Hemingway and Biography

- [Man] I hate the myth of Hemingway, it obscures the man.

(upbeat music) - His talent is stunning.

- He went against the grain.

- [Man] It's hard to imagine a writer who hasn't been influenced by him.

- In order to have something new to write, he had to have something new to live - [Woman] And he fell in love quite a few times.

- He's complex and deeply flawed, but there he is.

- [Man] Hemingway the man is much more interesting than the myth.

- [Advertiser] "Hemingway" starts Monday April 5th at 8/7 Central, only on PBS.

- Good evening.

I'm Sharon Rockefeller, president and CEO of WETA, the PBS station in Washington, DC.

I'm pleased to welcome you to Hemingway and Biography.

This event is part of conversations on "Hemingway".

The virtual event series that is taking place in advance of the upcoming film from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick.

The three part documentary "Hemingway" will air on PBS stations throughout the country on April 5th, 6th and 7th at 8:00 PM Eastern time.

I would like to thank our partner for tonight's event, Georgetown University, president and wonderful friend, Jack Digioia.

I'm also very grateful to the films funders whose support ensures that people everywhere will see "Hemingway" and truly treasure it.

Our gratitude extends to the Bank of America, The Annenberg Foundation, The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, members of the Better Angels Society.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the Public Broadcasting Service.

WETA has been Ken and Lynn's production partners for more than 30 years.

It is one of my greatest honors to work with these esteemed and beloved filmmakers.

During our panel discussion tonight, you will hear from Ken and Lynne, from author Howard Bryant, and biographer, screenwriter and journalist Amanda Vaill.

Moderating the conversation will be Paul Elie, senior fellow at the Berkeley Center at Georgetown University.

Ken and Lynne have created an intimate portrait of the visionary work and turbulent life of one of the greatest literary figures that our country has ever produced.

To give you a taste of what we'll be airing on your local PBS station in just a few weeks, here is the introduction to "Hemingway".

Thank you very much.

(cool music) - Hemingway was a writer who happened to be American.

But his palette was incredibly wide and delicious and violent and brutal and ugly.

All of those things.

It's something every culture can basically understand.

Every culture can understand falling in love with someone, the loss of that person, of how great a meal tastes, how extraordinary this journey is.

That is not nationalistic, it's human.

And I think with all of his flaunts, with all the difficulties, his personal life whatever he seemed to understand human beings.

You see, I'm trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across, not to just depict life or criticize it.

But to actually make it alive so that when you have read something by me you actually experienced the thing.

You can't do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful because if it is all beautiful you can't believe it.

Things aren't that way.

It is only by showing both sides, three dimensions and if possible four that you can write the way I want to.

(cool music) - [Narrator] Ernest Hemingway remade American literature.

He paired storytelling to its essentials.

Changed the way characters speak, expanded the words a writer could legitimately explore and left an indelible record of how men and women lived during his lifetime.

Generations of writers would find their work measured against his.

Some followed the path he blazed, others rebelled against it.

None could escape it.

He made himself the most celebrated American writer since Mark Twain, read and revered around the world.

- It's hard to imagine a writer today who hasn't been in some way influenced by him.

It's like he changed all the furniture in the room, right?

And we all have to sit in it.

To some, we can kind of sit on the edge of the arm chair on the arm or do this, but he changed the furniture in the room.

- [Narrator] The value of the American declarative sentence, right?

The way you build a house brick by brick out of those.

Within a few sentences of reading a Hemingway story you are not in any confusion as to who had written it.

- I can't imagine how it's possible that any one writer could have so changed the language.

People have been copying him for nearly a hundred years and they haven't succeeded in equaling what he did.

- If you're a writer, you can't escape Hemingway.

He's so damn popular that you can't begin to write till you try and kill his ghost in you or embrace it.

And I think, identify that most about Hemingway's that he was always questing.

The perfect line had not happened yet, there's always a struggle trying to get it right and you never will.

- [Narrator] For three decades people who had not read a word he'd written thought they knew him.

Wounded veteran and battlefield correspondent, big game hunter, and deep sea fishermen, bullfighter aficionado, brawler, and lover, and man about town.

(cool music) But behind the public figure was a troubled and conflicted man who belonged to a troubled and conflicted family with its own drama and darkness and closely held secrets.

The world saw him as a man's man, but all his life he would privately be intrigued by the blurred lines between male and female, men and women.

There were so many sides to him.

The first of his four wives remembered that he defied geometry.

- He was open to life, he was open to tragedy, he was open to feeling.

I liked that he fell in love, and he fell in love quite a few times.

He always had the next woman before he left the existing woman.

- [Narrator] He was often kind and generous to those in need of help.

And sometimes just as cruel and vengeful to those who had helped him.

- [Jeff] "I have we've had the illusion it was more important or as important to be a good man as to be a great writer.

I may turn out to be neither, but we'd like to be both."

- [Narrator] Hemingway's story is a tale older even than the written word.

Of a young man whose ambition and imagination, energy and enormous gifts, bring him wealth and fame beyond imagining.

who destroys himself, trying to remain true to the character he has invented.

(cool music) - One of his weaknesses I was going to say failing.

