He Inspired Hemingway Before Falling Out Over a Famous Fish

After serving as an inspiration for Ernest Hemingway’s stories, Henry Strater 1919 finally broke off his friendship with Hemingway over a fish. It was a great fish: a 14-foot, 1,000-pound marlin that Strater caught while fishing with Hemingway in the Bahamas. The problem was that Hemingway let the press believe he caught the fish, and also — this is why you can’t trust novelists — immortalized the drama of catching it in a tale that won him the Pulitzer and Nobel prizes.

Born in Kentucky, Strater served as the editor of The Daily Princetonian and wavered, for a time, between choosing a career as a writer or an artist. Like many of his classmates, he took a break from his studies to serve in World War I, driving ambulances for the Red Cross in France — much the same experience that started Hemingway’s career as a writer. “But after attending the Julian Academy for one month,” he said, referring to a painting school in Paris, “I decided I would rather sit before a beautiful woman than a typewriter.”

In France, Strater moved with the most famous figures of the Lost Generation, including James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, William Carlos Williams, and fellow Princetonian F. Scott Fitzgerald 1917. (Fitzgerald used him as a model for the character Burne Holiday in his novel This Side of Paradise: humorous, eccentric, and, like Strater himself, a pacifist who campaigned for anti-war causes as a student.) He met Hemingway in “an impromptu boxing match on a Paris street corner,” the Associated Press later reported, which, regrettably, was a very characteristic way to meet Hemingway.

“I had boxed in school, and I think I impressed Hemingway with my punch,” Strater said. “That’s the only way you could impress him.”

When Hemingway learned that Strater was a former ambulance driver who enjoyed boxing and fishing, the two became fast friends. He sat for several portraits by Strater — who was a well-known artist in his own right, with work that often appeared in prestigious salons — and used one of them for the frontispiece of the 1925 book In Our Time. He based some of his writing in that collection on Strater’s accounts of the bullfighting scene in Spain.

The event that led to the end of the friendship happened in 1935, when the two were fishing on Hemingway’s yacht off the coast of the Bahamas. “We fished for black marlin off Bimini for almost a month, and didn’t even get a strike,” the painter later said. “Then one day we decided to troll at a faster speed and I snagged a big one.”

Hemingway was in the habit of using a sawed-off rifle to shoot at sharks. When Strater brought the fish alongside the ship, Hemingway grabbed his rifle and — standing behind Strater and shooting past his head — shot at the fish instead, yelling, “Sharks, sharks!” If jealousy over what might be a record catch was his motivation, he succeeded: The shots roiled the water so much they attracted sharks, which ate away much of the fish by the time Strater could reel it in.

Still, what remained of the fish was a beauty, and when they brought it to shore, a huge crowd gathered to applaud the catch. A photographer took pictures; “Hemingway sidled up close to the fish, stuck out his chest, and got his picture taken as if he had caught it,” Strater said.

In 1952, Hemingway published the novella The Old Man and the Sea, which tells the story of a fisherman who struggles to land a record marlin, which is ultimately eaten by sharks before he can bring it in. A few years later, Time published a picture of Hemingway and the fish, Strater said: “The caption said something about this being the fish that Hemingway caught which inspired him to write The Old Man and the Sea.” Hemingway declined to write in a correction — the last blow to their friendship, which had been on cool terms since the fishing trip.

“Hem was a fine sportsman, but in this case too competitive,” Strater said. “Oh, he was very alive and more fun to be with than anyone I ever knew, but he could be a real S.O.B.”