November 2013

To Henry Strater,* Valencia, C. 24 July 1926

Dear Mike:

The pictures were swell and thanks for sending them. I am terribly sorry about your mother’s death. So is Hadley. She sends her love and her sympathy to you both. There is one thing about dying and that is that the good people do it. I have never yet known a shit to die altho if we live long enough it may happen.

You were awfully swell to me in N.Y. and don’t think I don’t remember it. We aren’t coming through in the fall and if we do will go by Galveston, Texas. Everything is all shot to hell in every direction but in the meantime there are eight bull fights here starting tomorrow. Gallo, Belmonte, Sanchez Mejias, Nino de la Palma and Villalta, Miuras, Villamartas, Concha y Sierras, Murubes, Perez Tabernos, Guadalests and Pablo Romeros. Hadley and I are down here together. Pamplona was grand. We were gypped out of Ondarria by Bumby getting the whoop cough and getting himself and Hadley and eventually me, coming from Madrid, quarantined on the Riviera in a former Villa of Scott Fitzgerald’s at Juan les Pins (Alpes Maritimes).

There isn’t any news that’s fit to print. I’m awfully glad you like the Torrents book and will have the novel fired to you by Scribners this fall just as soon as it’s out. We’ve just been conge-ed (given notice to quit) in Paris and have to go up and get things cleaned out by the 8th of August. Please remember Hadley to the Von Schlegell’s (sic) and all our love o you and maggie and the kids.

Write me care of the Guaranty in Paris. I do hope you were able to do something for your father–though it must be an awfully hopeless business to lose someone you’ve been in love with and made your life with.

It’s one of the swell things especially reserved for all of us. So Long, Mike, and write–

Yours always,

Hem

* Henry (Mike) Strater, American Painter (b. 1896, Louisville, Kentucky), Princeton, Class of 1919, first met EH in Pound’s Paris studio in the fall of 1922 and saw much of him in Paris, Rapallo, and later in Key West. In 1979 he compiled “an autobiography in color, Rocks, Nudes, and Flowers,” which contains his three portraits of EH.