Ernest Hemingway

 

Ernest Hemingway’s former home now belongs to the cats.

His books, photographs, furniture, marriages, fishing stories, and carefully cultivated legend remain on display, but the cats move through it all as though the famous writer were merely a previous tenant. They sleep beneath chairs, patrol the gardens, and receive visitors with the composed indifference of minor aristocrats.

I paused to say hello to every cat I encountered.

This slowed the tour considerably, although none appeared concerned about my schedule.

Hemingway first came to Key West with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, in 1928. Three years later, they moved into the Spanish Colonial house on Whitehead Street, where he lived through most of the 1930s. His writing studio occupied the second floor of a carriage house behind the residence, separated from domestic life by a courtyard and a short walk.

The arrangement suited him. He could leave the house without truly leaving the property, preserving both the comforts of marriage and the appearance of escape.

The Key West years became one of the most productive periods of his career. In the Whitehead Street studio, and during the broader years he moved among Key West, Cuba, Wyoming, Spain, and Africa, Hemingway worked on Death in the Afternoon, Green Hills of Africa, To Have and Have Not, The Fifth Column, and portions of For Whom the Bell Tolls. He also produced major short fiction during this period, including “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.”

Of these works, To Have and Have Not belongs most directly to Key West. Its boats, smugglers, poverty, violence, and uneasy movement between Florida and Cuba grew from the island Hemingway knew during the Depression. Key West was not merely where he sat down to write. It entered the fiction.

The island also suited the public character he was constructing.

He fished the Gulf Stream aboard Pilar, boxed, drank, traveled frequently to Cuba, and surrounded himself with companions who shared his appetite for physical adventure and extended evenings. Key West offered deep water, large fish, strong drinks, masculine fellowship, and enough distance from respectable literary society to make every afternoon appear vaguely dangerous.

That mythology remains so powerful that the writer can disappear behind “Hemingway.”

The house tells a less heroic story.

Pauline’s family money helped purchase and renovate the property. She oversaw major improvements, including the swimming pool, an extravagant addition in a place where fresh water remained precious. Hemingway’s affair with journalist Martha Gellhorn contributed to the destruction of the marriage. He eventually left Key West, divorced Pauline in 1940, and moved toward another life.

The years preserved so warmly in the house therefore contained more than literary discipline and heroic fishing. They also held privilege, betrayal, domestic strain, and the slow collapse of a marriage.

Museums prefer objects because objects remain where they are placed. Lives are less cooperative.

The cats, however, seem entirely at home.

The property now shelters dozens of them, many displaying polydactyly, the inherited trait that gives them extra toes. According to the tradition maintained by the museum, they descend from Snow White, a six-toed cat given to Hemingway by a ship’s captain. The certainty of that story has sometimes been questioned, but the cats have long since outrun the need for documentation.

Each bears the name of a famous person, though celebrity appears to have made little impression upon them. They settle into shaded corners, drift among visitors, and occupy the grounds with a confidence Hemingway himself might have admired. Some of their paws resemble small mittens, though none appeared interested in using the additional toes for productive labor.

I greeted each one because it seemed rude not to.

Some acknowledged me. Others did not. This also seemed appropriate. Hemingway spent much of his life constructing the image of a man who could command rooms, boats, animals, landscapes, and sentences. A cat would regard this as an unnecessarily elaborate way of asking for attention.

It happened that we visited on Hemingway’s birthday, July 21.

Birthdays are strange occasions at the homes of dead writers. The person is absent, but the date returns each year with perfect punctuality. Visitors gather, guides repeat familiar stories, books continue to sell, and the subject of the celebration remains permanently beyond surprise.

I marked the occasion by purchasing a copy of A Farewell to Arms.

The novel occupies an interesting place in Hemingway’s relationship with Key West. It was published in 1929, before he moved into the Whitehead Street house and before the famous studio became his regular workplace. He had, however, worked on the novel during his earliest period in Key West and reportedly completed it while staying on the island.

It belongs to the beginning of his Key West years, though not to the room we visited.

That distinction made the purchase more meaningful rather than less. I was not carrying away a book produced in that particular studio. I was carrying one connected to the moment Hemingway was first discovering the island that would shape the next decade of his life.

The title also seemed quietly suited to the visit.

Hemingway repeatedly said farewell—to places, wives, wars, friends, versions of himself, and eventually to Key West. Yet the house preserves the illusion that he might return from the dock at any moment, carrying a fish story that had improved considerably during the walk home.

He never did.

Pauline remained for a time. The house became a museum. The studio became a shrine to disciplined work. The legend expanded, while the cats took possession of the grounds.

That may be the most fitting outcome.

Hemingway worked hard to make himself unforgettable. The cats accomplish something similar by sleeping in strategically visible locations.

I left with A Farewell to Arms in hand, having observed his birthday and greeted every cat willing—or unwilling—to receive me. Hemingway’s name brought me through the gate, but the cats determined the pace of the visit.

He wrote himself into immortality.

They got the house.