As a native Tampon who escaped and is never going back, I can say that Key West is the best part of Florida (or at least was) because it has the weirdos concentrated for idealists and well-meaning makers, not just the meth heads and gun runners and Hiassen characters, etc. It's also somewhat bearable because the breeze is strong and the island small. Florida's climate is the worst thing about it, and it is only getting hotter forever.
Where is Joe Merchant is perfectly fine, too; Buffett has the same ring to me, but he has some great moments, and was a generous funder of things to keep wild Florida still barely hanging on. Did not know my beloved Brautigan had spent time in KW, but you did forget Thomas Sanchez, a minor 80s writer whose debut was a Vintage Contemporaries, and who later wrote the requisite "boomer looks back at the 60s to draw meaning" novel from KW.
Glad my intuitions drawn purely from media were not a total delusion. I probably won’t read it unless I come across it in an Airbnb or something but I get a kick out of the Joe Merchant description— it sounds like a Pynchon novel haha.
I'm sure Jimmy wanted it to be a little like that, just more saleable. Still, I read it and the short story collection when they came out, and they were not high art but they did demonstrate some ability and some actual intent to write well and tell stories that was respectful and respectable.
Highly recommend our mutual friend Matthew Specktor's Crashing in the Same Car, which features a superb portrait McGuane. Shoot, you've probably read it already. But a shoutout for the benefit of all the comment lurkers!
Specktor’s treatment of the Key West scene—particularly the McGuane-Kidder-Oates-Ashley-Fonda love pentangle—was excellent. William McKeen’s Mile Marker Zero is also really good.
This is such a beautiful essay! I love your writing on Americana, and as someone who grew up in South Florida, I think you capture the Keys' weird blend of tourist kitsch and genuine mythic beauty really well. I hope you write that piece on Miami crime fiction too, Elmore Leonard is one of the Great American Novelists in my opinion.
If you ever go to Key West, I encourage you to take your time enjoying the drive down the Overseas Highway. The best way to do it is to stop outside Miami to get yourself some Cuban coffee and snacks for the road, then stop at all the tourist traps on the smaller Keys on the way south. Ralston Crawford did a great lithograph of the view from that drive too if you'd rather experience it from afar...
Thanks! I read the Joy Williams guidebook to the Keys, which is incredibly entertaining, and felt like I got a great sense of that drive, even though it hasn't been updated in 20 years and it ends with a sour afterword saying the old magic is dead and gone.
Fantastic again, Henry. I feel the only way I know to comment on this is by means of personal reflection on my father. Over time, I’ve realized that though I do love music and boats, I’ve come to hate beaches and drinking. I’m speaking here as a former beer, wine, and cider brewer on the later point. On the former point, I’m not including the rocky crags of Maine or the cold beaches of the world, but rather what most mean when they say, “I’m going to the beach.”
It’s one of the biggest contrasts between my late father and I. Dad would spend his last cent getting to some clime — some tourism spot — full of folks like him, spend far in excess of anywhere his income had any business traveling towards. I, on the other hand, would save my last dime trying to create some kind of mean ing or magnanimity. His travel list was a bucket list. I travel to make things and to meet folks and to help the least. Only retroactively do I look back and say, “Well that place was cool, but mainly because of X project, Y person, or Z issue we helped with.” As a result, I accidentally and unknowingly checked off five of dad’s top ten bucket list travel destinations, but only through the help of or in order to help friends. Grace upon grace and all of that: my only reaction was gratitude; his was envy masked as a thin joy for me.
I say this because dad was a huge Buffett fan and when he bought books, he gobbled up the sort of things you’d find for five bucks in a St. Pete spinner at a surf shop. He never finished a single one of those. I liked Buffett through dad, even came to like Hemingway through dad, but primarily because the books and Buffett reminded me of dad. So Buffett only spoke to me because dad spoke to me and hearing Buffett’s voice has an eerie summoning tone to it, a seance, a kind of divination I would never intend to practice, but often find myself stumbling into, headlong, shouting, “Dammit, Jimmy, who put this frigging circle of candles and chalk runes on the kitchen floor?!”
