Papa doc

PBS image

Is greatness overrated?

This possibility occurred to me recently after watching Ken Burns' and Lynn Novick's three-part biography of Ernest Hemingway on PBS. 

Hemingway was the touchstone, the Jeopardy answer to the question of why some men of a certain age might, when they were younger men, have entertained the crazy notion that writing could be a pretty good profession to go into.

Actually, the coolest profession ever.

There was just one catch. You had to be able to write. But when you're a younger man, you often don't know what you don't know. Overestimating yourself is something younger men do. Especially those wanting to be writers.

Ernest Hemingway was a writer like no other. The talking heads on the documentary – including writers Tobias Wolff, Edna O'Brien and my favorite, Abraham Verghese, along with literary scholars and biographers, take turns telling why. He was a game changer.  Like Shakespeare, the English language wasn't the same after he had his way with it. As someone observed, every writer since Hemingway stands in his shadow. Especially with male writers, anyone who ever put pen to paper or fingertip to keyboard in the century since Hemingway's first short stories were published in early 20s is his literary heir. Papa's son.

But even with all the spectacular adventures Hemingway undertook in order to have something to write about, even with Ken Burns and his collaborators' wonderful stylistic screen signatures, even with inimitable Jeff Daniels providing the author's voice in a pitch-perfect vocal cast, the effect of the documentary was akin to accidentally dropping a priceless bust, leaving its myth of monumental machismo fractured into a bunch of broken shards on the floor.

By the end I wasn't even convinced he was that good a writer. Take away all the “thes” and “ands,” and there weren't a whole lot of words left.

Hemingway first learned what he would hone into his writing style at age 18, working at the Kansas City Star. Like him, I developed the belief that there is nothing better than a simple declarative sentence … with single-syllable words …  You learn this by working in newspaper newsrooms where you ate deadlines for breakfast, and the next deadline was always upon you before you had a chance to go on an ego trip about conquering the last one.

Back in my Maui News days, I used to mark that day's press deadline with my fellow writer/editor Ron Youngblood in the alley between the newsroom and the building housing the giant press. It would run a few minutes later, shooting out that day's edition by the thousands. 

Ron couldn't wait to get out of the newsroom to reach for a Camel. He would begin with the butt of his last one that he had stowed behind the No Smoking sign on the brick wall.

Ron was the best newspaperman I ever worked with, over more than three decades with a handful of publications. But that wasn't enough to satisfy him, much less subdue his ever-present demons and doubts. He knew he hadn't passed the Ernest Hemingway test, even though our discussions of the craft of writing were never ending, as fascinating to the two of us as they would be tediously boring for anyone else in earshot.

To be a newspaperman is to be in daily touch with the mediocrity of your own talent. Ron would never realize that when it comes to telling stories, being pretty good is plenty good enough. From Ken Burns' biopic, it looks like Ernest Hemingway may never have realized that, either.

Those Camels would claim Ron's life a few years later. Suicide by cigarette. It was as close as he could get to a grand Hemingway gesture.

Ron and I did come to the embarrassing realization that it had been the image, rather than the craft, that first drew us to the profession. But the years of doing it, the hundreds of thousands of words crafted the way a potter shapes clay, into glimpses of the human spirit and soul, had made us passionate practitioners. Mistaken motives notwithstanding, we had become writers.

Hemingway was a product of his times … and ahead of his time. He was, possibly, the first modern media celebrity, the medium as much as the message as much as the messenger. He was in those prepolitically-correct dark ages a “man's man” – a testosterone test tube, defining masculinity against an endless array of backdrops – battlefields, bull rings, boxing rings, hospital wards, bedrooms, African savannas, oceans stretching to the horizon, full of huge fish … He could also be a bully, a posturing caricature, a self-important product of his imaginings, eventually unable to differentiate between what was fiction and what wasn't.

According to Ken Burns' version of Hemingway's life, being a man was a test without pause, one that could never be won. Alcohol was one more badge to fuel the mystique rather than to numb the pain, and the gun was always waiting in the closet, like the one his father had used to end his own life, when there was no strength left to deny inevitable defeat.

Even with the pragmatically poetic contribution of Ken Burns' longtime scriptwriter Geoffrey C. Ward, it's ironic that the medium for this biography isn't the printed page but the TV screen. Decades ago, when Ron and I were younger men striking our Hemingway poses, the best minds of our generation were going to USC film school They knew that stories would be told visually in the future … which has become the now.

Words on the screen become characters in Burns' biopic, sometimes appearing the way they would from a pen, or from typewriter typebars on a sheet of white paper. The words onscreen are creative elements in their own right, adding an almost abstract, modern art effect at times. But they go on and on, accidentally illustrating the cumbersome weight of words in today's speed-of-light consciousness.

The six-hour series might have done better as a four-hour series. In the delicate alchemy of trying to communicate, the real power lies in the space, or silence, between the words. Less is more. 

That was one thing Hemingway got absolutely right.