A Research Tip, a Mystery, and Nearly 20 Years Later, a Resolution

In gathering material for a forthcoming Hemingway project, I took another look at a post-script to Hemingway at Eighteen. This article first appeared in the Kansas City Star on October 1, 2017, under the headline “On the trail of a Hemingway mystery in KC.” I’ve made some small, largely inconsequential edits here.

By Steve Paul

            At the end of my book Hemingway at Eighteen I recount the discovery of a long-missing piece of Kansas City information, never before reported about the young writer in the making.

            Years ago, I’d been put on the trail of this piece of business by the great Hemingway biographer Michael S. Reynolds. Everyone in the world of Hemingway scholarship owed a debt to Reynolds for his important work over the years, including an impressive five-volume biography published in the 1980s and ‘90s. Reynolds’ earlier book, Hemingway’s First War, about the making of A Farewell to Arms, was also vitally important to my understanding of the dynamics of Hemingway’s young-adult life and work.

Being a newcomer to the game, I’d only encountered Reynolds in 1999, Hemingway’s centennial year, and, sadly, just a year before he died. I’d met Reynolds at conferences and helped arrange a speaking engagement for him in Kansas City to promote the centennial and the publication of his fifth book in the series. I didn’t realize until we chatted one day over lunch that Reynolds had a family connection in Kansas City, which, of course, deepened my regard for him.

            I had just begun researching details of Hemingway’s brief apprenticeship at The Kansas City Star and the state of the city in which he lived – at the age of 18 -- for six and a half months.

            In one brief email with Reynolds after we’d met, he assigned me a task as I carried on my research: Find out about Hemingway’s appearance before a Kansas City grand jury.

            I tried. I cajoled judges and prosecutors over the years, hoping to gain access to Jackson County District Court records of a grand jury involving General Hospital. Reynolds and I had assumed that Hemingway had been subpoenaed to discuss his reporting on mismanagement at the hospital in the midst of small-pox and meningitis epidemics, ambulance shortages and possible graft and corruption. I got nowhere. Nor could I find newspaper reports of such a grand jury.

            But, 16 years after Mike Reynolds put me onto the challenge, I finally found the evidence. As I write in the book, the case involved not the hospital but an odd shooting incident pitting federal agents against Kansas City police. And the grand jury was summoned not by the state court but by a U.S. District Court judge. I found the case file at the National Archives at Kansas City. I found Hemingway’s name on a witness list. The road went cold after that. The Star, in its reporting about an indictment, did not mention Hemingway’s appearance before the grand jury. In addition, the archived documents did not detail the young journalist’s testimony or include a deposition.

Within a week of Hemingway’s presumed court appearance, he left Kansas City for the Red Cross ambulance service in Italy. Nowhere in my experience reading Hemingway’s correspondence and other materials did he ever mention testifying before a grand jury. So it was a minor achievement and a gratifying bit of biographical research to confirm at least that he had been summonsed.

Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, Boston

            Yet something still nagged me -- even after I’d finished my book and tacked on the afterthought about the grand jury. Reynolds clearly had implied to me that Hemingway had been subpoenaed by a court in Kansas City. When I revisited his email, it dawned on me finally that he knew that to be true. It was not just an assumption. But I didn’t know how he knew that. Years ago, Ann Reynolds, his widow, had allowed me to rummage through his files in their home in the New Mexico desert, but I never came across that detail. And the court records delivered to me by an archivist at the National Archives a year ago also did not include a copy of the pertinent subpoena.

            As if to prove that a writer’s work is never done – you know where this story is headed – I found myself in Boston last spring with a few hours to spare. I made another trip out to Columbia Point and the John F. Kennedy Library’s Hemingway Collection. I’d spent many productive hours there in the past. Now I wanted to look at some materials I’d never tripped over before among the many thousands of pages of manuscripts, letters and quotidian documents.

            In a box of folders marked humbly as “Other Materials” I came across a file labeled “Court.” Well, boy howdy, there it was. A subpoena issued April 23, 1918, for “E.M. Hemingway, Reporter Star” by a judge of the Western District of the U.S. District Court. Reynolds surely saw that piece of paper. And I can’t stop dwelling on the thought of how much time I might have saved—and how much more I could have learned—had I found it years ago, too.

