A visit to Finca La Vigia: Guest Post by David Lansing

Good Morning Hemingway Friends!

There have been some interesting things posted on David Lansing’s blog in the last few months and he was kind enough to let me share them with you. David is a travel writer (yes, I know – the perfect life, right?) and as you can see by his work, a longtime Hemingway fan. He has most recently been in Cuba fishing, drinking, writing, exploring (sound familiar?) and reporting on the sights and sounds of Havana.

In April, David introduced a young friend to the book The Sun Also Rises. “Which he didn’t like”, David said. In response to his young friends’ opinion that the writing seemed antiquated, David wrote several of his posts in “ Hem’s clean, crisp writing, free of adjectives and adverbs”, trying to illustrate “how space was important to him and why the things he left out of a story were often more important than what he put into a story.“ It was an experiment that reaffirmed David’s appreciation of the distinctive style that is Hemingway.

Today, I am publishing a piece David wrote about his visit to the Finca La Vigia, Hemingway’s beloved home for over 20 years. David also created a youtube of his impressions of Cuba. Be sure to visit David’s blog at  David was interviewed by yours truly in February, 2010. His fascinating interview can be read here: David Lansing Inteview Enjoy — !

In April of this year I took a ’57 convertible Impala out to San Francisco de Paula, about half an hour outside of Havana, to spend some time at Ernest Hemingway’s old house, Finca La Vigía. This was my fourth visit in five years and easily the most disturbing. I’ve never seen the ol’ gal look so down at the heels. The out buildings that used to be the garage and guest cottage, where his boys—John, Patrick, and Gregory—used to spend part of their summers, has fallen in such disrepair, listing like a ship in a storm, that it looks like the next big wind could easily knock it down.

Some of the rooms in the main part of the house, including the bedroom where Papa usually slept, continue to be damaged by sun and weather exposure and have been closed off. What’s even more distressing is the false way sections of the home are being displayed. For instance, in the dining room is a copy of a Miró painting called “The Farm” which Hemingway bought in 1923 as a present for Hadley’s 34th birthday. The painting went back and forth between Ernest and Hadley until his death in 1961 after which his last wife, Mary Welsh hung on to it until donating it to the National Gallery (it’s currently on loan to the Tate Modern in London). Why the curators of the Hemingway Museum would lean a copy of the Miró painting against a dining room table in Cuba is a mystery to me.

Even more strange is the way they’ve turned the old tower building, which when Hem lived here was used as a storage facility for his hunting and fishing equipment, into a faux Hemingway office, complete with an old Remington typewriter with a “manuscript” page rolled in it. Hem never had an office in the tower, nor did he ever write there. So why pretend he did?

Most disturbing of all to me was the way the security guards who stand in every room in the house have become little more than panhandlers. You have to pay to take photos of the house in the first place, but even if you’ve got a tag on your shirt designating you as a photographer, every time you try to take an interior shot, the woman in a short navy blue skirt and white blouse will ask for $5. What they then do is take your camera and, because they are inside the house and you are outside, snap a photo of the same thing you would have gotten, but they want to be paid for it. So you walk around the exterior of the house looking in the window and every guard inside wants five bucks.

The whole experience this time around was rather depressing. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it rather suited the story of Ernest Hemingway and his time in this house. When he and Pauline, his second wife, first came here in 1939, Hem was a slim, virile, masculine man at the peak of his powers. When he left shortly before committing suicide in 1961 he was a bloated, tired, ailing old man with little to look forward to. I suppose the same could be said of the Finca.

With this in mind, I decided to put together a short video that not only shows Hemingway at Finca La Vigía over the years, but also shows the way the house now looks. I wanted the photos and video to have a soundtrack and usually I’d think of using something Cuban, but instead I used a somewhat elegiac song by the British group Elbow called “The River” from their new CD Build a Rocket Boys.” It seemed to me to perfectly match the mood I felt while thinking of a declining Hemingway living some of his last days at the Finca La Vigía in Cuba.