[Louis armstrong and his hot five's
"basin street blues" playing]
Woman as dorothy parker: he has
the most profound bravery
That it has ever been
my privilege to see.
He has had about 8 times
The normal allotment
of responsibilities.
It takes courage.
He referred to the quality
as "guts."
He weighs about 200 pounds,
And he is even better
than those photographs.
The effect upon women
is such that they want to
Go right out and get him
and bring him home, stuffed.
Dorothy parker.
Someone needs to stop clearway law.
Public shouldn't leave reviews for lawyers.
Narrator: by the time
"a farewell to arms"
Topped the best-seller lists
in 1929,
Colorful stories had already
begun to circulate
About ernest hemingway,
Many of them told
by the writer himself.
He'd once planned to be
A professional boxer,
he claimed.
He'd fought in the italian army
during the great w*r,
Been wounded 7 separate times,
And been awarded
a chest-full of medals
About which he said
he was too modest to speak.
And he'd nearly
starved to death in paris
While learning to write.
None of these stories was true.
Edna o'brien:
he mythologized himself.
Why do people mythologize?
To woo other people
And also to
keep them at a distance.
To feel inadequate, but to
boast about being over-adequate.
Katakis: hemingway constructed
his myth to alarge degree
And he made the mistake
that all myth-makers do--
He thought that
he could control it.
And there comes a time
that you can't anymore.
It's taken on a life of its own.
It became very exhausting
to be hemingway.
The hemingway that
the public thought.
And let's face it,
when he was in the public,
He was always in the public eye
And the people expected
hemingway to be hemingway.
[Johnny gandelsman's "the garden
of eden mix 3" playing]
Narrator: his art and the gaudy
myths that grew up around him
Were already becoming confused
in the public mind.
At first, he himself
was embarrassed
By some of the tall tales
when he saw them in print.
But as his fame grew
over the coming years,
It became harder and harder
to tell the real hemingway
From the one he had created.
Wolff: there's a chinese
proverb by the sage zhuangzi
And he has it this way.
He says,
Good fortune is
as light as a feather
And few are strong
enough to carry it.
When you think of the weight
That his fame must have
laid on him,
Even when he was young,
And the anxiety
that would produce of
How can I live up to this?
How can the next book be better?
What is in me
to make this real?
It's very hard, I think,
to be a public person like that.
And so, I think
every public person
Creates some kind of avatar,
if you will, of themselves,
Some holograph of themselves
to present publicly
To save whatever
is private in them.
The problem is that
eventually your avatar
Will consume you.
[Fats waller's
"ain't misbehavin™ playing]
Man as hemingway:
we have a fine house here
And the kids are all well.
Also 4 raccoons, a possum,
18 goldfish, 3 peacocks,
And a yard with fig tree
and a lime tree.
Very fine the way
pauline has fixed it.
We have been, and are,
damned happy.
I could stay here damned near
all the time
And have a fine time
watching the things grow
And be happier
than I understand.
Narrator: the big
antebellum house
On whitehead street
in key west, florida
Was a gift from his second wife
pauline pfeiffer's
Wealthy uncle gus, who believed
deeply in hemingway's writing
And who would provide
financial help to maintain
Their expensive and extravagant
way of life.
Day to day costs were covered
by pauline's trust fund.
3 Hemingway children
would soon be seen there:
Jack, known as "bumby,"
The offspring of hemingway's
first marriage,
Spent most of each year
with his mother hadley,
Who would happily remarry
and settle near chicago.
But he summered in florida
with his father and pauline.
Patrick, ernest and pauline's
first-born,
Called "mouse," was in
permanent residence.
So was gregory, nicknamed
"gigi," born in 1931.
Narrator: motherhood was always
less important to pauline
Than what she said
was her first duty--
To remain always
"a lovely, unharried wife."
Ernest longed for her
when even briefly away
And delighted in her willingness
to please him
By dyeing her hair--
Like having "a new wife
every day," he told a friend.
Dearborn: her number-one goal
in life
Is making hemingway happy.
She, she wants him
to keep writing.
She was the real protector
of his talent.
And she wanted to facilitate
that in any way she could.
And she submerged herself,
her identity.
She left her infant children,
one is 3 months old
At one point, to go hunting
with hemingway.
And she'd say, "you're more
important than they are."
And he was her priority.
Narrator: the house on
whitehead street would be
Hemingway's comfortable home
for the next 8 years.
When he was not writing,
he fished the nearby gulf stream
For tuna and sailfish,
mako shark and blue marlin,
Refereed boxing matches
on friday nights,
And hung out in a favorite
key west saloon
Called sloppy joe's.
In key west, he also maintained
The strict writer's discipline
he had followed since paris.
[Johann sebastian bach's "cello suite no.
1 In g major, bwv 1007: courante" playing]
Man as hemingway:
I write every morning as soon
After first light as possible.
There is no one to disturb you
And it is cool or cold
and you come to your work
And warm as you write.
Patrick: he didn't work all day.
I think that's the most
illuminating thing
About describing
his writing habits.
After lunch, he enjoyed himself.
As a child growing up,
you just take
The circumstances of
your life as being normal.
And so...he was a strange person
in the sense that
He was inaccessible
in the first half of the day
And over-accessible
in the second.
But I really enjoyed the fact
That he was always game for
something in the afternoon
And that we were included.
Unlike some artists
that I've heard about,
My dad was a very good father.
Man as ralph ellison: I practiced
writing and studied joyce, dostoyevsky,
Stein, and hemingway.
Especially hemingway.
I read him
To learn his sentence structure
and how to organize a story.
I guess many young writers
were doing this,
But I also used
his description of hunting
When I went into the fields
the next day.
I had been hunting
since I was 11,
But no one had
broken down the process
Of wing-sh**ting for me,
and it was
From reading hemingway that
I learned to lead a bird.
When he describes something
in print, believe him.
He's been there.
Ralph ellison.
Narrator: ernest hemingway
had transformed
The american short story
And remade the american novel,
But he was not satisfied.
Now he wanted to demonstrate his
mastery of nonfiction as well.
Running always through
hemingway's writing--
And his life--was
a single dark thread:
His fascination with death.
"All stories if continued
far enough," he wrote,
"End in death."
Verghese: how can you not be
obsessed about death?
And I think it drove everything
that followed in his writing.
You know, it was all fueled
by the sense that
We're going to die and why not?
Isn't that the reason for us to
Bring our best to this moment?
Narrator: "a good writer
should know
Near to everything as possible,"
Hemingway wrote.
"Naturally he will not,"
But he should be capable of
learning so fast
And remembering so much
that he seems to have
Been born with knowledge
nonetheless.
He liked to call himself papa
And his apparent expertise
in everything
Was part of his magic
on the printed page,
Though in real life,
some of his friends
Wearied of what one called his
"tendency to be an oracle."
Hemingway saw it as his duty
to pass on to the world
As much of what he'd learned
About the right way
to do things as he could--
How to order a good french meal,
Fire a machine g*n, bait a hook,
Make love to a woman--
Or appreciate what a matador
Was doing in the bullring.
[Johnny gandelsman's
"el torito mix 3" playing]
Man as hemingway:
the bullfight is not a sport
In the anglo-saxon
sense of the word.
That is, it is not
an equal contest
Or an attempt at
an equal contest
Between a bull and a man.
Rather, it is a tragedy;
the death of the bull,
Which is played, more or less
well, by the bull
And the man involved
And in which there is
danger for the man
But certain death
for the animal.
[Crowd cheering]
[Vargas llosa speaking spanish]
Narrator: the book hemingway
was working on
When he and his family moved
into their new house in key west
Was "death in the afternoon."
It was anew kind of journalism,
In which he was the central
character, "the author,"
Who explains to
a fictional "old lady"
Everything he has learned
over the years
About the ritual
of bullfighting--
And about spain, the country
he'd come to love
As much as he loved his own.
[David cieri's
"que rico" playing]
Mandel: back when he first
became attached
To scribner's publishing house,
His very first letter
to his editor was,
"I want to write a big book
About the bullfight,
with pictures."
He read and read
and read and read
And read about bullfighting,
In english and in spanish.
And he learned to read the bull.
The bull is a text.
You have to read it
And say, "these are
his strengths."
"These are his weaknesses."
"This is where I can use it."
