Editor’s note: For our 30th anniversary, we’re reprinting some of our favorite past features. This one first ran on November 29, 2000, following a trip to Cuba with the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park-River Forest. We’re reprinting it now to honor Hemingway’s birthday. He was born July 21, 1899.
Ernest Hemingway ended up a long way from Oak Park. He ended his life in Idaho, but that was just the denouement. He really ended up in Cuba.
Cuba was where he stayed off and on throughout the 1930s, in Room 511 of the Ambos Mundos Hotel in Old Havana. That’s where he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls, among many other works.
But he left his heart in San Francisco de Paula, a poor village outside Havana, where he and his third wife, Martha Gellhorn, first rented, then bought Finca Vigia (“Lookout Farm”), which was Hemingway’s home from 1939 to 1960-the longest he lived anywhere.
He lived in Oak Park second-longest-the first 19 years of his life-and Ernie the man, the myth, the author and the celebrity are regarded very differently in those two places.
In a recent Wednesday Journal promotional supplement, the Readers’ Choice Awards, Ernest Hemingway was voted Most Overrated Deceased Local Celebrity. That reflects a common sentiment among people in this country. Americans typically regard him with either very mixed or entirely negative feelings. He wasn’t that great a writer, they say, too macho and violent. He was a drunken libertine. He was a victim of his own celebrity. He was too full of himself. He killed himself.
Americans seem to have problems with any writer once he or she gets too popular. We look askance at any writer whose personal life we disapprove of – F. Scott Fitzgerald, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer.
Not so in Cuba. There Hemingway is respected, even revered. They seem to have an easier time accepting his complicated soul.
But there is something else. Hemingway was the first – perhaps the only-North American who wholeheartedly embraced Cuba and its people. He became one of them. As Cuban Hemingway aficionados are fond of pointing out, many of his Cuban devotees didn’t even know he was a writer.
That’s because he wasn’t an elitist. Although the photos at La Floridita and La Boguedita del Medio, two of his favorite Havana haunts, show him hobnobbing with the likes of Gary Cooper, Spencer Tracy and Erroll Flynn, he seems to have been far more comfortable with the common folk, especially Cuban fishermen, whom he memorialized in The Old Man and the Sea.
In fact, during the one television interview he consented to in the wake of his Nobel Prize in 1954-discovered in a dusty video archive only a few years ago-Hemingway, speaking entirely in Spanish, identified himself as a sato, a Cuban word that can’t be easily translated, but the American term “good ol’ boy” comes closest.
There’s a telling moment at the end of the interview when the reporter tells Hemingway they’re through, and Hemingway, with a combination of relief and joy, bursts into a beaming grin that is remarkably childlike in its body language.
We watched that interview at the Institute of Journalism in Havana, one small part of an organized scholarly exchange between the Cuban Hemingway catedra and the Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park (a contingent of 50-plus Papa aficionados), the two groups representing the “bookends” of Ernie’s life.
The video interview was a revelation because there are so few film segments of the man that capture his normal mannerisms. It made him suddenly seem real, less a prisoner of the popular imagination.
That was also the feeling the day before when we visited Hemingway’s room at the Ambos Mundos Hotel, which has been turned into a one-room museum. I wasn’t expecting much as we waited for the previous group to finish its brief walkaround. But when I spotted the old manual typewriter on top of the tiny writing desk in front of the corner window, with its view of clay-tiled rooftops, I was taken aback by the immediacy of the writer’s presence. It’s a great room to write in, and I could easily imagine the man working there. Papa liked to play a lot, and he certainly had his shortcomings, but when he worked, he worked hard. That’s one side of Hemingway that detractors overlook.
But if you really want to meet Hemingway’s ghost, you have to go to Finca Vigia (pronounced feen-ca vee-hee-a), otherwise known in Cuba as Museo Ernest Hemingway, in San Francisco de Paula-which is precisely what our tour group did on Thursday of our week in Cuba. But before touring the house itself, we took turns introducing ourselves to our gracious hosts.
Grupo de Hemingway covered quite a range of interests. Roy Hlavacek was one of the original foundation board members back in 1983-just about the time our Cuban counterparts came together. Harry Gordon is a high school English teacher from California who makes his students wrestle with Hemingway. Phil Dibble, a physician, has published many articles on Hemingway. Mark Weyermuller lives in the Chicago apartment that Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley, lived in for two months in 1927 before they left for Paris. “I’m not important,” he said, “but I live in an important place.” He calls it the “Hemingway hallway” and insists, with tongue in cheek, that it was the springboard for the rest of Ernie’s writing career. When he opened the apartment during a neighborhood festival on the Near North Side last year, some 4,000 people ambled through.