Dad would run from his daily figurative realistic brutality (how he meditated negatively on most of his work and living) into the arms of a literal escape: beaches, babes, cans of empty bottles. I, on the other hand, delve deeply into figurative escapism, arts and philosophy alike, which drives me into the arms of a literal reality with a desire to help, to build, to love, to gather the diverse at my dinner table.
Dad got S.A.D. in the winter; I get it in the heat. Dad envied my internship in San Diego; I consider that town the boob job of America — imported sands, imported sod, imported water, imported imports, imported importance. And, as a long tail result, important impotence. Lovely people, my friends there, but the town and culture seemed categorically fake on every level and I wondered if at some point in the distant future whether the desert would simply call time, call in its debts, and reclaim it all as the ocean would call “last call” and, as the designated driver of our global climate, confiscate the Keys from the drunks.
It’s hard, in short, for me not to hate someone who runs from the world to these kinds of places. That’s the real ire towards escapism the realist apologists should have leveled. I don’t hate these people or hate the places. But that hardness — that effort — for me NOT to hate reveals to me that I don’t in the end hate them precisely because I don’t in the end hate my dad. He works as a kind of arbiter — as a universal intercessor — for anyone like him. I get it, though I withhold major reservations about choosing pleasure over almost everything else in one’s old age, particularly when wisdom, goodness, truth, and beauty seem to me to be in such short supply. Dad and I are different, that’s okay. But surely at some point guys like dad could wake up and realize that pleasure is merely a proximate good just like money or power or fame?
Which brings me to Dylan. The album, as you know, contextually crosses the Rubicon into Key West. Then Dylan speaks immediately of a murder most foul with JFK. And if you cross that rubicon with him, he seems to be contrasting his life of pleasure with the brutality of the world and what could have been.
Stephen King, also of dad’s generation, also of Dylan’s, and similarly possessed of the alternative timeline of JFK, said, “We could have saved the planet, but we opted for the home shopping network.” He grieved it all. Grieves it still, it seems.
That kind of man still holds power — the last five presidents, most of Congress, and so on. I do wonder what would happen if, as a set, they let go of all this pleasure seeking and pearl clutching and dragon hoarding and fame sporing and honor rigging and pursuit of “world class products” for an item that need not go any further than a small town’s city limits and finally embrace the entirety of the pain within, the pain without, and then grieve for the world they used as fuel for all of their beachfront bonfires and “global” products. It seems for all his humor, Carl Hiaasen does just that. His climax of BASKET CASE, which reveals the absolutely meaningless his father’s obituary, hit me incredibly hard and hilariously at once: I cried and laughed for a half hour thinking of my father and men like him.
It’s rare that I do both, but it’s hilarious how painful it is to me; it’s painful how hilarious it is.
Swimming pools do hide alligators. Makes it hard to really relax, in the end.
Wonderful essay that I started reading, as it happens, at a rest stop in Alabama during a drive northward from the Florida Panhandle. I haven't delved deep into J.B. beyond the obvious tunes, but a dear friend who's a devoted Parrothead has been urging "Tales from Margaritaville" on me for years. Your essay has convinced me to take the plunge. More pressingly, the Joy Williams guidebook sounds amazing.
A certain philosophizing is certainly present in Stevens' work, but it's mostly a red herring to sneak in the angelfish and blue tang and whatever other colorful quick fish of those tropical scenes and sounds that you and Hofmann mention. One of the many great things about Harmonium is what a unified *book* it is, as opposed to a gathering of discrete poems. The way the metaphysical sea navigator nonsense (non-pejorative) of "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon" is played off of the quieter piano riff of "Tea" near the end of the book, for example.
Great Hofmann essay, of course; it was good to re-read. His notion of Stevens as a hemispheric poet is exactly right, somehow already sensed and intuitive to most readers I'd think. He really is in some ways a Latin American poet who happened to write in English. Or maybe a French painter who happened to write in English; in an older essay Hofmann calls him "the Matisse of poets" (exactly right, again).