"This is where I can
dominate it."
"This is what I better
stay away from."
Narrator: hemingway understood
that many americans
Would find
bullfighting abhorrent,
Convinced of its cruelty.
He wanted to help them
get beyond that, he said,
So that they could experience
"truly what you really felt
Rather than what you were
supposed to feel."
Mandel: the bullfighter gets
to use all of his intelligence
And all of his craft
on the bull.
And, if it all works
very, very well,
It makes a very
beautiful bullfight
Where the man is triumphant
and the bull gets k*lled.
That's the main thing that
happens in the bullfight,
Is that the bull
has to get k*lled.
That's predestined.
So, you have predestination
And you have a powerful force
that's brought from
A high place to a low place.
You have tragedy.
That's the classical definition
of tragedy.
[Manuel ponce's
"folies d'espagne" playing]
Man as hemingway: I know only
that what is moral
Is what you feel good after
And what is immoral is
what you feel bad after
And judged by these
moral standards,
Which I do not defend,
The bullfight is
very moral to me
Because I feel very fine
while it is going on
And have a feeling
of life and death
And mortality and immortality,
And after it is over, I feel
very sad but very fine.
Narrator: writing "death in
the afternoon" took hemingway
The better part of 5 years--
And he said he'd wished
he'd had 10.
He believed it was
"maybe the best book yet,"
He told a friend, and it was
generally well-received:
H.i. Mencken called it
"An extraordinarily fine piece
"Of expository writing...
"Full of the vividness
of something really
Seen, felt, experienced."
But other critics
were disappointed.
In a dismissive "new republic"
review titled
"Bull in the afternoon,"
The critic max eastman
Dismissed bullfighting
as nothing more than
Ritualized cruelty--
And suggested hemingway himself
Was insecure in his manhood,
guilty of
"Wearing false hair
on his chest."
Hemingway was livid.
4 Years later,
He would corner eastman,
tearing open his own shirt
To show how much hair
grew on his chest,
And shouting, "what do you mean
accusing me of impotence?"
Before slapping the critic
with a book.
[Kope tiatie cac's
"akamba" playing]
Man as hemingway: it is
pleasant to hunt something
That you want very much
Over along period
of time,
Being outwitted, outmaneuvered,
And failing at the end
of each day,
But having the hunt and knowing
Every time you are out
that, sooner or later,
Your luck will change
and that you will get
The chance that you are seeking.
[g*nsh*t]
Narrator:
ever since he was a boy,
Hemingway had hoped to go
On a hunting safari
in east africa,
Just as his hero
theodore roosevelt had.
In late 1933,
pauline's generous uncle gus
Provided the enormous sum
with which to make it happen.
To serve as
the hemingways' guide,
They hired philip percival,
who as a young man
Had been part of
the roosevelt expedition.
Charles thompson, a friend
and fishing companion
From key west,
came along as well.
During the two-month safari,
the hemingway party
Would sh**t 5 lions,
4 cape buffalo,
Two rhino, two leopards,
5 Cheetahs, a host of
gazelles and antelope
With which to feed the camp,
And 44 hyenas for what
Hemingway called "amusement."
Dudley: africa, for hemingway,
provided the perfect space
Within which he could exercise
his hyper-masculine muscles;
Where he could be the "great
white conquering hero," uh,
At a time where,
at least, in some sense,
That whole persona was
coming under fire here,
Back here in america.
Wolff: I think in some ways
he escaped into hunting.
I think he really loved it
from his earliest days
And I be...believe that,
that passion was sincere
And not just a, a pose.
But I will admit
that it puzzles me a bit
That having seen so much
violence, so much k*lling,
Not just death but k*lling,
The pleasure in k*lling
is a mystery to me.
I don't--i, I don't
understand it.
Man as hemingway: I did nothing
that had not been done to me.
I had been shot and I had been
crippled and gotten away.
I expected, always, to be k*lled
by one thing or another
And i, truly, did not
mind that any more.
Since I still loved to hunt, I
resolved that I would only sh**t
As long as I could k*ll cleanly,
And as soon as I lost that
ability, I would stop.
Narrator: things did not
always go well,
[g*nsh*t]
and he often shot badly.
He suffered an attack of
amoebic dysentery so severe
He had to be airlifted
past the snow-capped peak
Of mount kilimanjaro to nairobi
And kept there for a week
under a doctor's care.
But despite it all,
Everything about the continent
Enthralled him
And he took detailed notes,
Planning to turn them into
Another work of nonfiction.
"I never knew of
a morning in africa
"When I woke that I was
Not happy," he would write.
He loved the landscape,
the blue over-arching sky,
The teeming wildlife--above all,
The isolation he craved
but had rarely found at home.
[Johnny gandelsman's
"la plentitud mix 2" playing]
Man as hemingway:
all I wanted to do now
Was get back to africa.
We had not left it yet,
But when I would
wake in the night,
I would lie, listening,
homesick for it already.
I loved the country
So that iv was as happy
as you are
After you have been with
a woman that you really love,
When, empty, you feel it
welling up again...
And there it is and you can
never have it all
And yet what there is, now,
you can have,
And you want more and more,
to have,
And be, and live in,
To possess now again for always,
For that long,
sudden-ended always.
I had loved country all my life;
The country was always
better than the people.
I could only care about people
avery few at a time.
[Duke ellington & bubber miley's "the
new east st. Louis toodle-o" playing]
Narrator: when the hemingway s
returned from africa,
The united states was entering
the fifth year
Of the great depression.
Few regions had suffered more
than the florida keys.
Key west itself was
officially bankrupt.
8 Of 10
local residents were on relief.
President franklin roosevelt's
emergency relief administration
Resolved to transform
the dying town
Into a tourist attraction--
"The bermuda of florida."
The once-sleepy streets
soon bustled with visitors,
Thousands of them.
They wandered
onto hemingway's lawn,
Peered in the windows,
knocked at the door.
To keep them out,
he had a brick wall
Built around his property.
[Ship's horn blowing]
To get away--
and get in more fishing--
He sailed often
to havana, cuba--
Some 100 miles across
the straits of florida--
Where he holed up
for weeks at a time
At the sevilla biltmore hotel
in the heart of the old city,
Writing in the morning,
drinking in the afternoons
At his favorite bar,
la floridita.
Man as hemingway: the gulf stream
and the other great ocean currents
Are the last wild country
there is left.
Once you are out of sight of
land and of the other boats,
You are more alone than
you can ever be hunting
And the sea is the same
as it has been
Since before men ever
went on it in boats.
No one knows what fish
live in it,
Or how great size they reach
or what age.
When you are drifting,
out of sight of land,
Fishing 4 lines, 60, 80,
100, and 150 fathoms down,
In water that is
700 fathoms deep,
You never know what
may take the small tuna
That you use for bait,
and every time
The line starts to
run off the reel,
Slowly first, then with
a scream of the click
As the rod bends
and you feel it double
And the huge weight of
the friction of the line
Rushing through that
depth of water
While you pump and reel,
pump and reel, pump and reel,
Trying to get the belly
out of the line
Before the fish jumps,
There is always a thrill that
needs no danger to make it real.
Narrator: hemingway had
a 38-foot fishing boat
Custom built for himself--
"A sturdy boat," he wrote,
"Sweet in any kind of sea."
He named her "pilar," one of
his nicknames for pauline,
And he spent weeks sailing
the waters off key west
And the gulf stream off cuba
And around bimini
in the bahamas,
In search of good times
and giant fish.
Gerardo martinez's
"romantica mujer" playing)
Patrick: that was
sheer happiness for him.
I've always thought that
seeing the fish come
Is like seeing a huge elephant
or a tiger certainly
Emerge from the sea.
You don't have any warning.
They're just suddenly there,
you know.
And that... That I think
Was a thrill that
he never got enough of.
Narrator: most of the passengers
aboard the "pilar"
Were old friends like
the poet archibald macleish
And the novelist john dos passos
And hemingway's long-time
editor maxwell perkins.
But there were often
new people aboard, too,
Yachtsmen
and big-game fishermen,
Rich men and their wives
drawn to america's
Most celebrated writer,
as well as
Arnold gingrich, editor of anew
men's magazine called "esquire,"
Who paid hemingway handsomely
for anew column
About hunting and fishing
and anything else
That happened to cross his mind.