And it was a great pity.

It's a great pity for any writer.

He loved to an audience.

He loved an audience and in front of an audience he lost the best part of himself by trying to impress the audience.

- I hate the myth of Hemingway and the reason I hate the myth of Hemingway it obscures the man.

And the man is much more interesting than the myth.

I think he was a terrific father sometimes.

I think that he was a loving husband sometimes.

I think he was like so many people except this enormous talent.

Hemingway is complicated, he's very complicated.

- [Jeff] "The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand.

And write when there is something that you know, and not before, and not too damned much after."

(cool music) - Good evening, everyone.

I'm Paul Elie, an author and senior seller with the Berkeley Center at Georgetown University, our host for this evening.

And we're lucky to have with us, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, co-directors of "Hemingway".

Howard Bryant, biographer and senior writer at ESPN whose books include "A Biography of Hank Aaron".

And Amanda Vaill, biographer, editor and writer of the PBS American Masters, a documentary on Jerome Robbins.

Thank you all for being here.

We're so lucky to have you together as a group.

- Thank you, Paul.

(indistinct) - Our topic tonight is Hemingway and Biography.

And what we just heard in the opening clip is an account of just how important biography was to Hemingway even while he was alive.

He was not only the most famous American writer before he got too far along in his career but the most celebrated American writer since Mark Twain.

Celebrated outside of the literary world in magazines, in newsreel footage, in still photographs, in legend that's even characterized at the time as myths.

All that looms so large that as you put it in the documentary, he winds up being a person who destroys himself trying to remain true to the character he's invented.

All this is to say that Hemingway as a living writer was engaged with biography to invoke something of a cliche among biographers now.

He was a writer whose most complex character was the one he created himself.

What was the challenge for you two making a film, to make a biography Hemingway that takes account of the complexities of biography that are so tightly wound into the life itself?

- Well, Paul, let me start.

And I certainly want Lynn to add to this.

I think it's important to say first off that all biography is failure.

I mean, the person that's closest to us in life remains inscrutable to the end.

How can we presume to reach back a century or two and divine who someone is.

We're obligated to try, and that's what we were trying to do here in our own forum.

I think the great impediment of this, which is of course trying to pierce the veil of this image that is self created and created by a culture that is willing to go along with the myth of self creation is that once you get past it you're actually able to touch and triangulate with that mythology, with the extraordinary writing, and with the vulnerability of the person, the complexity of the person, exactly what you should be doing with engaging that complexity.

You're not pursuing biography to find something out that simple, that ABC, it is so complex.

I have not met anyone in my life let alone the subjects of the films who have chosen to make that in any way comes off as a simple thing.

So what the calculus is for us is to spend as much time as we can wrestling to the ground the complexity of this and tolerating the undertow, tolerating the ability to hold intention.

Sometimes divergent views about the same thing, the same moment.

And that was our great mission.

And Lynn can talk more about it.

That was the struggle.

- Absolutely I'm not sure we fully succeeded in like Ken is saying that you never quite get there, it's the journey in a way.

He was so self-created but he was a real person.

Somewhere behind there there's human being, Ernest Hemingway.

And how you figured out who that is, especially because he so often blurred the lines in his fiction so that when you read a lot of his work there's a character that could be him or has a lot of similar characteristics or similar experiences.

And maybe it's a different name.

It's not kind of a post-modern exercise, but yet is he Jake Barns, Is he Fredrick Henry, is he Nick Adams?

You know, these are iconic American literary characters.

Each of them had a little bit of Hemingway in them.

And there's generations of biographers of Hemingway that I've tried to connect the dots and trace the breadcrumbs back to figure out was he in this place at this time as this character in the novel or the short story?

And we sort of, we tried to get our arms around all of that but not to get kind of sucked into the fact-finding mission in a way of unpacking all of it and trying to get to some deeper truths of knowing him on an intimate, emotional level if that makes any sense.

And we got to that partly through his son, Patrick who very graciously agreed to be interviewed twice for the film and from his letters.

So he reveals himself in his letters in a way that is kind of in the moment.

So you're following him through the trajectory of his life through the letters and then through the images.

So you look at him and you see him at all different stages of life, and you like you kind of see through his eyes into something.

And of course we project onto that, we all do, but still, looking into his eyes at different times in his life, I did feel like I got access to something, got a little closer.

And hopefully in the accumulation of the film, we feel we got somewhere.

- And I think also that the writers who come in, an international cast of writers help corral or triangulate or whatever the word is.

And then of course having biographers and the dual threat of Amanda and others that are in the film who really actually helped us center our pursuit of him, is just invaluable.

And I can't say enough and I have the opportunity to say so publicly to Amanda.

- Yes exactly.

- Ken and Lynn, I've heard both of you speak at the process of making the film and you mentioned notes in the file, but Hemingway going back to the '80s.

Then you mentioned your process of really bearing down and producing the biography.

And you both use the description of subtractive rather than additive to describe your process.

This reminded me of Hemingway's a notorious iceberg theory of fiction.

Hemingway said that a fiction operated kind of like an iceberg, only an eighth was above the surface but the seven eighth were below the surface made the iceberg what it is, made the fiction have the power that it has.

