Hemingway and Henry Strater

The painter Henry (Mike) Strater (1896-1987) was born in Louisville, Kentucky, where his father and uncles had founded the prosperous Strater Brothers Tobacco Company that manufactured snuff, chewing and smoking tobacco.  During the Depression Hemingway wrote to Strater, “I hope the snuff racket is holding up well.”

Strater, given the incongruous middle name of “Hyathinth”, was educated at Lawrenceville school and Princeton University, where he was a friend of Scott Fitzgerald.  He was the model for the rebellious and philosophical Burne Holiday in Fitzgerald’s first novel This Side of Paradise (1920): “Broad-browed and strong-chinned,” with fine gray eyes, “he gave an immediate impression of bigness and security.”  Strater’s first wife, Margaret Connor (1895-1972), was born in Philadelphia and educated at Vassar.  They met when she was studying sculpture at the Philadelphia Museum of Art,  married in 1920, had three sons and a daughter, born between 1921 and 1931.  Margaret suffered from chronic asthma and sinus problems; they divorced in 1942.

Hemingway’s artist-friends Strater and Waldo Peirce (1884-1970)—tall, strong and athletic—had parallel careers and a great deal in common.  (Strater’s photo appears in the Cambridge edition of Hemingway’s Letters, 1932-1934, after page 200.)  Peirce was born in Maine; Strater lived in Maine from 1926.  (See my essay for TheArticle on Hemingway and Pierce here.) Strater paid for the land and helped design the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, which opened in 1953.  Both men came from wealthy families who enabled them to paint without financial pressure.  They went to elite prep schools and Ivy League colleges, and drove ambulances in World War One, where Peirce won the Croix de Guerre and Strater was wounded.  They studied art in Spain and France (Strater’s teacher was Edouard Vuillard).  Both met Hemingway in Paris, told him about the bullfights, painted three portraits of him and fished with him in the Caribbean.  Peirce had four wives and five children; Strater had three wives and eight children.  Most of their wives were artists, and none of Strater’s wives liked him to paint nudes.  The marriages of both men broke up during wartime.  Late in life they spent winters in Arizona; Peirce lived to 86, Strater to 91.

Hemingway had recently returned from reporting the Greco-Turkish War and had not yet published any fiction when he met Strater, who had a painting in the 1922 Paris Salon, at Ezra Pound’s flat in January 1923.  Strater complained that he’d been drinking weak tea; Hemingway offered him whisky from his hip flask.  Strater told him he boxed, they both weighed 195 pounds, and the next day in his studio they fought a few rounds and sealed their friendship.  Just as competitive in drinking, skiing and fishing as in boxing, Hemingway liked to win everything and couldn’t believe that a man with such an effete middle name could hold his own in a fight.  They visited Pound in Rapallo on the Italian Riviera, in February 1923, and Hemingway was so eager to knock out Strater that he stopped sleeping with his wife to conserve his vital energy.  Strater sprained his ankle and couldn’t box, but they managed to play tennis.

They discussed writing and painting, and the concise Hemingway criticised “the freedom with which writers like Faulkner and Bob McAlmon expressed themselves: ‘it just comes out of them as though they were evacuating their bowels.’ ”  His only criticism of Strater’s work, when thinking of Cézanne, was “why don’t you artists make mountains look like mountains?”  Hemingway liked Strater and called him an all-right nice guy.

Strater had lived in Spain and aroused Hemingway’s interest in bullfights even before he had seen one.  Strater drew a map of Spain with his favourite places, told him about the best restaurant in Madrid and the pension where the matadors lived.  In September 1923 Hemingway wrote to Pound that he’d been working on a long story about Strater and his wife Maggie.  He abandoned that story, but wrote another one, also unfinished, with “Strater’s voice telling of a Spanish bullfight where the first two matadors were both gored badly; the last matador, a young kid, had to kill all five bulls.  On the fifth bull he kept missing with the sword: ‘He tried five times and the crowd was quiet because it was a good bull and it looked like him or the bull [would die] and then he finally made it.  He sat down in the sand and puked and they held a cape over him while the crowd hollered and threw things down into the bull ring.’ ”