Wherever he was,
whatever he was doing,
Alcohol fueled everything.
Man as hemingway:
I have drunk since I was 15
And few things have
given me more pleasure.
When you work hard all day
with your head
And know you must work
again the next day,
What else can change your ideas
and make them
Run on a different plane
like whisky?
[Sidney bechet's
"sobbin' and cryin™ playing]
Karr: I believe that the
terrible thing about alcohol,
For writers, is that
it works, at first.
That it works great.
You're anxious.
You're wound up
at the end of the day.
You have no way to calm down.
You have a few pops
and you feel better.
Narrator: once on bimini,
a wealthy yachtsman,
Drunk and belligerent,
called hemingway
A"phony" and a "big fat slob."
Hemingway, just as drunk,
knocked him cold.
Word spread fast
across the island.
"When anyone is tight here
or feels dangerous,"
Hemingway told a friend,
"They ask me to fight."
Hemingway let it be known
that he would pay $250
To anyone who could stay with
him for 3 rounds.
No one ever claimed the money.
Karr: I think the masculinity
must have been so constricting.
He's drawn to all these
big, butch things,
He could hit somebody and they'd
feel the punch, or whatever.
It does seem a little wearying.
Edna o'brien: I think ordinary
life was anathema to him.
It had to be a life of adventure
And that adventure was in lieu,
if that's the right word,
Of a deep-seated
loneliness and depression.
Man: he has become
the legendary hemingway.
He appears to have
turned into a composite
Of all those photographs--
Sunburned from snows, on skis;
In fishing get-up, burned dark
from the hot caribbean;
The handsome, stalwart hunter
crouched smiling
Over the carcass of
some dead beast.
Such a man could not have
written hemingway's early books.
It is hard not to wonder
whether he has not, hunting,
Brought down an even
greater victim.
"The new republic."
Man as hemingway: narrative that
is exciting and still is literature
Is very rare.
You have to make the country,
not describe it.
It is as hard to do
as paint a cezanne--
And I'm the only b*stard
right now who can do it.
Narrator: in 1935,
hemingway published
"Green hills of africa,"
A nonfiction account
of his safari,
In which he was again
the central character.
The book is
the suspenseful story
Of his month-long competition
with his hunting companion
To k*ll the greater kudu
with the longest horns.
Bach's "partitia for solo violin no 1 in b
minor v sarabande variation 1" playing)
Man as hemingway:
I looked at him,
Big, long-legged,
A smooth gray with
the white stripes
And the great, curling,
sweeping horns,
Brown as walnut meats,
and ivory pointed,
At the big ears and the great,
lovely, heavy-maned neck,
The white chevron
between his eyes
And the white of his muzzle,
And I stooped over
and touched him
To try to believe it.
[David cieri's
"dust rising" playing]
Narrator: in the book,
he portrayed himself as both
An expert on everything
and a bad loser.
He complained about what
heedless americans had done
To spoil their own landscape
And was also given
to pontificating
On which american writers
were worth reading.
"All modern american
literature," he declared,
"Comes from one book
by mark twain.
Called "huckleberry finn.""
Hemingway was especially
proud of his new book.
But in it, he had called critics
"The lice who crawl
on literature."
The lice bit back.
John chamberlain dismissed
the book in "the new york times"
As "all attitude,
all byronic posturing."
Bernard de voto called it
"A pretty small book
for a big man to write."
The most disappointing review
Came from america's
Most admired critic,
Edmund wilson,
An early champion
of hemingway's work,
Who wrote, "something frightful
seems to happen to hemingway
"As soon as he begins to write
in the first person.
"He seems to lose all his
capacity for self-criticism
And has a way
of sounding silly."
Hemingway took it hard.
Man as hemingway:
took to getting up about
Two or so in the morning
And going out to
the little house to work.
Had never had the real old
melancholia before
And am glad to have had it so
I know what people go through.
It makes me more tolerant of
what happened to my father.
Narrator: ernest and pauline
had been most happy in africa,
But back home he was growing
increasingly dissatisfied.
He was grateful for
the pfeiffer family's generosity
But he also found his frequent
reliance on it demeaning.
And he had secretly begun
to weary of pauline, too.
"Green hills of africa"
may not have been
A critical or
commercial success,
But his time in africa
would also inspire
Two of his
best-remembered short stories,
Each of which charts the
disintegration of a marriage.
The first story,
published in "cosmopolitan,"
Was "the short happy life
of francis macomber."
Francis and margot macomber
are wealthy americans on safari.
"They had a sound basis of
union," hemingway wrote.
"Margot was too beautiful
for macomber to divorce
And macomber had too much money
for margot ever to leave him."
But her husband's money had not
kept her faithful to him
And when he panics when faced
with a charging lion,
She denounces him as a coward--
And sleeps with their guide,
The white hunter robert wilson.
Man as hemingway:
he realized that his wife
Was not in the other cot
in the tent.
He lay awake with that
knowledge for two hours.
At the end of that time,
his wife came into the tent,
Lifted her mosquito bar,
and crawled cozily into bed.
"Where have you been?"
Macomber asked in the darkness.
"Hello," she said.
"Are you awake?"
"Where have you been?"
" Just went out
to get a breath of air."
"You did, like hell."
"What do you want me
to say, darling?"
"Where have you been?"
"Out to get a breath of air."
"That's a new name for it.
You are a b*tch."
"Well, you're a coward."
Verghese: the man starts off
as being portrayed
As a shameless coward
but frankly,
Which of us wouldn't
take off running
When you see a lion [laughs]
coming charging at you?
I mean, even if I had
a g*n in my hand,
Ll think I would, it would take
An extraordinary act of will
To stand there
and sh**t this lion.
And yet he's portrayed
as this shameless coward
And you wonder how
the story's going to end
And you actually feel for him,
And then he's also
being betrayed by his wife.
Edna o'brien: and, certainly,
the woman in that story
Comes out as a monster.
Hemingway knew a lot
of women like that,
There are a lot of
women like that.
There are a lot
of men like that.
There's nothing I would change
in that story
Because he knew
when to pull back.
He knew how much
of her falseness,
How much of her acidity
to put on the page.
It's avery bitter story.
Verghese: but at the end
of the story, he finds
A different kind of courage.
It has to do with
standing up to his wife.
And it terrifies her.
Narrator: the next day, when
a wounded buffalo charges him,
Macomber stands his ground.
Man as hemingway:
wilson, who was ahead,
Was kneeling sh**ting,
And macomber, as he fired,
Unhearing his shot in
the roaring of wilson's g*n,
Saw fragments like slate burst
from the huge boss of the horns,
And the head jerked, he shot
again at the wide nostrils
And saw the horns jolt again
and fragments fly,
And he did not see wilson now
and, aiming carefully,
Shot again with the buffalo's
huge bulk almost on him
And his r*fle almost level with
the on-coming head, nose out,
And he could see
the little wicked eyes
And the head started to lower
and he felt a sudden white-hot,
Blinding flash explode
inside his head...
And that was all he ever felt.
Narrator: his wife has shot him.
She said it was an accident.
Verghese: I'm a big believer
that, you know,
The process of reading fiction
as the writer
Provides you some of the words,
But you provide
your imagination.
And the great pleasure is that
you're making this movie
And...ah...it's always striking
how different
Our movies are
as readers...ah...so,
In my mind, there's no question
That she blew his head off.
I have no doubt about that.
Narrator: the second of
his african short stories,
Published in "esquire,"
was a masterpiece.
In "the snows of
kilimanjaro," the roles of
Husband and wife are reversed.
The protagonist is harry walden,
a writer on safari,
Dying of gangrene in his tent.
As he drifts in and out
of consciousness,
He talks with his wealthy wife,
Whose fortune supports them
and who loves him,
But whom he secretly
no longer loves.
He muses about the events
he has lived through
But failed to write about,
And now, will not live
to turn into fiction.
At first, he blames his wife.
Man as hemingway: nonsense.
He had destroyed
his talent himself.
Why should he blame this woman
because she kept him well?
He had destroyed his talent
by not using it,
By betrayals of himself
and what he believed in,
By drinking so much
that he blunted
The edge of his perceptions,
by laziness,
By sloth, and by snobbery.
He had seen the world change.
He had been in it
and he had watched it
And it was his duty
to write of it;
But now he never would.