Had that comparison occurred to you and what is it that the seven eighth that you left out or that's not onscreen for us?

What is it that that brings to the biography that audiences are gonna watch in a couple of weeks?

- I mean, yes, yes.

The short answer is yes.

That's exactly our process.

I think with Hemingway, he's hoping that you're going to infer or intuit all the things that he left out.

And I'm not sure that that's possible, so there's many examples of that in his work.

And I don't think we're hoping that either.

We're hoping that what you see on screen, the six hours that we ended up with, working with Jeff Ward, our writer and Sarah Pots and our producer and our team of editors and producers is really the distilled version of the story that we could come up with that made sense and works as a film.

So we're very much aware of what's below the surface and that's how we got here.

So I'm curious to hear from Amanda and Howard too about their process, because they go through the same thing we do with just enormous amount of material on.

- There is an invitation in the work that is that what is unspoken.

I'd say it's nine tenths is underwater.

I mean, so much is suggested that in a way the baseline for the film is listening to this extraordinary literature.

Even when it goes off the rails and you write some rec, there's something there that you can hold on to.

And then if you're dealing with the mythology you have of the letters and all of the other kind of commentary something happens, but it begins with what is unspoken in that and how much you are pulled into the mystery of that.

It's very much like music.

It's not the notes, it's the intervals.

And the pace and rhythm of "Hemingway" and what's unsaid so much is inviting.

We were having a discussion the other night and we were in the middle of something we stopped to watch a clip.

And at the end, it ended with this spectacular letter about Hemingway and gender and his wife Mary in Africa, and everybody just at the end just covelled.

It just stopped the thing because even though everyone there had not heard this passage before it was breathtaking.

And you had to stop and admire someone who could put words together like that.

I liked that invitation - Howard and Amanda I saw you nodding when I mentioned the iceberg theory.

So I'm guessing that it doesn't belong to novelists or even documentary makers alone, that we as biographers have some claim to that approach or that experience, is that right?

- Oh, absolutely.

I think first of all, there's so much that you leave out that you must leave out, but it informs what you write.

And even if it doesn't make it onto page, you've done the work, you've been there with your subject and what you've researched, what you have understood that ends up informing what does go on the page or on the screen.

- Yeah, no question, no question.

And I think that it's a great exercise to watch.

And in the film, it talks very much about how Hemingway studied other writers.

And I think that we do this as well when you're reading the different ways that you're trying to approach a biography.

I remember going to the movies and watching the Mr. Rogers biography, the film.

And I remember walking out of that film thinking I don't really know anything more about this man but what I do know is that this was a biography about the public man, right?

This was about his public life.

It was a biography of the Mr. Rogers that we all remember from television.

And so there's so many different approaches that you wanna take.

Are you telling a story about the public person, about the myth, about the persona?

Are you trying to get beyond the persona?

Are you trying to find a level of humanity in the person that squares with the humanity and the writing or vice versa?

There's so many different ways that you can sort of approach what you take on.

And I think obviously we're all at the mercy of our sourcing.

We're all at the mercy of what, how much information do you have, what can you get?

And I think that's also one of the, really key things that you're going to have to wrestle with before you put anything on the page because if you're not comfortable with that, you're a complete mess.

(laughing) I was gonna say no.

And also one other thing about that is that I think Ken and Lynn, you guys have done this so many times obviously when you did it with Jackie Robinson as well, because you had Rachel.

So to have Patrick in this film as well and to have the letter as into anybody who has written in their journal and you go back and you go, oh, I wrote this 25 years ago.

So how do you take what that person had said and written about in that time and try to interpret it, not just for all of us as audience, but for yourselves as you're creating?

- I thought you did such an extraordinary job in this film of using that written record.

People always will say, well you can't show someone writing, oh you can't show somebody's thinking, but in fact you do show Hemingway's process in a way that's really extraordinary to me.

I was really thrilled to see it.

- Yeah this was a writers' film.

- Let's go, that's great, wonderful.

(laughing) - Thank you, if that was the great struggle too Amanda was how you tick the words on the page.

And what's so interesting is having access to the manuscripts and to the physical letters.

Then gives you a chance to use some of the digital tricks that we have.

And rather than manipulate them we could remove some of that.

And as you see, the very first shot of the film is the opening paragraph of farewell to arms.

One of the most famous opening paragraphs of any novel ever written.

And you're seeing him making the corrections.

The ghost of Ernest Hemingway is making the corrections, and all we're doing is reapplying what we took off.

But in that you've removed a veil, at least one veil and put yourself a little bit closer to the subject into the process because it is all about process here, particularly with Hemingway.

- And what you did by doing that is so much like what a written word biographer does.

When I went to the Hemingway collection and went through his manuscripts and his letters, it was the same feeling you've given the viewer, that feeling of discovery and adventure.

Fair is the word, there's the page, there's the man jumping off of it at you.

You did that.

It's quite amazing.

- Yeah, and I think that's one of the keys.

It's not simply that it's also as always it's what you choose to emphasize, right?

That's the key when you walk in and you've decided that you're going to be the person to take on this project.

Are you emphasizing the right things?

When I walk out of the library of Congress did I choose the right gems?

