Today I viewed the Ernest Hemingway & Walker Evans exhibit at the Gibbes Gallery here in Charleston. The collection celebrates three weeks the two men spent in Havana in 1933 in close company meeting, talking, drinking and dining. Hemingway loaned Evans $25. He later forgave the loan. During this time Evans entrusted 44 photos to Hemingway who took them to Key West where they stayed in storage for years and passed to a friend after Hemingway shot himself in 1961. From that friend the pictures made their way to the Kennedy Library and eventually to this touring exhibit. Despite the thousands of pictures Evans – one of the great photo-journalists of the 20th century had published in numerous magazines these originals did not appear in any collections of his work.
Hemingway’s suicide by shotgun in Idaho was a severe disappointment. I recall that on the Sunday morning I read of his death I felt he cheated his family, his friends and his fans, of which I was one, and I took it as a personal betrayal. He had always carried himself in life and written as a man’s man. Suicide, I thought at the time when I was thirty years old, was a coward’s way out and unworthy of a man. Some forty-five years later I continue to believe suicide is wrong, but not necessarily “a coward’s way out.”
The exhibit is on tour and will move to another city in late February, early March.
