TRAVELING IN STYLE : PAPA WAS A ROLLING STONE : Ernest Hemingway Roamed the World, but Made Himself at Home in Four Very Different Corners of North America

ERNEST HEMINGWAY LIVED AN INTERESTING LIFE. WRITING, he said, is alchemy, a blend of observation, experience, travel and imagination. From that, he made words into style. He stayed devoted to his craft throughout the whole journey--and his sense of place was as sharp as an ice pick.

Hemingway is well-traveled territory himself, of course. Every secret that can be uncovered about him, every aspect of his life and work that can be interpreted, already has been. His trail is old, but it is not so cold as you might think. And following his footsteps has this reward: Hemingway favored the kinds of places that are easy to enjoy--the dizzying dark waters of the Gulf Stream, the high blue sky of the Rockies, the boisterous corners of good saloons. . . .

UNDER THE STARS IN THE STEAMY AIR AT HEMINGWAY’S 95TH BIRTHDAY party, I dance the rumba with my wife on the old man’s second-story veranda in Key West, Fla. The band plays on the lawn below and the weepy trees are draped with lights. Through the window we can see his toilet and the bed he shared with his second wife, Pauline, and the clay Picasso sculpture of a cat that is glued to his dresser--and, off in back, the detached studio with the old Royal portable where he wrote sentences that even today have the artist’s unmistakable brush strokes in them.

The rumba is my wife’s idea. “Hemingway was a bastard,” she’d said, “but he was a romantic, no? Dance with me.” Frankly, I don’t know that Hemingway ever danced. But I know when to say yes in the starlight. And I know how to rumba.

Hemingway arrived here, in the southernmost city in the continental United States, in April, 1928, on the advice of John Dos Passos “to dry out his bones.” By the time he departed in December, 1939, he had left such an indelible mark that his haunts remain the biggest tourist attractions in the Florida Keys to this day.

Visitors crowd Hemingway’s former house at 907 Whitehead St., now a museum and home to about 54 descendants of his swarm of six-toed cats. His favorite saloon, Sloppy Joe’s, is a rock ‘n’ roll bar with a Hemingway mural behind the stage and pictures of him on the wall. The saloon where wife No. 3, Martha Gellhorn, pursued him is now called Capt. Tony’s. The marina where he docked his boat, the Pilar, still bristles with fishing boats.

Shopkeepers at local bookstores say they do at least 15% of their business in Hemingway publications. “People come down here for lots of reasons,” says John Boisonault, proprietor of Key West Island Books, “and they seem to get wrapped up in Hemingway. Some people cannot name two of his books and end up paying $500 for a first edition. Others can tell you the most amazing trivia--how many steps there were on the walkway up to his boyhood cabin at Walloon Lake in Michigan--but they don’t know the year Scott Fitzgerald died. One thing I can tell you, though: Hemingway sells more books now than when he was alive.”

Once a year for the past 13 years, in the heat of July (when Hemingway himself always made sure to be somewhere else), a festival has been convened here in his memory. Though the event’s organizers have tried to give the festival some trappings of seriousness, with writers workshops, storytelling performances and a first-novel contest, it remains mostly a campy week that gives Hemingway fans a terrific excuse to go on a bender and celebrate his birthday. One tour book describes the festival as “a ritual of alcohol indulgence.” Indeed, Key West’s beaches are lousy, its offshore reef is dying, the fishing is not what it used to be--but the bars and Hemingway’s memory endure in a boozy, fun-loving embrace.

This year at the festival, more than 80 men have entered the three-day Hemingway look-alike contest, and everywhere you turned in Key West you saw a burly chap with a pot gut and a silver beard, sly grin, khaki shorts and a long-billed fishing hat--a good many ghosts with cold drinks in their hands.

If you insist, of course, you can always find someone to talk with, to argue the contradictions that make Hemingway so lastingly interesting: He glorified the kill, but wouldn’t shoot an elephant because it was too majestic. He was a macho maniac, but his posthumously published “Garden of Eden” was full of androgyny and gender-switching. He was a bigot and an anti-Semite, but he sought out, befriended and glorified the working underclass, and his generosity is without dispute. He was a poseur. He was a man of deeds. And, excuse me, may I have another rum soda, please?

NINETY MILES AWAY, ON THE OTHER SIDE OF the world, is Cuba.

At night, approached from the air, Havana is a city of few lights. Abandoned by its old ally the former Soviet Union, and periodically embroiled in yet another bitter showdown with its erstwhile friend the United States, Cuba suffers oil shortages and power blackouts, as well as scarcities of food and other necessities of life.