Hemingway Sighting: Martin Cruz Smith's "Havana Bay"

Novelists write fiction, of course, and Martin Cruz Smith writes exceptional novels, often featuring the brooding Moscow investigator Arkady Renko. In Havana Bay, published in 1999, Smith sends Renko to Cuba to poke around after the apparent death of a Russian colleague. I picked the book up recently and plunged in to take a break from a couple of intensive projects. Smith’s depiction of Havana and other Cuban places squares with my experience — five relatively short visits over 15 years — and also expands my knowledge of many details, practices, and aspects of Cuban life. “It’s complicated” is how I put it in an article a few years ago, after hearing that explanation over and over. Smith’s descriptions of the Havana cityscape as well as the interior mindscape of his Cuban and Russian characters are terrific.

Smith works in a brief Hemingway reference via an American expatriate in Havana, who claims ownership of a vehicle once owned by Hemingway, a 1957 Chrysler Imperial convertible.

Well, that’s nice, but it might not be actually true. I don’t know whether Smith was taking liberties or subtly trying to suggest this particular character was a liar (I haven’t quite finished reading). Hemingway owned several cars while living about 20 years at his hilltop estate outside Havana. A Buick. A Plymouth. And, notably, a 1955 Chrysler New Yorker convertible, blue with orange interior, according to various accounts, including a documentary film about the car’s restoration. Well, who really cares? I’ve never been much of a car guy.

From the Archives: On Hemingway's 100th Birthday, Writers Gather to Celebrate and Debate

Near the very beginning of my Hemingway journey, which I’ve long referred to as my own private graduate school, I attended a star-studded conference to mark his centenary at the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum in Boston. The year was 1999. The JFK holds some of Hemingway’s most important collections of papers—correspondence and manuscripts—and other materials, a mecca for Hemingway studies. Here’s the report I brought back and published in the Kansas City Star on April 18, 1999 under the headline “Hemingway’s Way.” There’s no small amount of insider entertainment here—squabbles and colorful moments—which, all these years later, still feel somewhat fresh. And I’m still rather amazed by the encounter with so many major literary figures—the keynoter was Nadine Gordimer for one.

 By Steve Paul

     John Kenneth Galbraith, the great patriarch of liberal economics, had something to say, and he was going to say it right here, right now.

      In the midst of a panel discussion about Ernest Hemingway's relationship to nature, just as the argument was heating up between writers Terry Tempest Williams and Peter Matthiessen, Galbraith stood up from his front-row perch in the audience, strode to the speaker’s table and took a microphone from the moderator. His cane planted firmly on the floor, Galbraith spoke in a booming baritone, partly to the speakers in front of him, partly to the audience behind him.

      Although he enjoyed this “marvelously important discussion,” he had a criticism of the proceedings: There was “a gross under-representation of the Hemingway generation.”

      Being apparently the only one of that vintage present among the hundreds in the audience, the 90-year-old Galbraith took it upon himself to make several observations, including the irony that Hemingway would have recoiled at such an event as this weekend conference marking the 100th anniversary of his birth.

      “He was not associated with the literary community at the time,” Galbraith said. “He basically held it in contempt.”

      There was indeed contempt in the air last weekend, but there was great fondness and admiration, too, at the John F. Kennedy Library's Hemingway Centennial symposium.

      The I.M. Pei-designed presidential library, home of the Hemingway archives and some fabulous views of Boston harbor, gathered dozens of writers, including four Nobel Prize literature laureates, for a weekend of gab, glory and the closest thing to gore that genteel literary bullfighting can produce.

      There was no blood on the floor, but stinging rebukes and wildly divided opinions added some contour to the polite and often enthusiastic celebration of this giant of 20th-century literature.