Hofmann himself has made some curious entries in the writing-about-Florida canon thanks to his day job at U of F in Gainesville. Odd stuff: his dry and sardonic but quizzical sensibility, more or less formed out of Central European poetry, bumping up against the golf carts and strip malls and frat dudes/sorority girls of central Florida and the Panhandle. Far, far from Key West geographically and metaphysically.
I might also put in a word for Hart Crane's cycle of poems about Key West, "Key West: An Island Sheaf," where his experience of the place becomes something heraldic and (I'll use your word) psychedelic, as in the nuclear sunset at the end of "O Carib Isle!":
Slagged of the hurricane—I, cast within its flow,
Congeal by afternoons here, satin and vacant.
You have given me the shell, Satan,—carbonic amulet
Comments like this make it all worth it. I think I grew to like Stevens a lot more in the process of rereading him and writing this and agree Harmonium is tremendous all the way through. I guess my question with him has always been whether what you say is true--with the most recondite stuff I have a powerful feeling of being Actually Too Stupid for it and lacking the philosophical framework one might need. Which is not usually my attitude towards difficult poetry-- like I'm happy to sit down and puzzle out the Cantos or something, at least in small doses. But who knows what deep insecurities are playing out there, certainly not his fault and he's undeniably one of the greats.
My favorite Hofmann thing is his absolute savaging of Stefan Zweig in the LRB. I have no opinion on Zweig -- he seems fine, whatever -- but to watch him absolutely lay in to (by modern standards) this popular in his day but now thoroughly NYRB-core writer who is really not worth the trouble is so funny. He says his suicide note is "more like an Oscar acceptance speech" lmao.
Will check out the Crane and yes, highly recommend the Williams book (also her Keys novel Breaking and Entering, natch).
Great essay. I have long wished to visit Key West, but being from Seattle the trip seemed just a bit too far and now I live in Asia. I also only recently grasped just what a creative giant Buffet really was and would love to read his stories. McGuane is a terrific writer (if not a "great" one) while Harrison is my guy. I have read all of his fiction and never can get enough. Despite having lived in Montana for much of his adult life, Harrison was born and raised in Michigan (as was McGuane) and much of his work is set there, especially in the remote cornersof the Upper Peninsula.
If I had a time machine one of the first things I would do would be to travel to early 70's Key West to hang out with that crew. They were on to something.
I remember being introduced to Ninety Two in the Shade in Mexico City by an American bookseller named Grant. Reading the flimsy jaundiced paperback on the beach, the pages fell out of the book one by one as I read along. I'll never forget McGuane's description in that book of Miranda's (I think?) breasts. It was something to the effect of, "she had appendages the shape and firmness of a Cuban flan."
My wife and I have visited Key West several times. We rent bicycles and pedal around the island. I love the funky feeling of wasted authors that permeates the place. And if you get away from Duval Street, it's actually a very pleasant, peaceful place (though I love the motto at the Hog's Breath Saloon, "Hog's breath is better than no breath at all.") We even considered buying a flat there, but we've decided on the Algarve instead.
Thanks for this piece. I've had an insuperable yearning for a Key West existence most of my adult life, chasing some sort of decadent nirvana, to be sure.
It will take me some time to recover from finding Jimmy Buffett and Wallace Stevens (whose work I deeply love) in the same essay. Bravo.
Two great Americans. If you haven't read that full LRB piece I link to, I think you'll love it.
As a native Tampon who escaped and is never going back, I can say that Key West is the best part of Florida (or at least was) because it has the weirdos concentrated for idealists and well-meaning makers, not just the meth heads and gun runners and Hiassen characters, etc. It's also somewhat bearable because the breeze is strong and the island small. Florida's climate is the worst thing about it, and it is only getting hotter forever.
Where is Joe Merchant is perfectly fine, too; Buffett has the same ring to me, but he has some great moments, and was a generous funder of things to keep wild Florida still barely hanging on. Did not know my beloved Brautigan had spent time in KW, but you did forget Thomas Sanchez, a minor 80s writer whose debut was a Vintage Contemporaries, and who later wrote the requisite "boomer looks back at the 60s to draw meaning" novel from KW.
