That Hemingway Fascination

I am forced to wonder at myself from time to time. Walking Cheyenne up Olivia Street I was quite surprised to see a crowd of people on the corner of Whitehead Street. Silly me, it's one of the biggest attractions in Key West.

Of corse I have visited from time to time because I do want to see what people come to see, even though I am not a huge fan of Hemingway's writing style, as spare as it is.

His home is also a slice of Key West history, this is how the wealthy lived in the twenties and his life is preserved. That his favorite home is in Cuba, also recorded on this web page if you search Finca Vigia doesn't detract from the historical value of this home.

It's a popular place and it never ceases to amaze me that this historic home is privately owned. In Europe where I grew up public places lie this with national significance would be owned by the state and held in trust for the people. That this is now a money making operation strikes me as a little weird.

The cats are always an issue in a town where neighbors have a hard time getting along. Supposedly the cats are descendants of Hemingway's felines and by means of the all-American lawsuit neighbors who hate the cats have managed to get the might of the Federal government involved in overseeing the animals. A federal judge ruled they are the equivalent of commercial bovines and need to be overseen as farm animals by the US Department of Agriculture! Strange neighbors indeed.

There's lots to see inside the gardens which cost a few dollars to enter but is not apparently entirely worth it for everyone. A quick peek is enough, whichnis how some people view Key West in its entirety, a small town, worth a quick view, no more.

Cheyenne likes the deeper longer inspection of her surroundings and she never seems to tire of walking city streets. It's not every dog that gets to sniff the famous Hemingway brick wall (which wasn't here when he was) and I doubt most dogs care.

I try not to get supercilious about the attractions that draw others to town. It is after all home to a writer who won the Nobel Prize. No small thing that, and there are tons of visitors to show it is an interesting thing, even if it isn't a properly registered National Monument.

Posted with Blogsy

Hemingway And The Dog

There was some slight tension on the leash as Cheyenne stopped to retrieve somebody's lost edible near the Hemingway House:


I needn't have worried because this couple took their time getting the shot just right while Cheyenne and I stood cheerfully and watched. The light was failing already and as a result my picture, taken with an impatient animal tugging, came out fuzzy...


And once again we have the mystery of the abandoned footwear:


And in case you are lost you can rely on a signpost to get you where you need to go. What else do you need in the Southernmost City?


Turning off Whitehead we passed this wreck,


...carefully labeled:


It is pretty amazing that in a town where dirt is anything but cheap that this sort of wasted space continues to be allowed to moulder away. Probably angry heirs or some such thing preventing development.


This place further up Catherine was finally open, even though there was a "closed" as well as open" sign outside. The Tomasitas were there and that is the first time i've been by and seen them out there actually selling fish. I was too shy to take their picture.


Which brought me to this phenomenon, quarters glued on the sidewalk. Perhaps the idea is to watch strangers bend down and try to enrich themselves twenty five cents at a time. Cheyenne and I didn't bite.


I am very fond of specialty license tags as they are much easier to read and memorize by members of the public when they call the police about, say a hit and run.


As for the palm stenciled on the trunk I'm not sure but reality is often rather better it seems to me:


Try painting an image of all that tropical lushness on the trunk of your car.




- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Finca Vigia

We've all seen the pictures of the 1950s American cars on Cuban streets, and even though we aren't allowed to visit the Forbidden Isle we think we have some faint idea of what it's all about. And then some of us find out different if we are lucky enough to cross the Straits of Florida. Kathy drove four hours to Miami earlier this month, then flew an hour to Havana and took a few pictures of her cultural exchange with the Godless communists across the water.She was part of a Key West Botanical Garden trip to Cuba, and on that trip she traveled in a group that included someone intimately associated with Ernest Hemingway in some manner I can no longer recall, and thus it was she got a rare private tour of the writer's home in Cuba. When she showed me her pictures I begged to post them here and eventually she yielded a glimpse into the rare world that was Ernest Hemingway's favorite tropical retreat, Finca Vigia.

In English the house name means "Lookout Farm" and it is pronounced feenka vee-hee-ah, approximately, with the emphasis on the hee. It lies just southeast of Havana, in a suburb apparently known as San Francisco de Paula, close to the main autopista to Cienfuegos and miraculously enough you can look it up in Google maps! The home was built in 1886 by a Catalan architect who seems to have enjoyed creating a light and airy tropical environment very different to the Hemingway House in Key West, which I wrote about here July 17th 2008.

For Key West, Hemingway is a meal ticket and his stay in the city, which ended in 1938 with a divorce and the arrival of the completed Overseas Highway, is touted as one of the city's major claims to fame. Finca Vigia on the other hand has been closed to tourists by the Cuban government though I have read that they do allow some visitors to stand outside and look in these days. Naturally, thanks to the preposterous continuing embargo I am unable to verify that myself...The World Monument's Fund has, according to the Internet placed it among the one hundred most endangered sites, but there again the house has apparently received major maintenance and now appears in good shape, at least from the pictures. The claim is that the house has been left exactly as it was when Hemingway left for the last time in 1960, down to the place settings on the dining room table and the location of the books scattered around the house. I don't suppose there is any way to verify this for sure of course, but by all accounts it is entirely possible that that is the case as the house still looks lived in- in 1950s style! Furthermore his boat Pilar, still showing it's home port of Key West, Fla, is restored and kept in a cradle under a roof on the grounds of the finca, fully fifteen kilometers from the sea...Hemingway bought the home in 1939 after his wife apparently found an ad for it in the paper. He shot himself while in Idaho in 1961 so he used this house a lot longer than the ten years attributed to him in Key West.Furthermore I have to say I have always found it profoundly odd that the Hemingway home in Key West is privately owned. There is something unnatural to me that a building that is claimed so forcefully by the public imagination in the US isn't actually a National Monument, but there it is. Paradoxically in Cuba where everything belongs to the state, more or less,the Hemingway home is perfectly preserved and at the same time largely inaccessible.While the architecture is very different the interior touches, all those dead animal heads are definitely Hemingway's style:I read somewhere that Hemingway had a library of some 9,000 volumes in the house and apparently they are all catalogued by the caretakers. And a few of them by Kathy too:And I have no idea what this member of the party was photographing, if indeed that was what he was doing:This lot look rather studious:I also read that Hemingway had a collection of records, classical and jazz, and that his phonograph still works. That one I don't know, but the records are in the pictures:I wish I could have been there but I gleaned what I could from Kathy's pictures, little details but stuff that one day soon we will all be able to see in person, perhaps:Just one hundred miles south of where I'm sitting, and it might as well be on the dark side of the moon.

Hemingway

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!