Hemingway House Key West

It was hot but a good hot with the humidity tempered by the constant Gulf of Mexico breeze. We walked down Duval, cut over on Olivia Street to Whitehead and there it was- Hemingway’s house. We paid the thirteen dollar admission and walked through the dense grounds toward the porch and the front door. Where Barb had the beaches on her mind, secrets be told, this was the major reason I wanted to visit Key West.

The house, bought for $8,000 in 1931, was a wedding gift to Hemingway and his second wife Pauline, purchased by Pauline’s uncle Gus. The tropical grounds are loaded with polydactyl cats (cats with six or seven toes). I asked a lady who worked on the grounds if the cats were descendants from original cats from Hemingway’s time and she said no.

The Hemingway house adopts and cares for polydactyl cats. Most are unrelated. The lady did say that Hemingway was very superstitious and highly accident prone. Polydactyl cats were believed to be good luck charms, somewhat akin to four leaf clovers, so Hemingway hedged his bets and collected them. The cats were popular on ships that passed through the keys. The first cat I played with was named Truman Capote.

The house interior has a funky, classic retro ambience, somewhere between Spanish and Victorian. The interior is dark, still and cool.

What I was really interested in (and inspired by) was Hemingway’s study. Just being in proximity of the space where Hemingway worked on A Farewell to Arms and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber was deeply thrilling. When I was a freshman in college (many years ago) an English professor gave me a hardcover copy of The Nick Adams Stories as a birthday present and I’ve been a Hemingway fan ever since. That’s were I learned, among many other things, to use plain descriptive language and to use only “he said” or “she said” for dialog and not atrocities like “she exclaimed enthusiastically”. Here’s a couple of shots of the study:

We live in an age of lowest common denominator reality shows, comic book movies passed off as art and sub-par IQ sitcoms. A lot of people visited Hemingway’s house when we were there.  It’s enormously encouraging that people still go out of their way to visit the house of one of the greatest writers of the Twentieth Century.