For more than a generation, the United States has sought to restrict travel and trade with Cuba. But during quiet periods--decidedly unlike the recent blustery confrontation between Presidents Fidel Castro and Bill Clinton--Americans nonetheless slip in among growing numbers of Canadian and European tourists.

And here the ghost of Papa Hemingway is preserved as nowhere else.

Visitors--including Americans--are spared “our present difficulties,” as the Cubans like to say. What awaits them is not shortages but tourist taxis with plenty of gasoline, English-speaking guides, hotels with ample food and special tourist-issue soap and shampoo, plenty of rum and cigars and a tourist currency based not on the devalued Cuban peso but on the U.S. dollar.

A common route is through Nassau in the Bahamas (see Guidebook). On the flight I took last summer were a few returning Cubans and a number of tourists--from Argentina, Canada, Japan, the Bahamas, England and two of us from the States. My fellow American is an old DC-3 pilot, who assures me that “Cuban fliers are great.” I’m glad to hear this since I had earlier witnessed the disconcerting sight of a mechanic jabbing a giant screwdriver into the engine on our tired Soviet-made AK-24 turboprop, coaxing it to start.

We arrive at Havana’s Jose Marti International Airport with tropical lightning flickering around us. Our plane lands so gently the tires don’t even squeak. Perhaps the pilot is concerned by their lack of tread. (I am.) It is 35 years since Hemingway left, 36 years since Castro’s revolution. The night air is hot, heavy and moist, rich with the damp smell of rotting vegetation buffered by the scents of wild tropical flowers.

The past lives on in many ways here--ways that are not usually beneficial to the Cubans but are certainly a curiosity for visiting Americans. Perhaps one-quarter of the cars on the streets, for instance, are spongy, leftover 1950s Detroit-built Buick roadsters and workaday Chevy coupes and boxy old Plymouths. Many are painted brightly. These mix with an assortment of Soviet trucks, belching buses and occasional donkey carts--plus about a zillion bicycles and sidecar motorcycles.

The architecture of Havana dates from 1600 or so until about 1960, when time seems to have stopped. I saw many buildings falling apart, but the Plaza Hotel was not one of them. Built at the turn of the century on the edge of Old Havana, it is a colonial-style structure with arched ceilings, stained glass, a grand piano, an indoor fountain, free-flying indoor birds and a 24-hour bar that smells of a century’s worth of cigars. I have chosen to stay here because it is a block from Obispo Street, the pedestrian thoroughfare that stretches down to the harbor and also to the site of Hemingway’s favorite Havana restaurant and bar, the Floridita.

In the 1940s and ‘50s, the Floridita was among the most glamorous and decadent hangouts in the world, and the place was always packed. Twenty years ago, I first saw those sharp black-and-white pictures of Hemingway and Spencer Tracy and Gary Cooper and the gang at the corner of the restaurant’s wooden horseshoe bar, and I have wanted to visit the place ever since.

Tonight, a distinguished-looking Cuban in a red jacket welcomes me, and there are empty seats to choose from. I take a place next to the brass chain that enshrines Hemingway’s corner stool. Propped on the end of the bar is a rare photograph of Hemingway with Castro, taken at a fishing tournament in 1960. Overhead is a three-quarter-size bronze bust of the author.

There is only one cocktail to request at the Floridita: A slushy daiquiri ceremoniously prepared with fresh limes and no sugar--a drink supposedly invented by Hemingway’s favorite barman here, Constantino Ribailagua. Icy fruit and rum drinks have been popular with Havana’s elites since 1810, when the first shipment of ice arrived at the Floridita from Boston.

My daiquiri is astringent and it coaxes forth the ghosts of the Lost Generation. The decor of the place has changed. The frosted ripple-glass windows of an earlier era have been replaced; furniture and murals are unrecognizable from the old photographs. But there remains an unmistakable nostalgia. Dinner in the circular dining room is elegant, and I will not criticize cooking in a country where wood pulp is discreetly added to the flour as an extender. The service is fastidious, and every crumb is swept away between courses with a polished silver trowel. My red snapper is small, grilled well and lavishly covered with enough thick gravy to fill the whole embossed china plate. There is no lettuce for the salad--only onions and tomatoes. That’s OK. After dinner, you can still light a nine-inch cigar at your table with impunity.

In the morning, along with four Japanese tourists and a Florida coconut-grower, I tour Havana, partly by foot and partly in an air-conditioned Nissan van. The standard itinerary for the government-operated Havanatur includes the ancient forts of the city, the Revolution Museum (where the boat Castro used for his invasion of the island is encased in glass), Revolution Square (where Castro makes his speeches), a shopping plaza reserved for tourists, assorted other museums and city hospitals. Cubans are incredibly proud of their universal health-care system, and we are promised free emergency medical services should the need arise.

