‘Hemingway’ Co-Directors Ken Burns and Lynn Novick on Trauma, Truth, and the Literary Canon

Sixty years after Ernest Hemingway’s death by suicide, the cliches about the American literary icon remain easy to rattle off. Hemingway, the author of novels including The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls, cultivated and curated those cliches about his war service, hunting and fishing prowess, and relationships with myriad women, using them to build a hypermasculine image that has remained lodged in our public understanding of his work. 

“All of those macho postures that he exaggerated for his own effect, and which the world was happy to do that, I think that was for him a kind of protective mask,” Ken Burns, co-director with Lynn Novick of the documentary Hemingway, told Decider.

In their latest collaboration, which they began exploring 25 years ago and which took six and a half years to complete, Burns and Novick worked to peel back those layers of infamy and mythology to reveal Hemingway’s anxieties, vulnerabilities, and doubts. The co-directors spoke with Decider in separate phone interviews about their three-part, six-hour series Hemingway, now streaming on PBS and the PBS Documentaries Prime Video Channel. 

DECIDER: Do you have a first memory of discovering Hemingway’s work? 

Ken Burns: I’m not sure if I would go so far as to be important on a personal level, but I certainly remember [being] a 14- or 15-year-old kid who read “The Killers,” and was just stunned because it was so terrifying and shocking and the language was difficult, and yet nothing happened. It was all about unspoken things that were going to happen, and it was a different kind of storytelling. Of course later on in high school I had to read The Old Man and the Sea, and then caught up with most of the other novels. And I found as early as the early ‘80s that we were talking about doing Hemingway as a subject, and I found the note of projects in the future to consider after The Civil War was done: do Baseball, then Hemingway. And other stuff got in the way, but Lynn came back on in 1989 and brought it up again in the mid-‘90s.

It’s always been important, and I think it was always knowing that there was this huge, and in some ways limiting, mythology about him that interposed itself between us and who he really may have been. Even though the elements of the mythology, the essential elements, were true: He was a naturalist, he was a deep sea fisherman, he was a big game hunter, he was a brawler, he was a man about town, he was a lover. All of those macho postures that he exaggerated for his own effect and which the world was happy to do that, I think that was for him a kind of protective mask about getting hurt, about the anxieties of suicide and madness that ran in his family, about being rejected by Agnes the nurse, about PTSD, about all the things. I think it hid a much more interesting vulnerability and empathy that betrays that macho misogynist thing. He is those things, and at the same time, he can be hugely observant and objective about it, as much as he can, in stories like “Hills Like White Elephants” and “Up in Michigan,” where he really does assume the woman’s perspective, to [novelist and Hemingway interviewee] Edna O’Brien’s delight, and really is essentially criticizing the image that he had become or would become in the public’s eyes.

Lynn Novick: I first encountered Hemingway in middle school reading The Old Man and the Sea, which I thought was very boring. I just did not get it at all. … Nothing happened with this old guy and the boat. I really did not appreciate the power of that story as a 12 or 13 year old. And I didn’t pick up any other Hemingway until high school and we had The Sun Also Rises in my 11th grade English class and I remember it vividly. A lot of my academic career books that I read, I don’t remember that well, but this one I remember. I think it was the power of the story, the way it was told, the milieu that it took place in, the characters just jumped off the page so vividly. And also the sort of mystery around it. It was so foreign to me, the world they were in, the things they thought about, what they did. It was all very exotic, as Edna O’Brien says in the film. And I was also very taken aback by the anti-Semitism and didn’t quite know what to make of that. It was a whole complicated mix of things. But mostly I love the book and I became somewhat fascinated in Hemingway the person as a result.

