ANNOUNCER: Major funding for Idaho Experience provided by the J.A.

and Kathryn Albertson Family Foundation.

Making Idaho a place to learn, thrive and prosper.

With additional support from Anne Voillequé and Louise Nelson, and Judy and Steve Meyer.

The Richard K. Shirley S. Hemingway Foundation.

The Friends of Idaho Public Television, the Idaho Public Television Endowment and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

[MUSIC] VOICE ACTOR READING ERNEST HEMINGWAY: "I was learning something from the painting of Cézanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them.

Ernest Hemingway."

JENNY EMERY DAVIDSON, COMMUNITY LIBRARY EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: He wanted to write like Cézanne painted.

We don't know when Mary taped that reproduction on the closet door.

But it has a connection to Hemingway and to his work and what he wanted his work to be.

PHIL HUSS, AUTHOR: That's Hemingway at his best.

He's with the people he wants to spend time with.

He's produced the book, he's reclaimed his reputation as a writer.

That's how I like to think of his time here in Idaho.

STACEY GUILL, SCHOLAR: And the fact that he's at the end of his life, but he's in that home in Idaho and he's thinking back on those days in Paris.

The moveable feast stayed with him, just as his prediction was true.

It worked for him because he was still living those days when he had those relationships and was forming his art.

CHERYL STRAYED, WRITER: What I felt lived on was the power of his creation and his love for the wild beauty of that land, that community and that house.

JUDITH FREEMAN, WRITER: Everyone can connect with this house and with Hemingway's greatness.

I really feel like this house provided refuge at that point in his life.

He was ill.

He had suffered a great deal, nine concussions.

He needed a refuge.

That's what this house provided.

And that's a great gift for a writer.

[MUSIC] NARRATOR: Short sentences.

Simple words.

Strong verbs.

No adornment, none of what Ernest Hemingway called "the scrollwork," the florid writing that had come before him.

But what made him the most influential writer of his age was more than that.

And less.

VOICE ACTOR READING HEMINGWAY: "You could omit anything if you knew what you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel more than they understood.

Ernest Hemingway ."

NARRATOR: Hemingway learned what to leave out.

The emotion and impact were felt, not described.

He likened good writing to an iceberg, where the depth and the power - and the danger - lie beneath the surface.

GUILL: Think about "Moby Dick" versus "Old Man and the Sea," or you think about Victorian architecture and then you think about Frank Lloyd Wright.

He decided to just use this clean language, sparing the words and yet having so much meaning underneath them.

That's what revolutionized, I think, the idea of fiction.

That really struck a chord with the post-World War I generation, and even after that.

NARRATOR: Hemingway was already famous when he came to Idaho in 1939 to lend his celebrity to the new Sun Valley ski resort.

MARY TYSON, REGIONAL HISTORY DIRECTOR: He was invited, as many celebrities were invited, by Union Pacific, who owned Sun Valley Resort, and they were trying to create a glamorous destination that would attract people who wanted to be around glamor.

So he comes in late September.

Everything's closed up.

They opened up the lodge, a suite in the lodge for him, which was otherwise closed.

NARRATOR: Hemingway would return, usually to hunt birds in the fall, for the next two decades.

He bought a furnished home along the Big Wood River in 1959.

Hemingway homes in Cuba and Key West, Illinois, even Arkansas, are museums today.

The Ketchum home is, instead, a haven for writers and researchers.

And it remains largely as it was when Mary and Ernest Hemingway lived there - their everyday objects alongside art that reflects the most important friendships and influences.

DAVIDSON: Something that we find really touching about the collection of objects that this house holds is how a lot of them seem to have been treated with a degree of familiarity.

You know, these things like the watercolor by Dorothy Shakespear, the paintings by Waldo Pierce, that remain unframed, like the books inscribed by Archibald MacLeish and Thornton Wilder that are just set on the shelf.

These are things that he carried with him from Paris to Key West to Cuba to Ketchum.

And so they really seem to bear witness to the friendships, the relationships that he held close.

NARRATOR: When he killed himself here in July 1961, Hemingway was at work on the book that would become "A Moveable Feast."

The title references holidays, or feast days, that move on the calendar.