Are they all gems... And these are the questions obviously, which is what keeps everybody up at night in terms of trying to create something new.

Do I have something that is unique?

Am I interpreting the information properly?

Am I interpreting the period properly?

And so when you go through this, you really want to I think the hardest part with that which you really wanna do is you wanna try to pull yourself as far away from it but also have enough trust in what you're doing that you believe that you know this material.

Do I know what I'm looking at?

And can I interpret what I'm looking at in a way that illuminates this person, and that illuminates my subject?

- I mean, I'll just say our process because we can't become the experts.

We rely on the experts, advisors and people who've spent their lives dedicated to scholarship of Hemingway so we can actually ask them for some help because it's an overwhelming archive, especially in this topic.

Thousands of letters, thousands of photographs.

It's a very collaborative process with our advisors as well to kind of at least they check us and they will remind us.

Like Sandy Spammy or who's the head of the Hemingway letters project came to us at a meeting.

She was reminding us of some stuff we didn't know about, that happens all the time.

Some particularly interesting letters between Hemingway and Micheal (indistinct) that we haven't come across yet 'cause they hadn't been published yet but she knew about them.

So we're very grateful for that kind of (indistinct).

- (indistinct) I'm working on several biographies right now.

And I had a consultants meeting on the next film coming out.

Howard was there.

Howard had some very powerful comments.

And so we imported him to this barn and filmed him and put him into a four-part eight hour biography of Muhammad Ali that will be out this fall, which has all of the same pitfalls, all of the same resistance to kind of easy and fast isle judgments.

It requires a great inner compassion on the part of the investigator to do that.

And I think Howard enriched our film is very unusual as Lynn knows to film somebody at the end and have them fit in.

The body tends to reject the new Oregon, but not Howard.

(chattering) - And need for a biographer to master material, you two are making a visual biography of a writer.

And I was so struck watching the film and then watching the clips tonight that things that I know through Hemingway's writing about them say Paris through certain parts of the fiction and the moveable feast is now there before our eyes through still photographs, he probably lived it and so forth.

And in a way takes me as a viewer back behind the myth to see a young man without all that subsequently happened to him kind of weathering his character.

That puts in mind the second clip.

Could you tell us what we're about to see?

- Yes, we wanted to pick a scene from relatively early in Hemingway's adult life which is after he's been to world war one, he has married his first wife Hadley and they have just gone to Paris to start a whole new life together and he wants to be a writer.

He's a foreign correspondent at the time.

And he was a young man on the cusp of everything that we think of later to happen to him anyway.

(lively music) - [Narrator] "January, 1922.

Dear family.

Hash just came in and says to send lots of love to you and tell you about our apartment.

It is at 74, Rude to Cardinal Lenoir.

And is the jolliest place you ever saw?

We rented it furnished for 250 francs a month, about $18.

It is the most comfortable and cheapest way to live.

And Hash has a piano.

And we have all our pictures up on the walls.

And an open fireplace.

It is on top of a high hill in the very oldest part of Paris."

The newlywed Hemingway's first real home was a fourth floor walk up in the Latin quarter.

Each evening accordion music drifted up from the working man's dance hall next door.

His friend and mentor Sherwood Anderson had persuaded Ernest that for a young writer, Paris was the place to be.

One could live cheaply there.

And the left bank teamed with revolutionary artists and writers from everywhere.

Pablo Picasso and Juan Miro, Igor Stravinsky, and Eric Sati, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein who remembered Paris as the place where the 20th century was.

Ernest was just 22 years old, working as a correspondent for the Toronto Star, otherwise unpublished and unknown.

But sure what Anderson had written letters of introduction to three influential friends, generously describing him as a quite wonderful newspaper man, whose extraordinary talent was sure to take him far beyond journalism.

- He's tall.

He is as handsome as a movie star.

He has dimples.

He has a swashbuckling quality to him, but he has this kind of Midwestern sweetness at the same time.

The fact is that if you would walk into a room people loved him the minute they saw him.

And that gives him a kind of confidence that you can do anything - The charm and allure of a movie star.

This is what you see in Hemingway Amanda.

Charm, allure, notoriously difficult to capture once a person has gone.

What's it like to try to get that elusive quality in a biography decades after the fact?

- Well, I think, you know you have to go to whatever source material you have.

And when I was writing about this very period of a bit when I was writing a biography of Gerald and Sara Murphy in which Hemingway was most definitely a character, I went back to their letters to the memories and memoirs of people who had known them.

And what you end up with is a lot of voices speaking to you and telling you what these people were like.

And to me, it's absolutely extraordinary the power of documents you don't need to have although it's great to have films and even photographs.

Photographs give you a very special sense.

However, I mean, there's that wonderful picture that you will show in the film here of Hemingway and Hadley looking at each other and he's got that, you know, in their profile and there's both so young and gorgeous and American looking and you just love them.

(laughing) And you know, that's what happens there.

These people become real to you.

You hear their voices, they're in your head, you end up talking about them as if they were people you know.

And your family gets bored with you talking about these people that they have never met.

And all you can do is talk about them.

It's sort of like when people fall in love with somebody and they have mentioned ideas, they always want to talk about the person that keep mentioning their name.