[What inspired the documentary 25 years ago was] my trip to Key West randomly, not to do with Hemingway particularly, just having gone there on vacation when I was in my early 30s and going to his house and seeing the work room: the way it was staged, and a typewriter, and his books. I know now there’s a lot of other artifacts of his that are in other places but standing in the place where he stood, I did feel some kind of presence, or connection, or epiphany, something. In the back of my mind, working with Ken Burns and Geoff Ward at that time on our Baseball series, I know we collectively were looking for iconic American subjects to explore and in 1993 or 1994, Hemingway seemed to fit that bill for sure. But for me it was the idea of exploring the life of an artist that was so influential, who led this hugely larger-than-life life, and created some indelible works of art: How does that all fit together? The way he blurred the lines between his personal life and things he experienced and what he put into his fiction I found really fascinating. So I knew that if we were to tackle him, we would be exploring something bigger than simply the life of one man.

Was there anything while creating the documentary that clicked something together for you about our American history, about the 20th century, about what he lived through?

Lynn Novick: It’s hard to pick just one thing. I would say World War I for me is a little bit obscure. I never really studied it in school. … It’s an American event, but the biggest impact is felt in Europe. America was part of it at the end, so the poetry, the literature, the art, and the cultural effect and the psychic effects of World War I to me were just abstractions until I really worked on this project. Even though I’ve studied it before, the human scale and the human cost of what happened, and the epic scale of what happened, and the way it upended notions of restitude, as Tim O’Brien says in our Vietnam film. There’s a direct line from Vietnam to World War I in a way in terms of loss of faith in systems, in our elders, in institutions, in the military, in politics, all these things because of the carnage of World War I. Seeing it through Hemingway’s eyes, both in his own experience and then how he wrote about it, was really profound. There’s many other things, but World War I definitely jumps out for me. 

What was really difficult for me while watching this was reconciling Hemingway as a person who wrote really thoughtfully about misogyny, who also turned out to be such a misogynist. That was hard to understand and to balance. Do you think we can?

Ken Burns: I think this is the thing, and it’s true of all of us, just not writ as large and as outrageously as with Hemingway and others. We’re able to see our own foibles and our own things, and I think it’s unresolvable. I don’t think you do it if you’re somebody that has to be black or white—Hemingway is impossible to deal with. You either have to ignore all of the reprehensible behavior and sort of subscribe wholeheartedly to the myth, or you’ve got to throw him out, and we suggested that there was another place.

Here was this macho guy who was also very interested in gender fluidity, that was 100 years early for a culture to be able to talk about it. Here was a man who could be cruel but also unbelievably kind. A man whose gifts failed him and who was writing pretty much well up to the end, if you think The Garden of Eden or True at First Light and A Moveable Feast are terrific, which I do. It’s a conundrum, it’s so wonderful, and I think that is helpful for us particularly today, when we live in a kind of binary world of 1s and 0s and good and bad and a superficial media culture, to be able to say, “Look, we’ve got to tolerate a good deal because if anything, the writing is just so spectacular.” We had these Hemingway Conversations events, nine of them, virtually, and they were really well-attended, thousands of people. It would be Lynn and me and a moderator and maybe a couple of people that were in the film, or scholars, or both, and we were talking about all sorts of topics: childhood, journalism, celebrity, nature, Florida and Cuba, the sea, biography, gender, and identity, all of that sort of stuff. And we’re in the middle of this really intense discussion—not even an argument, just a discussion about him—and we cut to that wonderful second safari in Africa, where he and Mary, as he said, “worked everything out,” meaning “You be my girl,” she says to him, “And I’ll be your boy.” He is talking frankly about things that, you know, people couldn’t even deal with back then. I find it so interesting. It’s the most complicated film I think we’ve done in a way. The Vietnam War has its complexities, The Civil War has its complexities, it’s hard to make films about music with Jazz and Country Music, but it’s very interesting, this biography.

Lynn Novick: I think we can understand it, I’m not sure we can balance it. It’s just kind of awful. … He wrote in some cases really beautifully about what happens when men behave that way toward women, and even what it’s like for the women. He could see from the outside looking in, or he could imagine what it must feel like to be the woman pressured to have an abortion, or a woman being pressured to actually have sex with someone when you’re not quite ready for that. But he still behaved horribly.

