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Dr. William Gallagher is on a quest. The Bangor dermatologist is not searching for the Holy Grail or a cure for the skin diseases he treats. Gallagher is seeking to understand and define the friendship between a writer whose style transformed American literature and a Maine painter whose importance is valued more in his home state than it is by the art world.
Gallagher, who moved to Bangor in 1985, stumbled upon the lifelong friendship between Ernest Hemingway and Waldo Peirce a little over two years ago. The lives of the two men, who came of age during World War I, quickly became an obsession for the physician. Gallagher’s extensive research has led him from the Searsport schools to the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
“It all started when I signed up for a Hemingway look-alike contest in Key West,” said Gallagher from his home and office on State and Bellevue streets in Bangor. “But I don’t have enough hair to win the big one.”
Like the men he’s studying, Gallagher, 66, is a big man, more than 6 feet tall. He bears a striking resemblance to Hemingway in his latter years, except for the doctor’s pate. Although, Peirce and Hemingway’s beards came and went during their lifetimes, the two men had much more in common than facial hair, according to Gallagher, who has read many of the letters they wrote to each other over the years.
“They had so much fun together,” he said. “Both were very bright guys, who loved to have a good time. Just from their letters, they must have had so much intellect. It seems like they had a lot of fun talking to each other. Their letters are full of Spanish and French asides, plus they knew everybody. They knew [Pablo] Picasso, Sylvia Beach, Gertrude Stein, John Dos Passos. They knew everybody.”
Both men served in the American Friends Ambulance Service in France during World War I before the United States entered the Great War. Both spoke several languages, were avid sportsmen, world travelers and heavy drinkers. They each were married four times, although Peirce was the father of five children while Hemingway had just three.
Peirce was born in Bangor on Dec. 17, 1884, the son of a lumber baron. Hemingway, the first son of a doctor, was born 15 years later in Oak Park, Ill. The two often used friends in their art – Peirce using them as subjects for his paintings; Hemingway turning them into characters for his novels. After World War I, the two were part of a lively group of expatriates who lived in Paris and were dubbed “the lost generation.” Gallagher believes they met in 1926 or ’27.
“I don’t actually know exactly when they met, which is driving me kind of crazy,” said the physician. “If I’m becoming this type of Hemingway-Peirce person, I should know the exact moment they met, but I don’t know. I know they both went to parties at Ford Maddox Ford’s house in Paris, so that could be where they met.”
Gallagher, however, is sure when the two men took their first of many trips together. Peirce immortalized his first trip with Hemingway to Pamplona, Spain, the way he marked many events in his life large and small – by painting it.
“Fiesta de St. Firmin,” owned by the Colby College Museum of Art, shows the traditional running of the bulls as they enter the arena. Hemingway is the man fighting the bull in the center of the painting and Peirce is the man in the lower right corner running away. A man in a hat, who appears in many of Peirce’s paintings, is in the lower left corner.
“I saw the painting at Colby and it took my breath away,” said Gallagher. “I could hear the bulls coming at me. I have seen pictures [photographs] from the ’20s of the event and this looks very much like it.”
Colby also owns small scrapbooks or notebooks that Peirce carried with him on his 1927 trip to Pamplona with Hemingway. They are filled with sketches and watercolors of people and scenes that made their way into the larger painting. As he did with much of his work, Peirce painted smaller pieces that were sections of larger paintings, said Gallagher. He did this with “Fiesta de St. Firmin” and many other works.
Peirce also went deep-sea fishing with Hemingway in Key West and painted several portraits of his friend. One made the cover of Time magazine in 1929. The artist also did several paintings of a legendary event in the two sport fishermen’s lives – the day Hemingway shot a shark that “attacked” their boat. The artist also painted Key West nightlife at Sloppy Joe’s, the bar the two men frequented regularly.
“After Key West, they never really met much,” said Gallagher. “Basically, they lived at other ends of the country. They still stayed in touch, but not as much. In ’59, [two years before his suicide] Hemingway was living in Idaho, but decided to stop off in Tucson where Peirce was wintering. It was a great get together. Ellen [Peirce’s fourth wife and widow] sent me a letter describing it.
