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Forgotten photos
recall Havana friendship
The exhibit 'Hemingway
and Evans, Three Weeks in Cuba 1933,' opening
today in Key West, recalls the brief friendship
between the famous writer and soon-to-be
famous photographer Walker Evans.
By Cara Buckley, cbuckley@herald.com.
Posted on Thu, Jan. 15, 2004 in The Miami
Herald.
KEY WEST - In late spring in Havana in
1933, on the eve of Gerardo Machado regime's
collapse, a shy young American photographer
struck up a friendship with a slightly older,
larger-than-life, egotistic American writer.
The photographer was shooting pictures
for a politically charged book called The
Crimes of Cuba. The writer was penning short
stories, carousing and fishing. Fearful,
it is believed, that the footmen of the
crumbling dictatorship would confiscate
his work, the photographer, Walker Evans,
handed the writer, Ernest Hemingway, dozens
of his prints for safekeeping.
Evans, who would later gain fame for photographing
destitute sharecroppers in America's dust
bowl, never asked for the prints back. And
Hemingway ended up boxing them up and storing
them in the backroom of Sloppy Joe's bar
in Key West.
As it turned out, even though Evans recalled
being stopped and searched by soldiers,
and ''once stoned by toughs,'' he left Cuba
with 400 negatives intact. The film wound
up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in
New York, and some prints ended up in the
2001 picture book, Walker Evans: Cuba. But
until recently, the relationship between
Hemingway and Evans had never been proven.
Nor had the photographer who shot the four
dozen prints found in Hemingway's memorabilia
been identified.
''They had mutual friends, similar pasts,
similar paths, and were in the same place
at the same time,'' said Claudia Pennington,
executive director of Key West's Custom
House museum. "But the fact that he
and Hemingway were friends was never documented.''
AT SLOPPY JOE'S
The Evans prints sat in the back of Sloppy
Joe's from 1939 until Hemingway's suicide
in 1961, alongside the writer's old baby
booties, childhood scrapbooks, dusty boxing
gloves, stuffed bear heads and the bloodied
uniform he wore when he was injured as an
ambulance driver in World War I.
After Hemingway's death, his fourth wife,
Mary, sorted through the mounds of carelessly
piled keepsakes. She kept some of it, threw
other bits away, donated some to the Monroe
County Public Library, some to the Key West
Art & Historical Society, some to the
JFK Library in Boston, and another pile
to Hemingway's old friends, Toby and Betty
Bruce.
Two years ago, the Bruces' son, Benjamin,
told Pennington that 46 unidentified photographs
in the family's collection mirrored the
prints in the Walkers Evans: Cuba book.
Experts soon determined that Bruce's photographs
were taken by Evans.
More pieces fell into place: a jotting
from Hemingway's 1933 Havana journal was
found which read, ''Dinner with Walker Evans.''
In a worm-eaten note to Hemingway, written
on letterhead from a Havana hotel, Evans
wrote that he had pictures, and asked to
borrow money: Hemingway lent him $25. And
in a 1950s letter to a publisher friend,
Hemingway said of Evans, "I remember
clearest what a nice kid he was.''
Now, the collection of Hemingway's Evans
photographs, along with miscellaneous letters
and Hemingway memorabilia -- including the
baby booties and bloodied uniform -- will
be on display at Key West's Custom House
beginning today until January 2005.
DANGEROUS TIME
The spring of 1933 was a dangerous, exhilarating
time to be an American in Havana. Cuba,
with its casinos and wild nightlife, had
become a playground for rich foreigners.
Hemingway loved it.
But on the fringes of Havana's ribaldry,
Machado's regime was brutalizing suspected
dissidents, and informers were showing up
dead.
In his three weeks in Havana, Evans shot
a few pictures of the tortured dead, but
the bulk of his work chronicled everyday
life in the Cuban capital: barefoot, ragged
newsboys clamoring for papers, dockworkers
with grime-streaked faces, an angelic girl
peering through a barred window.
Pennington believes Hemingway drew on Evans'
pictures to build scenes in one of his novels,
a sentiment echoed by Patrick Hemingway,
the writer's youngest son.
''His grandfathers had fought in the American
Civil War, and he was born at the time of
the Spanish American war. He was very interested
in revolution,'' said Patrick Hemingway,
75, who was raised in Key West and now lives
in Montana. "He brought that baggage
to Cuba, and wrote about it pretty quickly
afterward. These pictures do help to elucidate
some of the passages in To Have and Have
Not.''
Evans' and Hemingway's paths never crossed
after those three springtime weeks, according
to Pennington. Evans, who died in 1975,
later wrote a friend asking about Hemingway's
whereabouts, but by that time the writer
was in Africa.
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