Orlando, our guide, adds a literary side trip: We walk to the Ambos Mundos Hotel, where Hemingway lived during his early days here. “A good place to write,” Hemingway called it. Today, the Ambos Mundos (“Both Worlds”) houses government functionaries, although Hemingway’s unnumbered fifth-floor room is maintained as a small museum.

After the tour, the coconut-grower and I visit the famous/infamous bar and restaurant La Bodeguita del Medio. Hemingway was a regular, but this tiny stone-block establishment has entertained so many of the world’s artists and celebrities that the author barely stands out among the yellowed photographs and old scrawled signatures covering the walls.

At La Bodeguita, we meet a Cuban civil engineer named Ricardo and his wife, Ellen. (At their request, these are not their real names; paranoia is not excessive here, but it exists.) Ricardo is a Cuban army veteran of the war in Angola; I am a U.S. Marine veteran of Vietnam. With our black beans and strips of barbecued pork, we chew over why the United States has rushed to do business with Cold War enemies such as China and North Vietnam but not Cuba. Then, to earn a bit of money, the couple agrees to drive us 12 miles to the hilltop suburb of San Francisco de Paula, where Hemingway’s home, the Finca Vigia, is maintained as one of the premier Hemingway museums of the world.

“What car is this that barely runs and sags like an old gourd?” I ask. “A Soviet Lada. We say, ‘A Lada-trouble,’ ” puns Ricardo as we lurch through the slums, the engine dying, the clutch trembling, with suicidal bicyclists testing our screeching brakes at every turn.

If you want to see how Hemingway lived from 1939 through the 1950s, the Finca Vigia is the place. His shoes, books, glasses, hunting trophies, Nobel Prize medallion, his boat, the Pilar, all sorts of relics, now belong to the Cubans--and most of them are on casual display at the villa, as if Hemingway were merely away on summer safari. Also here is the converted wooden bookcase where he wrote standing up and on a good day dulled the points of seven No. 2 pencils. Here is the pool where he scandalized the neighbors by swimming nude. Here is the living room where he romanced young Italian countess Adriana Ivancich under the pained glare of Mary, his fourth and last wife. And here are the overgrown grounds, on which the author once instructed his gardener: “Your job will be not to cut, not to prune.”

Some mysteries are not decipherable by the best of writers, like why Cuba? In a magazine article published in 1949, Hemingway said merely this: “You live in Cuba because you can plug the bell in the party-line telephone with paper, so that you won’t have to answer, and you work as well there in the cool early morning as you ever have worked anywhere in the world. But these are professional secrets.”

ERNEST HEMINGWAY BEGAN LIFE in Oak Park, Ill., a suburb west of Chicago, in July, 1899. He finished the journey in Ketchum, Ida., 62 years later to the month, in July, 1961.

His boyhood home, at 339 N. Oak Park Ave., is being slowly turned into a museum. Another museum two blocks down, at 200 N. Oak Park Ave., displays some of his high school writing and memorabilia. A private home nearby at 600 N. Kenilworth Ave., where Hemingway’s family moved when he was 6 and and where he lived through high school, is marked by a small plaque.

At Oak Park High School, an ornate classroom modeled after an Oxford University reading room bears Hemingway’s name. School officials believe it is the most photographed classroom in America. “Kids respond when they come visit the museum and see Hemingway’s letter sweater, and view him as a person for the first time,” says Jim Walwark, a veteran English teacher at Oak Park High. “But as for his writing, they find his style stilted. They don’t find it realistic. In his day, he offered something new in literature. But to them, it’s not new. He tried to leave things out to reach the essence of his subject. They feel he left out too much.”

Ketchum, appropriately, has no Hemingway museum.

The author first came here in September, 1939, when a public relations whiz handling the Sun Valley Lodge, the original destination ski resort, invited him to be a guest, figuring it would boost business. Hemingway accepted and rendezvoused at the lodge with Martha Gellhorn, in room 206. (From time to time, people still come just to stay in that room.) Over the years, he returned frequently, usually to hunt birds, and in 1959 moved permanently to Ketchum, the town adjacent to Sun Valley. The Ram Bar at the lodge became one of his favorite drinking places, and the resort’s Trail Creek Cabin was the scene of many wild, happy parties.

On July 1, 1961, old beyond his years, unable to recover from electric shock therapy prescribed for depression and a deteriorating mental condition, Hemingway ate his last meal at Ketchum’s Christiana Restaurant. At home the next morning, he killed himself with a shotgun.