Bill and Diane Falla of Hyannis, Mass., relax in the evening by taking turns reading Hemingway aloud to each other. Sarah Eldrige is interested in “the art that nourished Hemingway.” Gerald Costanto, a poet and teacher from Pittsburgh, admits that he “wanted to grow up to be Hemingway.” Bill Greffin, a marketing consultant and foundation board member, has a particular fascination with Hemingway’s cars and is hoping to track down his ’55 Chrysler, which, rumors say, still exists, albeit as a ruined hulk.
Foundation President Virginia Cassin tells our hosts: “Our hearts are all in the same place. The Oak Park Hemingway and the Finca Hemingway were the same man with the same heart. We look forward to being one family for many years to come.” To cement that familiarity, plenty of gifts were left behind.
As he left it
We split into small groups, each led by a museum staff member, and began exploring this beautiful, 103-year-old farmhouse. Isaac, a tall, dark-skinned string bean of a young man, led our cluster. We skirted the outside first and looked in through the large open windows, the way most Cubans and foreign tourists see the house. Isaac noted that Hemingway had books everywhere, even in the bathroom. Sure enough, on one side of the toilet is a bookcase. In his study, Hemingway’s size 47 loafers still rest side by side in the shoe rack. Hemingway wrote in the mornings, standing at his typewriter, which rests on top of one of the bookcases, stomach high, directly beneath an antelope head near an open window. Isaac says he wrote standing because of a kneecap injury during World War I.
The study contains a bed (“For when he had arguments with his wife,” Isaac says) and the only air conditioning unit in all of San Francisco de Paula-the only one in the house, as well.
Inside, the home is open and expansive. Animal heads decorate the walls, along with paintings and posters of matadors in mid-bullfight, created by Spanish painter Robert Domingo.
To the left, inside the front door, is Hemingway’s extensive collection of 900-plus records, many of them 78s, which cover the listening spectrum from classical to calypso to flamenco to jazz. At the moment, a Glen Miller record is playing on the old Victrola. His collection includes the likes of Jelly Roll Morton, Noel Coward, Dave Brubeck and Harry James.
To the right of the front door is the living area, which features two easy chairs and a small bar between them for ready access. For those interested, when Hemingway left, his bar consisted of half-filled bottles of Schweppes Indian Tonic, Aqua Mineral, Bacardi and Havana Club rum, Old Forester Straight Bourbon Whiskey, Campari and two bottles of Gordon’s Dry Gin. An ice bucket sits on the floor directly below.
Off the far end of the living room is the comedor (dining room), a long table set with dishes that contain the symbologia familia, the family logo that Hemingway designed, which features three hills (for either Paris or San Francisco de Paula, depending on who you talk to), an arrowhead for the Ojibwa Indians of Michigan and stripes for his World War II military rank.
The guest room was actually the cats’ room (30 or so had the run of the house) until 1947, when his wife Mary had a three-story tower built for him to write in. He didn’t feel comfortable there-it was too quiet-so the cats took it over.
In the library, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves contain some of the 9,000-plus books that Hemingway kept there. The collection, a combination of hardcovers and paperbacks, covers as wide a range as his record collection. It’s hard not to see the titles as commentaries on the owner’s life: Lost Weekend, The People Ask Death, No Love, History of Human Marriage, So Little Time. There are books in 54 different languages-not that Hemingway spoke that many. They were gifts, mostly.
A complete collection of Mark Twain sits next to the Harvard Classics. A rolling wooden ladder stands in the library to access the upper shelves. Two marlin tusks sit on the long library desk, serving as paperweights. Above the door to the back patio hang the roots of the ceiba tree that had to be cut down because it was wreaking havoc with the foundation. Over the doorway to the living room are the roots of a mangrove tree-an old Cuban tradition that protects the family within from evil spirits. “He was a supersitious man,” Isaac observes.
Other titles: Waiting for Nothing, You Can’t Be Too Careful, Diary of a Writer (Dostoyevsky), the four-volume set Los Toros, Historia del Toreo, Man Explores the Sea, Aficionado!, To Live as We Wish, Fishing from the Earliest Times.
There are a few books by his archrival, William Faulkner, and even a copy of the lowbrow Peyton Place.
