blemishes on individual frames, often relies on computer-driven pixel iteration and integration. New frames are also integrated from surrounding frames as needed, to correct timing and eliminate the jerky motion common to old footage.

Most importantly, as I noted previously, Burns and Novick’s Hemingway is also a piece endued with the values of old-school journalism. The primary source material and commentary are presented with balance, in a way that that lets the viewer decide issues regarding Hemingway’s flaws.

CRITICISM

In my own writing, I am a stickler for setting things in proper historical context. I am also schooled in weighing primary source evidence, especially when that evidence crosses into areas of science. Based on that experience, I want to rebut a few points of criticism leveled against the Burns and Novick film that I have encountered since its debut in April 2021. I reserve the right to revise and extend this section as new points of criticism arise.

A review that appeared in Salon was especially sloppy and self-serving. The reviewer asserted that the depiction of Hemingway was mean-spirited, petty, and intellectually lazy; moreover, that Burns and Novick somehow portrayed the mentally ill as worthy of hatred.

The review itself –kind to Hemingway, but brutal to the film–was rendered with a mean-girl pique one normally encounters in a teenager who finds they were not invited to a party. The reviewer was apparently on a dual mission to both validate his own earlier work attempting to claim Hemingway for modern socialism, and  tar Burns and Novick with an accusation of disregard for the mentally ill.

The reviewer first revealed his true intentions by falsely asserting, “Burns and Novick recycle the familiar claim that Hemingway’s first writing job was as correspondent for the Kansas City Star.”

In his prior writings attempting to somehow wed Hemingway to socialism and thus claim him for modern leftist socialist movements, the reviewer makes much of fact that while Hemingway was still a teenager writing for his local paper, he also contributed a few pieces to a farm labor newspaper with leftist leanings. To the zealous reviewer, the omission these contributions by Burns and Novick was compounded by calling Hemingway’s work for the Kansas City Star his “first job.” In the reviewer’s mind, was amounted to definitive proof that Burns and Novick were deliberately trying to hide what he considers to be Hemingway’s life-long dedication to socialism.

But Burns and Novick never said writing for the Kansas City Star was Hemingway’s first job. The film claims only that Hemingway’s move to Kansas City Star was “a compromise.” Hemingway wanted to enlist to fight in WWI, but he was underage and his parents would not sign a waiver. Moving to Kansas City to be a reporter was, therefore, as Burns and Novick portrayed it, the best the restless Hemingway could negotiate.

I also vigorously disagree with any assertion that the Burns and Novick documentary was somehow a “slur” against Hemingway.

By any fair appraisal, Burns and Novick’s Hemingway was well balanced and, overall, lauding of Hemingway’s talents while being careful to expose and fairly portray his flaws.

HEMINGWAY AS SOCIALIST AND ANTIFASCIST

Hemingway was not, by his words either a leftist or socialist. He was an antifascist, but his antifascism bears no resemblance to the modern use of that term by mobs that simply declare that anything that does not comport with their leftist or intersectional ideology is fascism.

Hemingway was for the party or Hemingway. Politics did not shape Hemingway’s views, per se, and there is no need to force politics upon him. Given Hemingway’s strength of personality, precision, and Spartan eloquence, he left no doubt as to where he stood on issues important to him.

When his individual views aligned with politics or a political movement is was just a temporary alliance. Hemingway’s work is filled with either an indifference to politics or an open distrust of political movements. In the end, it was only worth fighting and dying for Hemingway’s personal code.

In both his personal life and his characters, excepting To Have and Have Not (which even Hemingway later recognized as a one-off and not characteristic of his other work), Hemingway eschewed politics. Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls, for example, is without politics and seeks to help the Republican (loyalist, socialist) cause in the Spanish Civil War for personal, not ideological, reasons.

Much is made of Hemingway’s support for the Republican (socialist) cause in Spain. It is also true that as a journalist–much to the disgust of his friend John Dos Passos–Hemingway shamefully pulled punches in favor of a loyalist cause that was slipping into its own deplorable brutality.

In 1951, however, Hemingway explained his time in Spain this way to his biographer Carlos Baker: “There were at least five parties in the Spanish Civil War on the Republic side. I tried to understand and evaluate all five (very difficult) and belonged to none … I had no party but a deep interest in and love for the Republic.”

Much is also made of Hemingway’s alleged offer to spy for the Soviet Union in 1941 (a time, it should be noted, when they were about to become our allies in a global war against real fascism). Russian intelligence records often listed prominent people in the West as spies as a form of disinformation, but even if true, the Soviets themselves said that Hemingway never provided them any information.

It is also important to note that whatever the level of Hemingway’s support of communist and socialist causes, it came before revelations of the depth of Stalin’s inhumanity, brutality, and repression toward his own people.

