Hemingway Adventure (1999) (24 page)

Late daylight spills on to the entrance porch where Hemingway took his own life on 2 July 1961.

Hemingway’s physical and mental health deteriorated fast in his last years out west.

Wrought-iron work above gates of Ketchum cemetery.

The end of the journey. Hemingway’s grave at Ketchum. Mary, his wife for fifteen years, lies beside him under the spruce trees.

In the late nineteen twenties a gently rising tide of fame was beginning to lap around Ernest Hemingway and he was not altogether happy about it. Paris had changed. There were too many tourists pointing him out on the street. Too many tourists in Paris, period
.

He had a new wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, and he wanted to come home, but to somewhere where he would not be bothered. His friend, the writer John Dos Passos, recommended Key West, the southernmost city of the USA. No more cold European winters, a tolerant, relaxed atmosphere and plenty of deep-sea fishing. On top of all this, Pauline’s rich Uncle Gus lived not far off, in Arkansas. When Ernest and the second Mrs Hemingway arrived in Key West he promised to have a brand new car waiting for them. A generous gift, but not absolutely essential. In 1928 there was no road connecting Key West with the rest of America. As Hemingway wrote to Dos Passos in February 1929: ‘45 mile water gap still and the County Treasurer absconded with all funds and they’ve closed the schools - let alone build the road.’

O
nce he’d got used to the heat, Hemingway became wildly enthusiastic about Key West. He sent out a flurry of letters to tempt his friends to visit him in what he called ‘the St Tropez of the poor’. He told his editor, Max Perkins, that he had salvaged fourteen bottles of Chateau Margaux from a wreck on the reef, that the shooting and fishing were fantastic and he had some pre-war absinthe he wanted him to try. He told Dos Passos he was absolutely broke but in one evening had seen 100 tarpon (a large gamefish), and was already planning to take him out fishing to the Tortugas.

Hemingway was good at persuading people that they wanted to do things he wanted to do, and a crowd of his buddies soon descended on the sleepy city. They came and went on the railroad that was built in 1912 and remained the only land route through the Keys until it was destroyed by a hurricane in 1935.

Hemingway was greatly affected by the hurricane, one of the worst in living memory, with winds of 250 miles an hour. He was furious that the weather service had down-played it so much that a camp of war veterans working on the new highway was not evacuated and hundreds were drowned. In a letter to Max Perkins, he was especially incensed about a writer who had come to the Keys because he needed a hurricane for the book he was writing:

Max, you can’t imagine it, two women, naked, tossed up into trees by the water, swollen and stinking, their breasts as big as balloons, flies between their legs. Then, by figuring, you locate where it is and recognise them as the two very nice girls who ran a sandwich place and filling station three miles from the ferry … I would like to have had that little literary bastard who wanted his hurricane along to rub his nose in some of it
.

Today, as I drive south on US One from Miami, it’s hurricane season again. I’m on Seven Mile Bridge, the longest of the connections between the islands, with the Gulf of Mexico on one side and the Atlantic on the other, washing in over the long coral reef, six miles out. The sea is peaceful in all directions, the heat intense.

Remains of the shattered railway, which, as Hemingway accurately predicted, was never rebuilt after the hurricane, can still be seen: chunky stone towers marooned in the shallow water.

Despite the splendours of this bridge, much of US One is a two-lane road with the feeling of going nowhere in particular. Driving through sedge-grass and mangrove swamp, passing straw-thatched pull-ins offering tropical cocktails, and signs warning of crocodiles crossing, I feel as if I’ve broken free from the corporate compounds of urban America and entered an unreal world where illicit pleasure is permitted and irresponsibility actively encouraged.

Of course it’s an illusion. Corporate America has its grip on the Keys like anywhere else. There are condos and apartment hotels and expensive resorts owned by insurance companies. It’s just that the grip seems a little looser here, and the feeling grows the nearer you get to Key West.

Not for nothing is US One known as the Overseas Highway. By the time I’m driving its last mile, past the clapboard colonial villas of Whitehead Street and the wide-open doors of the Green Parrot - ‘Last Bar on US One’ - it is not the Keys, but the rest of America that has become remote and unreal.

*

E
rnest Hemingway would have been a hundred years old today and I can find no mention of this fact in the newspaper. I check the date again, July 21st 1999. But there’s nothing there. My copy of USA Today is still full of news of the death of JFK Junior in an air-crash at the weekend. The grief of the Kennedys has eclipsed the celebrations of the Hemingways.

But he is not forgotten here in Key West. Indeed every year at this time, in the height of sub-tropical summer, men with beards don thick woollen sweaters in imitation of their hero and gather in the steamy heat of a downtown bar to see who looks most like him.

