Cuban-U.S. Team to Dig Into Hemingway’s Past

SAN FRANCISCO DE PAULA, Cuba -- His bearded countenance looms large in American literature, yet even lifelong scholars of Ernest Hemingway concede that they know little about the half of his adult life spent in this palm-shaded Havana suburb.

The gaps in those 21 years may soon be filled: Cubans have decided to share with Americans a trove of writings, journals, photographs, letters and jotted notes the author left behind.

In a rare act of collaboration between the countries that claim “Papa” as their own, Cuban and U.S. researchers are combing through the 9,000 books lining the walls of the salon and study at Finca Vigia, his home in Cuba, the land where he wrote “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and his Pulitzer prize-winning “The Old Man and the Sea.” They are scouring the cluttered guesthouse cellar where more than 3,000 photographs and an equal number of manuscript pages and letters have nested in boxes and file drawers for more than four decades. They are probing and cataloging and putting together the pieces of a life on the edge between discipline and indulgence.

“Hemingway had an understanding of the Cuban spirit that made people here feel close to him, that he was like us,” said Carmen Fournier, a literature professor at Havana University who will be working with U.S. scholars researching and microfilming the long-neglected contents of Finca Vigia.

Fournier traces Cubans’ affinity for the writer to his humble rededication of his 1954 Nobel Prize to those who inspired his story, describing himself as a “Cubano sato,” a phrase from the Cuban dialect meaning both flirt and half-breed.

“Cubans wept when he said that,” Fournier said.

The cellar contents and Hemingway’s massive library have been in Cuban custody since the author left the island, and there has never been a comprehensive, in-depth examination of the material, she said. Fournier expects the joint work, being funded by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation and conducted by an array of Cuban and U.S. Hemingway experts, to preserve the fragile memorabilia and shed light on the subject’s creative process.

“It’s like an archeological dig. You hope there will be interesting and exciting things to discover, and you think there will be, but you won’t know exactly what unless you excavate with an open mind,” said Sandra Spanier, a Penn State University professor recently named by the Hemingway Foundation to edit a multivolume anthology of the author’s personal correspondence. She visited the cellar stash in March and November but only long enough to see that the search-and-rescue project will take years.

Few expect to discover unpublished novels or whole stories, because Hemingway stored his writings in a bank vault that was emptied after his death. But the snippets of everyday life being gleaned from marginalia and his copious correspondence disclose previously unknown details of the mercurial author. Spanier says scholars have been surprised by Hemingway’s impressive command of Spanish, his rapt attention to household matters, even his taste in music and the bitter repartee that marked his marriages.

“He wrote out instructions to the servants on how to cook his meals. He paid a lot of attention to domestic details. It really rounds out our image of Hemingway as a rough, tough big-game hunter and deep-sea fisherman,” Spanier said.

The Cuba of the 1940s and ‘50s was an ideal retreat for Hemingway, she says, because he could find the solitude he needed to write and the outdoor sports and carousing to which he devoted equal attention.

At the lush Finca Vigia estate, Hemingway rose at dawn each day to write standing up for as long as six hours. He would then abandon his Royal typewriter to head off to the marina at Cojimar to take out his 40-foot fishing boat, the Pilar. Evenings he divided between the Old Havana haunts of El Floridita and La Bodeguita del Medio, the former for daiquiri binges and the latter for mojito moods.

Hemingway’s Cuban estate remains much as it was when he left in 1960 for Idaho, where he took his own life a year later. The rooms that visitors can view from the open doors and windows look as if the writer might just have stepped out for a moment. Books are still piled on his desk and shelves and beside the toilet, just as he left them. Stuffed game trophies mounted on the walls, pottery and trinkets acquired during travels to Europe and Africa, even his old Victrola and stash of big band albums give the appearance of a house still lived in.

Manuel Sardinas Gonzalez, an assistant curator at the estate that is now the Hemingway Museum and is visited by 40,000 people each year, says Cubans expect the U.S. help in preserving the writer’s legacy to boost awareness of Finca Vigia and its potential as a tourist destination.

“Hemingway was a universal figure. He shouldn’t be looked at as an American because he felt himself to be part of our culture as well,” Gonzalez said.

Aside from the sultry villa, visitors can glimpse the pool, now empty, where actress Ava Gardner once swam naked. They can appreciate Hemingway’s bond with pets at the poolside graves of his four dogs. In a photo gallery set up in an auxiliary building, they can peruse images of a 5-year-old Hemingway decked out to go fishing and the author as master of ceremonies bestowing a fishing trophy on Fidel Castro.

The cellar hoard came as a surprise to most Hemingway experts. The author’s fourth wife and widow, Mary, came here a month after he killed himself and cleaned out the bank vault where then-unpublished manuscripts for “Islands in the Stream” and “The Garden of Eden” were stored. She also hauled 200 pounds of documents and belongings back to New York. But she burned the bulk of his papers, letters and journals in a bonfire that lasted three days.

“We really don’t know what’s left in the basement. What Mary Hemingway took back with her seems almost hit or miss,” said Jenny Phillips, granddaughter of Hemingway’s editor and close friend, Maxwell Perkins, and initiator of the U.S.-Cuba collaborative project. “We’ve seen only the tip of the iceberg.”