File talk:Ernest Hemingway with sons Patrick and Gregory with kittens in Finca Vigia, Cuba.jpg

The photo date and the particular Cuban cats

Hemingway never kept cats in Florida, which is ironic since the cats are what his Key West home is perhaps known best for, today.

Hemingway did keep cats in Cuba, but only after 1941 or so. He rented the Finca for Martha from mid 1939, until marrying Martha in late 1940, and then bought it with some of the first royalties from For Whom the Bell Tolls in December. Cats arrived later. The first was Princessa, the gray Persian you see in the middle of the cat photo at the Finca. This cat was bought from a breeder in Key West. To either side (Good Will and Boise) are two males acquired as kittens in Cuba (although they are nearly full grown in this photo) in mid 1942. Thus, the photo date from internal evidence is late 42 or early 43, not late 1946. From these cats were descended most of EH's Cuban cats that had exploded in numbers by 1943. However, there is no mention that any of these were polydactyl-- and EH wrote a great deal about his cats.

There is a book called Hemingway's Cats if you want the known dope on all of this (I haven't read any more of it than what's on Google Books). However, one thing is clear: Hemingway didn't know the first thing about keeping cats! The first thing about male cats is they must be neutered young if kept indoors, unless you're willing to put up with constant urine marking and odor from that. Female cats must be spayed unless you don't mind an exponentially growing cat population (which can outpace any owner). Both these things happened to Hemingway. He didn't care about the spraying and odor, but Martha did. When she had some of his males neutered while he was on a trip, he nearly divorced her for it. I think Hemingway's cats and their smell probably helped drive the fastidious Martha into long trips, and we know how that ended. When Mary inherited the Finca after 1946, she exiled nearly all the cats to the white "cat tower."

SBHarris 04:53, 24 June 2010 (UTC)

More on the photo date

The notation of Nov. 1946 is clearly so wrong that I wrote the JFK archives to find out how it came to be. The nice archivist Emma Clement at Audiovisual Archives John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum 617-514-1622 JFK.AVArchives@nara.gov wrote me that some previous uknown archivist had written that for reasons unclear, but it's not original for the photo. They agreed the photo must be pre-WW II, since in Nov. 1946 Patrick at left would have been 18 and Gregory at right age 15, and that's clearly not right.

For internal reasons given in the original "authorized" Carlos Baker bio, the date of this photo is probably July, 1942. The basic reason is not just the cats, but the fact that EH started growing a beard about that time (he said to protect from Sun on the sub hunting voyages aboard Pilar that started in the Summer of 1942), and he kept it all the way through his entry into London in May 1944 (he shaved it off to later go into France, but there are photos of him as correspondant to the RAF in London with it). But here, there is no beard.

So there's a very thin window between when the 3 cats arrived in mid-1942 and when EH started growing the beard he doesn't have in this photo, which beard would have been present through 1943 and 1944, until he returned from the war in early 1945.

Patrick and Greg vistited Havana for summer vacations at least in 1942 (July) and 1943, but this is not a 1943 photo due to the beard. And it has the look of boys meeting young cats for the first time, so I infer July, 1942. SBHarris 01:19, 19 March 2013 (UTC)

Incidently, here is a 1944 photo of EH with Patrick, which shows a very full beard and clearly older boy: [1] SBHarris 02:03, 2 April 2013 (UTC)