Glad my intuitions drawn purely from media were not a total delusion. I probably won’t read it unless I come across it in an Airbnb or something but I get a kick out of the Joe Merchant description— it sounds like a Pynchon novel haha.
I'm sure Jimmy wanted it to be a little like that, just more saleable. Still, I read it and the short story collection when they came out, and they were not high art but they did demonstrate some ability and some actual intent to write well and tell stories that was respectful and respectable.
https://www.amazon.com/Mile-Vintage-Contemporaries-Thomas-Sanchez-ebook/dp/B005C2SOOA/ref=sr_1_1?crid=KR2MGURS1DIB&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.2a6q3cA4UVCEzlzu7ZKhKWWQVVM1aXdydBb8No729MnGjHj071QN20LucGBJIEps.07JT4kgfPtVjyyMTvoWn3iS04iuVtoHgnIOsLmb64EM&dib_tag=se&keywords=mile+zero+thomas+sanchez&qid=1756910335&sprefix=mile+zero+%2Caps%2C129&sr=8-1
Highly recommend our mutual friend Matthew Specktor's Crashing in the Same Car, which features a superb portrait McGuane. Shoot, you've probably read it already. But a shoutout for the benefit of all the comment lurkers!
I have and second the recommendation!
Specktor’s treatment of the Key West scene—particularly the McGuane-Kidder-Oates-Ashley-Fonda love pentangle—was excellent. William McKeen’s Mile Marker Zero is also really good.
Man, you've got style. Those first two paragraphs are a marvel. Great piece!
Stephen King (who has a touch of Buffett about him, perhaps?) makes a fine contribution in ‘Duma Key’, his best novel in my opinion.
This is such a beautiful essay! I love your writing on Americana, and as someone who grew up in South Florida, I think you capture the Keys' weird blend of tourist kitsch and genuine mythic beauty really well. I hope you write that piece on Miami crime fiction too, Elmore Leonard is one of the Great American Novelists in my opinion.
If you ever go to Key West, I encourage you to take your time enjoying the drive down the Overseas Highway. The best way to do it is to stop outside Miami to get yourself some Cuban coffee and snacks for the road, then stop at all the tourist traps on the smaller Keys on the way south. Ralston Crawford did a great lithograph of the view from that drive too if you'd rather experience it from afar...
Thanks! I read the Joy Williams guidebook to the Keys, which is incredibly entertaining, and felt like I got a great sense of that drive, even though it hasn't been updated in 20 years and it ends with a sour afterword saying the old magic is dead and gone.
with its lovely climate and pirate and panjandrums who holiday on nearby islands, Florida is really the Cornwall of the USA
What an excellent exploration of creativity in the Keys! Many of us know about Hemingway, but there are so many others who have made a home there.
Fantastic again, Henry. I feel the only way I know to comment on this is by means of personal reflection on my father. Over time, I’ve realized that though I do love music and boats, I’ve come to hate beaches and drinking. I’m speaking here as a former beer, wine, and cider brewer on the later point. On the former point, I’m not including the rocky crags of Maine or the cold beaches of the world, but rather what most mean when they say, “I’m going to the beach.”
It’s one of the biggest contrasts between my late father and I. Dad would spend his last cent getting to some clime — some tourism spot — full of folks like him, spend far in excess of anywhere his income had any business traveling towards. I, on the other hand, would save my last dime trying to create some kind of mean ing or magnanimity. His travel list was a bucket list. I travel to make things and to meet folks and to help the least. Only retroactively do I look back and say, “Well that place was cool, but mainly because of X project, Y person, or Z issue we helped with.” As a result, I accidentally and unknowingly checked off five of dad’s top ten bucket list travel destinations, but only through the help of or in order to help friends. Grace upon grace and all of that: my only reaction was gratitude; his was envy masked as a thin joy for me.
