One True Sentence:Hemingway.

"There were so many sides to him, he defied geometry" - Hadley Richardson, Ernest Hemingway's first wife.

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's visual biography of Ernest Hemingway, the succinctly titled Hemingway (BBC4/iPlayer) begins, more or less, and ends, more or less, with a suicide. But between the suicides of Hemingway's father (Clarence) and Hemingway himself, there is quite a lot to pack in. Ernest Hemingway only lived for sixty-one years - incidentally the number of years since he died - but in that time he became perhaps the world's most famous author - and a byword for all that is macho.

The fighting, the fishing, the drinking, the womanising, and the blood sports - they're all here. But Burns and Novick have dug much deeper to find a far more conflicted, and nuanced, individual than the writer who has become more myth than man in the decades following his death. Anyone can get into a fight, anyone can get drunk. Not everyone wins the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Not everyone ends up being described as the most celebrated American writer since Mark Twain.

The story is told by the use of long slow scanning shots of black and white photographs with an authoritative narration courtesy of Peter Coyote. There is jaunty jazz music for the twenties and Woody Guthrie for the depression years and there are multiple close ups of old typewriters. It's textbook Burns right down to the quotes (Dorothy Parker, Ralph Ellison) and the talking heads (writers - and lots of them including Edna O'Brien, literary scholars, biographers, and, quite surprisingly, John McCain).

It tells of how Hemingway aimed not to depict or critique life but to show how it felt to be alive. Both in the good times and in the bad times. Both of which he had plenty of personal experience of. Born in 1899, with four sisters and one brother, in the prosperous Oak Park suburb (an area overflowing with Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings) of Chicago, Hemingway nevertheless felt the pressure of his father's depression and blamed his mother, Grace, for it.

The maternal relationship was the first of many difficult ones Hemingway would have with women throughout his life. Though keen, from an early age, on hunting and fishing, the young Hemingway also loved the written word and devoured the books of Jack London and O Henry - as well as the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.

He knew he wanted to be a writer so, after leaving school, he started writing sports stories for local magazines and got himself a job at the Kansas City Star - a respected publication. At the age of eighteen he took a job driving Red Cross ambulances and was sent to Italy to do that for the American forces in World War I.

There he saw headless corpses, he witnessed the very worst of humanity, and he ended up in hospital in Milan after a bomb sent two hundred and twenty shards of shrapnel into his body. The war stories he told on returning to the US were eventful enough but Hemingway couldn't resist further embellishing them. Neither could he help affecting horror at those who became vicariously excited by his gory tales.

While he was still, quite clearly, making up stories he wasn't getting any further in his writing career and, after a period of rejection, eked out a living in Toronto writing about fishing and, er, barber's colleges. Nobody seemed interested in his short stories and his confidence suffered until he met, and fell intensely in love with - for Hemingway it seems love was never not intense - Elizabeth 'Hadley' Richardson from St Louis.

Richardson's own back story is quite something and she shared Hemingway's tendency towards anxiousness, depression, and suicidal ideation. Feeling he'd met his soul mate, his confidence recovered to such a degree that he felt able to, finally, start writing his first novel.

In 1921, Hemingway and Hadley married and soon ended up living in the Latin Quarter of Paris. Then the world's cultural capital and home to people like Picasso, Miro, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Stravinsky, and Erik Satie. Stein, as well as Ezra Pound, took to the young Hemingway and tried to help him in his career and while in Paris, Hemingway became an admirer of the writers DH Lawrence, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky as well as the painter Paul Cezanne.

He also travelled to Spain to watch a bullfight. He'd expected to loathe the barbarism and cruelty but he didn't. He loved the bullfight and he loved Spain. Some years later he would write about the 'sport' in 1932's Death in the Afternoon but the pleasure he found in the company of matadors was not matched by the unhappy feelings he experienced on learning Hadley was pregnant with their first child.