      Among the most grateful attendees were Gladys Rodriguez and Danilo Arrate Hernandez, who had made the trip to Boston from Cuba. He is the director of the Museo Ernest Hemingway, and she is his predecessor, and both also have roles in Cuba's Ministry of Culture.  The Cuban museum encompasses the Finca Vigia, the house in San Francisco de Paula outside Havana that Hemingway called home for some 20 years. Tourists can walk around the house and peer through windows, but few people are allowed inside and no visitors, including scholars, can so much as touch a book on the shelf in what was Hemingway's voluminous personal library.

      The Cubans toured the Hemingway Collection at the JFK Library, an archive they could envy if only for its air conditioning. Arrate explained that his most important role is to preserve the thousands of books, manuscripts, photographs and other objects that remain at the Finca Vigia in a humid country strapped for cash and official friends outside its borders.

      Stephen Plotkin, the curator of the JFK's Hemingway collection, referred to Rodriguez and Arrate as his personal heroes for the work they had done amid extremely trying circumstances.

      “The Cuban people love Hemingway,” Arrate said in an after-hours conversation. “In Cuba, it’s as necessary to read Hemingway as it is Pushkin and Tolstoy.” Mr. Guey—pronounced Gway, which is a fond Cubanism for Hemingway, Arrate said— “is an integral part of Cuba's culture.”

     Hemingway, of course, set one of his most popular books in Cuba, The Old Man and the Sea. And he has been an integral force in American literature ever since he arrived in Paris in the early 1920s and began publishing short stories and novels that demanded to be noticed as new and as modern and as revolutionary as anything being written.

      He holds the distinction, too, as one speaker pointed out, of being the only American writer to have published a new book in every decade of the century since the 1920s.

      Underlying some of the weekend’s discussion was the knowledge that readers soon will have a chance to see one last big work from Hemingway's hand. True at First Light — a fictional memoir, it’s called — has been edited by Hemingway's son Patrick and will appear later this spring, closer to the July 21 centennial date.

     The book is set in Africa during a Hemingway safari in 1953-54.  (One story line involves Mary Hemingway’s desire to shoot a big elusive lion, the result of which now lies on the floor of the JFK's cozy Hemingway Room.)

      True at First Light is bound to raise anew significant questions about Hemingway's competence in writing about Africa.  Two of his best-known Africa-related short stories, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” are certainly brilliant, said Nadine Gordimer, the South African Nobel laureate, but they are not about Africa. Instead they “are typical of the attitude that Africa was a place to come and play.” Gordimer set the good-news, bad-news tone for the conference in her keynote address. She said Hemingway “never had both feet down in Africa,” largely because he never tried to understand or to write about its people except in the most patronizing and superficial way. But she also acknowledged much of his work belongs among the  “essential literature of the 20th century” and urged her audience to “leave his life alone,” meaning the problematic legend that he created for himself, and return instead to his books.

Revisionism and fisticuffs

     The several hundred symposium attendees also heard from writers as diverse as Japan's Kenzaburo Oe; the West Indian poet Derek Walcott; and Americans such as fiction writers Saul Bellow, Robert Stone, Tobias Woolf, Francine Prose, E. Annie Proulx and Leslie Epstein, the critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. and the editor and raconteur George Plimpton.

     For Oe, discovering Hemingway's earliest short stories was as important as discovering Mark Twain, and he made a brilliant comparison between Hemingway's young character Nick Adams and Twain’s Huck Finn. Walcott offered a singular analysis of some of Hemingway's prose in his bullfighting book, Death in the Afternoon; the rhythmic structure and musicality of some of his sentences were the equal, Walcott said, of anything in Dante and Shakespeare.

      Justin Kaplan, biographer of Mark Twain, Walt Whitman and others, expressed a common lament that “Hemingway has been commodified, Elvisized.” Taking issue, for instance, with a volume of Papa-related recipes called The Hemingway Cookbook, Kaplan said, “This is like casting Emily Dickinson as the cookie baker of  Amherst.”

      Many of the scholars in attendance, the kinds of people who make careers out of studying everything about Hemingway down to the last missing comma, were appalled, but said so only privately, by the lack of understanding or preparation they heard in various panel discussions.