But I also recognize for his time—this is by no means an excuse—but it’s true that he does seem to understand what we would now call toxic masculinity from a man’s point of view. There are some stories in other works of his that we didn’t include that explore that even more, and how sort of ultimately tragic it is for the man, too. So he can see it from many different angles, but he still behaved the way a hypermasculine man would behave. That’s totally unacceptable, whatever time frame you’re living in. 

You have worked together on these documentaries that are about broad concepts and wide swaths of American history: Baseball, Prohibition. What is different about doing a documentary about a single person?

Ken Burns: This was hard. The first time [Lynn Novick] and I shared director credits was on a film about Frank Lloyd Wright, who has got this unbelievably tabloid personal life. And arguably, like Hemingway in writing, is the greatest American architect, and we had to deal with the kind of disagreeable aspects of him. We did Mark Twain, who is the hero of Hemingway. Hemingway believed that all American literature begins with Huck Finn. I agree with him. … So yeah, we’ve dealt with complexity before.

Lynn Novick: Together we worked on Frank Lloyd Wright, and there actually are some parallels there and some differences. I think this particular story and his life, they offer us insights into more than just his life. His life signifies something deeper both good and bad about our history, our culture, etc. Going into it, you kind of know that you’re going to be looking at an iconic American life that is going to reveal a lot about America, let alone the human condition, because he touched, he lived this American century. He died young, relatively speaking, but the times during which he lived and the events he was part of and witnessed, are some of the most important events of the 20th century. So through him we’re going to understand so many things about what happened in that time period. So that was a really great opportunity through his story to explore this patch of history that we need to understand. 

“Going into it, you kind of know that you’re going to be looking at an iconic American life that is going to reveal a lot about America, let alone the human condition. [Hemingway] touched, he lived this American century.”

There was a piece I read in Slate recently that argued that Hemingway, compared with William Faulkner or F. Scott Fitzgerald, doesn’t have the same impact. That Faulkner’s experiments with form have had more impact, and The Great Gatsby is the greatest American novel. What do you say to people who would call Hemingway irrelevant? 

Ken Burns: I disagree. I’m not sure I want to counter that. That person is entitled—I read that piece, and I thought, “Oh, I so completely disagree with that.” I think Fitzgerald is great, I love Faulkner. But nobody reached the kind of level that Hemingway did. … You can certainly make this sort of high-brow argument about formal considerations. Faulkner is difficult. Fitzgerald is somewhere between Hemingway, “easy”—as our scholar in our film, Stephen Cushman said, he dared to impersonate simplicity because of the spareness of the writing, which can be read by anybody. And there was a time where if anybody had read a novel, it would have been by Hemingway. People who didn’t read read a Hemingway novel.

The three of them represent three great writers in American literature, and I won’t say that one is more important than the other, but I think that Hemingway—the complexity of this story, the undertows of tragedy, the demons that overtake him, the madness in the family, the PTSD, the suspicion of relationships after having been left by the nurse, the mother’s complicated contributions and detractions, the father’s complicated contributions and detractions. His own concussions, the alcoholism, the self-medication—you just can’t buy this in one thing. 

Maybe people fall out of fashion, and they’re not teaching it. Maybe the reputation of misogyny or the anti-Semitism or the use of the n-word frequently in his writings is enough to sort of scare people away. I’m not sure that Hemingway isn’t still more read than Fitzgerald or Faulkner—certainly Faulkner, who is difficult and requires an extraordinary amount of energy. He’s fantastic, he’s great. But I think in all of American literature, he remade the short story and the novel and to some extent even nonfiction writing, and everybody is in response to that. Everybody’s entitled to their argument, I just read it and went, “Uh uh. I don’t agree with that.” 

Lynn Novick: I don’t think it’s a contest, that there’s four or five writers and only one of them gets to be important. I like to think that we have now—hopefully, and it seems to be the case—a more expansive view of who should be read and whose voices should be heard and what kind of stories should be told, and that means not just white men who have a certain degree of privilege. Now we’re sort of parsing between these particular white men of a certain degree of privilege, whose voice is most important, who deserves to be told. And Hemingway was part of that conversation because he really cared a lot about his place in the quote unquote “pantheon.” He was very competitive and dismissive of other writers—some of his least appealing qualities. So he kind of feeds into this by the way he behaves at times. To me, I love Fitzgerald. I’m fascinated by the relationship between Fitzgerald and Hemingway. I love Faulkner. They’re all interesting. I don’t want to put them in some kind of rank for myself.

