BOSTON (AP) – A new documentary on Ernest Hemingway – powered by vast but little-known archives preserved at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston – sheds new light on the acclaimed novelist.
‘Hemingway’, by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, a long-time collaborator and premiering on PBS on three consecutive nights starting April 5, takes a more nuanced look at the author and his longstanding reputation as an alcoholic, adventurer, outdoorsman and bullfighter. misogynist who struggled with internal turmoil that eventually led to his death by suicide at the age of 61.
The truth about the man many consider America’s greatest 20th-century novelist – whose concise writing style made him an outsized celebrity who became a symbol of unrepentant American manhood – is much more complex, Novick said.
“We hope this film offers opportunities to look at Hemingway in different ways,” said Novick, who has co-created several other documentaries with Burns, including “The Vietnam War” and “Prohibition”. “There is complexity beneath the surface.”
That complexity would have been nearly impossible to detail without the largest Hemingway collection in the world entering the JFK library thanks to the widows of Hemingway and Kennedy.
Although the two men never met, they admired each other and briefly corresponded. Hemingway had even been invited to Kennedy’s inauguration but couldn’t make it due to illness, said Hilary Justice, the Hemingway scholar-in-residence at the library.
When Hemingway’s fourth wife, Mary Hemingway, was thinking about what to do with her late husband’s belongings, she asked Jackie Kennedy if they could be housed in the JFK Library.
The archives contain Hemingway’s manuscripts – including “The Sun Also Rises” and “For Whom the Bell Tolls” – personal correspondence and approximately 11,000 photographs.
Much of the material used in the documentary has not or hardly been seen in public, Novick said.
Burns had been to the JFK library multiple times for a variety of positions, but had no idea of the size of the Hemingway archives until they started researching the film, which has been years in the making.
“The Hemingway collection was central to the process,” said Burns. “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 while recovering from the injuries he suffered to his four wives during World War I. incurred.
“So much of what he did in life was about love: run to it, run from it and screw it up,” Burns said.
While considered the archetype of American masculinity, the truth about Hemingway’s masculinity was more complex, the filmmakers discovered.
As a child, Hemingway’s mother treated him and one of his sisters like twins and often dressed them in identical outfits, sometimes as boys, sometimes as girls. He explored gender fluidity in both his books and in life, growing out his hair while his wives trim theirs short.
“We wanted to oppose the idea that Hemingway didn’t like women,” said Novick.
Novick’s favorite part of the collection was Hemingway’s manuscripts, many of which were handwritten on store-bought notebooks. They show in detail his thought process as he wrote, rewritten, adapted and edited his works by means of strike-through, scribbles and marginal notes.
Hemingway, for example, wrote dozens of endings to “A Farewell to Arms” – a whopping 47, according to one count.
“You can see how each work evolved from the first concept to the last manuscript,” she said.
For Burns, the most striking thing about the collection are the pieces of shrapnel dug from Hemingway’s body after he nearly died as a teenager in a World War I Red Cross ambulance. Burns cannot help but think that such a profound near-death experience had a profound impact on the rest of Hemingway’s life and contributed to his death.
Whether you’re a Hemingway aficionado, or know virtually nothing about him, there’s something in the series for you, Novick said.
“There is a tremendous amount to learn and new interpretations of his work and life here,” she said.