Maybe the only place on earth where the great Ernest Hemingway could go and no one give a damn for him was the town of Piggott. Perhaps for this reason, and because his in-laws lived there; the Pope would not like visiting that corner forgotten by God in Arkansas, where villagers saw him as a vagabond …
Still at that conservative feud, Hemingway wrote much of his novel ¨A Farewell to Arms¨, and probably fragments of seven other books conceived while he was married to his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, between 1927 and 1940. It is said you do not come to Piggott by chance, but you go for something. And that something is almost always the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum, whose director, Adam Long, came to Cuba for the International Symposium on the life and work of the legendary novelist, stubborn adventurer and controversial figure…
Finding Adam at the O’Farrill Palace Hotel was not difficult, perhaps because he is one of the few foreign guests not physically resembles Hemingway. Half dozen imitators of Pope are attending these conferences and lectures, as in Hemingway’s version of the movie “Being John Malkovich”.
” For anyone who devotes his life to preserv the legacy of Hemingway, walking through Havana or visiting the Floridita is great,” Adam said to OnCuba . Besides the personal experience, he aims to create a professional relationship with Vigia Farm, the museum of the district of San Francisco de Paula where the writer lived his last years in Cuba. The structural resemblance to the Pfeiffer’s house gives an idea of the environments where the harsh novelist found desire to write.
There we have the red barn, an old garage turned into a studio where Hemingway wrote. The institutions that study him try to keep in touch; we are like a society that admires that great of modern literature. Hemingway established a contemporary writing style; his personal life made him a representative figure of the period, although in Piggott he was looked with disapproval. ¨Nobody there cared things like the Pulitzer or the Nobel, “he once said.
The fact that Hemingway was an intense traveler makes that many corners of the world to claim him as local heritage, and among them is Piggott, which if not for the Pope would be condemned to the most tedious anonymity. Adam knows it, and that is why he is so interested in establishing links with other museums dedicated to the author of For Whom the Bell Toll and The Old Man and the sea.
When asked about the stereotypes haunting Hemingway, Adam estimated that they all have their roots in truth, but sometimes they are exaggerated. “Maybe he was so sexist, had a volatile temper, drank too much, or believed he was bigger than life itself, but he was also a literary genius, a very sensitive and generous man. He had great charisma, and stereotyping him does not make justice to his greatness, because it leaves out the brighter side of his coin, “he told.
Maybe the Pfeiffers and the other inhabitants of Piggott came to realize the artistic dimension of that character of bushy beard and rare clothing, who at the time seemed a bum. Maybe. But it was already too late, and now they live of his memory…