      The panels were made up largely of well-known writers rather than academics. The memoirist Susan Cheever, for instance, showed an astonishing level of breathless, presumptuous naivete, which was occasioned by her reading of Hemingway's A Moveable Feast and other examples of his nonfiction in just the previous week. Really?

      Another of those blood-boiling moments occurred during a panel on the role of biographers. A.E. Hotchner, who palled around with Hemingway for a time in the 1950s and later wrote a hero-worshiping memoir, tried to counter what he thought was misinformation about A Moveable Feast. Hemingway's popular memoir of Paris in the 1920s was published in 1964, three years after his suicide, becoming the first of what will be now five major books published since the writer's death.

      Hotchner said A Moveable Feast was not cobbled together after Hemingway died, as some critics and researchers have contended; Hemingway wrote it in the 1920s, and it appeared as he intended. Hotchner himself was on the scene, he said, at the Ritz Hotel in Paris on the day in 1952 when Hemingway was given a Louis Vuitton trunk of his that had been in storage for many years. Among other things, the trunk contained manuscripts of the personality sketches of Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald and others that made up A Moveable Feast.

      All the while Hotchner was telling this tale, biographer Michael Reynolds, two seats away at the panelists’ table, shook his head in disbelief and looked ready to pounce. Reynolds has virtually lived with Hemingway for some 25 years to produce a five-volume biography, the last entry of which will appear in July. He soon gently chided Hotchner by saying that all the evidence, including letters between Hemingway and his last wife, Mary, indicates that “a good deal of that book was written near the end of his life.”  

     Throughout most of the presentations, Hemingway family members, including sons Patrick and Jack, patiently listened and graciously received the verbal fisticuffs.  Carol Gardner, Hemingway's youngest sister, had heard few surprises, she said on the conference's second day.

      When asked about her fondest memories of her brother—he was 12 years her elder—her eyes lit up with the memory of how she would stand guard for the teen-aged Ernie while he boxed with his friends in their mother's music room.

      “I not only let him know if Mother was coming in,” she said, “but I also would hold a bucket of water in case he got a bloody nose.''

     And that, she said, would happen every time.

Motor mouths: Savvy TV writers figure out that Papa knew best

Hemingway’s prose style—his language, his rhythms, and especially his dialogue—have long distinguished him as an American writer and long fascinated readers and scholars. Years ago—in November 2002—I was prompted by an article and some contemporary television watching to meditate on Hemingway’s wide-ranging influence. The result is one of my favorite Hemingway-inspired pieces. Written as a dialogue, it won a feature-writing award, and I think it still has some legs. I always meant to send a copy to David Mamet, but never had the guts. The piece first appeared in The Kansas City Star in 2002; I’ve made a couple of very small edits to fix a couple of issues with the manuscript version in my files.

By Steve Paul

“Wall Street Journal says people are talking really fast on television.”

  “You don't say.”

  “No, really. Especially on `West Wing.' “

  “Smart show.”

  “That's right. Mostly written by a guy named Aaron Sorkin.”

  “All that politics — ”

  “Ripped from the headlines!”

  “And real-life drama.”

  “It's nice that Bartlet and his wife are getting closer.”

  “Illness will do that.”

  “I suppose. But it's about —”

  “Power and powerlessness.”

  ”Good way to put it, but I've been thinking about this TV thing for a long time. And one thing the Journal didn't mention — “

  “Only one?”

“Seinfeld did yada yada. Hemingway did nada nada.”

  “Well, a few things, but one important one was the real source of that dialogue.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Straight out of Hemingway.”

  “Howzat?”

  “Sun.”

  “Sun?

  “The Sun Also Rises. All that Paris banter. All those young hipsters.”

  “All that drinking —”

  “That, too, but I first noticed this a few years ago on another show Sorkin did — `Sports Night.'“

  “That ESPN thing.”

Martin Sheen in “The West Wing”

  “Something like that. But it was great. Behind the scenes at a sports talk show that had virtually nothing to do with—”

  “Sports.”

  “Yeah. It was all about the people. And they talked fast, and they talked on top of each other and they completed one another's --”

  “Sentences.”

