As Hurricane Irma bore down on the Florida Keys, unleashing
a wrath that devastated many islands prior to its USA landfall, one famous structure
loomed large in my mind: The Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum in Key West and
the 54 polydactyl cats that live there.
Ernest Hemingway lived in the home for eight years in the
1930’s, writing To Have and Have Not,
later made into a film starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, and The Snows of Kilimanjaro, made into a
film starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner and Susan Hayward. The structure was
built in 1851, ten years before the start of the American Civil War, and is made
of solid limestone 18 inches thick.
Polydactyl cats have as many as eight digits on their front
or hind paws. Hemingway’s first polydactyl cat was a gift from a sea captain.
He became so enamored of this feline abnormality that he eventually had between
40 and 50 living at his Florida residence. For this reason, polydactyl cats are
often referred to as Hemingway Cats.
In 1961, his home became a museum and in 1968, it was declared
a national historic landmark. By 2017, it was home to 54 cats, about half of
them polydactyl. Though residents of the Keys were ordered to evacuate, several
staff members remained behind in order to care for the cats. According to the Los
Angeles Times, the felines sensed the storm approaching even before
their human caretakers and began to seek shelter inside the house. All 54 were
rounded up and they rode out the storm in the well-fortified home. Though the
storm knocked out electricity, running water and Internet everyone survived and
the house, true to form, remained intact.
Ten miles
east of Havana, Cuba in the town of San Francisco de Paula is a second
Hemingway residence; Finca Vigía was his home from 1940 until 1960.
Meaning “Lookout House”, it was built in 1886 and is on the World
Monuments Fund and The National Trust for Historic Preservation’s 11 Most
Endangered Places. Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea at Finca Vigía
as well as For Whom the Bell Tolls
and A Moveable Feast. In 1961 after
Hemingway’s death, the property was turned over to the Cuban government.
Hurricane
Irma’s path took it over the northern coast of Cuba, flooding parts of the
island and destroying homes and businesses and toppling trees. Parts of Havana
were flooded and while the Hemingway home is only a few miles inland, there
have been no reports as of this writing to how the structure and property have
fared.
Though
Hemingway died more than 55 years ago, his legacy still lives, which is not
unusual for authors. Only 61 years old when he killed himself at his residence
at Ketchum, Idaho, he left a body of work that encompassed hundreds of
newspaper stories and dozens of poems, short stories, novellas and novels. His
last book, a memoir, Under Kilimanjaro,
was published posthumously in 2005.