I say this because dad was a huge Buffett fan and when he bought books, he gobbled up the sort of things you’d find for five bucks in a St. Pete spinner at a surf shop. He never finished a single one of those. I liked Buffett through dad, even came to like Hemingway through dad, but primarily because the books and Buffett reminded me of dad. So Buffett only spoke to me because dad spoke to me and hearing Buffett’s voice has an eerie summoning tone to it, a seance, a kind of divination I would never intend to practice, but often find myself stumbling into, headlong, shouting, “Dammit, Jimmy, who put this frigging circle of candles and chalk runes on the kitchen floor?!”
Dad would run from his daily figurative realistic brutality (how he meditated negatively on most of his work and living) into the arms of a literal escape: beaches, babes, cans of empty bottles. I, on the other hand, delve deeply into figurative escapism, arts and philosophy alike, which drives me into the arms of a literal reality with a desire to help, to build, to love, to gather the diverse at my dinner table.
Dad got S.A.D. in the winter; I get it in the heat. Dad envied my internship in San Diego; I consider that town the boob job of America — imported sands, imported sod, imported water, imported imports, imported importance. And, as a long tail result, important impotence. Lovely people, my friends there, but the town and culture seemed categorically fake on every level and I wondered if at some point in the distant future whether the desert would simply call time, call in its debts, and reclaim it all as the ocean would call “last call” and, as the designated driver of our global climate, confiscate the Keys from the drunks.
It’s hard, in short, for me not to hate someone who runs from the world to these kinds of places. That’s the real ire towards escapism the realist apologists should have leveled. I don’t hate these people or hate the places. But that hardness — that effort — for me NOT to hate reveals to me that I don’t in the end hate them precisely because I don’t in the end hate my dad. He works as a kind of arbiter — as a universal intercessor — for anyone like him. I get it, though I withhold major reservations about choosing pleasure over almost everything else in one’s old age, particularly when wisdom, goodness, truth, and beauty seem to me to be in such short supply. Dad and I are different, that’s okay. But surely at some point guys like dad could wake up and realize that pleasure is merely a proximate good just like money or power or fame?
Which brings me to Dylan. The album, as you know, contextually crosses the Rubicon into Key West. Then Dylan speaks immediately of a murder most foul with JFK. And if you cross that rubicon with him, he seems to be contrasting his life of pleasure with the brutality of the world and what could have been.
Stephen King, also of dad’s generation, also of Dylan’s, and similarly possessed of the alternative timeline of JFK, said, “We could have saved the planet, but we opted for the home shopping network.” He grieved it all. Grieves it still, it seems.
That kind of man still holds power — the last five presidents, most of Congress, and so on. I do wonder what would happen if, as a set, they let go of all this pleasure seeking and pearl clutching and dragon hoarding and fame sporing and honor rigging and pursuit of “world class products” for an item that need not go any further than a small town’s city limits and finally embrace the entirety of the pain within, the pain without, and then grieve for the world they used as fuel for all of their beachfront bonfires and “global” products. It seems for all his humor, Carl Hiaasen does just that. His climax of BASKET CASE, which reveals the absolutely meaningless his father’s obituary, hit me incredibly hard and hilariously at once: I cried and laughed for a half hour thinking of my father and men like him.
It’s rare that I do both, but it’s hilarious how painful it is to me; it’s painful how hilarious it is.
Swimming pools do hide alligators. Makes it hard to really relax, in the end.
God, I love reading you. You can right about anything and I’ll read it.
I do have a soft spot for Florida too.
Wonderful essay that I started reading, as it happens, at a rest stop in Alabama during a drive northward from the Florida Panhandle. I haven't delved deep into J.B. beyond the obvious tunes, but a dear friend who's a devoted Parrothead has been urging "Tales from Margaritaville" on me for years. Your essay has convinced me to take the plunge. More pressingly, the Joy Williams guidebook sounds amazing.