Jack would be born in 1923 but perhaps Ernest was worried he wouldn't be able to look after children. That year's Three Stories and Ten Poems and 1924's In Our Time (both collections of short stories) had not sold well at all and some of the content (gonorrhea and dubious sexual encounters on a Michigan lakeside) was considered obscene.

In Our Time, though still not selling well, did go on to become a critical success and Hemingway found himself being compared to James Joyce, William Faulkner, and F Scott Fitzgerald. It was The Sun Also Rises, in 1926, which he'd written in Valencia and Madrid, which was his first work to gain critical acclaim and, crucially, sell well. 

The Sun Also Rises was a sardonic account of the generation of people who'd been scarred by World War I and Hemingway, of course - both mentally and physically, could count himself very much as part of that generation. So could Hadley and so could her friend Pauline Pfeiffer, a Vogue reporter, whom Hemingway fell in love with.

Hemingway seemed happy to keep both Hadley and Pauline on the go at the same time but, unsurprisingly, this state of affairs was not satisfactory to either of his lovers. Eventually it was Hadley who was ditched and Hemingway married Pauline in Paris in 1927. His first marriage had lasted six years. It was not to be his shortest.

The same year Hemingway released another collection of short stories, Men Without Women, and it had sold badly. The themes of abortion and homosexuality and multiple uses of the n-word, it seems, were not what middle America wanted to spend their hard earned leisure time reading about.

For his next novel, 1929's A Farewell to Arms (written, among other places, in Key West and Arkansas), Hemingway returned to the great war. It was a story about an American ambulance driver who falls in love with a nurse while in Italy during WWI. Ambulance driving, war, falling in love - Hemingway was on familiar territory.

Its release followed a tumultuous year in Hemingway's life - 1928. His second son, and first with Pauline, Patrick had been born in the summer and his father had taken his own life in the winter. Hemingway commented "I'll probably go the same way" but still publicly called his father a coward for what he'd done and privately blamed his mother for what had happened.

Even though Hemingway was, as his friend John Dos Passos called him, "the king of the fiction racket" he still mythologised his own life and lied that he'd fought for the Italian army, had been awarded several major awards for gallantry, and that he'd nearly starved to death in Paris. While, in fact, he'd never been short of money for whisky in the French capital.

Another son, Gregory - later to become Gloria, was born in 1931 but for Pauline it was Hemingway Sr and not either of her children - nor her stepson Patrick, that was her chief priority. Even as he spent most of his time fishing, refereeing boxing matches, and drinking in Sloppy Joe's bar in Key West.

Oh - and writing. Though that was mostly done in the morning to free up time for other interests. It took Hemingway five years to write Death in the Afternoon, a non-fiction work about bullfighting and it seemed to whet his appetite for further animal cruelty as he travelled to East Africa to go on big game hunts where he and others shot lions, rhinos, buffalo, leopards, gazelles, cheetahs, hyenas, and antelope.

He wrote of these times in 1935's Green Hills of Africa. On returning to Key West, he observed it had become more touristy and started to spend more time in Havana, Cuba. Drinking and fishing, naturally. He began tiring of Pauline and started writing short stories about marital disintegration which reflected this but post-depression USA turned on Hemingway for being elitist and not writing about the working man.

Despite, or perhaps because of, this, he still attacked the Roosevelt administration for letting homeless veterans die in a lethal Florida hurricane. Critics remain impressed that he should indulge himself by writing about suicide in 1937's To Have And Have Not. 

The world was heading in a terrible direction and Hemingway's beloved Spain had been torn apart by a bloody civil war that would eventually kill more than half a million people. Both Hitler and Mussolini had provided Franco with fighters and planes which showed, if anyone still needed showing, the direction of travel for Germany and Italy.

The war correspondent Martha Gellhorn sought out Hemingway in Key West and together, as lovers, they travelled to Spain to cover the conflict where they were joined by the likes of Robert Capa, Langston Hughes, John Dos Passos, Antoine de Saint-Expurey, and even Errol Flynn.