GUILL: The title of "A Moveable Feast," which is drawn from Hemingway saying, "If you're lucky enough to live in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go, it will stay with you because Paris is a moveable feast."

And the fact that he's at the end of his life, but he's in that home in Idaho and he's thinking back on those days in Paris.

The moveable feast stayed with him, those days when he was forming his art.

I think that's a real full circle, but it actually makes the prediction true.

It followed him.

When you think about the Cézanne and the Miró and Pierce, which is, of course, the bullfights, again in the '20s, they all sort of connect, don't they?

They all tell that narrative of him.

[MUSIC] HUSS: A lot of writers, myself included, live a solitary existence.

But Hemingway was not that.

Somehow he was able to have these larger-than-life adventurous experiences, not only in war and covering war, but in these hunting experiences, safaris, and he took in the cultural tonic of Paris.

He lived four or five amazing lives in one lifetime.

So what I wanted to do is show that his time here was spent in the first five hours of the day, standing at his typewriter and pouring forth onto the page.

But then there are these wonderful adventures as well.

And I think that captures Hemingway at his best.

He lived a life of the mind.

He lived a life of adventure.

And I think it's important to show both.

NARRATOR: Hemingway studied many artists.

He said he learned the power of repetition by listening to Bach.

But the biggest influence was Paul Cézanne.

In a passage he deleted from his story "The Big Two-Hearted River," Hemingway had his protagonist, Nick Adams, explain.

VOICE ACTOR READING HEMINGWAY: "He wanted to write like Cézanne painted.

Cézanne started with all the tricks.

Then he broke the whole thing down and built the real thing.

He wanted to write about country so that it would be there like Cézanne had done it in painting.

He felt almost holy about it."

GUILL: He once said, "If I could be anything except a writer, I would want to be a painter."

He was able to draw from art as he was first coming up with his own language, his own way he wanted to write.

Here he is, a young man walking through the museums and thinking about how he wants to add dimensions to his story.

And he tells Gertrude Stein, "I want to write landscapes like Cézanne," and eventually did.

NARRATOR: This print, taped to the closet in Idaho, is not just any Cézanne.

It is of Mont Sainte-Victoire, one of a series that Hemingway would have seen in the 1920s in Paris museums and in the Paris home of his mentor, Gertrude Stein.

From Cézanne, Hemingway learned to break down form in his prose, play with depth and focus, color and light.

GUILL: What Cézanne did was moved away from the Impressionist idea of perspective.

Cézanne came up with, you know, his theory of, I'm going to make the background just as powerful, the saturation of color and light and whatever.

And I want to reproduce what really happens, what you really experience when you're experiencing a grand vista.

In a Cézanne, you're moving back and forth.

If you read like, say, the first paragraph of "For Whom the Bell Tolls" and you watch how Hemingway will describe the foreground, the middle ground and the background, he will move into the landscape and back.

It's fascinating.

And once you are aware of that, you see that almost every time he does a grand vista.

VOICE ACTOR READING HEMINGWAY: "He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees.

The mountainside sloped gently where he lay; but below it was steep and he could see the dark of the oiled road winding through the pass.

There was a stream alongside the road and far down the pass he saw a mill beside the stream and the falling water of the dam, white in the summer sunlight.

Ernest Hemingway."

NARRATOR: Hemingway's first and most prized painting was "The Farm," by his friend Joan Miró.

In its simplicity and directness, some scholars see a parallel with Hemingway's own desire to distill and compress his prose.

GUILL: It was Hemingway's most beloved possession and he bought it in 1925 and had to borrow money to buy it and gave it to Hadley for her 34th birthday.

He said everything about Spain that you feel about Spain when you're there and everything you feel about Spain when you're not there and can't go back.

NARRATOR: Hemingway gave the painting to his first wife, Hadley, as a sort of parting gift when he left her for his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer.

The painting has a long, complicated story, involving two powerful American museums, a serious restoration job and a clandestine trip out of Castro's Cuba.

After Hemingway died, the painting became the subject of a bitter legal fight between Hadley and Mary.

In 1963, Mary paid $25,000 to settle Hadley's claim.

The original hung prominently in Mary's New York apartment, and this worn copy, clipped from a magazine, was taped up in Mary's bedroom.