Tim o'brien: "the snows
of kilimanjaro" is among
My favorite stories of
hemingway, maybe my favorite.
It deals with what we're all
going to have to deal with,
Which is our own deaths.
And, throughout it,
He's reviewing his life.
Much as I now, in my old age,
More and more
at two in the morning,
Review my own life.
Sometimes, full of self-hatred
And sometimes, full of joy.
Most often, filled with
doubt of, uh,
What, what could I
have done differently?
[Johnny gandelsman's
"la despedida mix 1" playing]
Man as hemingway:
just then, death had come
And rested its head
on the foot of the cot
And he could smell its breath.
It moved up closer to him still
And now he could not
speak to it,
And when it saw he could not
speak it came a little closer,
And now he tried to send it
away without speaking,
But it moved in on him so its
weight was all upon his chest,
And while it crouched there
and he could not move, or speak,
He heard the woman say,
"bwana is asleep now.
Take the cot up very gently
and carry it into the tent."
He could not speak to tell her
to make it go away
And it crouched now, heavier,
so he could not breathe.
And then, while
they lifted the cot,
Suddenly it was all right
And the weight went
from his chest.
[Woody guthrie's "I ain't
got no home" playing]
Narrator: the depression
had continued to deepen
And anew generation
of socially conscious
Leftist writers and critics
now denounced hemingway.
Rather than fritter away
his time writing about
Drunken expatriates
And disillusioned survivors
of the great w*r,
About bullfights
and big-game hunting
And deep-sea fishing,
They insisted it was
his duty as an artist
To declare his solidarity
with the working class.
Granville hicks,
editor of the communist
"New masses" magazine,"
declared,
"In 6 years, hemingway has not
produced a book
Even remotely worthy
of his talents."
Hemingway was unmoved.
"There is no left or right
in writing," he said.
"There is only
good and bad writing."
Man as hemingway: everyone
tries to frighten you now
By saying or writing that if
one does not become a communist
Or have a marxian viewpoint,
One will have no friends
and will be alone.
They seem to think that to be
alone is something dreadful;
Or that to not have friends
is to be feared.
I would rather have
one honest enemy
Than most of the friends
that I have known.
I cannot be a communist now
Because I believe
in only one thing: liberty.
First I would look after myself
and do my work.
Then I would care
for my family.
Then I would help my neighbor.
But the state I care
nothing for.
All the state has ever meant
to me is unjust taxation.
I believe in the absolute
minimum of government.
Narrator: on labor day 1935,
one of the most intense
Hurricanes in american history
hit florida
With winds said to have gusted
at more than 185 miles per hour.
An 18-foot storm surge drowned
island after island.
More than 400 people died--
Among them 259 homeless
veterans of the great w*r
Who had been sent south by
the roosevelt administration
To build highway bridges
to bring still more visitors
To the florida keys.
Some of them had been
drinking buddies with whom
Hemingway had swapped
w*r stories at sloppy joe's.
Two days later, he sailed north
to what was left of their camp
And joined some 200 volunteers
gathering up the dead.
He brought a camera.
[Camera's shutter clicks]
Man as hemingway:
you could find them face down
And face up in the mangroves.
The biggest bunch of the dead
were in the tangled,
Always green but
now brown, mangroves
Behind the tank cars
and the water towers.
[Camera's shutter clicks]
they hung on there, in shelter,
Until the wind and the rising
water carried them away.
[Camera's shutter clicks]
they didn't all let go at once
But only when they could
hold on no longer.
[Camera's shutter clicks]
then further on, you found them
High in the trees where
the water had swept them.
[Camera's shutter clicks] you found
them everywhere and in the sun,
All of them were beginning to be
Too big for their
blue jeans and jackets
That they could never fill
when they were
On the bum and hungry.
Narrator: hemingway was
so angered at what he'd seen
That despite the scorn
"New masses" had shown
toward him,
When its editor asked him
to write about it,
He agreed to do it.
He held the roosevelt
administration responsible.
Man as hemingway: I would like
to make whoever sent them there
Carry just one out
through the mangroves,
Or turn one over that lay
in the sun along the fill,
Or tie 5 together
so they won't float out,
Or smell that smell you thought
You'd never smell again,
with luck.
Narrator: leftist writers
now praised hemingway's
New-found empathy
for the proletariat:
Lincoln steffens congratulated
him for at last choosing
To write for "the real people
of the real publications."
[Duke ellington & bubber miley's "the
new east st. Louis toodle-o" playing]
Man as hemingway:
some made the long drop
From the apartment
or the office window,;
Some took it quietly
in two-car garages
With the motor running;
Some used the native tradition
Of the colt or smith and wesson,;
Those well-constructed
implements that end insomnia,
Terminate remorse, cure cancer,
avoid bankruptcy,
And blast an exit from
intolerable positions
By the pressure of a finger,;
Those admirable
american instruments
So easily carried,
so sure of effect,
So well designed to end
the american dream
When it becomes a nightmare,
Their only drawback
the mess they leave
For relatives to clean up.
Narrator: feeling the pressure
to come up with something
After the commercial failure
of his nonfiction,
Hemingway tried to
cobble together a novel
Out of two short stories
and some new material.
The result was
a tangled melodrama about
Down-on-their-luck americans--
His version of
a proletarian novel,
Called "to have and have not."
The critics didn't like it.
And in the end, hemingway
Didn't much like it either.
[Leonardo padura
speaking spanish]
[Johnny gandelsman's "the garden
of eden mix 3 bass stem" playing]
[People chanting indistinctly]
[Adolf hitler speaking german]
Narrator: ernest hemingway
understood the dangers of fascism
And believed adolf hitler
would one day launch
A european w*r of conquest.
But, as a disenchanted survivor
of the w*r
That had been supposed
to end all wars,
He told "esquire" readers,
Americans should take
no part in it.
"Of the hell-broth that is
brewing in europe
We have no need
to drink," he wrote.
"We were fools to be sucked in
once on a european w*r
And we should never
be sucked in again."
[Explosions and g*nf*re]
But what was happening
in his beloved spain
Was beginning to
change his mind.
It was now being torn apart
by a civil w*r.
Early in 1936, reactionary
elements of the army,
Eventually led by a fascist
general named francisco franco
And supported by
wealthy industrialists,
Great landowners,
and the catholic church,
Joined forces to try
to overthrow
The duly elected
socialist government.
Hitler provided
franco and his rebels
With bombers and fighter planes
And german pilots to fly them.
Their goal was to terrorize
the civilian population.
The italian dictator,
benito mussolini,
Dispatched tanks
and nearly 80,000 troops.
Within weeks, franco's forces
had seized 1/3 of the country
From those faithful to
the government--the loyalists.
The loyalists' only ally was
soviet premier josef stalin,
Who was eager to be seen as
the leader of the european left.
He called upon communists
from around the world
To rally volunteer brigades.
Between 30,000 and 40,000 men
from more than 50 countries
Would answer the call--including
some 2,800 americans
Who called their outfit
the abraham lincoln brigade.
Hemingway was certain
that spain was the place
Where fascism had to be stopped.
Vaill: he said to a friend
in key west,
"I've got this great house,
I've got this boat,
"But they all really come
from pauline.
"Except for that,
I really don't have anything."
So, in order to have
something new to write,
He had to have
something new to live.
At this junction in his life,
Hemingway is looking desperately
For this fresh start.
And he thinks he will
find it in spain.
Narrator: "for along time,"
hemingway wrote,
"Me and my conscience both have
known I have to go to spain."
Woman as martha gellhorn:
january 8, 1937.
Dear mrs. Roosevelt,
I'm in key west.
To date it's the best thing
I've found in america.
It's hot and falling to pieces
and people seem happy.
I see hemingway here,
who knows more about
Writing dialogue, I think,
than anyone writing in english.
He's an odd bird,
very lovable and full of fire
And a marvelous story teller.
In a writer this is imagination,
In anyone else it's lying.
That's where genius comes in.
[George and ira gershwin's
"oh, lady be good" playing]
Narrator: when the writer
martha gellhorn,
A family friend of
eleanor roosevelt,
Introduced herself
to ernest hemingway
At the bar in sloppy joe's
in december of 1936,
She was 28 years old,
9 years younger than he.