Plenty of residents still remember the hulking Hemingway. “He was loud and he smelled,” one woman tells me at the Duchin Lounge, another Hemingway hangout. “He smelled of garlic and booze.” Later, she recites a Hemingway passage from memory and actually breaks into sobs.

A lode of Hemingway anecdotes can be found in the oral histories of the region collected by the Ketchum Library. Transcripts are open to browsers. Hemingway’s home, situated above the banks of the Big Wood River, on the west side of town, is gated and posted with “No Trespassing” signs. The Nature Conservancy owns the property, and from time to time discusses opening the house for limited visits. But for now it remains harder to get into than Cuba.

Hemingway is buried in the Ketchum cemetery beneath a plain horizontal gravestone. A few miles away on the east side of Ketchum above Sun Valley Lodge, a tasteful memorial to him has been erected. Here, on Trail Creek, in a grove of trees, rests a lonely stone bench facing a monument inscribed with an epitaph Hemingway wrote for an old hunting friend: “Best of all he loved the fall,/The leaves yellow on the cottonwoods,/Leaves floating on the trout streams,/And above the hills/The high blue windless sky./Now he will be a part of them forever.”

GUIDEBOOK: On the Hemingway Trail

Prices: All prices are approximate. Hotel prices are for a double room for one night. Restaurant prices are for dinner for two, food only.

KEY WEST

Getting there: There are frequent daily connecting flights between Los Angeles and Key West on Delta Airlines via Orlando, and American Airlines via Miami. By rental car, the drive from Miami to Key West takes about four hours.

Where to stay: The Holiday Inn La Concha, 430 Duval St., (305) 296-2991. An old and centrally located landmark, where Tennessee Williams stayed and wrote. Rates: $110-$190.

Where to eat: Louie’s Backyard, 700 Waddell Ave., (305) 294-1061. Elegant and expensive, with first-rate fresh fish dishes--grouper in spicy peanut sauce, pompano with fruit salsa--and a splendid view of the Atlantic from the back porch; $80-$100. P.T.’s, 920 Caroline St., (305) 296-4245. A local favorite with hearty chow; $20-30. Blue Heaven, 729 Thomas St., (305) 296-8666. Another chance to get away from the tourist crush for delicious jerk chicken; $12-$30.

Hemingway Days Festival: For next year’s dates and other information, contact the festival office, P.O. Box 4045, Key West, Fla, 33041; (305) 294-4440.

For more information: I Love Key West Tourist Information and Reservations, 1601 N. Roosevelt Blvd., Key West, Fla. 33040; (800) 733-5397.

HAVANA

Getting there: Though there is no official U.S. ban on travel to Cuba, there is a trade embargo. This means that American tourists may not engage in financial transactions--for instance, buying dinner or paying for a hotel--while in Cuba. The Treasury Department says that it “vigorously” enforces the embargo. Those determined to risk prosecution have been known to find their way to Cuba, nevertheless, through countries that maintain open-door policies with Castro’s homeland, such as the Bahamas, Canada and Mexico. Travel agents in these countries typically book three-day and one-week tour packages, including transportation and choice of hotels. (Cuban immigration officials do not mark American passports with incriminating entry stamps.)

OAK PARK

Getting there: From Chicago, Oak Park is an easy half-day trip. Take the Congress Line “El” for the 30-minute ride to Oak Park. Most of the Hemingway sites mentioned above are within walking distance of the station.

For more information: Oak Park Visitors Center, 158 N. Forest Ave., Oak Park, Ill. 60304; (708) 848-1500. Or The Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park. P.O. Box 2222, Oak Park, Ill. 60303; (708) 848-2222.

KETCHUM

Getting there: Delta Airlines offers several connecting flights daily to Sun Valley, next door to Ketchum, via Salt Lake City or Boise. Once there, a car is essential for Hemingway-themed touring.

Where to stay: The Sun Valley Lodge, 1 Sun Valley Road, Sun Valley, (208) 622-4111; reservations, (800) 786-8259. Rates: $109-$125.

Where to eat: The Lodge has been completely renovated since Hemingway’s day, but the main dining room remains upscale pleasant; $50-$95. The Pioneer Saloon, 308 N. Main, Ketchum, (208) 726-3139. A local blue-jeans steakhouse favorite, with a 28-oz. slab of roast beef for the hungry carnivore; $28-$50.

For more information: Sun Valley/Ketchum Chamber of Commerce, P.O. Box 2420, Sun Valley, Ida. 83353, (800) 634-3347; or Idaho Travel Council, 700 W. State St., P.O. Box 83720, Boise, Ida., 83720-0093, (800) 635-7820.