GUILL: It's quite the story.

So that, you know, the fact that it's in Mary's powder room speaks both to how much it meant to Hemingway, but probably also that journey that she insisted that she keep that painting.

NARRATOR: Just months after fighting in court, Hadley sent Mary a postcard.

GUILL: It's from Hadley to Mary, and it says to Mary, "I remember this day.

Love, Hadley."

And the day is, of course, Hemingway's birthday.

I find it very powerful that Hadley was reaching out to the other human being that had close connections to Hemingway.

I think, that sense of connection that nobody else could possibly understand.

DAVIDSON: The courage of that gesture, from one woman to another, to reach out and recognize a common sorrow, it's been little things like that, to me, make all of the characters that have inhabited this house a lot more human.

NARRATOR: After Hemingway killed himself in 1961, Mary lived in their Ketchum home another 25 years.

In truth, it's Mary's home.

Her clothes still hang in her bedroom closet, and the notes she taped to the walls remain.

DAVIDSON: Mary was notorious for taping things up.

There are pictures of the windows with Christmas cards taped all over them.

In the laundry room, there remain notes that she received from friends - jokes, cartoons.

And there's a kind of familiarity and casualness to that that I think is very heartwarming.

NARRATOR: Mary Welsh grew up an adventurous child in northern Minnesota.

She landed a job as a reporter with Time magazine, covering World War II.

She met Hemingway in London and they married in 1946.

TYSON: She was in Ernest's shadow a lot.

She was glamorous in her own right.

She seems very athletic and adventurous.

I like to imagine, you know, if she could have focused on writing or on her own output, what would she have done?

NARRATOR: Writer Judith Freeman was a newspaper reporter in 1972, when she was assigned to collect a recipe for an article on Sun Valley celebrities.

FREEMAN: Well, I was very young at the time, and I don't think I understood then how many wives of famous artists and writers who are also artists and writers themselves were going to be completely overshadowed by the men that they married.

And I hadn't realized that Mary Hemingway had had a career as a journalist.

But I think when she married Ernest, she gave herself over to the care and nurturing of Ernest.

And in many ways, she, I think, was the wife who he needed the most at the time in his life when he needed a real friend.

And she was that friend.

She had this strong, vivacious spirit, which is I'm sure in part what Hemingway was attracted to.

The biographies that I've read said he was actually a pretty, pretty sweet guy, pretty kind guy, who could be very generous.

I think he could be terrible to his wives as well.

I think, you know, he had both sides to him.

I came here to the house, a photographer came with us.

Mary stood out on the deck.

She at the time was 64 years old.

This tiny, little, vivacious, attractive woman who was so friendly.

Anyway, the photographer took a few pictures out on the deck.

It was 11 o'clock in the morning, I remember.

And she said, "I think we need some champagne, don't you?"

I was like, "OK." And she opened a bottle of champagne and we came in here, not to the kitchen, but into the living room.

And I sat down and I listened to Mary talk about her life.

And she knew she had this wonderfully captive audience and this young would-be journalist, which is what she had been when she met Ernest.

And she was a very serious journalist and she reported from London during the Blitz.

And I was happy to listen to her stories, drink her champagne, sit in this wonderful place, share her memories, and then after about an hour, I asked her for the recipe that I'd come to get.

And that was my first time in this house.

She ended up giving me a recipe for hamburgers made with any kind of wild game.

That was Ernest's favorite.

He liked it very crispy on the outside and almost bloody rare on the inside.

NARRATOR: The house was at the edge of Ketchum when it was built in 1953, in the style of the Sun Valley Lodge.

Businessman Bob Topping built it for entertaining, with projectors and a movie screen.

The Hemingways entertained there, too, with the circle of friends Ernest Hemingway called "The Family."

HUSS: These are, you know, common people, hunting guides, fly-fishing guides.

I think that's why he called the people "The Family."

This was a conclave of individuals who are expert at what they do.

He's buried here in the Ketchum cemetery, which tells a story.

He's surrounded by not only his family but also the family of hunting guides, Lloyd Arnold, Jean Van Guilder, Taylor Williams, the Atkinsons.

They're all surrounding Hemingway's grave.

So as you walk around the cemetery, that tells a story.

