Today his house has moved up to the top of the charts and visitors are met at the gate with a charge of $7.50 for adults and $4.50 for children and a sign reading ‘Do Not Pick Up Cats’. The cats are, to be honest, a bigger attraction than Hemingway. There are over sixty of them strolling, sleeping, washing and occasionally leaping about the house and grounds in proprietorial fashion. They are reputedly descended from Hemingway’s six-toed cats and the sure sign of this is that half of them are still polydactyl - that is, they have a bit to spare in the toe department. Some have six, others seven or even eight. They lighten up what is otherwise a pretty lifeless series of rooms, and they give the guides something to talk about.
‘This red one here is a marmalade tom we call Bill Clinton. He has seven toes, and yes, he has been neutered.’
All the rooms are fully accessible except for his writing room, located above one of the outbuildings. It was once attached to the rest of the house by a rope bridge, which must have tested Papa’s sobriety. It is unconvincingly pristine, with dead animals on the wall and the obligatory typewriter as its central feature. (Hemingway seems to have had as many typewriters as he had cats.) Visitors peer into this sanctum from behind a screen of Spanish-style wrought-iron bars, as if about to see someone tortured on the rack.
By the end of the tour I feel sorry for Pauline, Hemingway’s second wife, who, with the help of Uncle Gus, created this home for him. Our guide holds her responsible for the fact that we are all dripping with sweat. According to him it was Pauline who apparently removed the ceiling fans and had them replaced by elaborate wood and glass chandeliers.
‘And she was fashion editor of Voguel’ Gentle titter.
‘Maybe it was a different Vogue.’ Bigger, if slightly uncertain, titter.
At the side of the house, next to the gift shop, is a murky green swimming pool. Our guide indicates a penny coin, sealed in the limestone paving beside it, and tells the story of how Pauline had the pool built in 1937 for the then substantial sum of $20,000. When Hemingway heard the price he was so disgusted he said something to the effect that as she had spent everything but his last penny, she might as well have that too, whereupon he’d flung down the coin we see today.
There is no mention of the fact that Hemingway had been away two-timing her with Martha Gellhorn in Madrid and that the pool had been paid for, like so many other extras in Key West, by generous Uncle Gus. But then, this is the Ernest Hemingway House, not the Pauline Hemingway house.
Hot, and a little bit bothered by all this, I cross the road to Ernest’s Cafe for a large ‘smoothie’, a big, refreshing pick-you-up of crushed fruit and ice. The bearded and bespectacled face of the great man growls down at me from T-shirts which the management is not allowed to sell owing to a copyright dispute with the house across the road.
From what I’ve read about Hemingway, he was very demanding of his friends, expecting loyalty and constant availability. His omnipresence in Key West makes him almost impossible to avoid and I feel myself suffering a severe attack of Hemingway-induced claustrophobia - as if I might find some manifestation of him in my bedroom cupboard or sitting next to me at dinner.
To clear my head I walk west down Whitehead Street, and find myself in a Hemingway-free zone of gracious, well-restored nineteenth-century timber and clapboard houses, many of which bear plaques indicating that they were built by wreckers and spongers. Ships regularly went aground on the coral reef and the opportunist seamen of Key West made a considerable living from salvaging the wrecks. That’s when they weren’t sponging, I mean, sponge-fishing.
Number 305 Whitehead is a pretty, balconied and balustraded building called ‘“Wrecker” Johnson’s House’, built entirely from the wood of submerged ships. Further down is the finest house on the street, the Geiger or Audubon house, saved from demolition in 1958 and now immaculately restored to its neoclassical glory with wide, shady balconies to catch the breeze, and inside a considerable number of bits and pieces, like a fine set of Chinese porcelain, that never made it past the reef.
Key West is that rare thing in the USA, a truly walkable city. The streets are mostly tree-lined and shady and in a short distance you can ring the changes from tourists and bars on Duval Street, to quiet backstreets with soothing names like Angela and Petronia. The trouble is that Key West is on the same latitude as Mecca and it can get very hot.
Which is why I end up talking to the local mayor, Wilhemina Harvey, at the end of the day, when the temperature is down to the low 90s and we can see the town from an air-conditioned car. Mayor Harvey has ruled Monroe County (which includes Key West and beyond) with charm, humour and, doubtless, a rod of iron, since 1980. She’s eighty-seven and not planning to retire. She’s a social liberal, very popular with the gay community, she tells me. As this comprises over a third of Key West’s 25,000 permanent residents, she should be there well into the next millennium.
We talk of all sorts of things, from the current sewage pipe leaks which have forced Key West’s beaches to close and for which she has applied for Federal Aid, to the separatist tendencies of this part of America. People born and bred in the Keys are called Conchs (pronounced ‘Conks’) after the sizeable local shellfish. There is a Conch Republic, with its headquarters in Key West and its own flag.
Mayor Harvey tells a good tale of meeting the Queen when she visited the Keys recently and presenting her with a conch shell which Her Majesty gratefully accepted. Only afterwards did the Mayor remember that she had not had time to warn her that conchs bring bad luck if taken indoors. She and her friends had a good laugh about this, until, a week or so later, Windsor Castle’s library burned down.
I feel obliged to mention Hemingway, thinking that she, like me, will be happy to avoid the subject for a while. Quite the opposite. She has fond memories of him coming in to her family drugstore.
‘He was a quiet, almost shy man till you got to know him.’
Try telling that to the Hemingway look-alikes.
Somewhat reluctantly plugging myself back into the world of Key West’s best-loved son, I search out the Hemingway suite at La Concha Hotel, which, at six storeys high with a tower on top, looks big and bulky amongst the neat, low-rise streets around it. It was opened in 1926 in anticipation of a tourist boom. Instead the Depression came along, Key West stayed poor and La Concha was spared a rival.
It hasn’t changed much and probably should, certainly in the elevator department. A one-legged man with a hod of bricks could have got up to the sixth floor faster than the lift I’m in. Nor is there anything very special about the Hemingway Suite, except for its current occupant.
Kevin is a New York policeman who makes my obsession with Hemingway look like mild interest. He runs with the bulls at Pamplona, has taken the Hemingway Suite at the Sun Valley Lodge and says he once broke down in tears after clearing four feet of snow off Hemingway’s grave in Ketchum cemetery.
Though Kevin has a spiky red beard and looks more like my auntie than Ernest Hemingway, it doesn’t surprise me that he has entered the look-alike competition, nor that he is through to the finals. Spiritually, Kevin is clearly a contender, and if this were a be-alike competition he’d win horns down.
He’s a little uncomfortable about the Suite. A guest recently checked out complaining of hearing someone else in the room and waking up to feel an invisible pressure on the end of the bed. Another guest cut short a booking giving no reason at all. I should imagine that any manifestation of Ernest would be just what Kevin wanted, but for a New York cop he sounds remarkably squeamish about the other side and suggests we continue the conversation in somewhere resolutely corporeal, like Sloppy Joe’s. Sloppy’s is basically a watering hole. A great crowd of people, including one man wearing a Viking helmet, are clustered round every available inch of bar and table, shouting against the thudding rock music, dealing with beers or simply chewing away on some of the house specialities - ‘The Bun Also Rises’, ‘For Whom the Grill Tolls’ or a simple Ernie Burger, ‘a giant half-pound burger from the cattle ranches of Key West’.