Far from any large city, a small town in northeastern Arkansas sits on the eastern edge of a low range of hills that drop to an expanse of flat farm land.
I had no reason to stop except that a sign convinced me there was a special house there that offered an interesting tour.
After following the arrows into a quiet and uncluttered part of town, I saw it — a large and stately looking house plus a few outbuildings surrounded by spacious grounds studded with large shade trees.
Its look of enduring elegance contrasted sharply with what I had seen of the town. As I suspected, the house was built by a prominent land owner. Inside, period furniture and the decor intensified the feeling of “southern comfort” graciousness.
Although the house was interesting, the nearby horse barn was what grabbed and firmly held my attention.
The low-built building was still capable of living up to its name — stalls and a stairway to the upper floor filled with hay that could be easily pitched downward to hungry horses.
But after mounting the stairs I was met not with hay but rather with the makings of an office — a rustic yet comfortable hideaway with a refinished wood floor on which sat a large desk, chair, work table, and a couple of lamps.
It took me a while to get my arms around the fact this had been a work place for one of the world’s most well-known and widely read authors. There, in the quiet, I couldn’t help but relate his past to my present. We both were men who were writers and we both were capable of connecting with earth while reaching for and tapping into the heavens of creativity.
Even then, that was a stretch. After all, he had been a world adventurer, a hunter of big game, a lover who had wed and divorced several times, a man able to adapt to a bewildering range of conditions, a risk-taker who lost count of the number of places he had been and the times he had narrowly missed or survived such things as wrecks, fights, bites, and bullets.
All of that was almost too much to imagine much less accept. Yet, as I stood there, a few fragments of what had been his life spoke to me — the horse barn, the quiet, the smells of earth and its animals, the words, the persona, the clacking noise made by typewriter keys hitting paper.
Even if his being there was already a dust covered past, I was being rewarded for my effort to more deeply understand and appreciate the man, his talent, and the adventures that either came to him or he brought upon himself.
With that, I have kept you in the dark long enough.
The place is Piggott, Arkansas. The home belonged to the Pfeiffer family — father and mother plus daughter Pauline who met Ernest Hemingway in Paris and later became his second wife.
During the newlywed’s first visits to Piggott, Pauline’s father felt sorry for Ernest because there was no good place for him to write except for maybe a porch step. So just for Ernest, he converted the hayloft in the horse barn into a refuge where Ernest could be alone.
It was there that Hemingway wrote much of A Farewell To Arms. That book, along with several others, led him to become one of the world’s greatest authors. That was validated when he later won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Although there is little we don’t already know about Hemingway, some scholars say the depth of his talent has yet to be fully understood. In that regard, I must confess that as I quietly looked at the surroundings in that horse barn, I felt the urge of wanting to know more about him.
The real challenge lies in reading and appreciating his works while recognizing that Hemingway the man, was a complex and sometimes uncouth person who no matter how illogically accomplished, lived his life his own way.
Years before, I had already thought I was too late in joining the Hemingway “party.” That unplanned stop in Piggott, however, proved that at least for some things, one can never be too late.
Even if we feel as if we are failing to live life to its fullest, logic tells us we continue to gain from knowing about those who do.
That’s certainly true of Hemingway who, because of his God given talent, continues to linger in our minds and flavor our existence.
