Plan for public tours at Hemingway home in Idaho protested
KETCHUM, Idaho -- The house is pretty much the way Ernest Hemingway left it, as if he stepped outside just a moment ago.
Even the antelope heads in the living room appear to be waiting for him. The marble eyes 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. Hemingway 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. He killed himself on July 2, 1961; his wife, Mary, found him in the foyer.
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 homes in Key West, Fla., and San Francisco de Paulo, Cuba, and his birthplace in Oak Park, Ill., are open to admirers. 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.
About 3,000 people live full time in Ketchum, a mining town turned playground for the rich, and another 7,000 spend part of the year here, golfing in the summer and skiing in the winter. The median price for a home in town runs just under $1 million.
A wealthy neighborhood has sprung up next to Hemingway's property in the years since his death, and the road that leads to his once-remote house now 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.
The 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 is like keeping a Van Gogh ''locked in a vault."
The conflict -- most of it waged in the halls of bureaucracy, involving zoning laws and property rights -- could be tied up in arbitration, or litigation, for months, even years. Lawsuits have been threatened, and the neighbors, all of them in multimillion-dollar homes, have deep pockets for a long fight.
There's disagreement even within the Hemingway family. Mariel Hemingway, the writer's granddaughter, wants the house opened, while the writer's son, Patrick, questions whether the place where his father committed suicide should be made into a tourist attraction.
Patrick Hemingway, who lives in Bozeman, Mont., has mixed feelings about opening up his father's home. He's critical of the neighbors, whom he calls selfish and ''obsessed with their real estate," and the Nature Conservancy, which he believes has not taken good care of the property.
A part of him wants to never hear about the house again. ''Do you think you could like the place where your Dad killed himself?"
Marty Peterson, who heads a citizens group working with the conservancy, said the home would be used in a way consistent with the spirit of Hemingway, the writer and outdoorsman.
The conservancy plan calls for turning the remaining 16 acres (Mary sold a portion of the property in the 1980s) into a nature preserve, and keeping the house mostly as Hemingway left it.
The plan also includes tours of up to 15 people at a time. Those interested would make reservations, and be picked up by a van in downtown Ketchum. The schedule would be restricted to one van per tour, with no more than three tours per day.