Well, that's you, the writer and the biographer and your subject.

You can't stop talking about them all the time.

You keep working it into everything you have to say.

You know, it's kind of pitiful.

(laughing) - Well, I actually thought when I was looking at and watching the film, one thing that I thought was really interesting in terms of the creation of it, it's when you deal with a figure like Hemingway, in some ways it's almost like dealing with a Jackie Robinson or an Abraham Lincoln where it's like, okay, what new can I pull out of this?

But on the other hand, it's not because people know the work, but they don't know the person.

And so for me is not being a Hemingway scholar at all but having read and trying to understand the person behind the work and understanding the man in his time and all of those things.

What I really enjoyed what are all the things that I didn't know?

The journalism and being a teenager, working at the Kansas City Star, I mean when you start looking at his actual arc of when he was writing it and at what age he was writing, it's remarkable.

And you start thinking about comparing, obviously can't compare your time to his but couldn't write two paragraphs when I was 18 years old never mind writing for the Kansas City Star.

And then also, obviously I think it's very difficult today to consider those times back then especially now that you're looking as over a hundred years ago.

The enormity and the effect of world war one on people (indistinct) we don't even really have wars anymore.

If anything wars are digital now, right?

So you push a button and you do things, and you kill lots of people by not leaving your house.

But when you look at the footage and you see the physicality and people talk about Hemingway as a physical person, the images of world war one and trenches and him being wounded, and you start to think about here's a person who was as physical as to his words.

Like he lived a very physical life.

And now you start put those things together and now you can start to see how it squares with what you're reading on the page.

And in a lot of ways, whenever I read Cormac McCarthy I think of Hemingway's very short typed sentences, extremely violent, extremely very physical in that way as well.

And I just think throughout this story, throughout these three parts, the number of ways that he is in such a physical presence.

The way that he actually lived was just really really important.

- Those things that you mentioned Howard, at one point every literary minded, American knew those things.

Hemingway went to bull fights and hunted in Africa and was a big game fishermen and had a place in Key West.

That's much less well-known now.

And then I'm imagining that offers you a certain kind of advantage as biographers that the ubiquity of Hemingway, the public figure is not what it once was.

So you can kind of move in and do something different.

Is that right?

- I don't know.

In the course of doing it a dear friend of mine sent me some stuff from the late '40s and '50s kind of pulp tabloid, 5 cent lurid books about Hemingway.

And so I think that there was essentially a cult there and it was probably easier for us now that that's the excitement about it has (indistinct) but at the same time, we live in an even more a horrifically celebrity culture of bold face names that you're not exactly sure why they're even famous at all and you kind of lose track and then just presume there's the haves and the have nots.

You know, the keyword I was thinking was something Amanda said about voices.

It's just for us a perpetual collection of voices.

It may be the voice of us, the disciplined third-person narrator that Jeff Ward in this case I wrote and we worked on a little bit.

It may be the voice of Hemingway.

It may be the other voices of Hemingway in letters and other stuff.

It may be the commentary of scholars and critics and writers and biographers.

It may be the voices of other people in his life, but that chorus is what permits you to aggregate as I think Amanda was suggesting, the kind of sense of the person, or as good as sense of the person as you get and particularly the time and the place.

And then the visual dimension are different kinds of voices, but I don't wanna get into how photographs speak.

That should be all other conversation that we have.

- I was struck watching the film.

We think of Hemingway as an American writer but just how much of it took place abroad.

And there's a very international flavor to his life that I'm not sure I'd totally registered.

Did you make a specific effort to bring out that aspect?

- It didn't take much effort because he actually didn't live in the United States for most of his adult life.

I haven't done the exact math, but he lived 20 years in Cuba and that's the longest he lived anywhere.

And he was frequently and he lived in Europe for a number of years.

Then he was in Spain a lot.

So even though he seems an iconic American Meyer and we started off sort of thinking about the film that way we quickly realized that, you know he transcends that label in his life and his interest in a way too.

So it was really important to us to visually represent that but also to hear, as Ken was saying from writers from around the world to kind of get a sense of what does it mean if you grew up in Ethiopia, if you live in Spain, if you are from Japan or from Ireland.

I mean, we began to understand his influence and fame, actually both by just sort of triangulating with perspectives from around the world.

It was super interesting.

And I think in a way he sort of embodies this iconic American male, I'm not gonna say ideal, but archetype, but he also critiques it.

And so that's kind of part of his story and the story we were trying to uncover.

He understands some of the pitfalls of that pretty well.

- What are the ways in which you break that down?

I think is by showing that this person who created the literary ideal of rugged male individualism was almost never alone.

The romance, one tumbling into another.

And some of that comes out in the next clip.

What is it that we're about to see?

- Oh yeah, so Hemingway was married four times, as we said in introduction.

And the first clip was with his first wife.

We're now jumping over wife number two to Martha Gellhorn who was his third wife and who was a very serious writer and work correspondent in her own right.

And they had gone to Spain to cover the Spanish civil war as Amanda so beautifully covered in her incredible book, "Hotel Florida".

And so now they're back home and we just wanted to sort of show.

