The invitation came from former state Sen. Kevin Smith of Helena, an Ernest Hemingway aficionado of the first order, and it proved irresistible: Hunt quail with Hemingway's grandson in Clay County on land near where the famous author once hunted. Smith said a group from Savannah, Ga., would fly in on a Friday after having purchased the hunt during a charitable auction in Key West, Fla. Part of the attraction for those who bid on the hunt was the chance to spend time with John Hemingway, whose father was Dr. Gregory Hemingway and whose grandfather was Ernest Hemingway.
John Hemingway came to Piggott with his wife Kristina and son Michael from Montreal, where they now live. John Hemingway is the author of Strange Tribe, which examines the complex relationship between his father and grandfather. He studied history and Italian at UCLA, later lived for a number of years in Italy, spent a year in Spain and then moved to Montreal. Also traveling to Piggott for the weekend was Jenny Phillips, the granddaughter of Max Perkins, the book editor known for discovering and nurturing famous authors such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe. Phillips, who lives in the Boston area, is a cultural anthropologist, writer and psychiatric nurse. Her husband Frank is the state Capitol bureau chief for the Boston Globe. In 2002, the couple began a project to restore the Cuban home of Ernest Hemingway and save the Hemingway papers that remained in Cuba following the writer's death in 1961.
We gathered on a cold, rainy, foggy Friday night at the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum and Education Center on West Cherry Street in Piggott, which has been operated since 1999 by Arkansas State University. The property consists of a house and barn built in 1910. Paul Pfeiffer, a wealthy St. Louis businessman, purchased the house and barn in 1913 and moved his family to Piggott, where he began buying what eventually would be more than 60,000 acres of farmland. Ernest Hemingway married Pauline Pfeiffer, the daughter of Paul and Mary Pfeiffer, in France in May 1927 after divorcing his first wife. Pauline was a writer in Paris on assignment for Vogue when she met Hemingway.
Hemingway visited Piggott for the first time in the spring of 1928 so Pauline could be with her family during her first pregnancy. He spent time there working on A Farewell to Arms. On later trips to Piggott, Hemingway sometimes would hunt quail on his father-in-law's extensive holdings. In 1932, Hemingway came to Piggott with his wife and three children (a 9-year-old son from his first marriage and two sons with Pauline) for a visit during the winter holidays. He wrote a short story, "A Day's Wait," about that visit with a description of a quail hunt on a "bright, cold day, the ground covered with a sleet that had frozen so that it seemed as if all the bare trees, the bushes, the cut brush, and all the grass and the bare ground had been varnished with ice."
On our Friday night in Piggott, we got to know each other better while eating barbecue following a tour of the home Paul and Mary Pfeiffer had once occupied and the barn where Ernest Hemingway once wrote. Most of the hunting party spent the night on the downtown square at The Inn at Piggott, in a building constructed in 1925 to house the Bank of Piggott. The bank went under during the Great Depression. The owners of the inn, Joe and Tracy Cole, are Piggott natives who gave up careers in law and international marketing after 24 years in Memphis and returned to their hometown. One of their projects was to renovate the former bank into a nine-room bed-and-breakfast inn. I stayed on the edge of town at the Rose Dale Farm Bed and Breakfast, a home built on the Norred Farm in 1917. Hemingway sometimes would drop by the house when he would hunt quail in the adjoining fields.
With wild quail almost a thing of the past in Arkansas, we hunted pen-raised birds on this trip. Stephen Crancer of Rector has transformed his family farm on Crowley's Ridge into a facility for guided quail and pheasant hunts. Following a 7 a.m. Saturday breakfast at the Inn at Piggott, our group took the back route along winding gravel roads as we made our way south down Crowley's Ridge from Piggott to Liberty Hill. Several wrong turns later, we arrived, only to find that the rain had gotten harder. After waiting for about 30 minutes, the rain stopped, and John Hemingway warmed up by shooting clay pigeons over a pond.
Our group, led by Crancer, walked from the pond to the fields where the quail were. These weren't wild birds, but it was enough to bring back memories of south Arkansas quail hunts with my father in the 1970s and 1980s when quail hunting was still a part of Arkansas culture. And I was hunting with a Hemingway in Clay County, a story I no doubt will still be telling years from now. Following the morning hunt, it was time for lunch catered at Liberty Hill by a Paragould restaurant known as Chow at One Eighteen. The menu consisted of grilled quail with mushrooms, black truffle oil risotto, green beans and biscuits.
As we ate, I thought about the Hemingway visits to Clay County. Ernest and Pauline's divorce became final in November 1940. Ernest soon married Martha Gellhorn, the third of his four wives. He committed suicide in Idaho with his favorite shotgun on July 2, 1961. There was a time, though, when Hemingway would hunt quail in Clay County. On one glorious January weekend, we did our best to relive those days.
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Freelance columnist Rex Nelson is the director of corporate community relations for Simmons First National Corp. He's also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.
Editorial on 02/01/2017