The North Carolina connection to Ken Burns ‘Hemingway’

We’ve all heard it - “Never meet your heroes because you’re sure to be disappointed,” right?

For NCSU Professor Marc Dudley, that was not a problem, not when it came to Ernest Hemingway.

Because Professor Dudley is prominently featured in Ken Burns’ PBS documentary of Hemingway that has set literary tongues a’waggin’, I figured he was a Hemingway fanboy from the crib, reading The Old Man and the Sea while still teething.

Wrong. “I wasn’t a fan when I was first introduced to him in high school,” Dudley told me recently in telephone and written interviews, “and even having to read him as an undergraduate did not spark anything in me. I simply was not ready for Hemingway back then. But then something changed.”

What changed?

Dudley read Green Hills of Africa, a book that intrigued yet “vexed” him.

“Not a great book, but a problematic one, and the problems were enough to make me dig and do some work,” explained Dudley, a professor of English and Africana Studies at NCSU. “That text for me epitomizes the good and the bad of Hemingway: spots of that classic style in action - there are some wonderful segments in it - but a lot of problematic racial politics. I decided to write my Master’s thesis on that work for those reasons, and I was off to the races!”

No real connection exists between Hemingway and North Carolina — okay, Johnston County native Ava Gardner appeared in three of his movies — but I found it intriguing that two of the contributors to the documentary live here. In addition to Dudley, also featured was Dr. Andrew Farah, a High Point-based psychiatrist who’s written a book on Hemingway’s brain — called Hemingway’s Brain.

Both done us proud.

Just as Muhammad Ali ruined many boxers and got them knocked into oblivion when they tried to emulate his unique style, Hemingway ruined untold numbers of writers who thought they could sound like him if they just stripped their writings of every adverb and adjective.

Trust me: it’s not quite that easy, yo.

“What makes Hemingway timeless?” Dudley repeated when I asked.

“His ability to paint a scene with words, often few words, and to distill things to their bare essentials. He is, as the film demonstrates, like any good visual artist, striving to make the greatest effect with the fewest (visible) gestures.”

That’s what the cats on the block call cool — the art of doing something without appearing to exert a lot of energy or even appearing to care a great deal.

Why do you think Hemingway made a great showing of being a bar habitué, a social gadfly, a man about town?

He cultivated this whole “look ma, no hands” image in which he seemed to turn out great prose while barely trying.

Of course, if you watched the documentary you know that he exerted a lot of effort – a lot of effort. He often rewrote rewrites of rewrites he’d already rewritten — and saved the rejected drafts, allowing Burns’ documentary to show us in real time how Hemingway labored to find just the right phrase.

Many people call Hemingway an American original. Dudley agrees, but only up to a point. “Contrary to the myth he tried to cultivate, especially as he garnered celebrity… he did not do it alone,” he said. “He is equal parts Stephen Crane, Mark Twain, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Paul Cezanne and Pablo Picasso.

“He learned from other greats, other writers and visual artists alike. And when he’s on, there are few who do it better. This says nothing of his mastery of those timeless themes that define us, that define who we are as human beings. Or put differently, his ability to connect with our humanity, to get at the loneliness and sometimes the bleakness that is and can be human existence.”

Wow. Nothing better nails the man who, in A Farewell To Arms, wrote “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places.”

Editorial Board member Barry Saunders is founder of the thesaundersreport.com.