In Rapallo, Strater painted two portraits of Hemingway. In the first, a profile against a bluish-grey background, Hemingway wears a blue tie and heavy brown overcoat.  He has thick dark hair touching his collar, wide forehead, firm nose, full mustache and tight mouth, and looks down with a thoughtful expression.  Strater recalled: “The first portrait, the profile, he said made him ‘look too literary, like H.G. Wells.’  He always rather resented that part of himself, the perfectionist artist, which made him a great writer.  He wanted to be a real tough guy.  His coloring was very handsome, dark hair and pink-and-white complexion; but the fair skin bothered him, so midway in the second portrait I said ‘O.K., I’ll paint you the way you look boxing.’ ”  The young Hemingway didn’t look at all like the then 57-year-old Wells.  But Hemingway believed that writers were slightly effeminate and had to project a virile image.  Strater’s “pink-and-white complexion” bothered him and he wanted it changed into a boxer’s look.

The second, close-up, full-face, head-and-shoulders portrait shows Hemingway’s head tilted slightly to the right.  Against a rust-colored background, he wears a white tunic and has thick hair, large dark eyes, square nose, red lips, partly open mouth and strong jaw, and looks appropriately tough.  Pleased with the second portrait, he told his sister that Strater is “miles ahead of all the rest of the pigmenters.”  He also said, “Mike spoils many paintings, but he has enough money so it does not matter.”  He used a woodcut of the boxer portrait as the frontispiece of his second book, in our time (Paris: Three Mountains Press, 1924).  Strater recalled that Hemingway “begged me for years to give him the boxer portrait and I said, ‘I’ll leave it to you in my will.’  I would have but he predeceased me.”  The first two portraits are now in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

In 1925 Strater created large coloured decorative initials, with fine drawings inside and next to them, for Pound’s XVI Cantos (Three Mountains Press).  Three years later Hemingway told Pound, “I haven’t seen any of his painting for a long time but I thought some was pretty good.”  Hemingway was deeply tanned when Strater painted his third portrait in Key West in 1930.  In a 3/4-view, facing right, he wears an open-collar green shirt against a dark background.  He has wavy brown hair, broad forehead, curved eyebrows, red cheeks, strong nose, full dark moustache and pillar-like neck, and has a severe expression.  More vivid and incisive, it reveals Hemingway’s brooding character.  Strater added, “with his usual verve, he took away my brush after I had signed, and added his own name.”  In May 1930 Strater wrote, “The portrait of you didn’t look so good later, so I spent four or five days on it, and now it is right.”

Hemingway discussed Strater’s marriage problems—and his own.  In August 1923 Strater had an affair with a woman in Paris.  But he and Maggie were reconciled, went on a second honeymoon and, as Hemingway sceptically remarked, “patched up for a year”. In March 1924 Hemingway said Strater had mistakenly left expatriate life in Paris for a puritanical-and-Prohibition existence in America.  Quoting Luke 23:34, he told the patriarchal Pound, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.”  In Rapallo, Hemingway had told Strater about the trunk filled with his precious early manuscripts that Hadley had lost—and had never been found—in the Gare de Lyon in December 1922: “‘You know, Mike, if you had had those manuscripts in your trunk, you would not have left them to go and get something to read.’  In other words, I was a fellow artist and if he had given them to me I would never have left them in an exposed position.  He was very upset because it showed how little she valued what he was doing.”  Hemingway never forgave Hadley’s carelessness and indifference.  Three years later, when he was having an affair with Pauline Pfeiffer and his marriage was breaking up, he wrote Strater from Valencia mentioning the consolation of the corridas: “Everything is all shot to hell in every direction but in the meantime there are eight fights here starting tomorrow.”  Strater was sympathetic and gave him sexual carte blanche by assuring him that “all men of genius are immoral”.

Hemingway kept in touch with Strater.  In November 1928 they watched boxing matches in Madison Square Garden in New York and the Princeton-Yale football game in Princeton.  In December 1928, when Hemingway’s father killed himself and he needed money to get home to Oak Park, he phoned Strater for help.  He saw the artist in New York in February 1930, often begged him to come down to Key West, and took the expert fisherman on many trips between 1929 and 1937.  Pauline’s rich Uncle Gus Pfeiffer had offered to pay $25,000 for Hemingway’s safari to East Africa, and he generously invited Strater, Archibald MacLeish and Charles Thompson, who owned a hardware store in Key West, to be his guests.

