Imagine the life of a Spanish bullfighter, circa 1931. You risk life and limb in an era before modern medicine can treat your worst injuries or video can immortalize your finest kills. There’s a depression on, civil war looming and a fanbase that tends to throw things at you when annoyed.
Now add to all this pain some know-it-all American who wants to immortalize you by calling the world’s attentions on your shabby technique in the ring, your homely face, and even your lack of courage at doing something no sane person would try.
Ernest Hemingway skewers any number of matadors in his famous memoir about watching them fight, Death In The Afternoon:
It was the most shameful season any matador had ever had up until that year in bullfighting. What had happened was that the horn wound, the first real goring, had taken all his valor. He never got it back. He had too much imagination. [on Cayetano Ordonez]
In appearance he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house, a good, mature, but rather thick-jointed figure, and the self-satisfaction of a popular actor. [on Domingo Lopez Ortega]
He is the only bullfighter I have been glad to see gored; but goring him is no solution since he behaves much worse on coming out of the hospital than before he went in. [on Cagancho]
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| Hemingway writes: "You cannot have a great bullfighter that is not gored
sooner or later, but if you gore him too early, too often and too young he will
never be the bullfighter he might have been if the bulls had respected him." Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish-style_bullfighting |
Even when Hemingway does enjoy a matador’s work, he can’t resist telling how much he falls short of some classic metric. Or when discussing the two matadors whom he regards as the best of recent time, Joselito and Juan Belmonte, he bemoans how their close work had a downside because it shined best against smaller bulls. Their showcraft disincentivized breeders from breeding bigger and better bulls.
Hemingway is pompous, a windbag, a borderline psychotic when he gets going, but all the while a galvanizing example of how writing can succeed as both art and craft. You feel the passion in every sentence, however ill-tempered. Death In The Afternoon encapsulates Hemingway’s self-portrait of writer as hero and boor.
The subject on the surface is bulls and the sport of killing them in a ring; underneath it is all about death. Hemingway makes no secret how much he relishes this point. “Killing cleanly and in a way which gives you aesthetic pleasure and pride has always been one of the greatest enjoyments of a part of the human race,” he writes.
That this point of view will put off many readers is something Hemingway acknowledges early and often. He is alternately philosophical, commiserative, and combative about it. He is not apologetic, not about the killing of bulls, not about horses also killed in the ring, and not about the men who sometimes die, too.
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| Hemingway in the 1920s, with friend. His love of bullfighting took off in Pamplona, Spain, which also served as a setting in his debut novel, The Sun Also Rises. He saw his first bullfight there in 1923. Image from https://www.pbs.org/hemingwayadventure/spain.html |
Rather he makes a case that death and suffering are the sum of life, its essence and ultimate truths. Only art lends them meaning. Of all art, Hemingway finds bullfighting the truest and most inspiring because of how close it gets to the bone of the matter, to death, and how transitorily it is experienced. All art, even the most lasting, ultimately fades; only in bullfighting is that impermanence accepted and understood:
If it were permanent it could be one of the major arts, but it is not and so it finishes with whoever makes it, while a major art cannot even be judged until the unimportant physical rottenness of whoever made it is well buried. It is an art that deals with death, and death wipes it out.
Death In The Afternoon is not the first book to read if you want to know Hemingway. It is too acerbic, too apersonal, too focused on a rather narrow subject. But if you have read Hemingway and like what you read, this is a good book to take that interest to the next level. You really get a sense of the writer here. For whatever reason, bullfighting fascinated Hemingway deeply, and he communicates that very well.
The book goes into a lot of detail about its subject. How bulls are bred for the ring, how they are chosen for combat and sized up by the matador’s retainers, how different parts of Spain experience bullfighting, how a matador will underpay the picadors and banderilleros working for him as a show of inherent masculinity or perform tricks in the ring to distract spectators from his avoidance of real danger.
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| A bull lines up a matador against the barrera, a short wooden wall that separates the bullring from the stands. Matadors and others use it sometimes as a handy escape route. "It is from the barrera that you see danger and learn to appreciate it," Hemingway writes. Image from https://www.pbs.org/hemingwayadventure/spain.html |
Hemingway inveighs a lot about this latter point, describing it as “decadence” born of emulating legends who came before, rather than developing one’s own style:
It may seem foolish to speak of almost killing such an animal as a fighting bull with a cape. Of course you could not kill, but you can so damage the spinal column, twist the legs and lame the animal and, by abusing its bravery, force it to charge uselessly again and again, each time recorting it ferociously, that you may tire it, lame it, and deprive it of all speed and a great part of its natural forces.