NARRATOR: For 20 years Phil Huss has taught a course on Hemingway at the Sun Valley Community School.

In 2020, he published a book about Hemingway's time in Idaho and what it tells us about his art, his life and the code he lived by.

HUSS: He never wrote about the Sun Valley area.

Some people have opined and said that he wanted to protect this place.

This was a place that he wanted to escape from celebrity.

He wanted to be able to spend time with the people he revered here, who didn't treat him like a celebrity.

They weren't interested in his books.

NARRATOR: But Sun Valley did find its way into one Hemingway novel.

HUSS: So he came over in '39 with 12 chapters of "For Whom the Bell Tolls."

And in Chapter 13, he works Sun Valley into the book.

Robert Jordan says, "If we make it through this war, maybe we'll be Mr. and Mrs. Robert Jordan of Sun Valley, Idaho."

NARRATOR: The Hemingway code that Huss describes is more than the silent, macho stereotype.

Huss says Hemingway prized mentors, like his Idaho hunting companions.

Men who were masters at their craft, who saw nature as an arena in which to behave honorably.

The code also helps explain Hemingway's complicated relationships with women, and his four troubled marriages.

HUSS: Hemingway, in his stories, writes profoundly about the failures of men to understand women in relationships.

I think it's important to note that Hemingway was never not married.

Ernest Hemingway would move on to the next woman as the marriage was deteriorating.

And I think that that speaks to his vulnerability.

NARRATOR: Hemingway fell in love as a young man recovering from his wounds in Italy during World War I.

When the nurse he loved recognized their relationship couldn't work, he was devastated.

HUSS: I think that exposed him for the rest of his life of fear that the women would leave him.

One of the code principles in the book that I wrote is "find faith in love."

When love wanes, and the relationship no longer is a loving relationship, to honor the concept of love, move on.

There's a reason that Hemingway created these characters, and it comes from his experience with war.

He nearly died as a young man in World War I.

But then he covered the Greco-Turkish war as a journalist, and then he covered the Spanish Civil War.

It had its effect on his religious faith, it had an effect on his belief in the world.

Hemingway wants to create characters who live by a self-imposed way of being in the world.

If you can't control these forces, like war, then you must control what you can control.

And that is how you conduct yourself in the world.

NARRATOR: When Mary Hemingway died in 1986, the house and 12 acres went to the Nature Conservancy.

The Community Library took ownership in 2017.

The library's Regional History Center encompasses both Hemingway and Central Idaho history.

Its multiple Hemingway programs include research and study of the house and its artifacts, an annual Hemingway seminar, and a growing collection of Hemingway materials.

A recent addition is the donation of 4,000 Hemingway-related items from collector David Meeker.

Among the items: a bullfighter's suit from Hemingway's 1959 trip to Spain, which inspired the book "The Dangerous Summer."

NICOLE POTTER, MUSEUM LIBRARIAN: And we know he worked on "The Dangerous Summer" in Idaho.

That is part of the story of the end of his life.

So having that really tangible part of that story was exciting for us.

We have the handwritten itinerary of his time there, telegrams that he sent while he was in Spain - "Running late, bullfight went long" - things like that.

So just really furthering the picture of this last great adventure he went on.

I'm very excited for people to see the photographs in the Meeker collection.

Some of them you will be familiar with, but some are unique and offer a new window into Hemingway's life.

NARRATOR: Library leaders see the Hemingway legacy, and now the Hemingway house, as a way to promote not just Hemingway's contributions, but the broader literary culture of Idaho.

DAVIDSON: I think it's really significant that Idaho was a creative space for him.

And I think because he continues to be such an iconic figure that he provides an invitation for us to think about how Idaho can be a creative space, has been and can be, for lots of different people.

NARRATOR: The centerpiece of this larger literary effort is an artist-in-residence program that hosts writers for extended stays in a new basement apartment at the Hemingway Home.

FREEMAN: I think Hemingway is a great gate to open to other artists and writers and musicians who have roots in Idaho.

This house is a very, very special place.

DAVIDSON: Our goal is that they come here and they actually fall in love with Central Idaho and that perhaps our community gets exposed to writers, ideas, thinking, that we otherwise would not have been exposed to.

