Hemingway Mystic Thrives At 100th Anniversary by Jane Sutton Fort Worth Star - Telegram. 20 July 23, 1999: D4.

Tuesday July 20 12:47 AM ET

Hemingway Mystique Thrives At 100th Anniversary

By Jane Sutton

KEY WEST, Fla. (Reuters) - A hundred years after Ernest Hemingway's birth, pilgrims flock to Key West in search of the barstool where the legendary writer held forth during his tenure on the southernmost island of the Florida Keys.

They search in vain for the barstool.

``Somebody stole that,'' said John Klausing, manager and keeper of the Hemingway legend at Sloppy Joe's bar, billed as ''Hemingway's Favorite.'' Shrugging, he added, ``They all want to know, 'Where did he sit?' In all the pictures I've seen of him, he's standing up.''

Fact and myth have mingled and provenance has dimmed for Hemingway relics. Sloppy Joe's glossy wooden table painted with the name of his boat, the Pilar, is a cheerfully acknowledged fake. But the Hemingway mystique only grows as his centennial Wednesday draws new interest to his old haunts, from Slovenia to Spain, Havana to Paris.

A Hemingway & Co Book Shop recently opened in Spain. There is a Hemingway museum in Gothenburg, Sweden, and another in his childhood home of Oak Park, Illinois. Hemingway's picture hangs in the Havana Bar in Hamburg. He is so linked with Pamplona's San Fermin festival that he may as well have invented running with the bulls.

``I walked into a monastery in France, in Mont Saint Michel and his picture is on the ceiling. The whole wall is covered with his pictures,'' Klausing said.

Hemingway's fishing vest and tackle go on display this month at a Fishing Hall of Fame in Dania, Florida. Aficionados can pay $2 for a peek at his old room in Havana's Hotel Ambos Mundos and $7.50 for a tour of his Spanish Colonial home in Key West.

``There are people who venerate Hemingway who have never read Hemingway. It's not Hemingway the writer they're in love with, it's the active outdoorsman,'' said Michael Reynolds, author of a five-volume Hemingway biography.

In life, Hemingway appeared in ads for Ballentine ale and Parker pens. Thirty-eight years after his death, his name and likeness still sell cigars, cars, furniture and robust rum drinks at most of his old watering holes.

But scholars say Hemingway the big game hunter, war correspondent and boozing adventurer is inseparable from Hemingway the contemplative man and introspective writer.

``It's Hemingway the writer who popularized Hemingway the active man,'' said Reynolds, who is also president of the Hemingway Society, an eclectic group of 500 literary scholars, book collectors, fishermen and hunters.

Hemingway became the second most-translated author in English after Agatha Christie with masterpieces such as the Nobel Prize-winning ``The Old Man and the Sea.'' He continues to draw attention in literary circles in part because new books are still coming, Reynolds said.

His publisher, Scribner, has 29 Hemingway titles in print, including ``True At First Light,'' the latest to be published from unfinished manuscripts after his death.

He had a profound effect on the direction of literature.

``Hemingway's short fiction is what changed American literature. It changed the way characters talk, changed the way dialogue is written,'' Reynolds said. ``You just couldn't write short stories after Hemingway in the 19th Century manner, which American writers did until the 1920s.''

The centennial tributes and posthumous books introduced Hemingway to a new audience of readers who came of age in the sensitive '70s, when Hemingway machismo was sneered at.

``For the longest time he was seen as a strictly male writer. I think the (1986) 'Garden of Eden' forced people to look at all of him,'' Reynolds said. ``Frequently the women are as strong or stronger than the men. Think of Brett Ashley in 'The Sun Also Rises.' She certainly does control the guys.''

Hemingway the author draws bibliophiles to the Key West Island Book Store, which sells signed Hemingway first editions and autographed dust jackets in its rare books section.

``People associate Key West with Ernest Hemingway. They come for the sense of the city, the feel,'' employee Carolyn Ferguson said. ``They like to buy the books where he wrote them.''

The Nobel prize-winning author, who died in 1961, wrote ''For Whom the Bell Tolls,'' ``A Farewell to Arms,'' and ``To Have and Have Not'' while living in Key West from 1928 to 1939.

This week, Key West will remember both Hemingway the writer and Hemingway the sporting reveler with a centenary festival that includes a short story-writing contest, literary readings by one of his granddaughters, a bawdy rhyme contest, arm wrestling, marlin fishing and a mock running of the bulls with wheeled toros made of old oil drums.

White-bearded, pot-bellied men from all over the country will don safari suits and heavy white fishing sweaters in the heat of July to enter the Hemingway look-alike contest that closes the island's annual Hemingway festival.

Fittingly, Reynolds said, Hemingway's motto, translated from the French, was ``The important thing is to endure.'''

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