Wildly enthusiastic about the expedition, Hemingway referred to the Yale elite society Skull and Bones and told MacLeish, who’d been a member, “Mike and Charles can go—yr the last man tapped for Bones—[African] Buffalo bones—Lion bones.”  Hemingway, claiming expertise, added, “Don’t let Mike tell you anything about guns.  Every thing he has written me about guns is utter nonsense.”  Fancifully combining allusions to bullfighting and sailing—kites flown behind a boat helped attract fish—he told Strater, “May take a sword and muleta [cape] for buffalo and you carry a kite for us to climb the string for elephants.”

As Hemingway tried to coordinate the lives of his three potential companions, his plans for the eagerly awaited safari became plagued with problems.  In June 1932 he postponed the trip and gave several unconvincing excuses.  He explained that his recurrent eye problems would interfere with his shooting, he wanted to hunt and fish in Wyoming that fall, and he had many good stories to write.  MacLeish could not go that year and the delay would help Thompson’s business.  A presidential election would be held in November; he didn’t like to leave the country during the uncertain Depression, and felt guilty about taking a luxurious holiday when so many people were unemployed and suffering hardship.

In June 1932 he informed MacLeish in telegraphic style: “Am going to call off Africa until next June on a chance you can go—It’s better for Charles—If it’s ok with Mike—Hope it will be—Must write him and hate to—I wrote Uncle Gus—My god damned conscience says not to go now—Too long away the way things are going.”  He also told Strater: “Hate like a bastard to postpone Africa—But the way things are going in the country I would feel like a heel to be hunting in Africa with the country in such a hell of a shape.”  MacLeish was actually delighted and said, “I hope to thunder you do put off that African trip.  I never liked the idea of it anyhow.”

Strater, by contrast, was furious but forced to agree.  He had made his own elaborate plans and the delay damaged their friendship.  Hemingway knew he’d postponed for mainly selfish reasons, and for several months he tried—humbly and most unusually—to make peace with Strater.  In July he sent a series of emotional bulletins to his two friends, and apologetically told the artist: “I wrote Archie there was a chance of postponement when got a very blue and dismal letter from him . . . . It must have been a hell of a jolt to you and I feel like hell about it—It is my damned fault.”  Six days later he wrote to MacLeish that it had been difficult to make all the arrangements and the trip was definitely postponed.  Strater was angry, but (since he had no choice) had to accept the delay: “Not going to Africa until next June or end of June—Mike seemed very upset that you told him this before I did—But I couldn’t tell him until I heard from Charles. . . . Trip was still on until he agreed to postponement.”

Seven days later, after Strater had refused to go on the Wyoming hunting trip, Hemingway feared the artist was holding a grudge: “hope you arent pooping on it on acct of my delaying Africa or not writing or writing anything that makes you sore.”  On July 31 he complained to MacLeish that Strater was unreasonably angry and that he himself was now the injured party: “Mike is on his very high horse now and wont come—He says he’s not sore but he is or was very sore about Africa—It is Africa or nothing with old Mike and bugger Wyoming . . . and he is really being very snotty to me. . . .  After all I postponed trip for your, for Charles and for my benefit and trip to be made whenever best for majority”—but not best for Strater.

In October, still troubled and desperate to maintain the friendship, he apologised again, admitted it was all his fault and felt guilty about it: “I wish I could talk to you and I could explain the African postponement so it would take the hurt out of your feelings. . . . I know you still feel hurt and sore. . . . I did bitch your plans and have and do feel goddamned bad about it and feel worse about it all the time.”  In February 1933 he again complained to MacLeish that though he’d tried to appease Strater, he refused to go fishing in Cuba “to snoot me probably because I delayed the Africa trip.”

In late November 1933 Hemingway, Thompson and Pauline finally sailed from Marseilles to Mombasa, Kenya, for their three-month safari.  In June that year Strater, not mentioning his anger, gave a reasonable excuse for not joining them.  Maggie’s deteriorating health was caused by “babies + operations + metropolis.”  He had to stay home to take care of her and “build her up unless I wanted to have a permanent invalid on my hands.”  Strater later added, “I was going, and then my wife got pregnant.  I wasn’t going to go off and leave a pregnant wife.  So I didn’t go, and Ernest’s nose was out of joint that I’d placed my wife ahead of him. . . . It was a big blow to him when I refused to go with him.  That was when our friendship ended”—though they had two more fierce quarrels before it finally terminated.