In order to help the Republican war effort, Hemingway shot and cooked partridges for people to eat and he dined with Soviet commissars but didn't expose, as Dos Passos did, that they had been murdering anarchists and Trotskyites despite them nominally fighting on the same side. Hemingway didn't want to hurt the war effort but, more selfishly, he also wanted to save the stories up for a future book!

By the time For Whom The Bell Tolls (set during the Spanish Civil War) had been released, in 1940, a much bigger war had engulfed Europe and Asia and France would soon fall to the Nazis. Hemingway and Gellhorn bought a house, La Finca (or Finca Vigia), twelve miles outside of Havana. He would live there for the next twenty years, regularly venturing into Havana for daiquiris and margaritas.

For Whom The Bell Tolls sold brilliantly. Only Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind had sold quicker. The money made enabled Hemingway and Gellhorn to take a four month long honeymoon in China. A country which was then at war with Japan.

When, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, America was brought into the war (and Germany and Italy both declared war on the US), Hemingway volunteered to patrol the waters around Cuba with his 'hooligan navy' but it seems he was, as so often, spending his time fishing and drinking heavily.

When Martha confronted him about his drinking they would argue terribly. Slapping would follow verbal abuse and there was more than one drunken car crash. Hemingway insisted Gellhorn choose between being his faithful and obedient wife and being a war correspondent.

She chose the later and Hemingway, perhaps predictably, fell into depression and even deeper alcoholism. He stopped writing and he didn't even bother to travel to Europe to bear witness of what seemed to be the death of fascism. But, cruelly, he sought to make Gellhorn pay for leaving him. He signed up to write for the same magazine as her with the intent of overshadowing her work and then he tricked her off a flight and the slow boat she took to get the location of the story meant she was beaten for time by other correspondents when it came to filing her story.  

A year on from his divorce from Gellhorn, Hemingway was married again - for the fourth time. Mary Welsh was a journalist who visited him with flowers as he recovered from a car crash in England - on a trip he believed would kill him. Together, they moved into a room in the Ritz in liberated Paris and, soon, Hemingway, overwhelmed her.

He was still drinking too much and, soon, he was violent towards her too. The young writer, JD Salinger, who came to visit Hemingway, saw another side to the older man. One of kindness and support. But, back in Cuba, where Hemingway feared he may never write again, the drinking got even more extreme.

Mary Welsh was to join Hemingway in Havana and there she would take Spanish lessons and Hemingway would teach her deep sea fishing. He would also demand, as before, complete obedience. Welsh said she enjoyed the sex - but nothing much else. Yet she stayed and went from being, in her own eyes, an 'entity' to becoming an 'appendage'.

Whenever she said she was going to leave him, he threatened to kill himself and when, still in 1946, she had a miscarriage following an ectopic pregnancy she was told she'd never be able to have children. 'Papa' was distraught that he would never get the "daughter he so craved".

Instead of staying and comforting Welsh, Hemingway travelled to Venice and, at nearly fifty years old, fell in love with the nineteen year old Italian noble woman Adriana Ivancich. She did not reciprocate his feelings - which was a new thing for Hemingway - so instead she became the inspiration for, and cover artist, of 1950's Across the River and Into the Trees.

It was not a well received book and Hemingway's behaviour was becoming ever more irrational. He would tell stories about affairs with countesses and of how he'd killed over one hundred armed men. In reality, he was sleeping with teenage prostitutes.

Across the River and Into the Trees did sell well but critics slaughtered it. They called it "sentimental" and "pitiable" and Hemingway became bitter. He called Mary Welsh a bitch, wrote a series of racist letters, and rehearsed performative suicides.

Despite all of this, Ivancich came to Cuba with Hemingway and, presumably in order to try and impress her, Hemingway somehow pulled himself back into shape and began work on The Old Man and the Sea. A novel about a Cuban fisherman, a marlin, and some sharks.

