That brings up another fine depiction from Burns and Novick: The Warrior versus the Writer. It's often true what they once said, He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword. Ask one of Hirohito's grandkids. (Oh, wait) But it's also jocularly true that He who lives by the words, dies by the words. Every man kills the things that he loves, said Oscar Wilde famously, some with a smile, and then they gaoled him and paroled him to Paris where he died in a gutter, like some David Lynch version of Quasimodo lying there dreaming of one day setting fire to Notre Dame cathedral. Over his career, Hemingway did his best to humanize the trauma soldiers were faced with on the battlefield and afterward -- the horror, the horror, and then, if you got lucky, you got laid, preferably some clitty clitty bang bang with your nurse, preferably with t*ts, if you were a man. But nobody really wants to be a warrior any more (we're too busy being worriers), except the psychopaths on drone patrol playing G.O.D., glowering clean cut kids fresh out of Full Metal Jacket Academy, and Cofer Blacks and his merciless mercenaries looking for trouble with the Russkies.
Sad to say, and it's never raised in the series, Hemingway mayn't have found a publisher for his war stories today. He may have ended that guy sweeping and buffing the high school floors after school, saying I also served, and muttering "small talk at the wall, while I'm in the hall," as the Bard from Duluth sings -- another Nobel laureate who might have become a janitor had he "burst on the scene" a decade later. And this raises the Question of what it is we get out of watching a series about Hemingway today? Who's watching (gulp, meekly raises hand)? What can He possibly teach us? We are so lapsed in our catholicism (lower case) and romanticizing, so relativized by the shifty paradigm we live by, that the conceits of the well-off and smug, like many of the "supporters" of PBS, strike one as bourgeois fantasy at Fate's end. How come Judy Woodruff is still there after 40 years? (Full disclosure: I had the hots for her back in the day.)
Still, we can probably rescue and fully appreciate the Hemingway style for its clarity, simplicity and almost journalistic "objectivity" that eschews (gesundheit) modifiers (subjectivity) for simple subject-predicate-object plank-hammering, as Hemingway put it, elegantly, I thought. Burns-Novick don't linger long on it (unfortunately) but the section on Hemingway's writerly beginnings at the Kansas City Star, were a trenchant and pure gaze at his male prose. We're told by a no-bullshit narrator that the Star "was a pioneer in crisp, clear, immediate reporting," and then they flash an image of the Star's Style Sheet and it's opening desiderata: "Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative." Sound advice, but, again, anachronistic in the Twitter-tweet age, where one tweet rolls into another.
The Style Sheet is excellent advice for any newbie writer of any generation, I reckon. I myself was so inspired starting out. Get a load of this lede (actual): "The state budget fiasco is running out of time. Like rebels who've lost their cause, Senate and House leaders are rushing headlong toward the fiscal cliff, neither willing to give in, while towns and cities clutch each other like fearful younger siblings in the back seat." Some editors liked the front page piece (above the fold), but I never did get the statehouse beat I coveted. More bozos out the cannon.
The other thing that Burns-Novick merely mention is Hemingway's very brief Nobel prize acceptance speech that he recorded (too ill to fly to Sweden for the ceremony), and which came at the end of his career and not long before the end of his life. He succinctly sums up the universal writerly life:
Writing, at its best, is a lonely life...For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day...How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.
This still holds true, be ye Hemingway, Toni Morrison, or any global flavor-of-the-month writer.
But the series could have been better. Much better. While the dynamic duo played up Hemingway's relationships with women with reasonable balance, not letting the Big Fella off the hook for belting his women around when he got untethered, it was a narrative glimpse that seemed to pander exclusively to feminist concerns with his untenable masculine aggression. Perhaps a more productive way forward would have been a deeper dive into Gelhorn's writing and journalism; they were writing competitors and we might have benefitted, in our understanding of each, if a brief compare/contrast of styles and focus had been displayed. For instance, they covered D-Day for Colliers, and that's mentioned in the episode, but a comparison of texts might have deepened the analysis we've been provided by Burns-Novick. Check out their D-Day stories for yourself: Hemingway's "Voyage to Victory" and Gelhorn's "The Wounded Come Home." Gelhorn, unlike Hemingway, got onto the beach and was among the soldiers and the wounded. And still, as Burns-Novick point out, Gelhorn's brief piece had to play second fiddle to Hemingway's longer landing craft observation piece. It's worth noting here that Gelhorn has a prestigious journalism award named after her. Mighta got a mention.
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