BY KAREN BOSSICK

The Arkansas Hemingway?

Kevin Smith, a former state senator from Arkansas who attended this weekend’s Ernest Hemingway Seminar 2017 at Community Library, has crisscrossed the world following in the famed author’s footsteps.

It was a journey that started in Piggott, Ark., home of the Hemingway-Pfeiffer House and Carriage House.

It ended in Ketchum this past weekend, where Hemingway lived out his last days.

“I saved the best for last,” said Smith, who serves on the board of the historic home.

Smith was introduced to Hemingway through the Hemingway-Pfeiffer House, which is maintained by the University of Arkansas.

The home and barn, built in 1910, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It was owned by Paul and Mary Pfeiffer, parents of Hemingway’s second wife Pauline Pfeiffer. And Hemingway spent many a summer there writing in a barn loft, which the family had converted into his personal studio.

He penned parts of “A Farewell to Arms” there and several short stories. Among them, a Nick Adams story titled “A Day’s Wait,” which is based on events that took place in the house.

The Pfeiffers hailed from St. Louis where Paul Pfeiffer and his brothers had founded a very successful pharmaceutical and cosmetics company, said Smith. They were a prominent family—very generous, he added. But the smoke of the city bothered Paul, who had bad asthma and so he bought 63,000 acres of land over time beginning in 1902. He moved his family to Piggott in 1913.

Mary Pfeiffer, a devout Catholic, had a chapel built in her home and had a priest come all the way from St. Louis. She happily fed vagrants riding the trains near her home during the Depression.

And, when critics protested that the hoboes would steal her silverware, she said it would be like giving her silverware to Jesus, citing Matthew 25:31 where Jesus tells followers that when they feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit those in prison and take in strangers, it’s the same as if they’re doing it to him.

“It was an amazing family Ernest Hemingway married into. Mary mothered him, became the mother he said he’d never had,” said Smith.

After Hemingway married Pauline in 1927, the couple came to Piggot to await the birth of their first child. They visited the Arkansas home often, sometimes staying months at a time. Hemingway loved hunting quail hunting there with his brother-in-law Karl. But he found town a bit boring, said Smith.

Pauline’s Uncle Gus had “adopted” Pauline and her sister as his own daughters since he had no children of his own. And he was a great benefactor of Hemingway, helping to fund the writing of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “Death in the Afternoon” and “Green Hills of Africa.”

The family sent him to Paris to check out Pauline’s beau when she announced her intentions to marry the young author. And Uncle Gus sent back a favorable report.

The Pfeiffers were devastated when Hemingway divorced Pauline to run off with journalist Martha Gellhorn. Mary Pfeiffer wrote Hemingway a letter saying the Christmas following the divorce was the saddest she had ever known. But she still thought of herself as a mother to Hemingway, signing her letter “Mother Pfeiffer.”

Today the home features about 75 percent of its original furnishings.

The museum features a film of a 1940 family reunion that included Helen Keller, to whom Gus had given one of his houses. It also feature’s Hemingway’s alpine skiing manual, taken from the Hotel Taube in Schruns, Austria, where Hemingway, his first wife Hadley—and Hadley’s friend Pauline--stayed during a ski trip in 1925. It was during that trip that Hemingway and Pauline began their affair.

“I found 75 coats of paint when we were refurbishing the home,” said Smith.

Smith admits that he wasn’t a Hemingway fan at first. That changed during a visit to relatives’ new house in Key West, site of another Hemingway haunt. He read several of Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories on the way. And by the time he got to Key West, he was smitten.

Smith spent the next several years Running with the Bulls in Pamploma and climbing Kilimanjaro. He chanced into an opportunity to see Hemingway’s first apartment in Paris, toured his childhood home in Oak Park, Ill., and visited Hemingway’s fishing sites on the Mediterranean Sea.

And he visited Hemingway’s safari sites in Africa.

Smith started his latest trip following Hemingway’s first trip West in 1928 from Kansas City where Hemingway got his start as a reporter for the Kansas City Star. He visited a dude ranch Sheridan, Wyo., where Hemingway put the finishing touches on “A Farewell to Arms,” fished the Clark’s Fork River, hunted big game on the outskirts of Yellowstone National Park and stayed in a cabin in Teton National Park.

Along the way, he collected mementoes in a cigar box, including a bandana from Running of the Bulls, ferns from a river that inspired “Big Two-Hearted River,” mint that had grown along railroad tracks in one of Hemingway’s stories, as well as coasters and matches from bars Hemingway had frequented.

“I found that if he wrote about a place, you don’t have to visit it. He wrote about it so well that even today you get the same feeling he got all those years ago,” Smith said. “So, if you can’t make it to one of the places he’s written about, it’s okay. In all honesty, you’ve been there just by reading Hemingway’s books.”

Smith was intrigued by the diverse opinions those at this year’s Hemingway conference expressed and how each had well-formulated reasons to defend them.

“But it makes sense,” he added. “Hemingway was a complex man. That’s why it’s still interesting to sit around in conferences like this one and debate what we think about him all these years later.”