November 7–14, 1996

open book

Ramshackle Dreamland

John Hersey's tales captured the essence of Key West.

By Jim Gladstone

Last weekend, Key West held its annual Fantasy Fest. It's a lazier, more laid back Mardi Gras, a sun-baked, whipped cream-covered pumpkin pie in the face. It features one of the most relaxed small-town parades along with some of the most relaxed big-city sexual mores (More! More! More!).

I've never been able to make it down for Fantasy Fest weekend, but in three other visits, Key West has unlocked a special place in my affection. In fact, I had just finished making reservations for trip number four (coming up in December) when I stumbled upon the brand new and long overdue paperback reissue of 1993's Key West Tales (Vintage) by the late John Hersey (Hiroshima, A Bell For Adano).

Barely a flick of pebbly sand off the pointy end of Florida, Key West has developed quite a literary reputation over the years. Ernest Hemingway's one-time digs — now populated by six-toed cats — remain a top tourist attraction. There seem to be ramshackle used bookstores down every other alley, all of them featuring the dog-eared works of Key West's residents and admirers: the lyrically piercing stories of Joy Williams, the somehow pensive chest-poundings of Robert Stone, the operatically purple prose of Thomas Sanchez, whose blustery Mile Zero is like a tropical storm wrought in words.

Odd thing is, none of these writers has ever really managed to capture the essential spirit of his or her favorite island. Like its bookstores, Key West itself is a ramshackle, odd-lot place. Turn a corner, step into another story. Here's a poor Haitian-American family; here's Harry Truman's splendid vacation compound; here's a gay disco; here's a redneck bar. For lunch Cuban rice and beans, for dinner candlelit French cuisine. What's remarkable is that, somehow, it manages to hang together.

Hersey, who died at 79 just before this book's original publication, kept a vacation home on Key West and lived there full time during his final years. As this collection clearly indicates, Hersey was finely attuned to his island's charms. Opening his mind's ear, he heard Key West speaking not in one authorial voice but in chattering fragments of overlapping, overheard experience.

Key West Tales is a mental rummage sale. Its zigzag progression of full-blown short stories, half-baked anecdotes and historical marginalia finds Hersey traipsing around Key West in relaxed fashion. He lights onto a person here, a notion there and sees what he can find in them. Some of it works, some of it flops, and it all hangs together beautifully.

Even the book's lengthiest, most polished pieces have loose interior structures that free them of the forced, gemlike sheen that characterizes so many popular contemporary short stories. Hersey isn't dispensing pearls of wisdom here; he's shucking sloppy, delicious oysters.

"Get Up, Sweet Slug-a-bed" is a novella-length story that, at first, seems to be about Billy, an ornery pottery professor dying of AIDS. Then it seems to be about a loving group of friends — straight, gay, married, single — who care for Billy during his illness. Enter Drew, a crazy, effeminate nurse-from-hell who, like Bette Midler at the Oscars, practically steals the show until — whoa, Nellie! — Hersey loads on on two old codgers from the Smokey Mountains, Billy's rabidly anti-gay sisters and the object of Billy's boyhood crush, now a heterosexual doctor.""

The story is a woolly 10-car pile-up of humanity, veering from tender to funny to telemovie horrific. There's no way it can end neatly, and it doesn't: a lot is left unraveled. It's as if, at the end of his career, Hersey is admitting that life's complexities can't fairly be packaged in neat fictional forms.

Hersey's sophisticated sense of proportion is reiterated from another angle in "Page Two," a collection of brief faux articles from a Key West newspaper, complete with headlines. There is the report of a burglar who fly-fishes for wallets through open windows, the claim of an arrested driver that the dog ate his license and the case of a woman who asks for a butterfly tattoo but ends up with a tarantula in her pants.

There's not really enough grist for a short story in any of these bits, so rather than inflate them with invented symbolic pomposity, Hersey serves them up in a concise, mild, straightforward format. Just as he understands that life can be too complicated for literature, Hersey also knows that it can be too simple. It was his work as a World War II correspondent that inspired his 1944 novel, A Bell For Adano, and, when appropriate, he continues to apply a fine journalist's sense of control and restraint.

Hersey also plays historian, peppering the collection with fact-based vignettes on the history of Key West that, while not always fulfilling in themselves, bring a healthy perspective to the book's contemporary tales. By setting the emotional crises of his modern-day characters against the epochal sweep of history — slavery, piracy, the Cuban revolution — he challenges us to reflect on the notion that every crisis is relative.

While the collection varies from piece to piece in length, style and point-of-view, it is an intentionally slapdash affair. The sections push and pull against each other throughout, and now and then Hersey beams in a brilliant device, something to remind us that an artist is, indeed, at work.

The story, named after the annual Fantasy Fest celebration, matches the festival with a perfect emotional counterpoint: a mother's reunion with the son she gave up for adoption decades ago. In a letter rife with realistic misspellings and grammatical errors, the son challenges his unknown parent to find him amidst the community masquerade:

"I will dress up as my own particular fantasy of my own particular self, and you do the same. And I have a distinct feeling we'll find each other... wouldn't it be wonderful if we imagined each other right? Wouldn't it be super if our chromosomes matched right down into our dreams?"

Dreams, daydreams and bric-a-brac. Offbeat characters and the heart's souvenirs. Jumbled together to make a strange sort of sense, these are the sounds in the voice of Key West — a voice captured with quirky grace in John Hersey's eccentric and satisfying swan song.