  “You've got it. And for some reason that's why I put two and two together.”

  “And came up with Hemingway?”

  “Listen to this. It's when Jake Barnes invites a passing woman to sit down and have a drink. He's the narrator:

  “What's the matter?” she asked. “Going on a party?”

  “Sure. Aren't you?”

  “I don't know. You never know in this town.”

  “Don't you like Paris?”

  “No.”

  “Why don't you go somewhere else?”

  “Isn't anywhere else.”

  “You're happy, all right.”

  “Happy, hell!”

  “I see what you're talking about.”

 “Things happen fast on TV comedies, and even some dramas, and this article I read said it had to do with cramming lots of scenes in a show to keep people laughing. Wears some people out. ‘Lucy’ was funny. But ‘Seinfeld’ was faster. Just like those old screwball comedies from way back when.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

  “I might add that ‘Frasier’ is just as clever, more urbane, but slower.”

  “It takes time to make a latte.”

  “And you know `Seinfeld,' that show about nothing.”

  “Yada yada yada.”

  “Exactly. Know where that comes from?”

  “I'm getting a feeling—”

  “Yep. ‘A Clean Well-Lighted Place.’ Seinfeld did yada yada. Hemingway did nada nada. Read it and weep.”

  “Will do.”

  “These really good TV guys—Sorkin, David Chase—”

  “ ‘Sopranos.’”

  “Yup. And Matt Groening—”

  “ ‘Simpsons.’”

  “Roger.”

  “Homer?"

  “No. Roger. As in `Roger that.' You're right. ‘Simpsons.’ But what I was trying to say—”

  “Before I interrupted—"

  “…was that the best of this stuff seems to be so aware of things. Aware of the world. Aware of pop culture.”

  ”Uh huh.”

  “I mean, some of these guys even love books.”

  “I'll never forget that Jack London episode of ‘Northern Exposure.’”

  “Brilliant. That's what I mean. Or Amy Sherman-Palladino.”

  “Who?”

  “She writes `Gilmore Girls.' There's some media-savvy dialogue, for you, even though it feels a little forced.”

  “She's no Hemingway, you mean.”

  ”Well, I don't think I'm too far out on a literary limb with that theory. Surely Sorkin read `Hills Like White Elephants.'“

  “Who hasn't?”

  “One thing you hear a lot is wordplay. Repetition. You accent something by repeating it two or three or more times.”

  “Repetition.”

  “It's like ping-pong words. Not sing-song to put you to sleep. Ping-pong to keep you alert.”

  “Back and forth you mean?”

  “Words ping-ponging, or pinballing. Like one time on `Gilmore Girls' Rory and a friend were riffing on the word ‘wing-it.’ They didn't know they were riffing, they were just saying what the writers wrote. But ‘wing-it’ as a compound verb and an adjective, meaning just the opposite of ‘Zagat,’ meaning you'd look it up in the restaurant guide rather than wing-it. The friend was having a date and she was worried about not looking at Zagat and they'd be forced to wing-it. Zagat. Wing-it.”

  “Wow.”

  “It's like action poetry.”

  “Poetry? On television?”

  “TV is literature, you know. I mean look at ‘Sports Night.’”

  “It's a shame they killed it.”

  “Yeah, that really torqued my chili.”

  “Peter Krause was great.”

  “Just like he is on `Six Feet Under.' And now one of those `Sports Night' guys is on ‘West Wing.’”

  “The guy with glasses.”

  “But Felicity What's-Her-Name—she played the lead character, the talk-show producer—was married to William H. Macy and they were great, too.”

  “Great character—Macy. The ratings consultant.”

  “Huffman. Felicity Huffman. And they're theater people.”

  “Really?”

  “They do Mamet. I mean they're friends with Mamet.”

  “Mamet?”

  “The F-word guy. Plays. Movies.”

  “Yeah, I know, I know. But did you just say, ‘It really torqued my chili’?”

  “Did.”

  “Where'd that come from?”

  ”People talk that way.”

  “C'mon—”

  “No, they do. The beauty of language. I love it. ‘Torqued my chili.’ Some guy from Oklahoma says it. I heard it at a diner.”

