They Are Giving 

Hemingway Another 

Look, So You Can, Too

Lynn Novick and Ken Burns consider the seminal writer in all his complexity and controversy in their new PBS documentary series.

By Gal Beckerman (NYT)

...and even introduce new dimensions, such as Hemingway’s apparent interest in gender fluidity.

[I'm so glad they're doing this. Garden of Eden is one of my very best favorite books of all time. I still have, and use as my iPhone screensaver frequently, the green-tinted glauzy, vague photograph of the woman that was on the cover. It was perfect cover photograph for a book in which gender and sexuality were blurred. It was Hemingway's most courage writing, but like all things Hemingway, it's complicated. He never published it. It was only published posthumously by his heirs, in 1985 I believe.Ironically out-of-focus, dream-like Garden of Eden (title from Bosch), brings so much of Hemingway's life and work into sharper focus. Now, why Beckerman says this, is beyond me:]

What remains most refreshing about his work was this ability he had to trust the reader so completely.

BURNS It’s a beautiful thing. And the thing I go back to often is that this is a guy who’s emerging out of a modernist tradition in which everybody is complicated. Joyce and Faulkner, they’re really super complicated. And he dared to impersonate simplicity. What he understood is that you could use these seemingly simple sentences, and they would be as pregnant as any long Joycean paragraph or Faulknerian sentence that goes on and on. So much was below the surface. And it requires you to go searching for meaning. It isn’t just how to order a French meal or fire a machine gun, it’s also about life and death and these fundamental human questions. And he’s saying, I’m not going to walk you through this. It’s mesmerizing to me, when it works. There’s nothing better.

[Christ, maybe Beckerman hasn't read Garden or much Hemingway:]

The most surprising thing for me was the thread of gender fluidity that runs through the series and seems to upend everything we’ve come to think about Hemingway — the fact that he was willing to experiment with his sexuality and take on what he thought of as a female role.

NOVICK I think the world first got a hint of this when the family published “Garden of Eden” posthumously in the 1980s...There’s a reason he never published “Garden of Eden.” It’s a dangerous topic for him to go into. Even in an unpublished manuscript, even in his private life...And then there were the huge problems he had with his son who was also interested in the same things. It caused an irreconcilable conflict between them, which is so sad. [Gregory/Gloria who went to the University of Miami Law School, was arrested by City of Miami police, who photographed him topless with his sex-change boobs, and who died in jail down here.]

BURNS It’s pretty interesting that he is pursuing this all the way through and, and not blindly, that is to say, I think there’s a consciousness to it. It’s in him asking all his wives to cut their hair short, in his sympathy for female characters in stories like “Up in Michigan” and “Hills Like White Elephants.” I don’t think it’s like, Oh, I can’t let this out of the bag. I think he’s moving toward it. And he’s exploring it all the time.

[I totally agree with Burns there. Once you read Garden, you have to re-read, or re-think anyway, a lot of Hemingway's earlier work.]

[Beckerman is editor of the NYT Book Review. Jesus.]