Hemingway house sparks feud

KETCHUM, Idaho -- Ernest Hemingway's house near Sun Valley isn't exactly as he left it on the morning 44 years ago when he put a shotgun to his head and killed himself. But many artifacts remain from when the Pulitzer Prize-winning author called Idaho home.\nA mounted gazelle's head stares out into the second-floor master bedroom. Two more trophies from Hemingway's two African trips, a lesser kudu and an impala, are in the living room. In one stairwell, there's a painting of a slaughtered bull. A postcard-sized drawing by Pablo Picasso adorns another wall elsewhere in the two-story, concrete-and-wood house.\nAnd then there's the typewriter resting in the black walnut-paneled back bedroom in front of a window with views of elk tracks in snow atop the Boulder Mountains.\n"This place is a good rental property in the skiing season and in the summer and was a wonderful buy," Hemingway wrote in 1960 to Gen. Charles Trueman "Buck" Lanham, a U.S. Army general he'd met while reporting the Battle of the Bulge in 1944 in the Ardennes Forest in Belgium. "I plan to live here in the shooting season."\nNow "Papa" Hemingway's "wonderful buy" is the subject of a tense fight over just what should become of it. The feud pits neighbor against neighbor in this affluent ski community nestled in the heart of Idaho's Rocky Mountains, and even surviving Hemingway family members disagree about the property's proper fate.\nThe Nature Conservancy, an environmental group that inherited the house and its surrounding 13 acres on the Big Wood River from Hemingway's widow, Mary, in 1986, has been trying for years to get rid of it. The place is slowly falling apart and costs up to $50,000 annually to maintain.\n"Our mission is one of conservation and biodiversity, not historical preservation," Geoff Pampush, director of the group's Idaho chapter, said.\nFor many here in Ketchum, Pampush's plans to deed the house to the Idaho Hemingway House Foundation, whose board members include actor Tom Hanks and the writer's granddaughter, actor Mariel Hemingway, and remake it into a scholarly library and writer's retreat would be a worthy tribute to the winner of the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for fiction (for his novella, "The Old Man and the Sea") and the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature.\nBut some neighbors fear the house would draw flocks of gawking tourists, disrupting the serenity they thought came with their multimillion-dollar properties in a community where the average home sells for $500,000.\nNow the Nature Conservancy has given itself 60 days to decide what to do, and it recently held a meeting at the Sun Valley Inn, one of the clusters of buildings built in 1936 as America's first destination resort, to find out what Ketchum residents want. About 300 locals heard variations of two options: Either create the retreat or sell the old Hemingway place to a private buyer with easements protecting the surrounding riverside property.\n"We're trying to thread the needle between Mary and Ernest and the rights to privacy that the neighbors have," Pampush said. "It's a small eye of the needle, I must say"