  “A diner?”

  “You know, like in `The Killers.'“

  “Ernie again?”

  “Short story.”

  “Kind of like television.”

  “Except without the ads.”

  “Another reason they talk fast, right?”

  “Yeah. To squeeze in more—”

  “Commercials."

In Hemingway's Cuban Home, the Finca Vigia

Skimming through some old photos recently, I retrieved a few shots from a visit, in 2013, to Hemingway’s hilltop house outside Havana. Because of special access inside the Finca Vigia, I also shot video during our guided tour. I’ve long hoped to finish editing my footage into a reasonable length worth sharing. Alas, until I upgrade my video editing software (maybe soon) I’m sticking with this quick-and-dirty edited version, posted on YouTube way back when.

Photos and video (c) by Steve Paul.

Papa as a meringue pie?

In my current reading and research into the life and work of the American poet William Stafford, this little item caught my attention. It’s from an interview with Stafford, conducted by Steven Hind, in 1984, and appearing in the book Kansas Poems of William Stafford (ed., Denise Low). On the topic of Robert Frost, Stafford recalls hearing someone, possibly Gerald Heard, say, “Only saints are hard all the way through.” He adds, “Well, Frost is no saint, and he’s crusty, but the pie’s pretty soft inside. Of course, Frost may be a strange one to say that about, but Hemingway was a spectacular example of a crusty meringue pie.” — sbp

Patrick Hemingway in Africa: A Report from the 1960s

Just to illustrate how random this blog will be as it accumulates over time, I’m offering this article about Hemingway’s first son. Patrick was born on June 28, 1928 at Research Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri, and as of this writing (September 30, 2022) remains with us, living in Bozeman, Montana, with his second wife, Carol. This Associated Press dispatch from Tanzania appeared in the Kansas City Times, the Star’s morning edition, on March 19, 1969. From the available evidence I must have found it while finishing my Hemingway at Eighteen draft in 2016. I knew of Patrick’s safari business in the early 1950s, but was unaware how many years he spent in Tanzania and that he taught at a school for wildlife management.

Playwright Tom Stoppard Had a Thing for Hemingway

“Hemingway’s plain speech and taut narrative, at once banking down and letting out pent-up emotion, his quick-fire dialogue, his disenchanted comedy, his immersion in landscapes, his toughness muddled up with bewilderment, had a powerful effect on him.”

— Hermione Lee: Tom Stoppard: A Life

While recently reading Hermione Lee’s gargantuan biography of Tom Stoppard (2020), I learned of the playwright’s long admiration for Hemingway. He became an avid collector of Hemingway’s books and apparently attended conferences. I’m now wondering if any of my fellow conference attendees encountered him over the years. Here’s an excerpt from Lee’s book, illustrating both the serious and playful aspects of Stoppard’s interest.

A Key West Happening, 2004

The Hemingway Society international conference in 2004 lured me to Key West for the very first time. At that meeting Gail Sinclair and I had cooked up an idea and introduced a proposal to hold the 2008 conference in Kansas City. Below is a (possibly unedited) draft of the article I published in the Kansas City Star, with a dateline from Key West.

Gallery photos above, all (c) Steve Paul, from Duval Street, the Hemingway House and the Key West Art and Historical Society (Hemingway’s uniform)

 By STEVE PAUL

     KEY WEST, Fla. – Harry Morgan, the angry boat captain at the center of Ernest Hemingway’s 1930s novel To Have and Have Not, struggled against the forces of economic change.

     Even then, Harry sensed the coming ruin of Key West, a transformation in which some unidentified “they” was displacing the poor locals and turning the salt-of-the-sea place into “beauty spot for tourists.”

     Harry undoubtedly would howl today at the sight of the nightly sunset revels in the heart of touristy Key West, the self-proclaimed “Conch Republic,” where the largest thing in sight is a cruise ship, all out of proportion to this fragile spot of faraway land.