[WORKSHOP CONVERSATION] NARRATOR: Actor, film writer and producer Naomi McDougall Jones and her husband moved to Ketchum in 2020 after falling in love with Central Idaho during her Hemingway residency.

NAOMI MCDOUGALL JONES, WRITER: I think a lot about how much the storytellers have concentrated themselves in New York and Los Angeles, particularly in my industry but also generally, and how unhelpful that is to the country.

You know, Idaho is beautiful and I think there's something really to be said for being an artist in a place that fills you up and does give you inspiration and creativity and space.

I think that's a lesson of Hemingway.

He did that.

He constructed his life so that he would be in places that gave him artistic nourishment.

NARRATOR: The first dozen resident artists have spent their time writing, thinking and participating in Community Library events.

Richard Blanco, President Obama's 2013 inaugural poet, hosted workshops for aspiring writers at the Hemingway house.

DEBORAH VAN LAW, WORKSHOP PARTICIPANT: It's a place where you have space to think.

And I imagine that's true for a novice writer like me or for Mr. Blanco or for Hemingway, a master writer like Hemingway.

It's just a place where time stands a little bit more still.

And the noise drops off and you can express yourself.

It's a place you don't want to leave.

NARRATOR: The weeks Blanco spent at the house gave him insight into Hemingway's life and mental decline, and his struggles after depression and alcoholism and electroshock therapy left him all but unable to write.

BLANCO: He became much, much more real to me in that respect.

Something about how terrifying, you know, it was for him to sit down or stand up to write that he would just tell himself, I just want to write one true sentence today.

Just one true sentence.

And god, could I relate to that.

And the terror of it, too.

Like, hey, if Hemingway was scared, I could be scared, too.

STRAYED: What I was reminded of over and over as I listened to Hemingway's words was how universal that struggle is, that sense of mission, that we want to tell one true thing, that sense of doubt, that fear that we won't be able to do it.

Writing has never been easy for me.

And it's so comforting and consoling to hear from Hemingway.

It was never easy for him either.

MCDOUGALL JONES: One of the things I have come to admire the most about Hemingway is that he took himself 100 percent seriously as an artist.

He believed in his own greatness.

He constructed his whole life around giving himself the best chance of creating great art.

So I really had to confront that about myself.

This has been a hard thing as more of us women work to be great creative artists, to say, no, I am a great artist, that it is worth structuring my life around, and I am worthy of that space.

And there was a confrontation with myself through Hemingway that happened in this house that has changed the level of seriousness with which I take my work and is part of I think why I moved back to Idaho.

NARRATOR: Naomi McDougall Jones has also become an activist, known for her TED Talk and book about Hollywood's systemic discrimination against women in film.

But the specific project that brought her to the Hemingway house was her screenplay about an ambitious young woman in the house of a famous dead man - in conversation with the man's ghost.

MCDOUGALL JONES: It's very much about a present-day woman who is herself trying to do great work in her life reckoning with the specter of a great dead white man.

I mean, how could I possibly have ended up in a better place to write that?

One of the great gifts of being here in this house was being able to live with Ernest Hemingway as a human being.

Being who I am, I thought a lot about that sort of overemphasis on masculinity and patriarchy does also destroy the men that it seems to help.

That by removing the nuance and forcing them into this performative thing, it destroys them as well.

STRAYED: He's modeling exactly what we have to do as writers.

You have to overcome whatever barriers are in your way.

I also... really I have to say, as a woman writer, as a mother, that I think that Hemingway was able to sit down first thing every morning and write until noon because somebody else was looking after the kids and the house.

There's evidence of his privilege as a male writer.

NARRATOR: Cheryl Strayed is the author of bestsellers "Wild" and "Tiny Beautiful Things."

Her friends and collaborators include Oprah Winfrey and Reese Witherspoon, who played Strayed in the film version of "Wild."

She spent November 2020 writing at the Hemingway house.

She understands the burden that celebrity placed on Hemingway.

STRAYED: The challenging part of fame is that what made you famous really began with you very, very quietly working alone in a room.

The work doesn't change just because people's response to it does.

There is nothing different about the way that Hemingway wrote and had to write.

When you write as a famous writer, you know that you're inevitably going to disappoint some people, and that's a burden.