“They hadn’t seen each other for a long time and talked about the old days in Paris. It must have been wonderful – these two old giants of the arts getting together. I really wish I could have heard some of that. Hemingway didn’t stay friends with very many people from the Paris days. He had this tendency to alienate people, push them away and ruin friendships, but Peirce was his buddy forever.”
Gallagher is sharing what he’s learned about this unusual friendship. Early this year he published a short piece in Harvard Magazine. The doctor shares his alma mater with Peirce. Last month, he gave a lecture at the Bangor Public Library. This summer, he will deliver a paper titled “Peirce and Hemingway: Mirror Images – Their Intertwining Lives” at a meeting of the Hemingway Society in Milan, Italy. So far, he’s collected 150 digital images and is toying with the idea of writing a book.
The doctor’s obsession with Peirce not only has turned him into a writer and lecturer, but an art collector as well. Gallagher recently purchased two of Peirce’s paintings. One is of Peirce’s daughter Anna Gabrielle, the other of the painter’s Parisian model and lover who died in the 1917 influenza epidemic.
Peirce’s paintings are scattered in museums, private collections and public buildings throughout the state. The Bangor Public Library owns a painting of a street festival or procession in Tunisia. Just a few blocks away, the Jewish Community Council has a painting that shows a section of the larger work.
The University of Maine boasts 81 Peirce works, according to Wally Mason of the University of Maine Art Museum. The drawings, oil paintings and watercolors were donated between 1954 and ’68 and include many given by the artist himself. In 1985, UMaine did a retrospective on Peirce and the portrait the artist drew of his mother was exhibited in last year’s portrait show.
“My opinion of Peirce’s work is based on what we have,” said Mason. “Many of his early works are really terrific and we have a number of those early works. Later in his life, I feel his paintings kind of fell into mediocrity. He could draw, there’s no doubt about that, but I think he did his best work when the act of making the work was wedded to the process as it is in watercolors and drawings. His portraits are most interesting.”
It is not the art that spurs Gallagher on. It is the connections and the coincidences. It’s the people who hear about the doctor’s interest in the artist, then invite him into their homes to see their Waldo Peirce painting.
“There are a lot of these things that are just fantastic connections,” said the dermatologist. “I went down to talk with the editor of Harvard magazine and she tells me about this book called ‘Friends of France,’ published in 1916. I found it in the Bangor Public Library and in it Peirce wrote a piece about the war, his experience and the death of this friend of his Richard Hall.
“I kept thinking, Where am I going to get this? So, I go down to Camden to look at my painting [of Anna], which has been restored, and to get it framed. There’s a used bookstore just up the street, so I went in and I asked, “Do you have any books on the First World War?” And, there it was, ‘The Friends of France.'”
He also saw Peirce’s notebooks at Colby on a Wednesday and later that week had a patient with the initials F.F. Gallagher knew an F.F. owned one of Peirce’s paintings of Sloppy Joe’s in Key West. It turned out that his patient’s daughter had it in her home in suburban Washington, D.C., not far from where Gallagher’s daughter lives. When he was doing research at the Smithsonian, he was able to see his patient’s Peirce.
Gallagher’s also had conversations with Peirce’s plumber and the son of a former housekeeper. Peirce gave paintings away as thank-you gifts, birthday presents and Christmas cards. The physician said the experts estimate Peirce painted more than 2,000 pieces before his death in 1980.The artist is buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in Bangor.
There are still those nagging questions Gallagher has not answered such as when and where the painter and the writer actually met for the first time. Or, if Hemingway based the character Tom Hudson in “To Have and Have Not” on Waldo Peirce.
“This whole search has been a kick,” Gallagher said of his quest so far. “I’ve learned so much. I’ve learned about paintings. I’ve learned about the First World War. I’ve learned about the ’20s in Paris. One thing just leads to another. One of Hemingway’s biographies said, ‘One question obviously leads to another question. The questions have been a pursuit and the pursuit true happiness.’ I thought that was marvelous.”
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