Likewise, while Hemingway also voiced support for the overthrow of the corrupt and murderous Batista regime in Cuba, it was before the murderous side of Castro and Che’s revolution was fully exposed.

Hemingway ultimately left his home outside Havana, Finca La Vigía, in a rush in July 1960. He hastily abandoned personal belongs, unfinished manuscripts, pets, and his beloved boat, Pilar. He never returned.

Hemingway was already showing signs of depression and neurocognitive disorders, and so plumbing his mind for the exact reason is perilous. Most Hemingway scholars conclude that he was unhappy with Castro’s government. Other say that the U.S. quietly forced him to leave.

It is hard to believe that Castro would want to give up such a public relations black eye for the U.S. as having its best-known writer living in Cuba. There is evidence the U.S. State Department felt the same way.

Throughout much of his career, Marxists and socialists loathed Hemingway, both for his lifestyle and his writing. It was only Hemingway’s personal motivations, not political sensibilities, that moved him to write anything of which they approved.

It is also is true that the FBI built a dossier on Hemingway and conducted surveillance of his activities, but that does not mean all of Hemingway’s manifest clinical paranoia was justified. Without parsing what was real and what was delusional, we are left with the fact that delusions can still be delusional, even with a kernel of truth to them. In fact, most are.

HEMINGWAY’S MEDICAL HISTORY, DEBILITATION, AND SUICIDE

There are literary scholars and medical experts who convincingly argue that hemochromatosis might have played a part in Hemingway’s debilitation and eventual suicide.

His history of head injuries–painstakingly chronicled by Burns and Novick–also fits well into contemporary understandings of the debilitating effects of cumulative head injuries.

Given the film’s extensive treatment of Hemingway’s war wounds, his later injuries (including head wounds), and his drinking, any accusation of indifference on the part of Burns and Novick is unsustainable. The film builds a specific record of Hemingway’s head injuries.

Arguments that a clinical neurologist should have been added to the cast of commentators to more clearly articulate the behavioral manifestations of cumulative trauma ignore the fact that Andrew Farah, a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and author of the 2017 book Hemingway’s Brain, appears in the film. While it would be unethical for Farah to diagnose chronic traumatic encephalopathy without examination, Farah does say of the evidence presented in the film, “When you have a head injury, your mind and your body are less well equipped to tolerate the effects of alcohol.”

HEMOCROMATOSIS

Burns and Novick have also been criticized for their lack of discussion of the hypothesis that hemochromatosis led to Hemingway’s suicide.

It is true that hemochromatosis can produce debilitating pain, exhaustion, and memory loss, all symptoms that Hemingway displayed at various points in his life, and especially after surviving successive airplane crashes in 1954. It is also true that drinking alcohol (especially heavy drinking) is contraindicated because it both mimics and worsens the symptoms of hemochromatosis.

The best evidence we have that hemochromatosis may have played a significant role in Hemingway’s debilitation come from the fact that other family members, even those who did not drink, showed symptoms associated with hemochromatosis.

Because hemochromatosis is an autosomal, recessively genetically linked disease (i.e., both parents contributed a gene linked to the disease and it takes both genes to produce the disease), it is important to note that Hemingway’s father, who did not drink, showed symptoms similar to Hemingway’s in later life.

This leads experts to speculate that alcohol was less a primary cause of Hemingway’s eventual debilitation than a secondary exacerbating factor of hemochromatosis.

But a diagnosis of hemochromatosis remains speculative. No tests were conducted and the forensic evidence, much of it biographical, can support several arguments regarding Hemingway’s decline and eventual debilitation. While hemochromatosis was known in Hemingway’s day, the genetic linkage was not known until the 1990s. Moreover, it is generally not diagnosed without a liver biopsy. Definitive symptoms often do not appear until a male patient is in his 60s. Hemingway died at age 61.

For the reasons above, Burns and Novick could have legitimately decided that speculation based on contemporary understandings of hemochromatosis was outside the scope of their documentary. There is also an aesthetic reason to leave out such speculation. This was a film documentary and there were no visuals that would have supported speculation on hemochromatosis per se without recasting the context of the primary sources available.

USING PRIMARY SOURCES IN CONTEXT: DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKING AS JOURNALISM

I am not privy to Burns and Novick’s reasons for not offering additional contemporary medical perspectives on Hemingway’s deterioration to suicide. However, I think there is a more rational explanation, in character with their other works, that avoids the accusation of insensitivity to the physical and mental disabilities that Hemingway suffered.

It’s arguable that Burns and Novick could have added several episodes devoted to nothing but speculation on the psychiatric and medical factors contributing to Hemingway’s affective and cognitive decline before his suicide. But to what end?