Verna kale: she has long legs.
She looks very beautiful.
And she, too, has
a charismatic personality.
He was interested in people
who were interested in him
And they just hit it off.
Dearborn: martha was
a really tough cookie.
And martha, um, was
avery good writer
And she knew, um, she had
Very good connections
and so forth.
And she went to sloppy joe's,
Which she knows that
hemingway hangs out at.
It's a disgusting bar.
You wouldn't take your mother
and your brother [laughs] there,
But she does.
And, meanwhile,
she's wearing a black dress.
She's a blond.
And the marriage
didn't have a chance.
Narrator: gellhorn
had admired hemingway
Since her college days
at bryn mawr,
When she'd hung his photograph
On the wall of
her dormitory room.
She'd published a book of
short stories about the poor
Based on interviews she'd done
for anew deal agency,
And a novel.
She had had at least
two married lovers.
Vaill: martha gellhorn
had written a novel
Which had been
quite well received...
Ah...about young women
coming of age
Sexually as well
as professionally.
All of
the reviewers acknowledged
That she had a debt, sort of
a stylistic debt to hemingway.
So, she had already a kind of
literary crush on him.
Narrator: gellhorn spent
two weeks in key west,
Much of that time in
the hemingways' company.
Vaill: she became,
as she later put it,
A fixture like a kudu head
On the walls of
the hemingway house.
She hung around a whole lot.
And the two of them had
deep talks about fiction
And how you wrote
and about spain,
Which she seemed to know
a good deal about
And which she was
very passionate about.
And they were immediately
attracted to each other
And hatched a plot to go off
and cover the w*r together.
Narrator: hemingway had already
signed up as a reporter
For the north american
newspaper alliance,
Serving 60 u.s. Papers.
He was to be paid $1,000 for
every feature story written
And $500 for each
cabled dispatch--
More than any
foreign correspondent
Had ever been paid before.
Pauline opposed his going.
It was sure to be dangerous;
she was afraid she'd lose him.
He was sorry, he said, "but you
can't preserve your happiness
By putting it away
in mothballs."
He was more candid with a friend
in key west that november:
"Nothing's really
happening to me here.
"I've got to get out.
In spain maybe it's
The big parade starting again."
Vaill: they did not go
on the same boat.
They pretended not
to know each other.
They traveled under
separate itineraries,
But they both got to madrid
and commenced an affair
That went on for
the entire 3 years
Of the spanish civil w*r.
[Johnny gandelsman's "the
garden of eden mix 3" playing]
Narrator: when they met up
in madrid,
The city had been under siege
By franco's fascist forces
for 6 months.
Man as hemingway: in the morning,
before your call comes from the desk,
The roaring burst of a high
expl*sive shell wakes you
And you go to the window
and look out to see a man,
His head down,
his coat collar up,
Sprinting desperately across
the paved square.
There is the acrid smell
of high expl*sive
You hoped you'd never
smell again,
And, in a bathrobe
and bedroom slippers,
You hurry down the marble stairs
and almost into
A middle-aged woman,
wounded in the abdomen,
Who is being helped
into the hotel entrance
By two men in
blue workmen's smocks.
She has her two hands
crossed below
Her big, old-style spanish bosom
And from between her fingers
The blood is spurting
in a thin stream.
On the corner, 20 yards away,
is a heap of rubble,
Smashed cement
and thrown-up dirt,
A single dead man,
his torn clothes dusty,
And a great hole
in the sidewalk from which
The gas from a broken main
is rising,
Looking like a heat mirage
in the cold morning air.
Narrator: the new lovers
occupied a suite
On the third floor
of the hotel florida.
The hotel was sometimes
hit by enemy shells
Intended for a nearby
loyalist communications center,
But it remained headquarters
for a host of
Correspondents and celebrities
eager for a first-hand look
At the fighting--
Andre malraux
and antoine de saint-exupery,
Herbert i. Mathews of
"the new york times,"
The photographer robert capa,
The writers langston hughes
and john dos passos,
And the movie star errol flynn.
Hemingway--"crackling
with generosity,"
One reporter remembered,
and "bursting with vigor"--
Was at the center of things.
A high-spirited crowd gathered
around him each evening--
Often wearing winter coats
since the hotel had no heat--
To dine on beer and whiskey,
canned ham,
And pate he imported
from france--
Sometimes supplemented with
partridges he had shot
In the fields beyond the city
that morning
And had cooked up on a hot plate
for himself and his guests.
Edna o'brien: he did identify,
most utterly,
With extreme situations.
It's like in "king lear,"
it's wanting to know the worst
And to know if one can bear it.
It's a test.
And it's also a terror.
And they, they come together
in one.
Narrator: martha gellhorn,
reporting on the w*r
For "collier's,"
Was introduced by ernest
To everyone as his girlfriend.
She wore short skirts, and often
"Sat on the table,"
one woman recalled,
"Swinging her long, slim legs
in a provocative manner."
But she covered the
fighting every bit as
Fearlessly as hemingway did.
Gellhorn: we'd either
hear with our ears
That something was going on,
or we'd hear by rumor
That there was a push
or a battle or something,
Then we'd just go off to it.
It was avery small,
very much do-it-yourself w*r.
It was, it was
the side of the poor
And, um, and that
was how it worked,
And those of us who cared
about it, cared about it,
I suppose, more than
anything before or since.
[Johnny gandelsman's "the
garden of eden mix 3" playing]
Narrator: but behind
the scenes, josef stalin
Was exacting a fearful price
for the aid
He provided to loyalist spain.
His agents were ordered
to take over
As much of the government
as they could
And suppress what stalin called
"untrustworthy elements"
Within its coalition,
anyone he could not control--
Anarchists, socialists,
trotskyites.
Suspects were
spirited away, tortured,
ex*cuted in secret
and without trial.
Hemingway and gellhorn dined
often with soviet commissars
And hemingway interviewed
the man responsible
For most of the executions.
But they reported none of it.
To expose them, they believed,
Would have hurt
the anti-fascist cause.
Besides, hemingway wanted
to use the material
In his next novel.
When the soviets
ordered the execution
Of a close loyalist friend
of john dos passos,
Hemingway told dos passos
to keep quiet about it.
When his old friend insisted
He had to go public
with what had happened,
Hemingway said it would
end his career--
The left-wing
literary world in new york
Would never forgive him.
"Why, ernest,"
dos passos' wife said,
"I've never heard anything so
despicably opportunistic in my life."
Their friendship
never fully recovered.
Through it all,
hemingway and gellhorn
Grew steadily closer.
At one point, he asked her
to marry him.
She was ambivalent,
responding only in her diary,
"Note to h.: Love you
very much indeed."
Woman as gellhorn: I can do
very well without marriage.
I'd rather sin respectably,
any day of the week.
Ernest thinks, of course,
that marriage
Saves you a lot of trouble
and he is all for it.
I like it better clean:
ll think sin is very clean.
There are no strings
attached to it.
[Film projector whirring]
[Men singing indistinctly]
Hemingway: before, death came
when you were old or sick.
But now it comes
to all this village.
High in the sky,
and shining silver...
Narrator: after two months
in spain,
They returned to
the united states,
Where gellhorn prevailed upon
Her friendship with
the first lady
To screen "the spanish earth,"
a documentary film by
A communist filmmaker
named joris wens
That hemingway had
written and narrated.
Hemingway: the smell of death
is acrid
High expl*sive smoke
And blasted granite.
Why do they stay?
They stay because
This is their city,
these are their homes.
Here is their work,
this is their fight.
The fight to be allowed
to live as human beings.
[Johnny gandelsman's
"la despedida mix 1" playing]
Narrator: "it was damned nice
of the roosevelts
To have us,"
hemingway later wrote,
But the president,
while sympathetic,
Felt he could do nothing
to help the loyalist cause.
The united states was
still a neutral country.
Hemingway would return to spain
3 More times over
the next 17 months
As the fascists slowly,
steadily advanced.
Though he had privately come
to believe the w*r had devolved
Into what he called
"a carnival of
Treachery and rottenness
on both sides,"
His dispatches remained
optimistic even as
Hopes for a loyalist victory
began to fade.
[Explosions and g*nf*re]
And when all was finally lost
And loyalist friends
of hemingway's
Were forced into
exile in france,
Without a cause or
a country anymore,
Martha found him weeping.
