Santas in July

Late July in Key West means a couple things. It's hotter than Hades. You start seeing interesting blobs on satellite images of the Atlantic. If you live in my house, you spend most of your nonworking waking time watching the Tour de France. And if you hang around Old Town, you suddenly have sightings of Santa wherever you look. Only it's not supposed to be Santa. The hale white-bearded fellows are entrants in the annual Ernest Hemingway Look-Alike Contest, a guaranteed publicity winner for the tourism council (and I've been as guilty as anyone; I once wrote a cover story called "The Papas and the Papas" for the late, lamented Tropic magazine, chronicling one year's contest). An earlier story I wrote about Hemingway's long, strong, posthumous celebrity pointed out that Amherst doesn't hold Emily Dickinson lookalike contests -- only now they do.

I've always hoped one year the winner would be the rare entrant who looks like the younger, darker-haired, nonbearded Hemingway -- as Hemingway looked when he actually lived here in the 1930s. You do get the occasional entrant who gives it a try but since previous winners serve as the judges, the late-Hemingway look appears to have a lock on the thing.

All of which is a longwinded introduction to a couple of recent book reviews, one of which has a strong Hemingway connection: My review of A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses ran in Sunday's edition of Solares Hill. And a couple Sundays before that they ran my review of Janet Malcolm's Iphigenia in Forest Hills. Both interesting, well reported and written books of nonfiction, though naturally very different. I liked the Malcolm book a lot about the court system; not so much with her pronounciations on journalism. And I liked Trubek's tour of writers' house museums though she was a bit snarky in approach at times. I hadn't realized how many of these museums I had toured until I really thought about it though to be fair two of them are in my backyards, past and present (Emily Dickinson and Ernest Hemingway, whom Trubek holds up as sort of polar opposite of house museum ethos).

Like many a Key Wester, I'm almost as sick of Ernest Hemingway as I am of Jimmy Buffett -- but lately I've been thinking it might be time to read him again. One reason is the hilarious portrayal in Woody Allen's recent movie "Midnight in Paris" -- young Hemingway again, before he was the self-created celebrity and legend. Another is simply in reaction to all the late-Hemingway hysteria; I haven't read the short stories and early novels since I was in my 20s and I have learned that books take on a whole new dimension when you bring some life experience to them. Maybe it's time for A Farewell to Arms. After I finish re-reading Jane Austen.

When Ernie met Martha

[gallery columns="2"] Who knew Tony Soprano had a Hemingway thing? Well, who doesn't? It turns out James Gandolfini has long wanted to bring the story of Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn's relationship to the screen -- and will finally do so, with Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman in the leading roles.

This is of interest to us around here because Key West is where the pair met -- Hemingway was living here with his second wife, Pauline, and Gellhorn was an ambitious young journalist hanging out with her family. The place they met was Hemingway's favorite hangout Sloppy Joe's -- then on Greene Street in the building now known as Captain Tony's. The pair married but the union was the shortest of Hemingway's marriages -- possibly because Gellhorn was the most independent and professionally successful of his wives.

So far the reaction I've heard around here is: Clive Owen as Hemingway? Really? And Clive Owen? If he comes to town, I'm planning to occupy your guest room! Either way we'll keep you posted. But be aware, the guestroom is booked.

I think it might be cool to look at this time in Hemingway's life because it's the period we don't often hear about him -- between the young man in Paris of the 1920s and the iconic Papa of the famous Karsch portrait. Maybe it will encourage more Young Hemingways to enter the annual lookalike contest at Sloppy Joe's.

Another question: Will Kidman pull out her fake nose from The Hours?

To have and to ... whatever

Imagine our delight here at the Key West library when we saw that our inaugural One Island One Book program , featuring Ernest Hemingway's Key West novel To Have and Have Not, had made the pages of American Libraries, one of the premiere professional journals of libraryland! And it was the issue with library god Neil Gaiman on the cover, even. How cool is that! Until ... we turned to page 12 and saw the nice write-up that explained our book of choice was Ernest Hemingway's ... To Have and To Hold. Huh?

Having written for publication for many years I understand how this sort of mistake happens. Once in awhile your brain just takes a little timeout -- and next thing you know, the action of your misfired synapse is set in type. If you're lucky, you have a smart editor whose brain is working better than yours that day and she catches the goof. If not ... it's mortifying. One of my favorite things about blogging is that you can go back and fix these kinds of screw-ups as soon as you, or someone else, notices them.

Unfortunately for the good folks at the American Library Association, and for us, you can't do that with print. So there we are, for eternity, with Hemingway's To Have and To Hold.

By the way, there is a novel with that title in our collection -- we came across it the other day while moving the large print novels. It's by Fern Michaels, the prolific romance writer. It's probably a fine piece of entertainment -- but it's unlikely to be chosen as a One Book One Island title. (And not to be confused with To Have and To Hold by Jane Green, which it looks like we used to have in the collection but no longer do.)