To their credit, Burns and Novick took great pains to present Hemingway as both an artist and a man shaped by his time. The writers and literary scholars who appear in the film were careful to evaluate Hemingway within the context of his time. Striving for context and balance runs against the latest trends in journalism, where objectivity is openly eschewed in favor of arrogant advocacy. It is in vogue to tell readers and viewers what to think, lest they be led astray by facts that support differing conclusions.

None are more superficially pious, and none more rigid in their interpretations of dogma, than the weak minded. Accordingly, Burns and Novick’s Hemingway will be anathematic to those who feel they must view all things through the lens of partisan politics.

The documentary will disappoint those who trivialize real violence, misogyny, racism, privilege, equity, and justice by reducing those terms to common criticism.

The documentary may infuriate those who feel that all art, regardless of its subject or context, must now be infused with the virtue-signaling pieties required by the cult of antiracism.

It’s not that Burns and Novick don’t present evidence that can be used to support such claims against Hemingway. They do, and in abundance. They also, however, studiously avoid drawing explicit conclusions in favor of presenting evidence and allowing viewers to reach their own conclusions.

While they provide evidence allowing viewers to conclude, for example, that Hemingway was a chauvinist, they also take pains to show him wrestling with his chauvinism.

As Burns said in interviews, “We dropped our baggage at the beginning. I don’t know where that baggage is. Instead of telling you what you should know about Hemingway, we shared with you our process of discovery.”

Accordingly, the documentary may frustrate those who would have cheered the dramatics of Hemingway being explicitly labeled a racist or denounced as a poster boy for “toxic masculinity.”

Burns and Novick have done a great service to viewers by trying to balance the presentation of primary sources with nuanced and contextual commentary.

THE POWER AND GLORY OF UNDERSTATEMENT 

For me, one of the glories of the entire film in terms of contextual discipline, understatement, and allowing the audience to decide, came about 45 minutes into the third episode.

After the presentation of evidence of Hemingway’s cruelty and use of racial epithets in a letter to his publisher rejecting a request to write a book blurb for James Jones’ From Here to Eternity, instead of simply denouncing Hemingway as a racist, the commentator, Marc Dudley–a professor of English at North Carolina State University and author of Hemingway, Race, and Art: Bloodlines and the Color Line and Understanding James Baldwin–said, with palpable grace and eloquence, “The fact he [Hemingway] would revile a fellow writer does not shock me at all, but the harshness of it, yeah–the racial epithets here–something he knew would probably see the light of day at some point… yeah, it complicate things immensely.”

Dudley pauses and looks pained to conclude, “I’m not really sure what to say about this to explain it away. I am not sure you can explain it away.”

There it was, a moment of sanity in the culture wars.

Here was a Black professor with a clear field to label Hemingway a racist, and yet he deferred, because he knew the story was more complex.

To paraphrase another commentator in the film, “Sometimes Hemingway was clearly being racist, and sometimes he wasn’t.” Indeed, a careful reading of Hemingway’s work shows he was often quite progressive on matters touching on race for his day.

Another interview exploring Dudley’s thoughts on the complexities of Hemingway and his work in terms of race can be viewed here.

Yes, Hemingway used racial slurs and language dismissive of women, but he also presented Blacks and women as heroic figures. He was a rebel challenging historic stereotypes concerning sex and race. He made people in power uncomfortable.

Hemingway’s simple sentences often contained complex and conflicting truths. His body of work, for example argues that war is simultaneously filled with heroism, tragedy, and unfathomable waste.

HEMINGWAY’S SUICIDE

I suspect that, centuries from now, critics will still be arguing over what factors played the largest role in Hemingway’s descent into depression, despair, and suicide.  [Author note: An excellent and insightful paper on Hemingway’s physical and mental decline to suicide is Sebastian Dieguez’s ‘A Man Can Be Destroyed but Not Defeated: Ernest Hemingway’s Near-Death Experience and Declining Health.’

In the end, I would argue that, with regard to his death, Hemingway acted in accord with what he told his friend, fellow writer, and posthumous biographer, A.E. Hotchner, “If I can’t exist on my own terms, then existence is impossible… That is how I’ve lived, and that is how I must live or not live.”

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1. “Ken Burns’ vicious Hemingway smear: PBS series totally ignores writer’s lifelong leftist politics,” Salon April 11, 2021. (Online)

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Photo: A portrait of Ernest Hemingway that still hangs at Finca La Vigía, his home 12 km outside Havana. Photo credit goes to my greatly missed friend Richard L. Porter, who made visiting Finca a part of his many mission trips to Cuba.

For my grandsons Owen Cafferty Lerner and Cary Cafferty Lerner: May you grow to enjoy Hemingway’s writing and learn from his life. Use what is valuable and reject what is destructive as you find your  own path to becoming better men.