Diary: Joy Williams, (2) Hemingway and His Houses

Bathroom at Finca Vigia in Havana, photograph by Carol M. Highsmith, Library of Congress; taxidermined kudu and impala heads, from Hemingway’s African safaris, hanging on the fireplace at the Hemingway House in Ketcham, Idaho

CUBA. MARTHA (continued)
Also here is a very un-Jungian tower, built as a guest house for his visiting boys, the ground floor reserved for cats, a splendid pool even larger than the one in Key West, a tennis court, and a cock-fighting ring. There is also a little strip cemetery for dogs. Four markers memorialize Black, Negrita, Neron, and Linda. The forty plus cats, disdained by Martha, don’t have a cemetery. They seem to have made do without one. When Martha suggested neutering the males Hemingway said he’d shoot them all before doing such a thing. Later he said he would shoot her if she tried to divorce him. He was just kidding though. He actually wanted a divorce because he wanted to marry Mary, whom he had met at the Dorchester Hotel in wartime London. She was a petite, personable woman who was a journalist of sorts and was involved in affairs with a general, a spy, and the novelist Irwin Shaw. Blacked-out great cities could be romantically thrilling for some.

Martha was the one who found the Finca, an overgrown wreck that she rented for a hundred dollars a month. They’d been staying in rooms at the Hotel Ambos Mundos in Havana. She briskly hired workers for an intensive cleanup and revitalization while Hemingway was on one of his long fishing excursions. This time when he returned to home improvements he was delighted and bought the place.

The marriage was brief and stupendously unsuccessful. Martha was a highly regarded war reporter and author—independent, confident, and ambitious—traits Hemingway did not admire in a woman. She had grown impatient with managing the housekeeping requirements of the Finca and thought her husband’s newest interest, intelligence-gathering and sub-hunting patrols, silly “rubbish.” The Pilar, now extensively armed, with a reinforced steel hull and a crew of former jai alai players, patrolled the coast of Cuba seeking to engage the enemy.

They divorced just before Christmas in 1945 and Hemingway married Mary in the spring.

CUBA. MARY
In her 2017 biography of Hemingway, Mary Dearborn writes that “he had come to view the Finca as a sort of feudal domain with himself as a local potentate with the very highest status in the local community … a sort of Lord of the Jungle.” Mary Hemingway seemed to accept all this with aplomb though in retrospect he was becoming quite unhinged, bombastic, deluded, his writing increasingly disordered, sentimental. In 1950 Lilian Ross’s portrait of Hemingway, “How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?,” appeared in The New Yorker, an excruciating read to this day, and his novel Across the River and Into the Trees was published to horrified reviews.

Depressed, his behavior increasingly erratic, Hemingway bestowed his ill temper mostly on Mary, who remained committed to the marriage if not exactly sanguine about it.

The remainder of the decade brought news both bad and good. The good news was the publication of The Old Man and the Sea, conceived as a coda to a much longer, messier project, and brought out as a novel of 127 pages. It benefits greatly by having no women or cringe-making love avowals in it. It concerns a boy, an old man, and a great fish. Simplicity, courage, and dignity abound. It won him the Nobel Prize in October of 1954. Mary put together a celebratory luncheon for friends and the press at the Finca after which Hemingway gave a short strange speech from the steps. “I am a man without politics,” it began. “This is a great defect but it is preferable to arteriosclerosis …” He would give his gold medal to the “people of Cuba” and their patron saint, the Virgen de Cobre.

The bad news—there were several pieces of bad news actually—was the two (!) airplane crashes in Africa, where they had been for several months on a hunting safari. Mary, at long last was getting “her” lion. The first plane crashed in deep brush but the pilot and the Hemingways managed to walk away from it. They hailed a boat passing on a nearby river and boarded another small plane which caught on fire as it taxied down a crude airstrip. (At the Finca a copy of the January 25, 1954, edition of the New York Daily Mirror rests on a chair, the news fresh as it was erroneous:

HEMINGWAY, WIFE
KILLED IN AIR CRASH

Hemingway suffered severe concussions (his fourth and fifth) in these crashes, escaping the flames of the second one by butting the cockpit door open with his head. He was heavily damaged but continued to maintain his habits for the next five years—writing, drinking, hunting, traveling. At the Finca they had dinner parties every night, one of the regulars being the American ambassador, who increasingly urged them to leave the country, now controlled, to America’s great annoyance, by Castro and his revolutionaries. Hemingway resisted—he was a man without politics after all—but after dumping the Pilar’s considerable armaments into the sea he left his tropical fiefdom in the summer of 1960, never to return.

