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"This is a splendid place," said Hemingway. "Nobody believes me when I say I'm a writer. They think I represent big Northern bootleggers or dope peddlers." Even now Key West, underneath the gentrification and new time-share resorts, is still psychically an island of pirates and smugglers, where it is rude to ask a last name or an occupation. For writers, anonymity is pleasant only until it begins to feel like obscurity. Then it is reassuring to be near other writers. Key West offers serendipitous encounters, noon walks, short talks. There are always parties, to refuse virtuously or to attend offhandedly, where balloons float in the pool and conversations are about Mozart's feelings for his mother or the best way to propagate a dinner-plate hibiscus. And there are none of the kind of sly references to agents, advances, deals, options and contracts that poison the air of the Hamptons. Or so the Key West authors claim.
One afternoon, as the sky began to sparkle and warm, the entourage gathered for a tour of authors' houses. The last was Hemingway's, surrounded by garden, inundated by cats, palm brushed. "Did you notice this fireplace is totally off center? As so many of us are in Key West," said Guide Larry Harvey, famous locally for his lyrical delivery of such unlikely information as "Some of us do recall the great star who sat in this chair, the late Franchot Tone."
In a panel on "The South Florida Novel," Evelyn Wilde Mayerson (Sanjo) complained that stories about the drug trade, or the death of aged parents retired to Florida, tell only a little piece of the truth. Indeed, most writers believe their piece of truth is more true than other writers' pieces. After too much time together—roughly the length of the average panel discussion—they begin to get testy.
The word serious, as in "serious work" or "serious writer," begins to be used more and more, with less and less attachment to objective judgment. Such a mood, curable by pouting, is an occupational hazard, and is not the kind of thing that attracts outsiders to the seminars. As Phyllis Cartwright, director of Fort Lauderdale's Main Library, put it, "People enjoy these seminars because they can hear authors discuss their feelings, what causes them to write." Or as Novelist Anne Bernays (The Address Book), who came from Boston to speak at lunch, said, "People think if they can touch and talk to an author, they will absorb the magic, be able to do it themselves. That's why they always ask technical questions like 'Do you use a pencil?' "