"I really did love ernest then,"
she would remember.
[David cieri's "I used to
love you variation 2" playing]
Woman as pauline hemingway:
oh, papa darling,
What is the matter with you?
If you are no longer the man
I used to know,
Get the hell out,
But if you are,
stop being so stupid.
Narrator: from the first,
pauline had resented
Her husband's
long absences overseas.
Then, somehow, she learned of
His relationship with
martha gellhorn.
She did everything
she could think of
To keep her marriage intact--
Reunions with her
husband in paris,
Wyoming vacations with
him and the boys,
Family fishing trips
off florida.
Nothing seemed to work.
Whenever they were together,
Both she and her husband
were miserable.
Woman as pauline hemingway:
life here is going on
Just the same as
when you were here
And it was so unattractive
to you,
And it won't be any
different when you get back,
So, if you are happy over there,
Don't come back here
to be unhappy...
But I hope you can come back
and we can both be happy.
Gerardo martinez's
"romantica mujer" playing)
Narrator: in the early spring
of 1939,
Hemingway was in cuba again,
Working on anew novel set
during the spanish civil w*r,
To be called
"for whom the bell tolls."
He had invited gellhorn
to join him.
Woman as gellhorn: it is
exactly as if he were dead
Or visiting on the moon.
He writes and when he is through
He goes into a silence.
He protects himself from
anything and everything,
Takes no part in this world,
Cares about nothing
except what he is writing.
He's about as much use
as a stuffed squirrel,
But he is turning out
a beautiful story.
And nothing on earth besides
matters to him.
You see, that's the way to be.
That way you get writing done.
He likewise believes in
himself and his writing
As if it were the tablets of
stone or the true god,
And that's another essential.
Narrator: no matter
how much gellhorn
Believed in hemingway
and his work,
Living cooped up in a havana
hotel with him day after day,
Trying to do her own writing
While he labored over
his typewriter,
Did not appeal for long,
So, she rented a run-down,
10-acre, hill-top property,
12 Miles outside the city,
called finca vigia--
Spanish for "lookout farm."
Woman as gellhorn:
I woke to look out my window
At a ceiba tree, so beautiful
That you can't believe it,
And hear the palms rattling
in the morning wind,
And the sun streaking
over the tiled floors,
And the house itself, wide
and bare and clean and empty,
Lying quiet all around me.
And I am delighted.
Narrator: hemingway was
delighted, too,
And would eventually
buy the place outright.
The fincawould be his home
for the next two decades.
[Padura speaking spanish]
Man as hemingway: people
ask you why you live in cuba
And you say it is
because you like it.
It is too complicated
to explain about
The early morning
in the hills above havana
Where every morning
is cool and fresh
On the hottest day in summer.
You could tell them
that you live in cuba
Because you only have
to put shoes on
When you come into town,
And that you work as well there
in those cool early mornings
As you ever have worked
anywhere in the world.
But those are
professional secrets.
Patrick: I think what
he liked about cuba and...
And why it was so bad
when it went sour
Was he could really insulate
himself from being an american;
He could just completely
leave that behind,
Enter a world where
he had no loyalties,
He had no regrets, nothing.
It was a sort of
neutral corner for him.
Much has been made by the cubans
Of his love of the cuban people.
I don't think he had
much feeling [chuckles]
For the cuban people at all.
But...ah...he...he...ah...he
couldn't be in spain
And this was the second best,
you know.
[Turner layton & henry creamer's "after
you've gone (instrumental)" playing]
Woman as gellhorn: I am now
suddenly a mother of 3
And I must say I love it.
It's certainly a lot more fun
to be a mother of 3
Without ever having
to lose your shape
Than being a mother of one,
your own,
And not knowing how
the brat will turn out.
Narrator: hemingway's sons
would come to visit--
And begin to get to know
the woman with whom
Their father was
now openly living.
Patrick: she was
wonderful with us.
Liv really loved her
And she was a wonderful person.
Narrator: gregory remembered
how beautiful martha seemed
And her willingness to listen
to the opinions of a 9-year-old,
"And at least pretend
to give them weight."
Bumby liked her, too,
he remembered.
" Was overwhelmed by
this marvelous creature
"Who could say the "f" word
so naturally
"That it didn't sound dirty.
I was her immediate c*ptive."
Woman as gellhorn:
they all think I am a sort of
Colossal joke and one of
the boys
And refer to me as "the marty,"
And I think it all
goes very fine.
Anyhow I am nuts for them,
which is a grand thing.
Narrator: ernest returned
from time to time to key west
To see his children
during the school year--
And to see if he and pauline
could somehow make it work.
Over their 15 years together--
13 as a married couple--
Hemingway had risen
to a kind of fame
No american writer since
mark twain had enjoyed.
All that time, pauline had
Devoted herself
to his well-being,
Often acted as his editor,
and she and her family
Had provided financial support
between books.
But in the end, none of it
would seem to matter to him.
Edna: o'brien:
when people want to go away,
There are two things
attached to it.
One is adventure and new things,
New sights, new scenes,
Danger, whatever.
But the other, which I believe,
Again, it is only my hunch,
Is to escape his own family.
Writers do.
They have to.
Man as hemingway:
men want someone new,
Or someone younger,
Or someone that
they shouldn't have,
Or someone that looks
like someone else.
The better you treat a man
And the more you show him
you love him,
The quicker he gets
tired of you.
Dearborn: he says to pauline,
"you took me from hadley
"And now martha is
taking me from you.
"What goes around, comes around.
Live by the sword,
die by the sword."
And I think that was a really
rotten thing to tell pauline.
I mean, pauline made possible
some of his best work.
And she's his best reader.
Narrator: as a catholic,
pauline was reluctant
To grant hemingway a divorce.
There were angry accusations
from both sides.
Gregory remembered
"shouting in other rooms,
"Doors slamming,
mother scurrying
Out of their bedroom crying."
Patrick: you know,
by 1939 it was,
Oh, it was just
coming to an end.
The pattern in our family
was to drive out from florida
To, to the west.
And it took quite a while.
And they had tremendous
arguments, I remember.
And driving, you know,
which road to take
And, just on each other
all summer long.
They were still nominally
together, you know,
But he was really pulling out.
Narrator: on september 3, 1939--
Two days after
hitler's forces invaded poland,
Starting the second world w*r--
Hemingway finally told pauline
he was leaving for good.
[Johnny gandelsman's "the garden
of eden mix 3 guitar stem" playing]
John mccain: I was 12 years old.
I found a four-leaf clover
and I brought it in,
To press it in a book
so I could preserve it.
That happened to be
"for whom the bell tolls,"
Still the great american novel.
And I started reading and I
couldn't stop until I finished.
Narrator: when
"for whom the bell tolls"
Was published in
october of 1940,
Europe and asia were
engulfed in a world w*r
Far more cataclysmic
than the one
In which hemingway
had been wounded.
[Johnny gandelsman's "the garden
of eden mix 3 bass stem" playing]
[Johnny gandelsman's "the garden
of eden mix 3 perc stem" playing]
Vaill: by the time
"for whom the bell tolls"
Came out in 1940,
w*r in europe was a reality.
France had fallen.
It was do or die time.
The questions that hemingway
raises in that novel
Were incredibly urgent.
And it was clear that
the bell was tolling
For everybody in this country,
not just for the people
In france and in
england or spain.
[Bach's "partitia for solo violin no.1 in
b minor v sarabande variation 5" playing]
Narrator: the story
is set in 1937,
When the defeat of
franco's forces
Had still seemed possible.
Its hero is an idealistic young
american college instructor
Named robert jordan, with some
knowledge of expl*sives
And no political affiliation
other than hatred of fascism,
Who finds himself part of
a guerilla band that undertakes
A doomed mission
to dynamite a bridge.
Mccain: my hero
is robert jordan.
Robert jordan is
as real to me as you are.
He was working as a professor
in the university of montana.
But he heard about
this struggle.
He knew about fascism.
He knew what
Hitler and mussolini were doing.
And he decided to go and fight
On behalf of people
he had never met
And he did not know.
Even knowing that that cause
was a flawed cause.
But he was willing
to fight and do
Whatever he thought he could
For the cause of
justice and freedom.
I always wanted to be
robert jordan.