Hemingway loved to lead a group of male friends on hunting and fishing adventures, but they were often unwilling to be led.  MacLeish later explained that the real reason for the two African refusals began in the islands off the Florida coast in the Gulf of Mexico just before the postponement.  He discreetly said, “Ernest and I and Mike Strater and Pauline’s Uncle Gus took a trip across to the Dry Tortugas in the spring of 1932 and got caught in a northerner [windstorm].  We were marooned for three days.  As a result we saw a little too much of each other.”

In April of that year, in a rare admission of blame, Hemingway confessed his faults and told MacLeish: “I know I am bossy and irritating son of a bitch in action when I get crabby.  And as you justly said no one takes offense quicker nor as I say more unjustly.”  Both men had quarrelled with Hemingway on that fishing trip.  They refused his Africa invitation, fearing that his fierce competitiveness would turn the safari into a grim struggle for superiority.  Hemingway’s lesser kudu would always be greater than their greater kudu.

Their battle continued in April 1935 when Hemingway became resentful about the artist’s refusal.  Strater recalled: “Hemingway was a fine sportsman, but in this case too competitive.  He was very alive and more fun to be with than anybody I ever knew, but he could be a real S.O.B.  In 1935 he was an S.O.B. because I had refused to go with him to Africa.”  Sailing with Strater and John Dos Passos in Bimini in the Bahamas, the sport-fishing capital of the world, the accident-prone Hemingway shot himself in both legs while holding a pistol and trying to land a huge fish.  Then, after Strater had hooked a giant 12-foot marlin, the wounded Hemingway, pretending to keep the marlin from being mutilated, cried “sharks.”  He fired tommy-gun bullets past his friend’s head and into the voracious sharks.  Attracted by the blood, the sharks devoured half the marlin and left only 500 pounds.  A photo showed them standing next to the skeletal half-eaten fish that Hemingway had helped to destroy.  Strater later added: “The truth is that Ernest was overcome with jealousy because I had the world’s record marlin hooked and had brought it up in record time.  Hemingway didn’t want me to be the one to catch the first big fish.  In fact the fish was never in danger from the sharks because I had already bought it to gaff with no damage whatsoever.”

Hemingway again offended Strater when a photo of him next to a giant fish in Bimini appeared in Time magazine on October 18, 1937.  Strater explained, “I caught a tremendous big fish in Bimini.  It was a great feat and I was very much the local hero.  But Hemingway stood in front of me every time the fish was photographed.  He’d stand between the camera and fish so he would be visible and I would not.”  Hemingway got credit for catching Strater’s fish and enraged his friend by refusing to tell the truth.  The artist said, “I was curious whether Hemingway would write in a denial in Time. Nooooooo.”

Hemingway had always been solicitous about Maggie’s poor health.  But in August 1942, when the Straters divorced and he was having problems with his second ill-fated marriage, he expressed resentment about the artist placing his wife ahead of himself and asked a mutual friend: “What do you know about Mike Strater getting married? . . . If Maggie Strater should be triumphed over after all these years, there is hope for our side in the great unending battle between men and women.”  Soon after his divorce Strater married Janet Meacham, who’d been a model in a department store.  They had one son, and divorced in 1946.  In 1951 he married Lois Thompson, who worked as a waitress in an Ogunquit restaurant.  They had three children (bringing his total to eight) and divorced in 1967.

At the beginning of their careers the young Hemingway and Strater shared a passion for boxing and Spain, an admiration for Pound, a professional interest in writing and painting.  Strater’s portraits enhanced Hemingway’s reputation and increased his fame.  But the writer’s intense competitiveness led to a battle of egos and three bitter quarrels.  Eager to preserve the friendship, Hemingway was unusually guilt-ridden and  apologetic.  They discussed their marriage problems and the artist was attracted to the writer’s charismatic character.  Despite all their conflicts, when Hemingway died Strater forgave and praised him: “he was not easy to get along with at times; but he had such overpowering charm and aliveness that one was always glad to see him again.”

Jeffrey Meyers has published Hemingway: The Critical Heritage (1982), Hemingway: A Biography (1985) and Hemingway: Life into Art (2000).

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