      Near the end of a string of islands that arcs southwestward from the southern tip of Florida, Key West also happens to be situated on the Hemingway Archipelago, a chain of alluring places around the world that still resonate with artifacts of the writer’s life, his spirit or his literature.

     And so Key West was the spot where some 250 scholars, devotees and members (as I am) of the Hemingway Society gathered last month for the organization’s 11th biennial international conference. Attendees came from 11 countries, it was announced, and spent a week delivering and listening to scholarly papers when they weren’t snorkeling or sipping fruit-and-rum concoctions on the beach outside a comfortable resort hotel in the quiet southern corner of the island.

      Well, there was more than that, of course.

      For a couple of dozen people the session included a cosmic high point one blustery morning at the end of a pier. They’d gathered at sunrise to witness the Transit of Venus, a rare alignment of planets that last occurred in 1882. Telescopes came courtesy of Joe Haldeman, a prominent writer of science fiction novels (The Forever War) and such an ardent Hemingway follower that he once wrote a novella about a dastardly effort to publish a bogus piece of Papa’s work (The Hemingway Hoax).

     One attending graduate student had the brilliant idea to lug his worn copy of Thomas Pynchon’s gargantuan novel Mason & Dixon onto the pier as we watched the black dot of Venus cross the face of a brilliant yellow-orange sun. (His book bore a thick fringe of day-glo note flags, the sure sign of a dissertation in progress.) Mason and Dixon were 18th century British surveyors, and on a June morning at the Cape of Good Hope, they, too, witnessed the Transit of Venus. As Pynchon has it:

   Upon first making out the Planet, Dixon becomes as a Sinner converted. “Eeh! God in his Glory!”

   “Steady,” advises Mason, in a vex’d tone.

    Ernest Hemingway’s Key West years spanned 1928 to about 1939, and although there was much happiness as he plied his “twin trades” of writing and fishing the Gulf Stream, his life there ended up anything but steady. His second marriage dissolved as his affair began with future wife No. 3, and, not long after the highway finally reached the island, Hemingway left for good to take up residence in Cuba.

   Hemingway’s writings from the Key West period – including A Farewell to Arms, Death in the Afternoon, To Have and Have Not and a slew of his finest short stories – were analyzed, deconstructed, explained and reimagined in the conference’s daily paper sessions. Hemingway’s spiritual leanings, his friendships and rivalries, his work’s racial conundrums, his fishing logs – the Hemingway territory is vast.

    Susan Beegel, editor of a twice-a-year scholarly journal (The Hemingway Review), connected Key West, Hemingway and Harry Morgan to the history and literature of piracy, the table in front of her draped for the occasion with a skull and cross-bones banner.

    Miriam Mandel, an Israeli Hemingway scholar, demonstrated the workings of Hemingway’s “iceberg theory” by explaining how three sentences in one chapter of Death in the Afternoon embedded a decade of labor unrest and violent repression during Spain’s revolutionary convulsions of the 1920s.

    There were feminist/Marxist papers and Freudian papers and one paper that performed a typical bit of academic acrobatics by discussing Harry Morgan in the context of  “masculinity in crisis” and linking him with Edward Norton’s character in the macho-mythic movie “Fight Club.”

     Several talks addressed one of Hemingway’s most overtly political writings. He wrote “Who Murdered the Vets?” in the aftermath of a hurricane that ripped through Matecumbe Key up the way, killing 458 military veterans who’d been sent there to do “coolie labor” at low pay and without regard to their safety in the storm season. Reading it today, Hemingway’s hot-headed essay might put one in mind of a Michael Moore-style “f-u-mentary.” The resulting divisiveness is similar, too. Indeed, one scholarly detractor suggested that when Hemingway wrote it he must have been drunk.     

     “When you go looking for ghosts, ghosts rise up,” Lorian Hemingway, a granddaughter, said one afternoon when she read from her memoir about a spiritual journey that took her beyond the bottle and into fly fishing.

