Papa's 'Last Retreat'
KETCHUM, Idaho — The house is pretty much the way Ernest Hemingway left it, as if he had stepped outside just a moment ago.
Even the antelope heads in the living room, with their marbled eyes, appear to be waiting for him. They stare out at a room frozen in time, suspended even in its slight messiness. The Life magazines look recently perused. Papers lie strewn on a table. Next to the fireplace is a black-and-white RCA television. He used to watch prizefights from the long, green couch across the room. The fabric is worn where he sat.
Hemingway, one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, wrote portions of three books in this house. He spent much of his last two years, and, most significantly, took his final breath here. The last thing he saw before killing himself on July 2, 1961, may have been the beige carpet in the living room or the pink ceiling in the foyer, where his wife, Mary, found him.
The house has never been open to the public, and may never be. It's the only one of Hemingway's homes not turned into a shrine. His houses in Key West, Fla., and San Francisco de Paulo, Cuba, and his birthplace in Oak Park, Ill., are open to admirers, and some believe his Ketchum home should be too.
Since late last year, the Nature Conservancy of Idaho, which owns the property, has tried to schedule limited public tours but has been stopped by residents nearby.
A wealthy neighborhood has sprung up next to the property in the years since Hemingway's death, and the road that leads to his once-remote house runs through the middle of the development. The neighbors don't want the traffic and exposure they believe would come with living next door to a shrine.
"We came here to retire. We don't want busloads of tourists coming through here 24/7," said Doug Lightfoot, a retired pharmacist and one of about two dozen homeowners in the neighborhood known as Canyon Run.
The Nature Conservancy makes the case for the home's historical significance, but the most passionate arguments have come from Hemingway fans and scholars.
Susan Beegel, editor of the Hemingway Review, based in Maine, said keeping the Ketchum house closed was like keeping a Van Gogh "locked in a vault."
Matthew Bruccoli, a Hemingway scholar at the University of South Carolina, said simply, "Hemingway is bigger than the neighbors' concerns."