Speaking for myself, I’m an Iranian-American woman, and Hemingway was one of my early favorites. But I can understand the desire that people have to read authors whose backgrounds align more with them. I’m all for expanding the canon. I could see where the argument was coming from.

Ken Burns: In our film, we went out of our way to show how as American as he is, his appeal is international. We had an interview in our The Vietnam War series of a woman, then a teenager, who went from then-North Vietnam to repair the Ho Chi Minh Trail, one of the most dangerous works you could do, and she carried with her For Whom the Bell Tolls, and felt that she survived because of Hemingway. So it’s all around. And I think you’re all for expanding the canon, and I agree with that completely, but I don’t think that Slate article was doing it. “Why did they do Hemingway when they could have done two other white guys?” That’s not expanding the canon. That’s what we want to do. That’s what I want to do. And that’s why we hold our feet to the fire and do not forgive or let him go or permit him to be redeemed for the bad stuff.

Do you think Hemingway changed how we talk about, write about trauma? 

Ken Burns: That is a really wonderful question. … It’s more interesting when you realize that this is a person whose cumulative experience is very familiar with the fact that none of us get out of here alive. When you take a short story like “Indian Camp,” which is like one of the great jewels of all time, with this horror of a Caesarean section and the suicide of the husband and the opening with the pen knife and the suturing with fishing line, and then this peaceful reverie on the way back, pepping his father with questions about suicide and men and women and all of this stuff. And then he’s certain he’s not going to die, which means of course he knows he’s going to die, but in this moment, Hemingway is saying—because there is no other moment but this moment—we can keep at bay the traumas of the past that try to slow us down, the demons that are catching up to us, and the anxieties of the future. We are imprisoned by those two nonexistent times. It’s only now. And that’s his great writing, it’s existential. 

And later on he writes a story called “Up in Michigan” about a brutish guy who just date rapes, essentially. She’s saying no, and he’s not listening. It’s from her point of view. Was he trying to atone? Was he writing from an experience that he had, and seeing it from a woman’s point of view? That’s just spectacular. I don’t think I answered your question. But I think he was willing to look at death and the abyss, and he did it in the natural world, of which he was a keen and spectacular observer. He was a great student of human nature, particularly how men and women get along, or don’t get along.

Lynn Novick: Yes, I do … I think part of the response to World War I and the traumas of World War I is kind of a fragmentation, a disassociation, a disconnection in a way in the psyche, and he describes that or represents that so beautifully in several of his works. Some of the works are in our film, some aren’t, but … he’s experienced it himself, he’s talked to people, he’s researched it, he understands psychologically what people go through who have experienced trauma, and he portrays it. His style is perfectly suited to that. And that’s a subject that we all need to be interested in and conscious of because trauma always exists in the human condition. I don’t think you would find that with say, Fitzgerald per se, but it doesn’t matter. It’s different. His lyricism and his portrayal of different aspects of American society aren’t focused on trauma. But Hemingway, I agree. 

I just think all of them—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner—all of them are fascinating, and you could do documentaries about all of them. 

Lynn Novick: I don’t want to take anybody off the shelf because they don’t quite reach number one, whatever that means. I feel like that’s just an American thing too, you know. Some kind of contest or race and you have to get here first and you have to stay the longest and you have to be number one. I think that is so antithetical to what great art or great literature should be about, which is many perspectives. And we need to read them all, and many other writers to really have a full picture of the American voice of the 20th century. Neither one of them is going to suffice, not to mention James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. It’s a long list.

I’m curious what you think about Hemingway’s obsession with the truth and “one true sentence.” So many of those experiences that he associated with these feelings of “truth” have to do with violence: with war, bullfighting, hunting. Do you think “truth” existed for Hemingway without violence?