KETCHUM. MARY
The Hemingways had visited Ketchum for years, usually as guests of the Sun Valley Lodge but also staying in motor courts and rentals. As the situation in Cuba had become more uncomfortable Hemingway bought several lots in town thinking of building a home (this would have been a first), but in April of 1959 he bought the Topping house on a brushy slope overlooking the Big Wood River. The house came furnished—“vulgar,” Mary pronounced it—but they moved in and spent Christmas there before returning to Havana. There are photographs of this Christmas. Mary’s arm is in a sling from a tumble and a small group of unglamorous people, glasses raised, surround a portly, dazed-looking Hemingway.

The house was built in the fifties on several lots in the newly established Sun Valley subdivision by Bob Topping, Jr., a wealthy bon vivant, playboy, and regular at the Lodge until expelled for bad behavior and general drunkenness. It’s not a spite house exactly, more a peculiar and hurt response to this humiliation. It’s a tiny single-family replica of the sprawling Lodge, mimicking style, construction, methodology, and materials. It is constructed of concrete forms stained to look like wood. Miniaturized and set apart in its sere location, it resembles a squat bunker, albeit with large fixed windows.

Its mid-century style is intact—low ceilings, blonde veneer paneling, stone fireplaces, a bathroom’s porcelain bright avocado. Several horned animal heads, a stuffed pheasant, and a painting by Hemingway’s friend Waldo Pierce of men skinning a bull allow the dark Hemingway vibe but the décor is primarily feminine, even fussy, the layout cramped.

This is the saddest house, and not just because of Hemingway’s suicide by shotgun in the foyer. It is fundamentally melancholy, unanchored, isolate, on land not richly creatured, unwild. Hemingway’s days here were miserable, his mental sufferings frightening to himself and others. Though technically his home for the last year and a half of his life, he spent much time away at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, under a regimen of psychiatric care that included many electric shock treatments. He killed himself on the morning of July 2, 1961. For years, Mary insisted that the shooting had been accidental. She retained the house but moved to New York City, seldom returning to Ketchum. Upon her death it was bequeathed, somewhat surprisingly, to the Nature Conservancy, which didn’t much want it. They didn’t know what to do with it and the land wasn’t anything special. They eventually proposed opening it to visitors to defray upkeep costs but the neighbors vigorously resisted arguing (1) the conditions of the right-of-way access didn’t allow it, (2) a tourist attraction had no place in a subdivision, and (3) Hemingway didn’t write anything there. Even Patrick didn’t want it to be a tourist mecca, perhaps regretting the fate of the Key West house which he and Gregory sold at silent auction as soon as they inherited it.

The neighbors prevailed. In 2017, the Conservancy, with much relief, transferred ownership to the Community Library in Ketchum. The Library is first rate: handsome, a bright and inviting local treasure with extensive research opportunities and rooms for readings and lectures. They take their stewardship of the Hemingway house very very seriously. Tactfully, but with steely resolve, they do not give tours or allow visitors. They do have a small residency program for writers who are quartered in the refurbished garage bays with no access to the home itself.

Discovering the address and walking around the place is strongly discouraged by the Library. They suggest a virtual tour or, on another note, a visit to the Ketchum cemetery which is peaceful but also kind of stagey. The Hemingway stone is the quintessential simple slab. Pilgrims leave whiskey and champagne bottles, coins, river pebbles, pens, photos of animals they have shot, books they’ve written … The tokens are removed periodically, the grave swept clean, schedule unknown.

People still talk about Hemingway, a few about his writing but most about his life. For example there are still those who discuss whether the shotgun he employed on his last summer morning was his favorite.

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Joy Williams is the author of four collections of stories, a book of essays, and five novels, most recently Harrow. She has written for Book Post about J. M. Coetzee, Richard Powers, Merrill Gilfillan, more.

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