Looking for the Writer Within the Life: Hemingway Museum Key West

This is the attraction we came to Key West to see, the Hemingway Museum, Key West. This is a two story bungalow on high ground in the middle of the island.  It was the family home of Hem and Pauline Pfeiffer, the woman who stole him from Hadley, and their two sons.

Bad Pauline

I was already soured against Pauline when I arrived, mostly because of a brilliant Smithsonian article by A.E. Hotchner called Hemingway in Love. Hotchner claims that Pauline was a woman on the make who used femme fatale tricks of all descriptions as well as seduction through money, which the writer was still short of at that time, to lure Hem away from his first wife, Hadley.

Put that down as my bias. But I had to go to see the home of this man’s man and writer’s writer.  Almost a hundred years later, people writing today still look to Hemingway as an artist who cared about style but used it to reach the larger reading public. At once a literary writer and a popular one, he transcended the writer’s most basic crisis of whether to pursue art or commercial success.

The Lady of the House

So:  The Hemingway Museum.  Here was the fence that Pauline had built to keep out tourists, who by 1937 were already arriving on the island to peer in; the pool that Pauline had built towards the end of the marriage, according to the docent who led our tour, at a cost of $20,000 because she had figured out that she was “out” and Martha Gellhorn was in; the cats, which descend from a multi-toed female called “Snow White” given to Hemingway by a sea captain friend. Unfortunately, most of the furniture was gone.

The only room where the family hadn’t taken the furniture was apparently the master suite, which Pauline had furnished with an antique headboard on a king sized bed, wrought iron pineapple lamps (you’ve got the see them to conceptualize) and carved wood totem figures from Cuba, each about three feet high.

Photos and Memorabilia

Most of the interior interest in the museum was furnished by posters and clippings, old Underwood typewriters (three) and pictures of the family, of whom the docent told us simple stories.  We were also able to see Hem’s writing studio, on the second floor of the carriage house, which back in the day was reached by a catwalk from the master suite.  The catwalk has since been destroyed by a hurricane.

The Docent Weighs In

I asked the docent after our tour who was the author’s favorite wife.  “Oh, I think Hadley,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“Well, he pretty much said that in A Moveable Feast.”

“But aren’t there some men for whom there is no favorite?  I think there are some men who don’t really love anyone.”

Leo and the docent looked at me askance.  Thinking back now I can see why.  But the docent allowed, haltingly, that it might be true.  Hem might not have really loved any of them.  After all, look what he did to Hadley … and the others didn’t do any better.  Honestly in some ways they got treated even worse.

In the Garden with My Notebook

It was when I went to sit in the garden of the house and wrote in my notebook that I really asked myself what it was about Hemingway that I (and so many other people, to see the crowds milling through the museum on a Monday afternoon in November) cared about in the first place? Undoubtedly he had his bad points. If he wasn’t really a misogynist, he could hardly, given the current climate and the way he lived, expect to escape the accusation.  He was an artist, and athlete, good time Charlie, a heavy drinker — but there were many of those.

Thinking About The Rich

I hated him when I read A Farewell to Arms in college. It was when I read A Movable Feast that I began to change my mind.  It was in his regret about Hadley that I finally came to appreciate him.  That, and his understanding of the truth about The Rich.

If the Hemingway Museum in Key West suggests anything, it suggests that Hemingway’s home life was dominated by the current wife.  Pauline’s mark seems to be on everything (indeed, she chose the house) and she built the pool right on top of Hem’s beloved boxing ring.  Hem’s inconstancy to the house, and his wives, contrasts most strongly with his lifelong friendships with men, such as Joe of Sloppy Joe’s, who he was with in Miami when the bar owner died at age 51, and his love for his boat, the Pilar, which he kept from 1934 until the end.  And to his writing, from which his interest never flagged.

The Writer Cannot Be Separated from His Life

It was John Irvine who said “Read the writing.  Forget the life.”  That was in The World According to Garp.  Hemingway is a writer about whom that is just about impossible.  It seems to me, after my pilgrimage to Key West, that somehow the life is fully half the story.

And it comes to me like a flash:  Hemingway was a memoirist by a novelist’s name. And the life he created the memoir from, was as large as the sky.  How could we help but respond in love and anger?