Opinion: Rheta Johnson - 'All of life is a blank page waiting to be filled with the best act we
By Rheta Johnson
There’ s a postcard they sell in Key West that has a photo of the dapper young Ernest Hemingway above the words “Hemingway Women” and portraits of four striking females.
It is neither here nor there, perhaps unimportant, but I couldn’ t help but notice that each of Hemingway’ s four wives was a little less beautiful than the one who came before her. Divorces are not always about trading up in looks.
“And, yes, I’ m aware of the irony,” our guide at the Hemingway house quipped as he pointed out a corner of the garden that’ s one of the most famous marriage sites on Key West. What a horrible marital omen, standing there where Hemingway had – and then had not.
The thrice-divorced Hemingway lived in Key West – or called it headquarters – about a dozen years with Wife Number Two, Pauline, whose rich uncle bought the mansion across from the lighthouse for the young couple.
Pauline was once the best friend of Hemingway’ s first wife, Hadley, and it has to be noted that Pauline gave the celebrity marriage her best shot. She even built her husband a $20,000 swimming pool, a first on the island, which in today’ s money would cost $250,000. Pauline had found out about girlfriend Martha, who became Wife Number Three, and was at the deep end of desperation.
I’ve toured the Hemingway house before, but somehow it meant more this time. And what really got my attention wasn’ t the procession of wives or the fat, six-toed cats or the fantastic image of Hemingway training boxers in his backyard before Pauline filled it with the swimming pool. Instead, it was a small room that made the biggest impression, Hemingway’ s writing studio, above a carriage house in the backyard. In his day, you accessed it by a catwalk from the main house.
You can have all the African safaris and deep-sea fishing trips and boxing matches and drinking bouts you want, but, in the end, for writers, it comes down to you and a blank page. And that room is where Ernest Hemingway faced off his biggest challenge, the struggle to stay alive creatively.
Few find fame like Hemingway, but all writers and others whose marketable skill is imagination have that in common. There has to be a cloister. And it is to that quiet place you bring inspiration, when you find it, grist for the mill.
Key West: The end of the road. It seemed a good place to be at the end of one year and the start of another. The island is the southernmost point in the Continental United States, as close to the edge as you can get in many ways, not just geographically.
One day, with the multitudes, I stood in Mallory Square, waiting for the sunset, watching the sword-swallower, the juggler, the whip cracker, the trapeze artist. To be a warm-up act for a spectacular sunset is also a creative challenge. Lame acts get no audience.
And it reminded me that all of life is a blank page, waiting to be filled with the best act we can muster, the most courage we can summon. Hemingway knew that.
He moved on from Key West to Cuba, later Idaho, and eventually the great writer lost a lot of his memory and writing skills and shot himself. But, my, till that final act, what an adventure he made of the ordeal called life, and how adroitly he used material.
Rheta Grimsley Johnson’s most recent book is “Hank Hung the Moon … And Warmed Our Cold, Cold Hearts.” Comments are welcomed at rhetagrimsley@aol.com.
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