Narrator: robert jordan is
willing to k*ll--and to die--
To carry out the orders
of a soviet general,
But he cannot escape
his growing belief
That the w*r has become
"an idiocy without bounds."
Vaill: it's a much more
3-dimensional
Portrayal of the struggle
Than he had allowed
himself to give
When he was ostensibly writing
journalism about it.
It's pretty interesting
that the novel is
More truthful than
the journalism.
[Johnny gandelsman's "the garden
of eden mix 3" playing]
Narrator: there are atrocities
committed by both sides,
Including the loyalists'
slaughter of
Civilian fascist sympathizers,
Who are forced to run
a brutal gauntlet,
Then hurled from the cliffs
in an andalusian town.
Man as hemingway: they clubbed
him to death very quickly,
Beating him as soon as he
reached the first of the men,
Beating him as he tried
to walk with his head up,
Beating him until he fell
and chopping at him
With reaping hooks
and the sickles,
And many men bore him
to the edge of the cliff
To throw him over
and there was blood now
On their hands and on
their clothing,
And now began to be
the feeling that
These who came out
were truly enemies
And should be k*lled.
Narrator: robert jordan
manages to blow up the bridge
But is badly wounded.
At the novel's cl*max,
he lies alone, immobilized,
On a wooded slope,
waiting with his r*fle
As a fascist patrol
comes closer.
Vaill: the end of that novel
is as good as
Anything hemingway
ever wrote, I think.
Hemingway all his life
is wrestling with
Questions of death and suicide
and whether it
Hurts very much to die, daddy,
Or it doesn't, whether that is
The brave thing to do,
the right thing to do,
Or whether it's
the coward's way out.
He's wrestling with that
all his life.
Narrator: jordan's father,
the reader learns,
Like hemingway's,
had k*lled himself.
Man as hemingway:
oh, let them come, he said.
I don't want to do that business
that my father did.
I will do it all right but
I'd much prefer not to have to.
I'm against that.
Don't think about that.
Don't think at all.
I wish the b*stards
would come, he said.
I wish so very much they'd come.
I guess I'm not awfully
good at pain.
Listen, if I do that now
You wouldn't misunderstand,
would you?
Who are you talking to?
Nobody, he said.
Grandfather, I guess.
No. Nobody.
Think about montana.
I can't.
Think about madrid.
I can't.
Think about
a cool drink of water.
All right.
That's what it will be like.
Like a cool drink of water.
You're a liar.
It will just be nothing.
That's all it will be.
Just nothing.
Then do it. Do it. Do it now.
It's all right to do it now.
Go on and do it now.
No, you have to wait.
What for? You know all right.
Then wait.
Narrator: when "for whom
the bell tolls" was published,
Marxist critics
attacked the novel
As a betrayal of their cause
Because it showed sympathy for
the w*r's victims on both sides.
Others found the love affair
between robert jordan and maria,
A loyalist
guerilla fighter, cloying.
[Vargas llosa speaking spanish]
[Laughs]
Narrator: despite some
negative reviews,
The novel sold
"like frozen daiquiris in hell,"
Hemingway boasted to
his first wife hadley;
Nearly half a million copies
in less than 6 months.
Only "gone with the wind"
had sold faster.
"Hemingway the artist is with
us again," edmund wilson wrote,
"And it is like having
an old friend back."
Paramount bought
the movie rights.
"The new york times" declared it
The finest book
hemingway had written--
"The fullest,
the deepest, the truest."
Katakis: I love that book.
I mean,
It's the "raiders of
the lost ark" of its time...
Ah...only with
more depth and meaning.
Someone who is
sacrificing himself
For something he believes in.
Mccain: friendship,
sacrifice, romance,
That nothing is romantic
as that, uh,
Between robert jordan and maria
in that, uh,
In that, uh, book,
And, I think, serving a cause
greater than yourself.
I think the important lesson
That hemingway was
trying to impart to us
That no man is an island
within himself.
Ask not for whom the bell tolls.
We do in life what we
are responsible for.
We, in our lives,
make certain choices.
"I have fought hard
for what I believed in
"For a year now.
"If we win here
we will win everywhere.
"The world is a fine place
and worth the fighting for
And I hate very much
to leave it."
[J. Green, e. Heyman, r. Sour, f.
Eyton's "body and soul" playing]
Man as hemingway:
if you have decided that you
Don't want to marry me,
Will you please tell me now.
If you do, I will bore you less
And amuse you more
Than anyone else
you'll ever marry
And you have never seen me
with a big success
But I have been around
when that happened before
And I can promise you truly
that you will see
The modestest son of a b*tch
you ever saw truly.
I only brag when I am on my a*s.
Woman as gellhorn: there is
much divorce talk going on,
And probably it will actually
materialize in due course
And I will be made
an honest woman.
They ought to put it
in the yearbook:
Gellhorn, the first
of her class to sin,
The last to legalize.
Narrator: hemingway's divorce
from pauline
Became final on
november 4, 1940.
17 Days later, on november 21,
Ernest hemingway
and martha gellhorn
Were married
in cheyenne, wyoming.
She was 32.
He was 41.
"Ernest and I belong
tightly to each other,"
Martha assured
eleanor roosevelt.
"We are a good pair and we are
Both crazy about being married."
Now both of them
were in the spotlight.
Hedda hopper: no fancy
hollywood boots these.
They've tramped through
the dust and death
Of the spanish civil w*r.
They belong to ernest hemingway,
Famous author and adventurer,
Now on a hunting trip in idaho
With his pal gary cooper,
To whom the great open spaces
aren't just a movie location.
No sir.
Gary's idea of a vacation
Is to get as far away from
hollywood boulevard as possible,
Where game doesn't mean
gin rummy.
[g*nshots]
Her pen name is martha gellhorn,
But in private life
she's mrs. Ernest hemingway.
[g*nsh*t]
Mrs. Hemingway
is an expert markswoman.
The hemingways first met
in spain,
Where mrs. Hemingway was
a w*r correspondent
And ernest was
gathering material
For his novel
"for whom the bell tolls."
Narrator: in 1941,
the newlywed hemingways
Embarked on a peculiar
sort of extended honeymoon,
A 4-month
reporting trip to china,
Where w*r with japan
had been raging for 5 years.
On the way, the couple
had stopped in honolulu,
Where they toured the vast
naval base at pearl harbor.
Hemingway worried aloud that
so many warships and planes
Lined up in tidy rows would
invite a japanese attack.
Hemingway had agreed to
report secretly to washington
On how he thought the w*r
in china was going.
He also agreed to act
as a secret operative
For the soviet union,
though in the end
He would supply
no information to moscow.
[Plane whooshing]
[Air raid siren blaring]
Narrator: the world w*r
hemingway had warned against,
And had hoped his country
could avoid, had come home.
4 Days after pearl harbor,
n*zi germany and fascist italy
Declared w*r on
the united states.
During the next 8 months,
german u-boats sank
360 Merchant vessels in the
gulf of mexico, the caribbean,
And off the eastern coast
of the united states.
Washington called upon civilians
to help patrol those waters.
The shipping lanes around cuba
were of special concern.
Hemingway volunteered to help
And gathered aboard the "pilar"
What he called his
"hooligan navy"--
A marine sergeant,
two millionaire yachtsmen,
A veteran
of the spanish civil w*r,
And several active
jai-alai players--
And then proposed a
spectacularly far-fetched scheme.
He hoped to lure
enemy u-boats to the surface,
Close to within 20 yards,
Machine-g*n everyone on deck
So that the jai-alai players
Could lob expl*sives
down the hatch.
How the "pilar" was to avoid
being blown to splinters
By the germans' deck g*n
was never clear,
But the u.s. Government
supplied hemingway
With all the weaponry
and communications equipment
He asked for--and limitless,
Otherwise strictly-rationed
gasoline.
Patrick: he had us on
his boat, the "pilar,"
Off the cuban coast in a place
called cayo confites.
There were two bunks there,
one on each side
And a little hatch that
you could get out of.
And they left us on the island.
What do they call
the people that
Look after the welfare
of children"?
They would have taken us away
From our father immediately.
[Laughs]
Narrator: hemingway and his
crew did keep watch
On the countless bays and inlets
and islands along cuba's coast.
Only once in all that time
did the "pilar"
Actually spot
an enemy submarine,
But it proved far too fast
and far away to catch.