Any challenges of biography when you have complicated subjects that don't always present themselves in the most positive light, let's just say.

- [Meryl] "The only serious complaint I have about matrimony is that it brings out the goodness in me.

And has a tendency to soften and quiet the hell on wheels aspect.

Then finally, I become bored with myself.

(gunshot firing) My man is another hell on wheels character.

And what is so Christ at art is that two people cannot live together with any order or health, if they are both hell on wheels.

So for the mutual good, they must both calm themselves.

And that is a moss but I have not yet found out what to do about it.

Ernest and I really are afraid of each other.

Each one knowing that the other is the most violent person either one knows.

And knowing something about violence we are always mutually alarmed at the potentiality is of the other.

So when we are together, we take it fairly easy.

So it's not to see the other burst into loud, furious flame."

- [Narrator] Martha Gellhorn had no intention of staying home with her husband as Pauline had.

And at first he encouraged her work.

- [Jeff] "I can't really write it all the way you can.

Well and easily and good.

I just nail words together like a bloody carpenter, and it is so tough to do.

You are my hero and always will be and I will be good and try to live up to my hero.

Thank you very much for having come to Key West and for having married me."

Gellhorn's view of herself and her talent was every bit as exalted as her husband's view of himself and his.

"We two are great people."

She wants told him.

"We can shake the world."

But the couple found it hard to keep their volatility smothered for long.

She began to travel more and more on assignment and he began to resent it.

- Martha was a woman who would not back down.

Martha was a woman who could give as good as she got verbally.

Martha was a woman who had her own life that she wanted to live in career she wanted to pursue and nobody was taking that away from her.

- They were great in the Spanish civil war where there's bullets and shells flying every which way but put them together in a house, and it was just a disaster.

(cool music) - [Narrator] After Gellhorn returned to Cuba from a lengthy reporting trip, she was convinced that Hemingway's adventuring aboard the pillar was pointless, just an excuse to fish and drink with his friends while the rest of the world was at war, and she did not hesitate to say so.

He was in fact not writing at all and was drinking more and more heavily.

Beginning with a scotch and soda at 10 in the morning and keeping at it all day.

He was angered by her criticism and now sometimes dismissive of her writing.

"I'll show you, you conceded bitch."

One of his sons remembered hearing him shout.

"They'll be reading my stuff long after the worms have finished with you."

- That clip is hard to watch and hard to listen to.

He thanks Martha Gellhorn.

He calls her his hero.

And yet he imagined some both dead and him triumphing while her work is, you know as it were consumed by the worms.

This is a person who is aggressive and someone say abusive.

What are the responsibilities of the biographer to treat this material in 2020, 2021?

And did you have to consider, you have a free hand with the estate and so forth?

- We did.

And in fact, I think in retrospect now it was very brave of them and Patrick does speak and permit us to go where it wanted.

But we set that absolute condition that we would speak our minds about what we saw and report all the things that we saw, and it is abuse.

It gets a lot worse.

This is nowhere near the worst scene.

In fact, you're dealing with somebody who's able to hold her own in the face of it in a way that perhaps Hadley and Pauline and his fourth Mary weren't able to though they tried pretty hard.

We were able, of course, part of this in the voices for us is bringing alive, not just Peter Coyote reading Jeff Ward's superb script, but Jeff Daniels reading the voice of Ernest Hemingway.

And we have Carrie Russell and Patricia Clarkson and Mary Louise Parker, and a young up-and-coming actor named Meryl Streep, who is just, I'm absolutely confident that she's going places who is reading Martha Gellhorn to give you that kind of little bit of that Hudson Valley lock jaw that Martha had.

And that I think Meryl can obviously do so beautifully.

It was important to us to just represent what it was.

And I swear to you as you know, Paul, it gets a lot worse than this.

- Permission aside, there's the whole challenge of committing to the subject of the biography as worthy of attention, worthy of years of the biographer's life and a certain cohabitation let's say, and yet a person that the biographer has to watch and show behaving badly.

Howard, we've discussed this off camera.

This is a theme for biographers right now.

What is it like to see it in active material that's a century old such as what we just saw?

- Well, I think that the importance of it is the fact that you're seeing it now 'cause I'm not sure how much you're gonna see it in the future.

The idea of control is so powerful today.

I think when when we were talking about this on Monday I was saying that Ernest Hemingway were alive, he would be the executive producer of his own biography.

He would have the control.

He would be the person who gets to determine what you see.

So you essentially get to see propaganda.

And that the key for all of this obviously I agree with Ken when we talk about biography being failure because it is, because you're only going to get your interpretation of what you see and you can't have that sort of God complex even though you're supposed to.

But when you start looking at the material from the standpoint of the actual individual controlling themselves, it's even worse.

So I think the hard part Ken's right, it does get worse.

And it's when I remember watching that I remember watching the scenes with Martha Gellhorn, I remember having read a piece about those two in Harpers way back in the early '90s.

And I remember thinking that that level of volatility brings out the best and worst of people especially when they're in the same field.

The level of competition, the level of drive, the level of ego, all of these things.

Sometimes when you're in the field, it fuels you but then all of a sudden we're still competitors.

