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Ernest Hemingway Sucked at Marriage. Or Did He?
Thoughts on the Ken Burns Hemingway Documentary
Like many other writers, I watched HEMINGWAY, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s three-part, six-hour documentary about the life of writer Ernest Hemingway, with interest. I’d read and admired Hemingway’s work, and read several biographies about him, and was curious to see how Burns would tell the story of this complicated man’s life.
Rather than focusing on the way Hemingway revolutionized writing, or the impact of depression over several generations of his family, or on the way the writer’s issues with and questions about gender shaped his work, the organizing principle Burns and Novick chose was Hemingway’s four marriages.
We learn in rich detail about his courtship of, marriage to, and eventual divorce from Hadley Richardson, Pauline Pfeiffer, and Martha Gellhorn, and about his long and difficult union with Mary Welsh, to whom he was married at his death. Courting each, Hemingway was compelling and attentive, but once married, he soon began to take his spouse for granted and moved on to his next conquest.
In short? Ernest Hemingway was a great man to have a love affair with but a lousy man to be married to. We’ve all seen that before. Unlike Hemingway’s writing, his love life is an old and tired story.
