For Whom Zest for Life Tolls

Michael Palin is many things--comic, clever and charming among them--but nothing about the former Python remotely brings macho Ernest Hemingway to mind.

The happily married British actor has no demonstrable talent for marlin fishing, cringes at big-game hunting and abhors bullfighting. Pound for pound, Palin looks like a baby antelope to Hemingway’s bull elephant, and he admits the literary giant probably would not have had any use for a funny Englishman.

So why has Palin produced a book and television documentary following the trail of Hemingway’s life from birth in Chicago, through wartime Italy, Spain, Africa and Cuba and back to the American West? Where’s the common ground?

“Adventure,” Palin said. “The great American novelist spent all but about 10 years of his working life out of the United States. He was a traveler.”

Palin is too, of course, having spent much of his life after Monty Python visiting far corners of the world to make travelogues. They are fellow globe-trotters, and “Michael Palin’s Hemingway Adventure,” as both book and program are called, is about Palin in Hemingwayland as much as it is about the novelist.

For that reason, the British critics did not like them very much. After seeing the first of the series that is to air Wednesday night on PBS (KCET and KVCR locally), Paul Hoggart in the Times of London suggested a more apt title might have been, “Michael Palin Visits Some Places Mentioned in Hemingway and Pootles Around a Bit.”

One wonders just how serious Palin should get when the centenary of one of America’s greatest authors last year was commemorated with a new line of furniture in his name. Still, the program is oddly gentle and comic for a story about someone who drank and shot his way through life to an early death. It fails to convey any real depth or insights into Hemingway.

But it is a travelogue, and if you like Palin travelogues, you might like this one too.

Hemingway Was ‘Competitive Bully’ Who Changed Modern Writing

Palin says his own sense of adventure was inspired by Hemingway, whose books he discovered as a teenager in the English industrial city of Sheffield. He called his first novel “Hemingway’s Chair” and has made a career trying to convey the master’s sense of place to television audiences around the world.

“The more you read about Hemingway, the more you realize what is beneath this extraordinary legend. He was a fantastic, compulsive, competitive bully in many ways, but also someone who managed to change modern writing,” Palin said.

“He had the ability to celebrate life writing, drinking, fishing, shooting. He was a man who filled his time completely. . . . He saw life as a scenario he was writing and playing out. He was a master of fiction and drama, but he was also more of an actor than we think. He was inventing a world in which he could play a whole lot of characters,” he said.

Palin set out to do the Hemingway book with photographer Basil Pao. When the BBC asked Palin to take along a camera crew and do a series for them, as well, the veteran of “Around the World in 80 Days” and “Pole to Pole” was more than happy to comply.

From the United States, Palin travels to Italy, where Hemingway drove an ambulance in World War I and was wounded in a bomb blast--fodder for the fictional Lt. Henry in “A Farewell to Arms.” Palin takes a CPR course and a turn at the wheel of an ambulance in Milan before setting off by bicycle to locate the place where Hemingway was hurt.

Conflicting directions from locals makes this impossible and, instead, Palin buries his old copy of “Farewell to Arms” in homage.

After touring Hemingway’s old haunts in Paris--times immortalized in “The Sun Also Rises”--Palin moves on to Spain, where Hemingway’s name and love for bullfighting are forever married.

Here Palin heeds Hemingway’s advice in the opening chapter of “Death in the Afternoon” that “whoever reads this can truly make such a judgment when he, or she, has seen the things that are spoken of and knows truly what their reactions to them would be.”

In Valencia, he interviews a bullfighter who professes his love for bulls, tastes a local delicacy--bull testicles--and somewhat squeamishly attends a bullfight before coming to understand Hemingway’s judgment that to confront death was to experience life at its most intense.

Palin Hunts for Poachers in Shadow of Kilimanjaro

Hemingway’s passion for bullfighting was equaled only by his love of hunting, Palin tells us as he sets out for Africa and a view of the snows of Kilimanjaro. But Palin tracks poachers rather than big game.

“The idea of putting a bullet through another animal doesn’t attract me at all, though I am interested in people who do it,” Palin said during a recent interview. “The same with bullfighting. It’s obscene. But a good bullfight and the crowd are fascinating. You go to see what in the world it is like, and the vitality and passion in bullfighting is fascinating.”

Palin’s sense of humor plays well in Africa, where he finds a zebra toilet with a hand-carved turtle seat, and models the Hemingway Jacket he ordered from a magazine he found at a Chicago shooting range. He makes fun of his own lack of prowess in an encounter with a caged baby cheetah.

“Is he tame?” he asks the handler.

“Well, he’s half-tame.”

“Which half?” Palin responds.

The cheetah lashes out at his leg and, disappointed that he has no bloody scar to show for it, Palin notes “two tiny but unmistakable punctures in my Hugo Boss chinos.”

He hits Key West and Cuba before landing in the American West, bison country in Montana and Idaho where Hemingway sought to get away from it all. Hemingway’s last days, alas, were filled with depression, paranoia and frequent suicide attempts. His last one was successful on a Sunday morning in July 1961.

“He defined his life by pushing himself into experiences that were pretty close to life-threatening,” Palin said. “He knew early on that the most likely way he would end his life was by his own hand, and maybe that is why he pushed himself into situations that tempted fate. Or maybe he thought he could make fate change its mind.”

Never fear, Palin is too much a comic to end on such a maudlin note.

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* Part I of “Michael Palin’s Hemingway Adventure” can be seen Wednesday at 9 p.m. on KCET and KVCR. It concludes the following Wednesday.