Ken Burns: Yes, oh yes. Most definitely. You can read it in “Big Two-Hearted River,” parts one and two. There is a war offstage, the war Nick Adams has left and come back to that’s unspoken and undescribed. So it’s present there, and in the scene that I was describing in “Indian Camp.” There’s incredibly peaceful things. I think it’s about love. I think the “truth” part of your question is absolutely right. And you pursue it as doggedly as he did if you know how fragile it is. If you know in a way what a liar you are. And I think from the beginning that he started to stretch the story, when he gets home from war and begins to sort of put his thumb on the scale and add to his resume unnecessarily. He’s already done an amazing thing. He suffered PTSD. To me, I think he pursued it with the energy that he did not because of the subject matters he needed to explore it with, but because of the inner turmoil over his own failure. Remember the opening, “I’d like to be a great writer, and a good man. I don’t know if I can be either, but I’d like to try to be both”? He is undoubtedly a great writer. The jury is completely out on whether he was a good man.

Lynn Novick: Wow, that’s a good question. If we ask him, he would probably say that it was all tied up. He was looking for the extremes, extreme situations, where some kind of truth could emerge—a moment of truth, or a true way to understanding life. He felt the closer you got to death and violent death, the more you were seeing some kind of eternal truth. That’s one way of looking at it. Someone could write a master’s thesis just about his use of the word “truth” or “true.” What does he even mean? It’s hard to define. What do we think “true” is? Something that is honest to who you are, that really happened, that seems unimpeachably authentic. There are a lot of different meanings. I can’t really say what necessarily he means by “true’—”true” to him. Sometimes I get a little—I guess I’m going to say, not frustrated, but kind of disinterested—in his grand statements about writing. I think sometimes he’s actually obscuring what he’s after, putting up smoke screens so that you don’t look too hard. There’s a mystery to it that he wants to preserve, which I find really fascinating. I almost feel like it’s more satisfying to just go back to his great works of fiction and just enjoy them and appreciate them. Whether they’re “true” or not, I have no idea. In a way, it doesn’t matter. It’s a great question. I’m always wondering, “What does it mean, the one true sentence? What is that?” 

And everybody’s truth is different. This is excellent advice, and also meaningless advice. 

Lynn Novick: Correct. And he knew that. He’s very self-aware and astute about things like that. He did write it, but it’s not so clear. I think he’s least effective when he’s telling us how to do things. It’s better to show not tell, we say nowadays, right? I think that’s where he’s at his most brilliant. When he’s most quote unquote “true” is when there’s some ambiguity and nuance and things left unsaid. I don’t know what is that “truth,” I’m not sure. I could go on. 

Is there anything no one asked you that you would like to talk about?

Lynn Novick: I’m grateful to have the chance to respond to some of the articles written about the film, which I think have a lot to do with people’s particular feelings about Hemingway more than the film, and that’s great. It shows that people care enough about Hemingway to have feelings about him, or his work. I keep coming back to the question you asked about misogyny and his work and how we reckon with that or deal with that. We kind of swing on a pendulum between revulsion for some of his behavior and attitudes and therefore not wanting to read his work because of it, and then the other way, saying, “It doesn’t matter, all that matters is what we published.” And I think we should be more expansive. We need to think about both. Because he did help to create, he sort of helped foster and encourage this kind of hypermasculine behavior while he also critiques it. It didn’t take Hemingway to put it on the printed page to make men want to behave the way that he somehow behaved. But certainly, so many men looked up to him and wanted to be like him. We can’t really negate that. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Hemingway is streaming on PBS’s website and the PBS Documentaries Prime Video Channel. 

Roxana Hadadi is a film, television, and pop culture critic whose bylines include Pajiba, The A.V. Club, RogerEbert.com, Crooked Marquee, GQ, Polygon, Vulture, and Bright Wall/Dark Room. She holds an MA in literature and lives outside Baltimore, Maryland. She is a member of the DC Area Film Critics Association, the Alliance of Women Film Journalists, and the Online Film Critics Society, and is a Tomatometer Top Critic on Rotten Tomatoes.

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