The Hemingway Look-Alike Contest is one of many highlights in a ten-day orgy of Ernestness called the Hemingway Days Festival, which also features competitions for storytelling and arm-wrestling. Flicking through my programme I see that the centenary will not go unnoticed. A giant birthday cake will be cut outside Sloppy Joe’s Bar at six.

Sloppy Joe is a potent figure in Hemingway mythology. His full name was Joseph Russell; a native of Key West, married with three children, he had first endeared himself to Hemingway by cashing a thousand-dollar royalty cheque from
A Farewell to Arms
which the First National Bank had refused to do on account of Hemingway’s scruffy appearance.

Hemingway liked a drink or two and though the sale of alcohol had been illegal in the States since 1920, Joe Russell ran a speakeasy and a 34-foot ocean-going launch with which he brought liquor in from Cuba, only ninety miles to the south. Hemingway joined him on some of these trips, slaking his considerable thirst and gaining, besides an appetite for marlin-fishing and Havana night-life, the basis for a character in one of his novels. Joe Russell, rechristened Harry Morgan, became the anti-hero of Hemingway’s Gulf Stream novel,
To Have and Have Not
.

When Prohibition was repealed at the end of 1933, Russell opened a new, smarter Sloppy Joe’s on the premises of a bar called the Blind Pig. This is where, in December 1936, Hemingway first encountered the good looks and powerful personality of a young novelist and reporter by the name of Martha Gellhorn, for whom he ditched Pauline three years later.

In May 1937, after a quarrel over rent, Sloppy Joe’s moved to where it is now, on the corner of Greene and Duval Streets. It’s here in the last, and for him, the least-visited of the three Sloppy Joe’s, that the Hemingway flame burns brightest, and tonight its unremarkable two-storey brick and plaster facade is garlanded with red and blue ribbon and, at intervals along the top of the building, are long white birthday candles and the message ‘Happy 100th Birthday Papa’.

In the street outside, a crowd has gathered around an immense cake, probably twenty feet in circumference, its icing gently fermenting in the evening sun.

No one can be suffering more from the effects of Key West’s devouring, energy-sapping humidity than a Scottish pipe band which suddenly appears, dressed head to knee in black and squeezing and puffing out a bagpipe version of ‘Happy Birthday’, their faces leaking like boats in a storm. At the end of this a great cheer goes up and on the roof, two men, bandanna-ed like a pair of hippie terrorists, fire off shells which scatter confetti over the throng. All of which seems to have about as much to do with Hemingway as the Hemingway key-rings, frisbees, golf-balls and yo-yos that can be acquired at Sloppy Joe’s gift store.

T
he commercialisation of Hemingway is not a new phenomenon, nor was it something he actively discouraged. In the early 1950s he gave his name and, one presumes, his creative talent, to an ad for Ballantine Ale. ‘I would rather have a bottle of Ballantine Ale than any other drink after fighting a really big fish,’ he enthused.

Even in Key West he was already aware of his celebrity potential. In a joky piece written for
Esquire
in 1935, he told readers:

The house at present occupied by your correspondent is listed as number eighteen in a compilation of the forty-eight things for a tourist to see in Key West … between Johnson’s Tropical Grove (number 17) and Lighthouse and Aviaries (number 19)
.

To discourage visitors while he is at work your correspondent has hired an aged negro … who meets visitors at the gate and says, ‘I’se Mr. Hemingway and ‘I’se crazy about you.’

Today his house has moved up to the top of the charts and visitors are met at the gate with a charge of $7.50 for adults and $4.50 for children and a sign reading ‘Do Not Pick Up Cats’. The cats are, to be honest, a bigger attraction than Hemingway. There are over sixty of them strolling, sleeping, washing and occasionally leaping about the house and grounds in proprietorial fashion. They are reputedly descended from Hemingway’s six-toed cats and the sure sign of this is that half of them are still polydactyl - that is, they have a bit to spare in the toe department. Some have six, others seven or even eight. They lighten up what is otherwise a pretty lifeless series of rooms, and they give the guides something to talk about.

‘This red one here is a marmalade tom we call Bill Clinton. He has seven toes, and yes, he
has
been neutered.’

All the rooms are fully accessible except for his writing room, located above one of the outbuildings. It was once attached to the rest of the house by a rope bridge, which must have tested Papa’s sobriety. It is unconvincingly pristine, with dead animals on the wall and the obligatory typewriter as its central feature. (Hemingway seems to have had as many typewriters as he had cats.) Visitors peer into this sanctum from behind a screen of Spanish-style wrought-iron bars, as if about to see someone tortured on the rack.

By the end of the tour I feel sorry for Pauline, Hemingway’s second wife, who, with the help of Uncle Gus, created this home for him. Our guide holds her responsible for the fact that we are all dripping with sweat. According to him it was Pauline who apparently removed the ceiling fans and had them replaced by elaborate wood and glass chandeliers.