Knickknacks abound: animal skulls; an antelope-horn corkscrew; a leopard skin on the floor; a silhouette of a fisherman alone in his boat, painted by 12-year-old Robert Hayes in the 1950s. He was inspired by The Old Man and the Sea and sent a letter telling Hemingway how much he liked the book.
The Finca museum staff is cataloguing the entire collection along with the author’s notations. Hemingway scribbled in the margins of approximately one-third of the books, everything from grocery lists to a still unpublished poem about his cats. They found a couple of overdue books from the Scoville Institute (the Oak Park public library when Hemingway lived here), and a couple of books have his grandfather Ernest Hall’s name written inside the cover.
In his study, Hemingway’s knife collection can be found. On the large desk beneath the water buffalo head are assorted rifle shells and military memorabilia. Beneath the glass, which has evidently never been removed, there is his business card, many photos and a holy card containing the Prayer of St. Ignatius. The attached closet contains his hats, boots and uniforms.
In the bathroom is the scale he used to keep track of his weight, methodically penciling the data on the wall, which has been preserved. The first entry, beginning in 1955, lists his weight at 242½ pounds, steadily declining until the last entry, July 24, 1960, at which point he was down to 190½.
A living museum
July 26 is a major festival in Cuba, commemorating the beginning of Fidel’s Revolution. In 1960, after the Bay of Pigs, Hemingway was already in significant decline, both physically and mentally, growing more and more anxious and paranoid, and the anti-American sentiment following the Bay of Pigs worried him, probably more than it needed to. He and his wife Mary departed for Spain in July 1960 and left the house pretty much as it is today. From Spain, he went to the United States for medical treatment in Rochester, Minn., which included shock treatments for his mental condition. Hemingway was never the same after that. He was in constant physical pain and couldn’t write, which may have been the last straw. He never got back to Finca Vigia.
When his wife returned, she met with Castro, who directed that the house be preserved. Their first thought was to create a library, but they settled on the museum.
Good thing for us. It’s the one place that gives the man some immediacy. One gets the feeling that, despite everything, Hemingway was happiest here, that he found a place to settle in and sink roots.
What was life like at Finca Vigia? According to author Anthony Burgess’ 1978 book on Hemingway, part of the Thames and Hudson Literary Lives series: “Finca Vigia, or Lookout Farm, was an enclave of richness and order in an impoverished and decaying Cuban town. There were 13 acres of flower and vegetable gardens, a cow pasture, an orchard, and a huge ceiba tree whose roots threatened to split the floor of the main house. There was a white frame guest house and a square tower intended as a working retreat, though it was primarily a home for the 30 cats of the establishment. There were three gardeners, a houseboy, a chauffeur, a Chinese cook, a carpenter, two maids, and a man who looked after the fighting cocks. There were dogs, including one called Black Dog that lay at the master’s feet as he wrote.”
Of his choice of residence, Hemingway himself wrote: “Character like me, the whole world to choose from, they naturally want to know why here. Usually don’t try to explain. Too complicated. The clear cool mornings when you can work good with just Black Dog awake and the fighting cocks sending out their first bulletins. . . . Some people put the arm on fighting cocks as cruel. But what the hell else does a fighting cock like to do? . . . You want to go to town, you just slip on a pair of loafers; always a good town to get away from yourself; these Cuban girls, you look into their black eyes, they have hot sunlight in them. . . . A half hour away from the finca you’ve got your boat set up so you’re in the dark-blue water of the Gulf Stream with four lines out 15 minutes after you board her.”
That would be off the fishing village of Cojimar on his beloved boat, Pilar, captained by Gregorio Fuentes, who is still alive at 103 and living in the house he built for his bride 80 years ago.
Our group visited him there and bestowed kisses and gifts and testimonials. He was patient and signed our autographs, and I was tempted to ask him about the Yankees and the great DiMaggio, whom Fuentes also outlived.
We visited their favorite hangout in town, La Terraza, which is mentioned at the end of The Old Man and the Sea: “That afternoon there was a party of tourists at the Terrace and looking down in the water among the empty beer cans and dead barracudas a woman saw a great long white spine with a huge tail at the end that lifted and swung with the tide while the east wind blew a heavy steady sea outside the entrance to the harbour.”
Forty years after he left, a group from Oak Park tracked Hemingway down and found his final resting place, the place where he felt most at home. It was at sea, fishing. Or as Santiago puts it in Hemingway’s Nobel Prize-winning novel: “Fishing kills me exactly as it keeps me alive.”
As far as Oak Park is concerned, Hemingway never went home again, but the Oak Park Hemingway group can vouch for the fact that in the end, he found another home that suited him.