The bell tolls for Hemingway home

Thomas D Herman*

One day in February 1926 an unknown American expatriate writer 
walked out of a New York snowstorm and into history. An important 
piece of that history is now in danger of being lost forever, 
caught in the controversy over the US trade embargo against 
Cuba.

The unknown writer was Ernest Hemingway, and the New York office 
he walked into was that of Scribners Sons' Maxwell Perkins, the 
most famous American literary editor of his day.

It is difficult to conceive — 80 years and an incandescent 
literary career later — but when Hemingway met Max Perkins that 
day, hoping that Scribner's might be interested in taking him on, 
the idea of publishing the 26-year-old Hemingway was a big risk. 
Hemingway had not yet published a novel. Indeed, his only 
published fiction consisted of a few short stories and poems, 
mostly in obscure Paris literary journals.

Yet Mr Perkins, as Hemingway was to call him for years 
afterwards, even after they had become close friends, took the 
risk. On the spot, he offered Hemingway a two-book deal with 
Scribner's that included a generous US$1500 advance on an 
unfinished, unnamed novel that Perkins had not even seen. 
Hemingway eventually decided to call it The Sun Also Rises.

Hemingway and Perkins began a correspondence that lasted for 21 
years, until Perkins's death in 1947. A number of those letters 
are now housed in Cuba, at Finca Vigia, where Hemingway lived 
longer than anywhere else. It was at Finca Vigia that he wrote 
For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and The 
Sea.

Thanks to the generosity of the Rockefeller Foundation and the 
leadership of Massachusetts congressman James McGovern and 
others, many letters and original manuscripts and thousands of 
photographs, all in precarious condition due to age and tropical 
climate, are now being conserved in Cuba. Copies will be sent to 
the John F Kennedy Library in Boston.

But the house, a rambling Spanish colonial villa given to the 
Cuban people by Hemingway's widow, is in danger of collapse. Now 
a museum, it will store the documents, along with Hemingway's 
9000-volume library (which includes many first editions of 
Hemingway's books and those of other famous writers), his fishing 
tackle, his boat Pilar, and other personal belongings. Finca 
Vigia has been called a preservation emergency by experts: It is 
in such bad shape that the next hurricane could blow it away.

A group of Americans, including Hemingway's grandson Sean, 
Perkins's granddaughter Jenny Phillips, Lauren Bacall (whose 
acting debut was in a film based on a Hemingway novel), and James 
Gandolfini (who is playing Hemingway in a new film), is trying to 
save the house and its contents. Yet the US Government won't let 
them.

The Treasury Department recently turned down the Hemingway 
Preservation Foundation's application for a licence to permit its 
architects, engineers, and consultants to travel to Cuba to 
research a feasibility study to help the Cubans save Finca Vigia. 
This denial, which is contrary to the letter and spirit of the 
law, is being appealed.

In the eyes of the Treasury and State departments, saving Ernest 
Hemingway's home is against the foreign policy of the United 
States because it might encourage tourism to Castro's Cuba. This 
is ironic, not the least because Finca Vigia is the home of an 
American literary giant who wrote harshly critical eyewitness 
accounts of the dictatorships that enslaved much of Europe in the 
1930s and 1940s and whose writings championed democracy.

Finca Vigia is a Cuban-American landmark where democratic values 
are celebrated. The home's literary significance and value to 
scholars is enormous.

Under this kind of policy, if our relations with, for example, 
France deteriorate further, Americans may find that preserving 
the cemetery and monuments at Omaha and Utah Beaches may someday 
be prohibited? And what if the monument to Teddy Roosevelt's 
Rough Riders at San Juan Hill in Cuba is endangered?

Max Perkins and Scribner's took the risk of publishing Hemingway 
in 1926. One might hope that the Treasury Department will 
reconsider and allow Ernest Hemingway's legacy in Cuba to be 
saved.

* * *

*Thomas D Herman, an international lawyer,
is counsel to the Hemingway Preservation Foundation.