Hemingway, the documentary, quickly became disappointing to me. I don’t know if it’s because I already know so much about his life, or maybe it’s just the sneaking feeling that Ken Burns is attempting to manipulate his audience by feeding it all the old Hemingway myths. Like disclosing the contents of his love letters with his first wife. I have been exposed to personal material of Hemingway and his various women before, but a certain sense of decency caused me to stop watching the documentary all together. Maybe Hemingway wouldn’t mind the public knowing but it caused me to feel embarrassed for him and his first wife, and his subsequent wives, and to realize that I am also a writer, and I would hate for private details of my relationships with my loved ones to be made public.
So often, as with The Sun Also Rises, fiction is really well-written, thinly veiled, gossip. And I don’t want to know his intimate life. The details that may or may not match what he knew of friends and family blur the achievement of the great work he created in later books. It’s like the blog I wrote a few months ago about Kurt Russell. The less I know about the personal life of an actor or writer, the better. How else can a mature person suspend disbelief and become engaged with characters and story?
And it really goes back to maturity. You get to a certain age and you just realize however remarkable his best work is, he was all too human and not to be admired as a man; and this is sad. When a young, sensitive man is first exposed to Hemingway’s work, there is often a kind of hero worship that occurs, but like The Sorrows of Young Werther, most of Hemingway’s novels, excluding The Old Man and the Sea, are young men’s books. Time and experience teach a man real life-lessons that make the presumptions of most of the abovementioned work hard to take seriously.
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