Ken Burns Interview: Hemingway for PBS

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, they present a more genuine picture of Ernest Hemingway and the linear life events that COURTESY OF PBS 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.

COURTESY OF PBS

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.

You delve into his personal sexual life with Mary and the whole androgyny role-playing.

Ken Burns: Let’s just say gender fluidity because it’s a term that we understand today and people can grasp. He is curious about those lines.

And from the very beginning, he’s having (first wife) Hadley and (fourth wife) Mary cut their hair very short and grow his long. He wanted this, for them to be his “boys” and vice versa.

That’s pretty interesting for this guy who’s creating this macho thing.

He loved the Mountain West. He loved hunting there. He’s an outdoorsman. He is a great observer of nature...

Idaho seemed a happy accident for him.

Ken Burns: He loved the Mountain West. He loved hunting there. He’s an outdoorsman. He is a great observer of nature, a big game hunter, and a deep-sea fisherman. He wrote about nature really well.

He wrote about human nature, particularly the way men and women interact, and about war.

When you go to Cuba, everything’s there in his home as he left it. The booze is still in the bottles. The records are on the record turntable. The pencil scribble marks of his weight are next to the scale in the bathroom. He walked out of there, wholly intending to come back.

I think by that time, the mental illness had begun to close in on him. The Idaho house was both a wonderful place but also the kind of sense of the final prison.

I feel like he would have never gone to Idaho if he hadn’t been invited in 1939 by Sun Valley Resort.

Ken Burns: I think he fell in love with that, the mystery and the vividness to that alpine experience. When I visit Telluride, it’s like a Hollywood backdrop. You can’t believe it’s real.

The air is so thin, and everything is clear and crisp. I think Hemingway, who loved nature and had extraordinary observational abilities, felt at home there.

Sun Valley was the final resting place, an exit ramp. I don’t think he moved there ever contemplating suicide. Though suicide was on his mind, I imagine, almost all the time given the family history of suicide and given his own ideation.

Being a drinker doesn’t make you a great writer. Not all great writers are drinkers. Alcohol doesn’t help the writing, and mental illness is often common to great writers and great artists. That can be treated as well without taking away from the art.

I hope you come to Idaho.

Ken Burns: I’ve been talking about going, and I’ve been to Idaho many times. I did go for “Lewis and Clark”, filming and cutting across the top of the panhandle, and spent time in Pocatello.

We did a virtual PBS in-person a few weeks ago in Boise, and that was wonderful. But I just want to come and spend some time there, for sure.