A certain philosophizing is certainly present in Stevens' work, but it's mostly a red herring to sneak in the angelfish and blue tang and whatever other colorful quick fish of those tropical scenes and sounds that you and Hofmann mention. One of the many great things about Harmonium is what a unified *book* it is, as opposed to a gathering of discrete poems. The way the metaphysical sea navigator nonsense (non-pejorative) of "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon" is played off of the quieter piano riff of "Tea" near the end of the book, for example.
Great Hofmann essay, of course; it was good to re-read. His notion of Stevens as a hemispheric poet is exactly right, somehow already sensed and intuitive to most readers I'd think. He really is in some ways a Latin American poet who happened to write in English. Or maybe a French painter who happened to write in English; in an older essay Hofmann calls him "the Matisse of poets" (exactly right, again).
Hofmann himself has made some curious entries in the writing-about-Florida canon thanks to his day job at U of F in Gainesville. Odd stuff: his dry and sardonic but quizzical sensibility, more or less formed out of Central European poetry, bumping up against the golf carts and strip malls and frat dudes/sorority girls of central Florida and the Panhandle. Far, far from Key West geographically and metaphysically.
I might also put in a word for Hart Crane's cycle of poems about Key West, "Key West: An Island Sheaf," where his experience of the place becomes something heraldic and (I'll use your word) psychedelic, as in the nuclear sunset at the end of "O Carib Isle!":
Slagged of the hurricane—I, cast within its flow,
Congeal by afternoons here, satin and vacant.
You have given me the shell, Satan,—carbonic amulet
Sere of the sun exploded in the sea.
Comments like this make it all worth it. I think I grew to like Stevens a lot more in the process of rereading him and writing this and agree Harmonium is tremendous all the way through. I guess my question with him has always been whether what you say is true--with the most recondite stuff I have a powerful feeling of being Actually Too Stupid for it and lacking the philosophical framework one might need. Which is not usually my attitude towards difficult poetry-- like I'm happy to sit down and puzzle out the Cantos or something, at least in small doses. But who knows what deep insecurities are playing out there, certainly not his fault and he's undeniably one of the greats.
My favorite Hofmann thing is his absolute savaging of Stefan Zweig in the LRB. I have no opinion on Zweig -- he seems fine, whatever -- but to watch him absolutely lay in to (by modern standards) this popular in his day but now thoroughly NYRB-core writer who is really not worth the trouble is so funny. He says his suicide note is "more like an Oscar acceptance speech" lmao.
Will check out the Crane and yes, highly recommend the Williams book (also her Keys novel Breaking and Entering, natch).
Great essay. I have long wished to visit Key West, but being from Seattle the trip seemed just a bit too far and now I live in Asia. I also only recently grasped just what a creative giant Buffet really was and would love to read his stories. McGuane is a terrific writer (if not a "great" one) while Harrison is my guy. I have read all of his fiction and never can get enough. Despite having lived in Montana for much of his adult life, Harrison was born and raised in Michigan (as was McGuane) and much of his work is set there, especially in the remote cornersof the Upper Peninsula.
If I had a time machine one of the first things I would do would be to travel to early 70's Key West to hang out with that crew. They were on to something.
I remember being introduced to Ninety Two in the Shade in Mexico City by an American bookseller named Grant. Reading the flimsy jaundiced paperback on the beach, the pages fell out of the book one by one as I read along. I'll never forget McGuane's description in that book of Miranda's (I think?) breasts. It was something to the effect of, "she had appendages the shape and firmness of a Cuban flan."
hell yeah
I have Tarpon on DVD and I dont throw out my DVD player just to watch it. This short doc makes it even better.
https://youtu.be/HR5HUmj-DJM?si=xhZhONs2lmEnr1V3
My wife and I have visited Key West several times. We rent bicycles and pedal around the island. I love the funky feeling of wasted authors that permeates the place. And if you get away from Duval Street, it's actually a very pleasant, peaceful place (though I love the motto at the Hog's Breath Saloon, "Hog's breath is better than no breath at all.") We even considered buying a flat there, but we've decided on the Algarve instead.
Thanks for this piece. I've had an insuperable yearning for a Key West existence most of my adult life, chasing some sort of decadent nirvana, to be sure.