Hemingway's Key West

Every visitor to Key West hears about Hemingway. Fewer hear the actual shape of the story: a young writer who came to a broke island town at the tail end of its collapse, found it perfectly suited to the life he wanted, and produced the work that made him famous while living there.

How he got here

Ernest and Pauline Hemingway first came to Key West as visitors in 1928, and again the following year. During that three-week 1928 stay, he finished his World War I novel A Farewell to Arms.

The story locals tell is that they came to collect a car that hadn't arrived yet and spent the wait drinking and fishing — and decided the town suited them. It was an odd choice for a rising literary star. Key West in 1928 was near the bottom: the cigar industry had largely moved to Tampa, sponging had collapsed, and within a few years the city would be effectively bankrupt. But it was cheap, it was hot, it was surrounded by extraordinary fishing, and it was a long way from New York.

907 Whitehead Street

The house was built in 1851 by Asa Tift, a Key West shipbuilder and salvager — a Spanish colonial villa of local limestone with deep verandas and iron railings, built by exactly the kind of wrecking-era money that made this island rich.

Pauline's wealthy uncle Gus bought it for them in 1931, and Ernest and Pauline lived there with their sons Patrick and Gregory until 1940.

He wrote in a studio in the loft of the outbuilding behind the house, reached by a walkway, working mornings and fishing or drinking in the afternoons. The Key West years produced To Have and Have Not — the only novel he set in America — along with work including The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Green Hills of Africa, and the Key West and Cuba fishing that fed directly into The Old Man and the Sea years later.

The pool that cost him his last penny

The best story in the house is about the swimming pool. Pauline had it built while Ernest was away — the first inground pool in Key West — and the cost ballooned to around $20,000, an enormous sum in the 1930s. Digging a pool into solid coral rock on an island with no fresh water was an absurd undertaking.

The legend is that when Hemingway saw the bill he took a penny from his pocket, pressed it into the wet cement, and told her she might as well have his last cent. The penny is still embedded there beside the pool, and the guides will point it out. The expense is said to have contributed to the end of the marriage — though the affair that ended it probably had more to do with it.

The truth about the six-toed cats

Here is the version most people repeat: a ship captain gave Hemingway a six-toed cat named Snow White, and every cat on the property descends from her.

Close, but the details are worth getting right. Snow White belonged to Captain Stanley Dexter, a seafaring acquaintance of Hemingway's who traveled between Massachusetts and Key West, and the cat sailed with him. What Dexter gave Hemingway was one of Snow White's polydactyl kittens — also white, also many-toed — which joined the household at Whitehead Street sometime in the 1930s.

"Polydactyl" simply means many-toed. A typical cat has eighteen toes — five on each front paw, four on each back. Polydactyl cats can have anywhere from nineteen to twenty-eight, with the extra digits usually on the front paws. It isn't an illness, and it doesn't hurt them. The extra toes may even give an advantage in balance and climbing — possibly useful on the moving deck of a ship, which is exactly where sailors said these cats brought good luck.

Hemingway was famously accident-prone and took the good-luck reputation of polydactyl cats seriously. He kept a colony of them here, and he named them — a habit that continues at the museum, where every cat is named after a famous person.

Two corrections worth carrying with you: not every cat on the property today is polydactyl (the trait is dominant but doesn't appear in every kitten), and the ones that aren't are still direct descendants of the same line. Whether six-toed or not, the cats have the run of the place — and they were there first.

The other Hemingway places in town

• Sloppy Joe's — his bar, though not at its current Duval Street address in his day. When the rent went up in 1937, the owner moved the whole operation down the block overnight, patrons carrying their own drinks. The original location is now Captain Tony's Saloon.
• The Key West Lighthouse — directly across Whitehead Street from the house. The often-repeated line is that he could find his way home by it after a long night. Climb it for the best free-standing view of Old Town.
• The harbor — where he kept Pilar, the boat that took him after marlin in the Gulf Stream and, in 1935, up the Keys to help with the aftermath of the Labor Day Hurricane. What he saw there produced the angriest magazine piece he ever wrote.

He left for Cuba in 1940 with his third wife, Martha Gellhorn. Pauline stayed in the house until her death. He came back to visit, but he never lived here again.

Hemingway Days

Every July, Key West fills up with bearded men in fisherman's sweaters for Hemingway Days — a look-alike contest at Sloppy Joe's that has become one of the great absurd spectacles in American tourism, plus a marlin tournament, a short story competition, and a running of the bulls involving wheeled fake ones. He would probably have loved it, or hated it loudly, or both.