In Key West: The Writer as a Star

By Jane O'Reilly

Authors, as a class, have become a kind of tourist attraction in Key West, Fla., in tire same general category as sport fish and gay discos, sunsets and hibiscus. Ernest Hemingway, who wrote nearly half his life's work here between 1928 and 1938, was the first big draw, and he is still the dominant local legend. As a resident, Novelist David Kaufelt (Six Months with an Older Woman) is fond of explaining, "Hemingway is our first literary ghost, the big marlin in the sea. Tennessee Williams is now our second ghost, the bougainvillaea twining secretly into our hearts." Robert Frost, Hart Crane and John Dos Passes are only a few of the competing ghosts. By now live writers are so thick on the ground that the pink stucco Monroe County Public Library publishes a pamphlet: Key West: Writers in Residence (latest announced total: 55).

A year ago, the Council for Florida Libraries, the Friends of the Monroe County Library, and the Miami Herald decided to hold one of their book-and-author events in Key West. The local luminaries gladly volunteered to divulge an opinion or two. The quiet little chat over coffee cups that was planned turned into a verbal extravaganza after a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., travel agency put together a package tour. "It ended up an incredible thing," says Travel Agent Judy Twyford. "People don't want to just sit by the pool any more, they want to get together and talk. This is one of the best-moving things I've ever seen." Last month 125 people, mostly librarians, aspiring writers and voracious readers, signed up for the second annual "Key West Literary Tour & Seminar." Key West's most fully realized art form is the party, and this one lasted four days. From the Thursday-night book auction to Sunday's "Meet the Authors" coffee, it was a celebration of words.

At morning seminars in the Tennessee Williams Fine Arts Center, panelists mulled over such perennial problems as censorship and whether fiction will survive. The murmur of opinions was regularly punctuated by that strange modern cacophony, the sudden chorus of digital wristwatch alarms. From the audience, Helen McDonald (The Life and Times of Tondaleah Rosponowitz) asked, "Why are all these authors here? Is Key West the Paris of the '20s, the Tangier of the '60s?" Residents Thomas Sanchez (Rabbit Boss) and Philip Caputo (DelCorso's Gallery), who had been soberly addressing the topic "War and Peace hi the American Novel," considered the reasons. The true answers He in the words written in Key West, in the poems of Wallace Stevens, or Hemingway's To Have and Have Not, or Thomas McGuane's Ninety-Two in the Shade. Panel discussions are no place to properly explain the creative jolt writers get from living in the midst of the collective eccentricity that is Key West, or to give away the words that could describe summer nights when the air stays above 90DEG, preserving a mood of lunacy and transformation. As a gesture of explanation, Sanchez offered, "This is a place for very famous people to come and be left alone so they can work."

"This is a splendid place," said Hemingway. "Nobody believes me when I say I'm a writer. They think I represent big Northern bootleggers or dope peddlers." Even now Key West, underneath the gentrification and new time-share resorts, is still psychically an island of pirates and smugglers, where it is rude to ask a last name or an occupation. For writers, anonymity is pleasant only until it begins to feel like obscurity. Then it is reassuring to be near other writers. Key West offers serendipitous encounters, noon walks, short talks. There are always parties, to refuse virtuously or to attend offhandedly, where balloons float in the pool and conversations are about Mozart's feelings for his mother or the best way to propagate a dinner-plate hibiscus. And there are none of the kind of sly references to agents, advances, deals, options and contracts that poison the air of the Hamptons. Or so the Key West authors claim.

One afternoon, as the sky began to sparkle and warm, the entourage gathered for a tour of authors' houses. The last was Hemingway's, surrounded by garden, inundated by cats, palm brushed. "Did you notice this fireplace is totally off center? As so many of us are in Key West," said Guide Larry Harvey, famous locally for his lyrical delivery of such unlikely information as "Some of us do recall the great star who sat in this chair, the late Franchot Tone."

In a panel on "The South Florida Novel," Evelyn Wilde Mayerson (Sanjo) complained that stories about the drug trade, or the death of aged parents retired to Florida, tell only a little piece of the truth. Indeed, most writers believe their piece of truth is more true than other writers' pieces. After too much time together--roughly the length of the average panel discussion--they begin to get testy.

The word serious, as in "serious work" or "serious writer," begins to be used more and more, with less and less attachment to objective judgment. Such a mood, curable by pouting, is an occupational hazard, and is not the kind of thing that attracts outsiders to the seminars. As Phyllis Cartwright, director of Fort Lauderdale's Main Library, put it, "People enjoy these seminars because they can hear authors discuss their feelings, what causes them to write." Or as Novelist Anne Bernays (The Address Book), who came from Boston to speak at lunch, said, "People think if they can touch and talk to an author, they will absorb the magic, be able to do it themselves. That's why they always ask technical questions like 'Do you use a pencil?' "

People continue to want to write, sharpening up their quills, warming up their word processors, traveling to the feet of authors in search of tips. Why do they go on, in the age of television and non-books? Because: without writing there would be no panels such as the one in Key West called, simply, "Poetry Reading." The introduction, by John Malcolm Brinnin (Sextet), a considerable poet himself, was voted the weekend's most magnificent moment. Listing the "illustrious succession of poets" who have lived in Key West, he said, "I am here to break the news that you are in the presence of the two greatest living American poets: James Merrill and Richard Wilbur. These guys, Dick and Jimmy, my dear friends for 40 years, these guys are awesome." Merrill, this year's winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for his long poem The Changing Light at Sandover, read what he called an "extractable section," a series of remarks from Clio, Terpsichore and their sister muses. Then, from his Clearing the Title, about buying a house in Key West, came words to define the territory: . . . this tropic rendezvous Where tourist, outcast and in- groupie gather Island by island, linked together, Causeways bridging the vast shallowness.

Nothing completes the loop of enlightenment as suddenly and surprisingly as a poet repeating his own words. Not all poets read well. But these guys could read, awesomely, their words designed to make the mind turn over and reconcentrate. To absolute stillness, Wilbur read The Writer, about his daughter, upstairs in her room trying to write a story. He, too easily at first, wishes her luck and then remembers that effort is part of success. His metaphor is a trapped starling that finally finds its way out of his daughter's room.

It lifted off from a chair-back, Beating a smooth course for the right window And clearing the sill of the world. It is always a matter, my darling, Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish What I wished you before, but harder.

There are ways to arrange words, although not very many such ways, so they will melt the heart until it reappears again as tears. That is why people continue to try to put one word after another. Because one little piece of the truth is enough. For these authors, the piece is easier to come by in Key West. --By Jane O'Reilly