We're still, even though you may be Ernest Hemingway, you're still competitive.

And how can you compete against your wife?

And how can your wife compete against you?

And here we go.

I thought it was a brilliant brilliant moment in the film.

And I was gonna say what I really sort of enjoyed about the volatility of that was the challenge of telling a story in 2021 about 1940 and about 1945, about the war, about the way that men and women were treated and treated each other back then, how men treated women back then.

And what choices were you going to make as filmmakers?

Were you going to try to tailor it to 2021?

Or were you going to let us see what we should see?

I think that the balance in the film was really terrific in a lot of ways, because by the end spoiler alerts.

There is a balance and that balance comes from the voices.

It comes from the people who get to do the speaking and they get to explain.

And I think it's also because there are so many women who are on camera who are giving you the interpretation of the years.

So in other words, yes.

Product of his times 100%, but doesn't get to escape.

I think that's the power of what this does and how the last thing I wanted to see in watching this film was a protected Hemingway.

He got to live in his time as a giant and now having been dead for 60 years, he can handle it, this is what it was.

Go ahead Ken, sorry.

- No, I didn't mean to interrupt you.

I just wanted to add something Paul to your question that I didn't address.

And Howard did really well.

This took six and a half years.

We didn't know what 2021 looked like and nor do we care because I think when you're in the business of biography particularly with some significant historical distance you're obligated to stay in the story and try to navigate all of its complexities.

What I've known from doing this for a while, what Lynn knows is that when you finally get towards the end and lift your head up, you suddenly realize how much it resonates in the present.

And if you speak to the present control not withstanding Howard, if the subject is in fact the executive producer that's a different sort of set of things.

But if you do that, you are liberated in little ways by the constraints, so that maybe in six and a half years from now, it will still be relevant.

You know what I'm saying?

And not playing to particular themes.

- Well, it's also real, Ken.

I mean this is the other piece of this.

When you're watching these films, it's like it was really interesting that you asked me to be part of this.

And when you were working in the film last year when Lynn called because I really didn't have any interest in it to be honest with you.

And part of the reason was because I thought Hemingway was a pig.

I thought he was a bore.

I thought he was the great white man that I had no interest in reading about.

When you read the killers, and I think you have that in the film.

The way he talked about black people and all of these things, I'm like this.

And the thing about it is that he was a wonderful sportsman and he was the Hemingway in Africa, Hemingway in the war, Hemingway in Spain, all of that stuff struck me as outmoded.

And I didn't really have a lot of interest in it.

And yet the way you presented it, it was brilliant.

It got me interested in him.

It also made me think about time and what it takes to do these films.

There was a time when it was a Hollywood (indistinct) to slap them in the face when they were hysterical, right?

This is what it was back then.

We don't do that anymore.

And because we don't do that anymore that doesn't mean that it didn't happen then.

And how do you deal with those sort of uncomfortable moments of history in the way that he writes on the page?

The way that people wrote on the page back then.

And so you take all of these different components, you take them from the personal life, you take them from what's on the page, you take them from the times and you do have an obligation to not care necessarily about how we're going to view it today because now you're doing your subject a total disservice.

We have to be able to look at these things as they were.

I'm good with them.

- Amanda will remember that at one point, a certain clarity and biography was derighted as pythography, not so long ago.

- Oh yes, Janet Malcolm said that she wrote a famous piece about biographers as essentially burglars who go through people's belongings for their own personal gain.

And I'm going to actually on that, on that note, kind of.

I wanna return to something Howard said which was that he felt that in the future it might not be possible to do biography in the way that this film has been done or the way certain biographies of Hemingway have been done.

I'm not sure that that is true.

I've always had an argument.

I have a very dear friend who is a biographer, Karl Wallace.

And then Karl believes that an authorized biography is not worth doing because you always be constrained by the estate of the people or by the people, the subject.

And I have always believed that unless you have the permission to come into the house, not be a burglar but walk into the house and go through the files, you won't get the good stuff.

But you also have to know you've got to feel pretty damn bulletproof when you're doing it.

And you have to think, I will not be corrupted, I will not be seduced by my subject or my subjects executors or whomever.

And you both were working with the Hemingway estate which is one of the most zealous in protecting what they think of as the image of their patron saint.

And you managed to get them to let you tell the story in a fully rounded way.

You have to get their trust, but you also have to tell them that you're not gonna write a hagiography.

- Right.

I mean, this is such a great point because we just can't say enough about the Hemingway family in terms of this project.

They had zero input into this film except for Patrick being interviewed multiple times and spending time with us talking about his memories and things that he remembered but off camera, just like as background, essentially.

But after that, his take was, "You guys know what you're doing."

And sort of like what Howard was saying Hemingway can handle it, let the chips fall where they may.

"Just tell the story you wanna tell and I'm sure we're gonna not love every minute of it, and that's okay.

We trust you to try to do the best you can and we can't wait to see what you come up with."

And that was a great gift to have that sort of... And then they opened the door to let us have access to the archives and the manuscripts which without which we couldn't do the story actually.

So doing it without that would have been probably...

I don't know if it really would have been worth doing.

I don't know what the movie would have really looked like but I think, in preparing for the project, reading many of the Hemingway biographies, there's sort of two camps.