He convinces, but also grows shrill after a while. It wasn’t like Hemingway was a grizzled observer. By the time of Death’s publication he had been following the bulls less than ten years, all while simultaneously pursuing a rather successful career as a novelist.
But something clearly spoke to him when watching corridas. When done well, the killing of a bull resonated in his heart like nothing else he ever experienced: “It is impossible to believe the emotional and spiritual intensity, and pure, classic beauty that can be produced by a man, an animal, and a piece of scarlet serge draped over a stick.”
Part of that attraction had to do with the setting. If I had to describe the book in a single phrase, it would be a travel guide with a body count. Hemingway found Spain an enchantingly unusual country, a continent in itself somewhat disconnected geographically and culturally from the larger European continent it was technically part of.
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| Should you find yourself in Pamplona, Spain some July, don't do this. Rather, watch others do this from a safe height. The Running of the Bulls is an annual tradition there that often leaves at least one participant hospitalized...or worse. Photo by Rick Steves from https://www.ricksteves.com/watch-read-listen/read/articles/pamplonas-running-of-the-bulls |
Understanding death, he notes approvingly, has long been part of Spain’s rich culture and traditions. Whether or not they believe in another life to come, they know the completeness of death in the material world and honor that weight collectively by facing it in the ring:
The bullfight is not a sport in the Anglo-Saxon sense of the word, that is, it is not an equal contest or an attempt at an equal contest between a bull and a man. Rather it is a tragedy; the death of the bull, which is played, more or less well, by the bull and the man involved and in which there is danger for the man but certain death for the animal.
It is half sport, half ritual by Hemingway’s accounting. There is an element of competitiveness in how masterfully matadors face the challenge, but there is also the knowledge death is never far away. Hemingway savors this fact, most notably and cruelly in his pleasure at the killing of the horses.
The horses are ridden by picadors, who lance the bull in preparation for the matador’s finale at the end of each fight. Because the bulls don’t like this, they tend to fight back by driving their horns into a horse’s belly when a rider drives one in, often killing it. Before the writing of the book, the Spanish government passed a law to provide a modicum of protection to the horses, padding their bellies to cushion the horn points.
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| Today the picador's mount wears more padding than in Hemingway's time. The object is the same: Lance the bull's mound of muscle just over the horns (or morrillo) so the bull is properly taxed before the matador begins the business of killing him. Image from https://focusedcollection.com/517123980/stock-photo-unrecognizable-picador-lance-riding-horse.html |
Hemingway hated this. The bulls needed the success of drawing blood, he writes, in order to be properly prepared for the closer work of the matador with his muleta. Also, it doesn’t help the horses, who still die from the force of the bull’s charge, only offstage.
I frankly think the guy was sadistic. When he writes “the death of the horse tends to be comic while that of the bull is tragic,” I have to wonder, and also later when he complains about a pair of horse dealers who don’t kill their injured animals in the ring but bring them out to patch them up. It’s just because they are too cheap to part with a damaged mount, and another sign of bullfighting’s decline.
The book comes with a thick glossary in the back, detailing hundreds of terms around bullfighting. Aburrimiento, for example, means “boredom, the predominant sensation of a bad bullfight. Can be alleviated slightly by cold beer. Unless beer is very cold the aburrimiento increases.”
Hemingway also wrote the captions under a series of photographs included in my paperback edition, such as a ghastly one of a dead matador on a table surrounded by men with serious faces. “Only two in the crowd are thinking about Granero,” he writes. “The others are all intent on how they will look in the photograph.”
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| Juan Belmonte, whose form bred many imitators but only one, Joselito, whom Hemingway regarded as an equal. During their rivalry, Hemingway writes "bullfighting for seven years had a golden age in spite of the fact it was being destroyed." Image from https://www.elmundo.es/cultura/toros/2020/04/08/5e8d9e4bfdddffec978b45aa.html |
In the main text, Hemingway takes many detours. He spends a lot of time decrying homosexuals, a subject that apparently bothered him. Religion did, too, and he finds a way to denounce the Old Master El Greco on both these points. In the last chapter, Hemingway goes on about all the things he didn’t have time to include in the book, a free-association rant which includes one memorable image of a dead duck.
Death is also messy but more apt when Hemingway writes about what he knows, the business of writing. He presents here the metaphor of what the writer knows being like an iceberg where only the top needs to be visible, and the need to be always working at one’s craft:
The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before; and not too damned much after.
Hemingway’s approach to art was harsh and unsparing, and I found myself liking him less the more of this I read. But Death In The Afternoon is fine reading all the way through, a journey inside a very complicated man’s heart via his travels in a country he loved.
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