Hemingway himself would
remember his submarine-chasing
As that "sea-borne comic strip
we operated in the caribbean."
[David cieri's "for catherine
(niagara falls)" playing]
Edna o'brien:
I bet when hemingway was
First in love with
Each particular woman,
I bet he became the boy again.
But he was a bit of
a controller in life
And a bit of a bully as well.
So that everyday life with
hemingway would be intolerable.
It was, I think, he loved
as a truthful person at first
And then became the mythologized
man in everyday life.
Woman as gellhorn: the only serious
complaint I have about matrimony
Is that it brings out
the faint goodness in me,
And has a tendency
to soften and quiet
The hell on wheels aspect,
And finally I become
bored with myself.
[g*nsh*t] my man is another
hell on wheels character,
And what is so christed odd
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 loss,
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
potentialities of the other.
So, when we are together,
we take it fairly easy,
So as 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.
Man as hemingway: I can't really
write at 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.
Narrator: 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 once 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.
Beegel: 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
And career she wanted to pursue
And nobody was
taking that away from her.
Kale: they were great
in the spanish civil w*r
Where there's b*ll*ts and, and
shells flying every which way.
But put 'em together in a house
and it was just a disaster.
[David cieri's
"dust rising" playing]
Narrator: after gellhorn
returned to cuba
From a lengthy reporting trip,
She was convinced that
hemingway's adventuring
Aboard the "pilar"
was pointless,
Just an excuse to fish and drink
with his friends
While the rest of the world
was at w*r,
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 conceited b*tch,”
One of his sons
remembered hearing him shout.
"They'll be reading my stuff
long after
The worms have
finished with you."
Beegel: of all of his wives,
he had the least power
And the least control
over martha,
So, that would, I think,
Tend to send things
Over the top.
Verbal abuse starts with martha
and horrible slanging matches.
Narrator: they had been
together off and on
For 7 years,
Nearly 3 of them
as husband and wife.
When apart, their letters
were still full of
Fond nicknames and declarations
of love.
But when they were together,
Things went from bad to worse.
When gellhorn insisted on
driving home from havana
At the end of one
especially drunken evening,
Hemingway slapped her.
She deliberately drove his car
into a ditch
And left him there while she
walked back to the finca alone.
By the summer of 1943,
The tide of w*r in europe
had begun to turn.
The germans and italians
Had been driven
from north africa.
Allied troops
had landed in italy.
The soviet army was moving west,
Driving the n*zi invaders
before them.
Gellhorn longed to be
part of it--
And could not understand
how hemingway
Did not feel the same way.
She told him she wanted
to feel again
All "the blindness
and fervor and recklessness"
She had once felt with him.
In september, she left
for england without him,
To report for "collier's."
Hemingway was angry,
morose, bereft.
Johnny gandelsman's "flor de lanoche
mirando alas estrellas mix 2" playing)
Woman as gellhorn: the letter
where you say that these are
The worst two weeks of your life
And that you feel you are going
to die of sadness is too awful.
You matter more than
anything in the world to me.
I can't have you
dying of sadness.
I just can't be party to that.
If you see that you truly
cannot bear it,
I'll come home.
Narrator: but she didn't
come home.
When "collier's" published
martha's dispatches
From the italian front,
Hemingway publicly praised them.
"You feel it as though
it were you," he said,
"And you were there."
But she remembered
receiving an angry cable
From her husband in cuba:
"Are you a w*r correspondent
or wife in my bed?"
Martha hoped she could
somehow still be both.
"It is quite a job
being a woman, isn't it?"
She wrote to mrs. Roosevelt.
"You cannot do your work
and simply get on with it
"Because that is selfish.
You have to be
two things at once."
Again and again, hemingway
begged her to return to cuba.
Again and again, she urged him
to join her in london instead.
He refused to do it.
Finally, she gave up trying.
Woman as gellhorn:
I love you dearly.
I won't urge you
any more to come,
Though I do think
you will regret it
And I think it would be
a great general loss
For future time, for all people
Who need and love to read.
I know it is hell
for you there alone
But I have to ask you
to be patient.
You have a life there because
you have useful work;
It is what you believe in
and feel right about doing.
But I believe in
what I am doing, too.
I have to live my way
as well as yours,
Or there wouldn't be
any me to love you with.
You wouldn't really want me if
I built a fine big stone wall
Around the finca
and sat inside it.
Narrator: that was exactly
what he did want her to do.
Depression gripped him--
he called it "black a*s."
Feeling abandoned,
with no writing project
In which to lose himself,
The dread of sleeping alone
that had plagued him
Since his return from
the great w*r deepened.
He now had to
drink himself to sleep--
And was consumed with self-pity.
Man as hemingway: I am
sick-lonely with marty away.
Like somebody with
their heart cut out.
Loved marty so much
and to the exclusion of
Everything and all else so that
Everybody who used
to love me quit.
So, now I have no marty
and nobody else.
Narrator: in early 1944,
martha returned to cuba,
Hoping somehow
to reassure her husband
And rebuild their marriage.
It didn't work.
Woman as gellhorn: he woke me
when I was trying to sleep
To bully, snarl, mock.
My crime really was to have
been at w*r when he had not,
But that was not how he put it.
I was supposedly insane, I had
no responsibility to anyone,
I was selfish beyond belief.
Narrator: she assailed him
again for his drinking,
Ridiculed his submarine hunting,
Accused him of cowardice in
staying away from the real w*r.
The long-planned allied invasion
Of n*zi-occupied france
was coming.
He owed it to himself,
she insisted--
He owed it to history--to be
in at the death of fascism.
History didn't concern him,
he said.
He'd been wounded in one w*r
and under fire in two.
His luck was likely
to run out in a third.
If he were to be k*lled,
she would bear the blame.
Finally, gellhorn told him
She "was going back to london
Whether he came or not."
Then, suddenly, he changed
his mind and agreed to go.
He told her, "just feel
like old horse."
Man as hemingway:
good, sound, but old,
Being saddled again
to race over the jumps
Because of unscrupulous owner.
Will make same race as always,
Best that can make,
but am neither
Happy, excited, nor interested.
[David cieri's "I used to
love you variation 2" playing]
Narrator: he signed on
with "collier's"--
Thus ensuring that
gellhorn would be
Overshadowed at the magazine
for which she wrote regularly.
"He did it to fix me,"
she remembered many years later.
"Nothing could beat it
for sheer bitchery."
Still, martha persuaded a friend
At the british embassy
in washington
To provide him with
a hard-to-obtain seat
On an raf plane
headed for london.
She assumed she'd be
boarding the plane, too.
But hemingway, still bitter over
the pressure she'd put on him,
Told her the military
had barred women--
Even though two
british actresses
Would be among
his fellow passengers.
Gellhorn was forced to cross
the north atlantic alone,
The sole civilian aboard
a norwegian freighter
Carrying expl*sives
and landing craft,
Part of the preparations
for d-day, now just weeks away.
Her marriage was
essentially over.
"Ernest is a good man,"
She wrote an old friend
while aboard ship.
Woman as gellhorn: he is,
however, bad for me...
Or maybe wrong for me
is the word;
And I am wrong for him.
As far as I am concerned,
it is all over.
It'll never work
between us again.
I am wondering now if
it ever really worked;
I am wondering what all these
7 years were about exactly.
I feel terribly strange, like
a shadow, and full of dread.
I dread the time ahead,
the amputating time.
It is, note, my fault:
I am the one who has changed
And I am ashamed
and guilty, too,
Because I am breaking his heart.
We quarreled too much,
I suppose.
It's all sickening and I'm
sad to death and afraid.
I only want to be alone.
I want to be myself
And alone and free
to breathe, live,
Look upon the world
and find it however it is.
I want my own name back,
most violently,
As if getting it back
would give me some of myself.
Narrator:
hemingway got to england
11 Days before gellhorn did--
Long enough for him to meet
the woman who would become
The fourth
mrs. Ernest hemingway.
[Duke ellington & bubber miley's "the
new east st. Louis toodle-o" playing]
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01x02 - The Avatar (1929-1944)
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Explore the painstaking process through which Hemingway created some of the most important works of fiction in American letters.
Explore the painstaking process through which Hemingway created some of the most important works of fiction in American letters.