Review of Ken Burns documentary on Hemingway

One of the things I love about having this blog is that I can talk about things none of my current friends are interested in such as Ken Burns documentary on Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway had an impact on my young adulthood. I read all his books and in that period, I really loved a couple of them. Interestingly, later in life, I bought my favorite as a gift to a brother of mine and he hated it. I read my copy again and I didn't like it any more either. The point being that there are some books that fit a particular time in your life but age and experience, and changing attitudes and taste completely transform your feeling and evaluation of that book. The book was "Moveable Feast."

The Ken Burns documentary is 6 hours long and I binge watched it yesterday. I had a really good day, went to Woodbury Friends Meeting and afterwood had lunch with two of the Friends at the little Woodbury Train Station Cafe' which is cheery and festive. One of the Friends came back to the WFM grounds to visit my solo-retrospective art show (more on that in another post).

By the time I got home again around 2:30, I was chilled to the bone and everything ached. As my sister said "Now you know why old people move to Florida!" We are in a cold smap and neither the WF Meeting-House, nor the gallery were warmed. It was like sitting in a refrigerator.

So. I put on a warm hoody, my slippers and got under my electric lap blanket and tucked in for a nice winter's viewing, after I fed the pets, of course.

As I have often said in posts, I was a book worm my whole life. I have loved books with my whole heart since I first laid hands on one. My house is filled with them literally fron floor to ceiling in wall shelving I had installed. I have been in the midst of moving them along for the past 3 years to the Free Books Project.

When I read Hemingway, I was a young adult. I had cut my teeth on a lot of antiquated literature in the vocabulary rich style of the late 1800's and turn of the century. Hemingway said he wanted his books to be able to be read by anyone with a high school education. I could read books by people with a college education by the time I was ten and had read Dostoevsky, Turgenev, deMaupassant, great British authors like Dickens, and the classic American greats like Mark Twain when I was a child. In my late teens, Hemingway seemed like a revelation. I mention these other books because it is the context in which I evaluated the writing and the stories. Hemingway's novels formed my early fantasies of what a literary, bohemian life would be like. It made me want to go to Europe!

The most interesting thing to me in the documentary was the pure high quality analysis of the great critics and authors Ken Burns recruited to talk about Hemingway's writing including one of my favorites, Edna O'Brien. Burns brought on board a couple of Hemingway's biographers whose works I had read over the years. I read everything about him, the magazine articles, the biographies, the criticisms and the praise.

One of the things I went to college for in the 1970's was to learn literary criticism. I didn't learn much. It is a big big subject. I did a huge amount of reading in my major, and I had a few really marvelous professors among them, James Thomas Farrel who wrote the Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan, and Basil Payne, the great Irish poet. What I enjoyed was the ability of the interviewed critics in the documentary to delve below the surface in the writing and to compare and describe the writing itself as well as to bring out the critiques of the period when Hemingway's books came out. And most especially what I enjoyed was the panoramic context of the times because they were my times!

I am a creature of the twentieth century and Ken Burns does a masterful tour of it. All my influences, other writers like John Dos Passos, the burgeoning crop of women journalists like Martha Gellhorn, the Paris art and literary scene, Sylvia Beach, Gertrude Stein. Part one I found enlightening and enjoyable; part two I had to do some fast forwarding because over my lifetime my sensitivity to the killing of animals has increased and I was horrified and sickened by the slaughter of animals, not to mention the extreme cruelty of bull fighting. I saw a bull fight in Spain and it was deeply depraved. The animal was frightened and tortured. he tried to escape by jumping over the walls but they were too high. After they tortured, weakened and tried to enrage the terrified creature, they stabbed it to death. It made me cry. I had never seen anything so depraved before. I know the laws are changing all over Mexico, South America and Europe in regard to bull fighting - it isn't really fighting, in fact, it is torturing and murdering in reality. The animal has no chance. These creatures are raised and fed and have no reason to suspect what is about to be done to them by human beings who up to this point haven't been a danger. The thoughtless, wasteful and cruel slaughtering of African animals by Hemingway and the people of that time is always profoundly upsetting. How he could pose over the carcasses of creatures murdered for no other reason than his entertainment is worth pondering. It is an outward sign of Hemingways wholesale giving over to his worst indulgences of violence, intoxication, and unrestrained lustfulness. He seems a slave to his appetites which in the end destroy him.

The one door for me to compassion for him was the obvious mental illness from which he suffered, and which he obviously inherited from his father, and which his own poor sons inherited from him. The suffering went on, generation after generation. Indulging his unrestrained greed for excitement, novelty, adrenaline drugged experience broke him - broke his skull, his bones, destroyed his liver and his brain and his constitution. It made him so sad and sick that he had to kill himself to end the suffering. It was an almost biblical portrait of the wages of sin.

Just recently in the news, President Biden commuted the death sentences of 37 federal death row inmates. The three he didn't commute were mass murderers who committed hate crimes like Dylann Roof. At the same time there was the story of the man Trump had put forward to head the Department of Justice, Matt Gaetz. The security check on him showed he had spent tens of thousands of dollars hiring prostitutes and had been seen buying and using multiple kinds of illegal drugs and had even been accused of sexual exploitation of a high school junior. He denies all of it, of course, but the report released to the press details the evidence behind the accusations. He resigned from the senate and took himself out of the running for the DOJ position. His excuse is that it was the bachelor life of a youth and that he is a different man now.

In the end of Hemingway's life, he was the tortured and murdered bull who couldn't escape the ring, and he was the shark shredded marlin as well as the old fisherman defeated in his triumph (The Old Man and the Sea). He studied death and practiced it and it turned out to be the indulgence that got him in the end. But he was so obviously suffering from what we now know as CTE chronic traumatic encephalopathy from his 4 or 5 concussions as well as the inherited tendency to depression. The alcoholism was the slippery slope down which he slid to his final suicide. Four of the 8 people in his family died by their own hands. It was a portrait not only of art but of dissolution and degenerate despair.

Was the documentary worth watching! Yes! If you read, you will learn so much about writing, and if you study the human condition, you will find a rich repository of observation. If you like history, you will find a great traveling companion through the twentieth century.

Happy Trils! Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com