Homing To The Stream :Ernest Hemingway In Cuba

By Kelley Dupuis

Born and reared in the suburbs of Chicago, Ernest Hemingway was a product of the American heartland who, once he got out of it, never wanted to have much to do with the American heartland again. Aside from a few of his earliest short stories, which in any case are set in upper Michigan rather than suburban Illinois, Hemingway never published a word about where he came from, nor did he ever go back for long.

There are as many possible explanations for this as there are biographies of Hemingway. Some have suggested that Hemingway, like others of his generation who lived as expatriates in Europe after World War I, found the provincialism and narrow-mindedness of middle America stultifying. Unlike most of his fellow expats, however, Hemingway never went home. After leaving his birthplace of Oak Park, Illinois in the fall of 1921 with his new bride, Elizabeth Hadley Richardson, Hemingway spent the rest of his life either outside the United States or on the periphery of its life, in places like the Florida Keys, the upper plains states, (he enjoyed Montana and Wyoming for their hunting) the Pacific northwest, specifically Idaho, where he ended his life in 1961...and Cuba. Given the enormously complex relationship that Hemingway had with his family, particularly with his demanding and overbearing mother, whom he repeatedly and for years denounced as a "bitch" to anyone who would listen, it's possible that Hemingway simply wanted to give the midwest a "wide berth" because that was where his mother was until her own death in 1951. (One of Nietzsche's biographers has suggested that Nietzsche's own passion for climbing high mountains may have stemmed from a desire to get as far away as possible-in this case the direction being up-away from a father as overbearing as Hemingway's mother was reported to be.)

Shortly before Ernest and Hadley were married in September, 1921, Hadley had said to Ernest, "The world's a jail and we're gonna break it together." They were young-he was 22 on their wedding day; she was not quite 30-and deeply in love; in later years, after later marriages, Hemingway would suggest that Hadley was the only woman whom he had ever truly loved. But, although he was at heart a romantic, and conventional enough a midwesterner in his heart to feel that any time he fell in love with a woman, he ought to marry her, Hemingway couldn't be monogamous. His friend and fellow author Scott Fitzgerald (who managed to remain married to the same woman until he died even though his wife, Zelda Sayre, was mentally unstable, he was an alcoholic and their marriage was a stormy melodrama) predicted quite early on that Hemingway was going to require "a new wife for each book." The remark turned out to be quite prescient; it was in fact the course of Hemingway's four marriages that took him to Cuba and lodged him there-he ultimately made Cuba the most permanent home he would ever make of any place.

Hemingway's trek south began in 1927, when he and Hadley divorced over his affair with wealthy Arkansas socialite and magazine journalist Pauline Pfeiffer, who promptly became the second Mrs. Hemingway. One thing Hemingway would never do with his wives, until his fourth and last one anyway, was to subject the new wife to living in the environs of the old. The venue of Ernest and Hadley's marriage had been Paris, where he struggled in the early-to-mid 1920s to get his writing career started. With the end of his first marriage, Hemingway's affection for Paris declined temporarily, and another friend and fellow novelist, John Dos Passos, suggested to him that Key West, Florida might be a good place for him to relocate. In 1928, when Hemingway and Pauline went to live there in a house that her wealthy Uncle Gus had given them as a wedding present, Key West was a sleepy, run-down fishing village at the end of the Keys southwest of Miami. Prohibition was still in effect, and among Key West's attractions for the notoriously-bibulous Hemingway may well have been that its very position on the periphery of America made prohibition little more than a word there; smuggled liquor from