This is not true for all of them, but often it's, I'm not gonna name names, there are people who seem to have a very strong feeling negatively about him.

And then the story kind of slots into everything that happens is ending up a very negative and portrayal of a very ugly person who just is awful in every way.

Or there's a great artist and everything he does is okay because he's a great artist.

I don't wanna generalize, there's some great biographies, but I think we really came in with an open mind that it could be yes and it could be all of the above.

So weren't trying to prove a point about what a jerky he was or what a genius he was or what a great guy he was but just a fully dimensional person.

- I was gonna say so and that's why I feel like this is a writer's film, I really do.

And I felt like anybody who has tried to put words together knows this is what it takes.

And we all know when it comes to there is a certain narcissist inside of all of us that feel that you have something to say that someone should listen to, imagine being at his level and imagine having that level of talent and imagine believing that you have not just the talent to take on, not just one form, but three forms.

I'm going to be the best short story writer.

I'm going to be the best novelist.

(mumbling) It's off the charts.

And so what does that you need to, you're not gonna be a saint for that.

I mean, there is going to be an enormous amount of volatility, there's going to be...

I just thought it was such a poignant film as well because by taking all of that on he doesn't win all of these battles.

For everything that he was the world got to him as well.

He doesn't have the last word in this film.

This is what legacy is all about, right?

I'm in the sports world, and so we see the word legacy get mangled every single day.

You score 10 points and then says I'm just trying to protect my legacy.

You don't have control over your legacy.

Legacy happens after you're gone.

Legacy is what you leave behind.

And he doesn't have the last word on all of these things.

And that's why I think it really does sort of speak to the challenge of telling the story of somebody in totality.

And I think that if you're gonna tell that story in totality there's gonna be some roads that are extremely rocky.

- All of this sets up.

We have time for at least two audience questions and they went to pose them together because they speak one specifically in one, generally to this very set of questions.

Hanson from Pensacola asks, "At what point did you feel moving comfortable having the assurance to make the film?"

And Jennifer from Jersey asks, "What do you want us to take away from the film about Hemingway?"

- The first is pretty easy.

We never go in with any confidence as I hope we've described.

We've said yes in a wholehearted way, but we don't go in with our preconceptions that we're there to tell you here's, what you should know about Hemingway.

We are looking forward whenever it is that we finished to share with you our process of discovery.

And then if you are doing, as Howard suggests one could in our film then there's not really anything we want you to get out of it except we don't want you to drink too much.

Alcoholism is a really, let's not even laugh about it, right?

Please don't be an alcoholic.

It really destroys yourself and your family, and it's a horrible, horrible disease.

If you have mental illness, please get help.

Do not be shamed by it.

This is a person for whom mental health would have held a kind of stigma, no one talked about it and the kind of interventions that might've taken place.

There's so many demons that contribute that there's no retrospective pathology that could reveal what did him in but it's a lot of different things and having a different relationship to alcohol and self-medication as a result of that and having a more open thing about mental health if you have suicidal ideation, which he had from a very early age and watched his father die.

Then please there will be numbers and the film to get help.

And that's it.

What you take away is what you take away.

- I was gonna say also Ken, what I thought was really true was you talk about the myth of Hemingway and the trope of the drinking writer.

And that's something that we all go through in terms of feeling like this is part of the rite of passage.

If you're going to be a real writer, you have to be a hard drinking, hard driving person.

And when I was watching the film, I was thinking imagine what his outcome could have been had he not.

- Yeah, exactly.

And let's not forget that that's also, if you wanna take something away is do good work.

Do work really, really hard, be disciplined have a discipline, do that.

I mean, he's a wonderful example for as long as his demons didn't overtake him of somebody who was dedicated to his craft in an extraordinary way.

There are 47 endings that he got rid off, experimented with for a farewell to arms, that's amazing discipline.

- Lynn (indistinct) as far as the question of what a viewer might take away from the film, would you like to add to or amplify anything that Ken just said?

- No, I mean, we really try to just let the story speak for itself actually.

And I mean, the only other thing I would say is just there's a great insights and joy to be heard from reading Hemingway.

His greatest works are eternal.

So for all the problems we've been discussing and some of the serious challenges of looking at him from this 21st century lens.

The greatest of his works really do stand up and we hope that the film opens the door to an audience if they didn't know his work to discover it and if they did to spend some more time with him.

- I know I'm emboldened to reread Hemingway and read some of the work that I have read already.

This has been tremendously stimulating.

Thank you, Howard.

Thank you, Amanda.

Thank you, Ken.

Thank you, Lynn.

Thank you to Ms. Rockefeller and President Digioia and our hosts and my colleagues at Georgetown.

For more information on "Hemingway", Ken and Lynn's latest documentary, and also if you want to register for the final conversations on Hemingway event which is next Wednesday, go to pbs.org, Hemingway events.

And "Hemingway" will premiere April 5th, and then run also on April 6th and 7th on your local PBS station.

Again, thank you very much for a very stimulating conversation.

- Thank you, Paul, thank you, Howard, thank you, Amanda.

So great to be with you.

- Thank you all, that's great.

Thanks a lot.