House of Hemingway

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House of Hemingway
Key West's favorite novelist and a little something to remember him by . . .
By Willie Drye

The wall is the first thing you see. It's odd. The courses of brick rise and fall gently rather than follow a straight line. The mortar between the bricks looks smeared on, not smoothed and pointed the way an experienced mason would do it.

But Hemingway was delighted when his handyman, Toby Bruce, built the wall in 1935. It was solid enough to keep tourists from strolling onto his Key West, Florida, property and tall enough to keep them from snooping on him while he enjoyed a drink and a cigar with celebrity friends on his porch. Public curiosity about Hemingway hasn't waned with time. More than half a century after the author left his house at 907 Whitehead Street with his second marriage in ruins, tourists pour through the gate of the Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum at the rate of 500 or more each day. The wall is just a relic. It's okay to come inside.

Crossing the wide paved walkway shaded by a giant Indian banyan tree—only four feet tall when Hemingway's second wife, Pauline, planted it in 1931—visitors pass a curious fountain. Built in the shape of a Civil War ironclad warship, it's an eccentric thing to have sitting along the approach to a Spanish Colonial-style house. Then there are the cats. Lying on the fountain, curled up on front porch chairs, prowling the grounds, there are more than 50 cats in residence, most descendants of Hemingway's cats—with names such as Zane Gray, Ava Gardner, Erroll Flynn and Marilyn Monroe. Descended from a charming but deformed old Tom the author brought back from a boat trip to Havana, a lot of them have six toes.

Proud of the house, the novelist wrote his editor "You will be crazy about this place when you see it."

From the mutant feline livestock to the funny fountain to all the odds bits of furniture, books, and hunting and fishing trophies, it's obvious this was meant to be a private place, a spot a famous man could come to indulge whims, relax and be ignored by a town made up of folks not big on reading. At least, that's what it started out to be. Proud of the house, the novelist wrote his editor "You will be crazy about this place when you see it."

This was Ernest Hemingway's home during some of his happiest, most productive years. With this house and town as his base, he started building his image as the larger-than-life writer, hunter, fisherman, lover, and brawler of international reputation—"Papa" Hemingway. Before that, he was the son of a physician, a native of Oak Park, Illinois. He left home at age 18 to drive an ambulance in the Italian army near the end of World War I. Seriously wounded in July 1918, hospitalized in Europe, he returned to the U.S. in 1919 and lived briefly in Chicago. Marrying Hadley Richardson, he learned the news business in Kansas City, then took his bride to Paris in 1921 where he worked as a correspondent for the Toronto Star. The couple returned to North America in 1923 where Hemingway worked in the Star's main office. But the writer clashed with the city editor and by January 1924 was back in the "City of Lights" with his wife and infant son John.

The Paris years are the most romantic in the Hemingway legend. As part of "The Lost Generation" of expatriate American writers and artists, he drank hard, played hard, attended American poet Gertrude Stein's literary soirees, and enjoyed boozy adventures with American writers F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Dos Passos. His own literary output was steady: In Our Time, his first short-story collection, appeared in 1925; his first novel, The Sun also Rises, based on the expatriate experience, was published in 1926. Then he threw over his wife for Vogue fashion magazine writer Pauline Pfeiffer. They married in May 1927.

After a home accident and other problems, Ernest and Pauline, pregnant with his second child, decided to return to the U.S. Hemingway recalled Dos Passos telling him about an out-of-the-way Florida town called Key West. After a 1924 visit he described it as a "dreamland," the perfect place for Hemingway to "dry out his bones" after his bad luck. Dos Passos waved a tasty bit of trivia at Hemingway to lure him; the island's name is a corruption of the Spanish Cayo Hueso, or Bone Key.

Once prosperous, Key West was a poor island town when the Hemingways showed up and rented an apartment there in late '27. Its 10,000 residents, living in a collection of run-down, unpainted frame houses, scratched out a living fishing and smuggling rum and whiskey from Havana, 90 miles south. Their only connection to Florida's mainland was a miles-long railroad bridge. A tough, independent collection of Cubans, New Englanders, and Bahamians known as "Conchs," they were steadfast in their live-and-let-live approach to each other and took the burly writer to their hearts.

While working there on his novel A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway made friends with wealthy Key West businessman Charles Thompson and speakeasy owner "Sloppy Joe" Russell. But locals didn't believe him when he said he was a novelist. In an April 1928 letter, he asked Scribner's publishing house editor Maxwell Perkins to send copies of his books so he could prove it. It was an anonymity he would yearn for in a few years.

The Hemingways went to Kansas City in June 1928 for the birth of their son Patrick. They returned to Key West in November, moving into a rented house at 1100 South Street. Several weeks later, the writer's father died, a suicide. Hemingway left immediately for the funeral but was back on the Key in January 1929. He urged friends to visit him. Perkins, Dos Passos, and painters Waldo Peirce and Mike Strater were lured by his reports of mid-70s January temperatures, wonderful Gulf Stream fishing and "lots of liquor" recovered from a bootlegger's wrecked boat.

After a visit and a fishing adventure, Perkins said Key West was a good place for Hemingway; the novelist was starting to agree. Before the Hemingways left town again for summer travels, Pauline looked at properties with Charles Thompson's wife, Lorine, including one Lorine described as "a miserable wreck of a house" at 907 Whitehead Street.