And yet what you have to do is the same thing you did at the beginning, and that is stay humble, stay true, do the work, overcome the voices, show up, show up at dawn, work till noon, you know, whatever your version of that is.

You have to do it.

NARRATOR: Like Hemingway before her, Strayed has redefined the genres in which she writes.

Her compilation of "Dear Sugar" advice columns created a new kind of advice literature.

STRAYED: What I always thought I could offer as a writer is not so much instructions or the answer but rather illumination.

Let us show us to ourselves.

I think all of literature does that.

I think all of literature is one long advice column.

In "Dear Sugar," it's more direct.

But, I really think when we say a book saved us, that's what we're saying.

NARRATOR: In "Wild," her memoir about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, Strayed flipped the adventure story on its head, writing about a woman alone in the wilderness.

STRAYED: The stories that were told about solitary people who went into the wilderness have almost always been men.

And so I knew that tradition.

I wanted to tell the true story of what happened to me, a woman in the wild.

What did I find?

What did I face?

And so I was writing both with and against a narrative tradition that I was deeply aware of.

And Hemingway was part of that.

NARRATOR: Writers come to the residency to spend time on their own work, but all end up reckoning with the complexities of Hemingway - the writer and the person.

STRAYED: I'm always struck, really, by his empathy, by his ability to pierce through that kind of veneer of masculinity and show us his characters in a vulnerable and real way.

He's writing about these men who have been through the war.

They've been wounded.

They're trying to heal.

They're not able to talk about healing in open-hearted ways.

He shows characters who are struggling with that, who are trying in the most glimmer of a moment to say, "I'm in pain, I'm hurting."

And that's what I think about when I think about Hemingway.

So much of that fishing and hunting and going off to war, that's like the sort of surface level of Hemingway.

And then all of the heart, all of the emotion, all of the pain and suffering and endurance and triumph is beneath that.

NARRATOR: Listening to the Big Wood River, looking into the distant Boulder Mountains also lets the writers connect with the landscape that inspired Hemingway.

BLANCO: The quiet, the solitude.

A certain peace and energy that I'm feeling very comfortable writing around.

I mean just sitting on the porch here and like listening to the river.

That's something that I'm taking with me for sure.

DAVIDSON: The natural landscape here is significant for all kinds of ecological reasons.

And it also was super significant to Ernest and Mary Hemingway.

So there's the house.

There's the landscape.

And there's the sense of this being kind of a sacred spot.

We kind of need spots that we are reverent toward, that do not become commercialized or become a spectacle.

And the fact that Hemingway died by suicide here is something that we don't want to gloss over.

You know, the fact that Mary, his widow, continued to reside in the house for another 25 years suggests that this, more than a place of death, was a place of healing and a place of sanctuary.

And perhaps the best way we can honor Hemingway's legacy is to preserve that sense of sanctuary that the house and Idaho was to both of them.

NARRATOR: One other place of sanctuary figures prominently in Hemingway's Idaho story.

Gene Van Guilder worked for the Sun Valley Resort and became Hemingway's friend and hunting companion.

When he died in a hunting accident in 1939, Hemingway was shaken and angered.

The careless accident violated everything he believed about performing honorably and well in the outdoors.

Hemingway hated to speak in public, but Van Guilder's widow asked him to give the eulogy.

HUSS: And he decided to do so.

And he wrote a beautiful eulogy that's at the bottom of the Trail Creek Memorial.

VOICE ACTOR READING HEMINGWAY: "Best of all, he loved the fall.

The leaves yellow on the cottonwoods, leaves floating on the trout streams, and above the hills, the high blue windless skies.

Now he will be a part of them forever."

HUSS: And he is Gene Van Guilder.

But I always like to say you can apply that to Hemingway.

Now he'll be a part of this place forever.

[MUSIC] ANNOUNCER: Major funding for Idaho Experience provided by the J.A.

and Kathryn Albertson Family Foundation.

Making Idaho a place to learn, thrive and prosper.

With additional support from Anne Voillequé and Louise Nelson, and Judy and Steve Meyer.

The Richard K. Shirley S. Hemingway Foundation.

The Friends of Idaho Public Television, the Idaho Public Television Endowment and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.