We are in the middle of summer and its those pesky days of not much tourist income so the tourist people have spent a good deal of time and bed tax dollars dreaming up whacky weekends to bring people to town. With gas at four and a half dollars a gallon its more of a struggle but the show must go on and this weekend we have not only Mel Fisher days, the man who found the treasure, but coincidentally Hemingway Days when fat old white men with beards will run down Duval Street with wooden bulls in hot pursuit. Either you get it or you don't. I don't. 
I am one among the last people on the planet who reads paper books, and I alone don't like reading Hemingway. His short sentence structure, terse dialogue and lack of description leave me breathless and hyperventilating. The guide on the tour suggested this style came about from sending telegrams when he was a reporter and had to keep it short. I used to write news copy for the radio but I like a florid, run on sentence or two. He was, as they say, larger than life. He won a Nobel Prize, he made a ton of money, always the sign of an American winner, and he chased women like they were going out of fashion. Hemingway makes me feel like a pansy, he hunted big game- I felt sick the one and only time I shot a deer, he married four times I think and cheated on all of them- I'm a home body, he drank like a fish all hail fellow-well-met- I'm a sober loner, he was a successful war reporter,-I drank like a fish when I reported from the front lines and spent most of my time ready to pee my pants when people shot at me. I guess my disdain for his writing style has deeper roots. But people throng to his home and pay their respects to the man of the written word. I like his house real well and it gives us some taste of what life was like in Key West in the thirties, but I think he would have made an awful neighbor, overrunning his place with cats:
Carousing till all hours, even hauling a urinal back to his startled wife from Sloppy Joe's old bar:
Arguing with her all the time, on one spectacular occasion about the money she wasted building a saltwater pool: 
No, no Hemingway and I would never have got along. But there again, who cares? His granddaughter comes to key West and presides over a short story competition, and the city has a favored son to commemorate and we have no threat from Cuba where Hemingway's favorite home was located, Finca Vigia ("Overlook Farm") and the real Old Man and the Sea recently died so we are currently Top Hemingway Dogs. Come one, come all, just keep the economy going, please. And the tour is fun. Our guide looked like he was rode hard and put up wet, no doubt keeping up the Key West image:
He chatted up the pretty girls and the kids as one is supposed to and the tour seemed happy enough, a shy bunch of strangers:
The interior seems much as it was though I don't really remember much about my last visit years ago, there is still plenty of open space under the tall ceilings, in a house open to the heat and decorated with the heavy dark Spanish style furniture Hemingway reportedly liked:
Which must have made the saltwater pool quite the refuge as air conditioning wasn't then an option:
The writing studio seems changed to me, not least because the walkway from the house is gone, and the stairs are still steep:
But also they have a manual typewriter on a table with a chair and as far as I know he wrote standing up to relieve back injuries from his excessively athletic youth. I seem to recall a writing stand in the room. Oh, and boxing I think is barbaric, Hemingway loved it, so we definitely would have been at loggerheads:
Looking in through the protective bars at the studio, the tourist in front of me made some snide comment about the ease of working only a few hours each morning, and compared to the daily grind for most of us there is some truth in that. On the other hand Hemingway ate his gun rather prematurely which puts me definitely in the 100 years as a Lamb, rather than a day as a Lion as Mussolini put it facing his own unsavory end. Hemingway lived large because he was driven to, and that, not just pushing a pen was his hard work. He got a nice view out of his studio window as he struggled with the English language:
Actually he didn't. There is a print of the Asa Tifton house at the time Hemingway owned it (purchased by his father in law because writing a few hours a day wasn't making it, ironically!) and the greenery around the house was sparse, nothing like it is now. Hemingway's taste in tiles is still evident. Fish and parrots. 
The tour of the house is brief but the beauty of the Hemingway House visit is that one is free to ramble anywhere and everywhere the doors are unlocked. There are no time limits and few restrictions that I could tell. Followers of The Man are free to stand and contemplate all day long if they choose, though the public loos are a little less fancy than the master's, though entirely acceptable. I saw visitors hiding from the sun chatting in one public outhouse. 
The Hemingway House boasts a rare thing in Key West, a genuine basement which the guide assured us has never flooded. The owners of the property have fenced it off so we the curious can't get in but that black hole in the ground was tantalising I have to say:
Especially on a hot sticky day like yesterday:
The cats didn't seem to mind the thundery humidity, though the visitors were complaining all the time as though they expected glacier melt to be surrounding the Southernmost City. The cats sit up and looks supercilious as the tours go through and get kibbles for their troubles:
This one was preening himself until something startled him though what could startle a Hemingway cat in this oasis of adoration I couldn't say.
Footprints in the cement perhaps?
As an illustration of close Key West living someone who chose to live near the Hemingway House a while back reported the property to the Department of Food and Agriculture accusing them of running a breeding farm without a permit. The complaint alleged that the stock (cats not cows) were suffering in an urban environment and they should be removed. Well, the shit hit the fan, predictably enough and at vast taxpayer's expense an FDA inspector came to town to investigate the illegal cat farm and the owners howled and everything ended up getting smoothed over which is why there is an impressive cat herding fence on top of the wall around the property:
Here's a hint: don't like cats? Don't take up residence near the Hemingway House! The cats look pretty smart by comparison to the humans, even though, in the final analysis another reason Hemingway and I wouldn't have got along- I'm a dog person!
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