Of course it was about so much more than that as well and Mary Welsh, after all Hemingway had said and done to her, absolutely adored it. So much she compared it to the fugues of Hemingway's beloved Bach and the drawings of Picasso. It went on to become one of Hemingway's most famous, and admired, pieces of writing.

In June 1951, Hemingway's mother, Grace, died in Memphis. Aged 79. Though Hemingway had financially supported her, he still hated her - and had not seen her for years. His family life was, as so often, in a period of turmoil. Son Gregory was arrested in Los Angeles for wearing women's clothes (it was a different time), and second wife Pauline died of a burst adrenal tumour for which Hemingway blamed Gregory.

Gregory gave as good back and Hemingway went out to Africa again as if to escape the pressure. Kenya. This time the only shooting of animals he did was with his camera (though he did try to hunt a warthog with a spear). At the time of the Mau Mau rebellion., Hemingway befriended locals and him and Mary became close again before both of them were injured when their plane crashed in Uganda.

Their recuperation seemed to consist of drinking Scotch together and sleeping high over the Nile in fear of being attacked by elephants. The world believed Hemingway was dead but he wasn't. Even if the rescue plane sent to return also crashed, after exploding, in Entebbe. Also in Uganda. Hemingway read his own obituaries but he had, in fact, survived two plane crashes in two days!

Just! He had fractured his skull, got first degree burns, and suffered a brain injury. It never rains but it pours. It was the beginning of the end. Hemingway began hallucinating and became even more short tempered and abusive than before. He lost all restraint and his son Patrick never spoke to him again.

When he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, he was too ill to travel to Stockholm to accept the prize. They took it to Cuba to give to him instead. There, against doctor's advice, Hemingway continued drinking which, of course, clouded his vision. At a time when it would have been beneficial to have a clear sight of what was going on. Fidel Castro's revolutionaries were waging war against the US backed dictator Fulgencio Batista.

That's something you'd have thought Hemingway would take a huge interest in but instead, as so many older men do, he reverted to fighting old battles and settling old scores. He started saying rude things about the long dead Gertrude Stein and F Scott Fitzgerald. After writing a kind of autobiography, A Moveable Feat, Hemingway moved to the Costa del Sol in Spain where he toured bullfights, drank, and sucked up the adulation he was given as a hero.

It exhausted him so he returned to Cuba. His discipline, it seems, had completely departed him and, once again, he could barely write. When Castro (whom Hemingway claims to have sympathised with by this point) defeated and replaced Batista, Hemingway left Cuba for the last time. 

For Idaho. Back in America, he became convinced the FBI were after him and he initially refused any help with his health problems. Until his condition became so bad he finally accepted hospitalisation. In hospital he was given ECT and, somehow - his celebrity perhaps, he was allowed to drink wine. In a hospital bed.

After six weeks he managed to convince his doctors he was better and returned from the hospital (in Minnesota) to his home in Idaho. He still couldn't write though. His strength was zapped. Hemingway had become the wounded bull at the bullfight and he knew all too well what happened to them.

It took Hemingway a whole week to write just four lines in praise of the new American president, John F Kennedy and when, in April 1961, the US backed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs failed, Hemingway knew he could never return to Cuba. He'd lost almost everything. He had more ECT but he still got worse and was considered, by this point, to be completely paranoid.

On the morning of the 2nd of July 1961, Mary was woken up by a large bang. Ernest Hemingway, the king of the fiction racket, the most celebrated American writer since Mark Twain, the Pulitzer Prize winner, the Nobel Prize winner, the man who lived to write "one true sentence", had turned the gun on himself - as he had so often said he would do.

It's not always easy, or even, possible to like Hemingway as a person (some of his behaviour was abonimable) but his life story, as told by Ken Burns, is absolutely fascinating and his books - or at least some of them, I hear, are pretty special too. Maybe I should read one one day.