BY APRIL NEALE
Award-winning filmmaker Ken Burns’ latest documentary series for PBS features one of America’s most famous authors, Ernest Hemingway. In the film, Burns utilizes the author’s letters, photographs, and other writings to span a lifetime and give the viewers ample space to decide how they feel about Hemingway’s actions until he ended his life, at age 61, in his breathtaking Ketchum, Idaho home. In Idaho, his health was steadily deteriorating. The Gem State is where he spent his final years. In Burns’ and producing partner Lynn Novick’s exhaustive and intimate film, COURTESY OF PBS they present a more genuine picture of Ernest Hemingway and the linear life events that shaped him. If not for a 1939 invitation from Sun Valley Resort—who knows if Hemingway would have made Idaho his final home. The Nature Conservancy has cared for The Ernest Hemingway House in Ketchum for 30 years. In 2017, the organization gifted the home to The Community Library. Hemingway’s remains lie in the Ketchum Cemetery. Q: You showed many lesser-known facets of Hemingway. A; Ken Burns: Ernest Hemingway carried this oversized public mask and toxic masculinity that is really wearisome. It was exhausting for him, as Mary Karr, the writer, says in our film. But what you find by triangulating the commentaries of people, the biography of his life, the great writing, and then the backstage letters that aren’t as polished as the writing that reveals the moods of a constructed edifice. This was, in part, to hide the vulnerability, sensitivity, anxiety, insecurity, and empathy for others. In some short stories, as we discussed in
the film, he’s in a way criticizing his own boorish behavior, or the boorish behavior of men he recognizes that are like him [in his short story] “Up In Michigan”, which is just an explosive story. Gertrude Stein thought it was too obscene to print 100 years ago! It was hard to shock Gertrude Stein. Or “Hills Like White Elephants”, one of Hemingway’s great masterpiece short stories, about a guy who tried to convince his girlfriend to have an abortion without the word abortion, by saying, ‘“It’s up to you, you decide,”’ but he’s, of course, imposing, as every woman on the planet knows. God bless Edna O’Brien for insisting that she talk about these and many other
things and underscore that androgyny and his ability to get under the skin, as she said, of other people. In the film, you talked about the burden of his persona. Ken Burns: Ernest Hemingway learned how to lie pretty quickly. And that’s what it’s about, of course. It becomes your own kind of Frankenstein monster that you can’t control. At the end of episode one, John Dos Passos calls him the king of the fiction racket. There’s the king in his castle at the beginning of episode two, but he builds a moat around it, and the moat keeps people out. But it also keeps him from getting out.
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