     And if the ghost of Hemingway were hovering in the halls of the Casa Marina Hotel, he might have been startled to encounter a doppelganger in the form of Lawrence Luckinbill, the actor, who’s in the midst of developing a one-man Hemingway show. Luckinbill, tall and round-faced and sporting a mostly white beard, last year staged a onetime performance, but, after failing to acquire the rights to use excerpts from Hemingway’s fiction, he rewrote it based on Hemingway’s prodigious and famously expressive letters. (Under an agreement put in place years ago, Hemingway heirs control publication rights of already published books and unpublished manuscripts, and the Hemingway Society and Foundation holds rights to letters in public collections.)

    Luckinbill’s 75-minute staged reading portrayed Hemingway in his last hour, the dark and troubled mind racing through memories, unable to draft a single sentence and about to signal his finger on the trigger. As Luckinbill and everyone else knew, he couldn’t have found a better or more brutal audience. Those who knew Hemingway so well were unrelenting in their feedback that night and over the next few days. Luckinbill plans to mount a version of the play in New York in December, and it will be fascinating to see how the play evolves in the wake of all that informed and passionate response.

     The Hemingway house in Key West remains a major tourist attraction, with its tall windows, its huge trees and its swimming pool, but for a credible sense of Hemingway’s history, you have to visit the Key West Museum of Art and History at the red-brick Custom House. The museum maintains a collection of Hemingway memorabilia, including, astoundingly, the tunic and breeches he apparently wore on July 8, 1918, near the Piave River in Italy when first a trench mortar exploded and then a round from a machine gun tore into his right knee. The uniform is carefully arranged in a display case to show off the faint red stains still visible in the leg.

     Also on display (for the rest of the year) is an important collection of nearly four dozen photographs taken by Walker Evans in Cuba in May 1933 during a period of rising unrest and repression. Evans and Hemingway met then, and Hemingway is said to have carried the photographs by boat from Havana to Key West. The prints were found in a cache of Hemingway belongings that were long stored in Key West and only recently came to light.

     The weekend newspapers made it clear that the Hemingway legend lives large in Key West, without even noticing that the scholars were in town. One story touted the forthcoming annual Hemingway Days Festival, centered on the writer’s 105th birthday anniversary, July 21, which promises the requisite lookalike contest and other folderol. Then there was the feature story about polydactyl felines, or “Hemingway cats,” the ones with six toes or more. Whether Hemingway actually owned six-toed cats in Key West – knowledgeable sources says he didn’t – is immaterial in a world that can’t stop believing he did.

      But more interesting was a letter to the editor of the Key West paper. A man complained about a fishing contest in which he’d just competed. He’d failed to win because of some weigh-in snafu. The man was a boat captain, and in his anger over being jerked around by the system he sounded more than a small bit like Harry Morgan. Yet more evidence that some things never change, even in Key West, and that Hemingway’s aim was true.

About This Blog

I’m a relative latecomer to Hemingway studies. My entry into the field came by way of journalism, beginning in 1998, when I spotted the 100th anniversary of Hemingway’s birth coming down the pike. Over the next half a year or more, I dove in completely. Read and reread the works, the Selected Letters, criticism, etc; attended centennial conferences in Oak Park and Boston; interviewed some writers for a Hemingway Review article on Hemingway’s influence (my debut in THR, 1999); and began researching Hemingway’s Kansas City period, discovering new material and compiling all that I could. That last effort led to the publication of Hemingway at Eighteen in 2017. (See the webpage devoted to my book elsewhere on this site.) Over the years I contributed more articles to The Hemingway Review and the Hemingway Society Newsletter and wrote a handful of pieces for the Kansas City Star that seem to hold up, including some reporting from Cuba and elsewhere on the Hemingway trail. I’ve recently become something like the assistant bibliographer for THR, helping Kelli Larson to compile the twice-a-year roundups of scholarly essays and books. Earlier this year I deposited the physical files related to Hemingway at Eighteen in the LaBudde Special Collections at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Nichols Library. In recent years, I’ve tiptoed back into my digital research files from time to time and have realized that there is much material that might be useful to me and others if only it could find daylight. Well, here we go. I plan to post random notes, as well as archived stories. I’m not sure there’ll be a logical thread running through it all. More like a miscellany that can be dipped into whenever a reader finds something of interest.