Twenty bucks got the five of us through the door. The first floor is largely taken up with these displays that allow the public to pose with La Belle Epoque scenes from French symbolist paintings. The girls posed for pictures with well-heeled Frenchmen out for a picnic. I think we were the museum’s only visitors that day.
The mindblower for me was on the second floor which is home to a room dedicated entirely to Hemingway’s life in Key West from 1926 to 1939. One exhibit tells the story of how many of Hemingway’s belongings were found in a back room at Sloppy Joe’s bar, which eventually found their way to this exhibit in the Customs House after his death. The collection is nothing short of astonishing. Here you can see Hemingway’s blood-splattered uniform from his service in Italy during the Great War. His leg had been laced with shrapnel, which had him laid up in a Milan hospital for several weeks in 1917. A case could be made that this was the central event of Hemingway's formative years, the circumstances that would define him as a writer when he was at the height of his powers. As the preeminent figure of Modernism, you could extrapolate that the movement's seminal moment could traced back to this blood-stained ambulance driver's uniform from the Great War.
While laid up in the Milan hospital, he was cared for by a nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky, a Red Cross nurse (shown on the left in the above photo; Hemingway is on the right). Hemingway fell in love and asked her to marry him, but she declined. In lieu of being his wife, she would serve as a literary character, becoming the heroine in A Farewell to Arms and the love interest in the aptly named short story, “A Very Short Story.”
Years later, long after Hemingway had become wealthy and famous, Agnes made her way to Key West where she attempted to make contact with the man who once been in love with her. Happy, healthy and married to his wealthy second wife, Hemingway, refused to see his old flame. And who could blame him? Key West wasn’t easy to get to back in the 1930s. So what brought her here? Presumably she hadn't come here to fish. One is left with the unmistakable impression that Agnes had come to tell her old beau that she had reconsidered his earlier offer.
Incredibly, this room also has what looks like the original typescript of Hemingway’s bullfighting classic, Death in the Afternoon.
Half a lifetime ago, as a young writer, I had read all of Hemingway’s short stories and all of his early novels. By the time I found my way to the English Department at the University of Colorado at Boulder, I had read all the Hemingway I could safely digest. Jeffery Meyers, the renowned biographer, taught here. A few years earlier he had written one of the great Hemingway biographies which contained the FBI files on the writer. According to the new disclosures, Hoover and his G-men didn't think much of the man who spent his days quaffing frozen drinks and hunting German submarines off the island of the Gulf during World War II. Meyers' biography is one of the best on Hemingway, offering both a literary and psychological view of the writer.
I remember seeing Meyers in the hallways of the Hellems Building where many of the English profs had their offices, and it seemed he always had a copy of Death in the Afternoon or A Farewell to Arms in his hand. He had a Hemingway-esque moustache and was said to have Hemingway-esque interests (deep-sea fishing, hunting, bullfighting, the written word). Some saw Meyers as a Hemingway caricature, a Hemingway-head, obsessed with the Hemingway legend. I had sat in on a couple of his classes and found him remarkably interesting. I remember him comparing Hemingway to Lord Byron, the defining literary figure of British letters. Hemingway, he claimed, was one of those authors whose work would live as long as there were books.
In any event, this walk through the Key West Customs House resurrected these dormant literary interests from decades ago. After surveying Hemingway's life, it was hard for me not to feel a little old and small. That young man packed a lot of living into a short period of time. By the time Hemingway was my age (45), he was way past his prime and had long-since moved from Key West. I wasn’t here to fish for marlin. I was here to sample frozen cocktails and to shepherd my family in and out of t-shirt shops. Perhaps to my discredit, I was having a splendid time.
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