Hemingway/BBC 4
A new Ken Burns documentary is worth waiting for though not worth missing England v Germany as it clashed.
You know that the production values will be high and he will lay out the facts in a non-judgemental way.
By contrast the Channel 4 type of documentary, normally on the royals, will be more of an expose more loosely based factually.
Everybody knows Hemingway as a macho man: the lover of bullfighting and boxing.
The image is of papa the bearded, hard-drinking man fishing from his boat in the Florida keys for marlin.
Yet far fewer have read his books or know of the man beyond his image.
At school we read For Whom the Bell Tolls – even our English teacher found it long-winded.
Well before our contemporary values of feminism and almost an obsession with mental issues Hemingway’s life and literary style were dated.
Yet he still lived on with only possibly Mark Twain the more enduring writer.
The first episode in this six-part series covered his childhood.
Hemingway was born to rich but repressive parents in an affluent suburb of Chicago.
He was tall and handsome but shy.
He soon adopted the life of the outdoors that was to characterise his life.
He acquired an early taste for adventure by enlisting as an ambulance driver in World War One.
In Italy he sustained injuries so grave that extreme unction was administered.
He spent many months in hospital.
At college he cut his teeth as a journalist and in moving to Paris was highly regarded by the best known journalist of the day – Lincoln Steffens -who specialised in muckraking.
Steffens wanted to see more of his writings so Hemingway’s first wife prepared a suitcase of these which disappeared on the train to Paris.
Hemingway was a member of the Gertrude Stein set in Paris in the 1920s which included Picasso, Stravinsky, Diaghilev but he preferred Spain and the outdoors non-metro life.
It was refreshing that as this was BBC there were no advertising breaks: no Meerkats, charity appeals, cremations nor promotions of other programmes.
