Walker Evans and Ernest Hemingway

Evans, Hemingway's friendship in focus: Trip to Cuba in 1933 influenced photographer and writer alike
By Coralie Carlson, Associated Press
Tallahassee Democrat
Sun, Apr. 11, 2004

KEY WEST - In the spring of 1933, Ernest Hemingway had escaped the Great Depression on a borrowed boat to Cuba, where he fished, drank and gathered material for his next novel, "To Have and Have Not."

With him for three weeks in the bars and bistros was a young Walker Evans, who would soon become known as one of the great American photographers of the 20th century.

But for decades, the tale of their friendship and influence on each other's work remained hidden away in a storage room of a Key West bar.

In those boxes and crates, Benjamin "Dink" Bruce discovered 46 original photographs taken by Evans in Havana in 1933. Bruce just didn't know what they were.

Bruce, together with the Key West historical society, unraveled the mystery of the photographs, a $25 IOU, and two Americans working together in the midst of a repressive Cuban dictatorship.

Their story and the photographs are now on display at Key West's Museum of Art & History at the Custom House.

"It was only a short friendship, but if you look at Walker Evans' photographs and read Ernest Hemingway's writing, it's exactly the same style," said Claudia Pennington, executive director of the Key West Art & Historical Society.

Text and image
In fact, descriptions of Evans' photos - including one showing a homeless man sleeping against a wall on a Havana street - appear in "To Have and Have Not," which opens with this line:

"You know how it is there early in the morning in Havana with the bums still asleep against the walls of the buildings; before even the ice wagons come by with ice for the bars?"

Bruce, the son of Hemingway's right-hand-man Toby Bruce, discovered the photographs in boxes of artifacts his family recovered from a storage room at Sloppy Joe's, a favorite Hemingway watering hole.

Hemingway moved his belongings to the bar when he left Key West in 1939 with his soon-to-be third wife, and his second wife told him to clear out his things from the house.

After his suicide in 1961, Hemingway's fourth wife donated many of his belongings at Sloppy Joe's to the Kennedy Library in Boston and the Key West museum. The remaining items, including the photographs, were left in storage and the boxes eventually moved to the Bruce family collection.

Many items on display
Among the remaining items - which included animal heads that Hemingway had hunted, fishing gear and handwritten letters - Bruce took special note of the striking black-and-white photos of Cuba. They included images of people lining up for bread, bodies with slit throats and a marquee of a movie theater playing "A Farewell to Arms."

He took them to Pennington, offering them for display at the museum.

"I said, 'Well, I'd like to get a little more information about them before we just put them up on the wall and say: "'Nice pictures,""' Pennington recalled.

In his research, Bruce found a book, "Walker Evans: Cuba," published by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. In it were the same images from Hemingway's collection.

He brought the information to Pennington, and they contacted the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which had the negatives and sent a curator to Key West who confirmed the authenticity of the prints.

The one piece still missing from the puzzle, Bruce said, was proof that the photos were printed and exchanged in Cuba. He returned to his collection of Hemingway artifacts - a storage room packed floor to ceiling - and found a letter from Evans to Hemingway.

Written on stationery from a Western Union in Havana and addressed to the hotel where Hemingway was staying in Cuba, the letter said Evans had "some pictures tonight and will have some more tomorrow. Also I will change my mind and take a loan of ten or fifteen dollars if you still feel like that."

On the back of the envelope, Hemingway wrote "loaned $25."

"That, of course, was enough to convince me that there was a connection there," Bruce said.

According to Pennington, the photos likely came into Hemingway's hands because Evans feared his negatives would be confiscated and destroyed by dictator Geraldo Machado's operatives in Cuba, so he asked his friend to ferry the photos back to the United States aboard the Anita.

When Evans returned to the United States with his negatives unscathed, Hemingway kept the prints.

A new way of seeing

The two men never saw each other again, though each later referred to the time they were together in Cuba. Hemingway wrote that, "We were both working against Machado at the time."

And Evans, who later became famous for his photographs of the Great Depression in "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," said that Hemingway caused him to look at photography with a new intensity and an eye of a journalist.

The never-before-exhibited original photographs and the story of the two men are on display at the Custom House through Dec. 15 and then will go on a national tour through 2007. The letter and other previously unseen items from Bruce's collection, including Hemingway's WWI bloodstained uniform, also are on display.

This snapshot of a unique moment history and the chance meeting of two extraordinary Americans extends its message for visitors today, Bruce said: "You never know who the people are that you'll meet and how they'll influence your life in the future."

 

great story, Ken. one question ... the original Sloppy Joe's, from what I understand, is now called Capt. Tony's. what's now called Sloppy Joe's is a very cool bar, but not from Hemingway's time. any idea which Sloppy Joe's was the cache?

who knows ... maybe that trunk full of stuff Hemingway lost in the Paris train station will turn up yet.

 

Hi Jeff,
I dont' know for sure, but I'd think the original now open under another name. Amazing that caches like this last that long - a huge trove of manuscripts, letters, photos, etc. were kept at his house in Cuba and recently with contributions from the U.S. they were able to conserve them and install updated HVAC for them.

cheers,
Ken