The Dangerous Summer – Ernest Hemingway, 1960 [1985] ★★

A Farewell to Death

Ernest Hemingway died in 1961 but that didn’t stop him pumping out product for the next 50 years. Only Jimi Hendrix’s estate was busier. In 1985-1986, Hemingway fans had three new books to choose from, a novel, a collection of early articles, and a late-in-life memoir.

Imagine how thrilling it must have been to learn the memoir detailed Hemingway’s rediscovery of bullfighting and the land which spawned it, Spain? Together, these are key ingredients in two of Papa’s most beloved works, The Sun Also Rises and Death In The Afternoon. What could possibly be wrong?

Nothing, so long as the reader doesn’t expect the same kind of transportive experience. The Dangerous Summer mostly delivers the goods, a summer highlighted by a pair of brilliant matadors. It manages to be straightforward, amusing, piquant, and somewhat dull.

Luis Miguel Dominguin was one of the most famous bullfighters of his or any other time, a world-famous celebrity notorious for stealing Ava Gardner from Frank Sinatra. His brother-in-law, Antonio Ordóñez, was an up-and-comer whose growing legion of fans included Hemingway.

For America’s most famous aficionado, Ordóñez was more than a rooting interest. He was a muse:

Antonio almost made me choke up with the cape. Not the kind of choking where people sob like the classic picture of the Frenchman at the Fall of France but the kind where your chest and throat tighten up and your eyes dim seeing something that you thought was dead and done with come to life before you. It was being done more purely, more beautifully and closer and more dangerously than it could be done and he was controlling the danger and measuring it exactly to a micrometric proportion.

The fact Hemingway can write like that about Ordóñez impresses me a great deal. What impressed me less was how he does so much of it.

Ernest Hemingway and the object of his affection in the ring, Antonio Ordóñez, in 1959. Hemingway says he called Antonio "socio," Spanish for partner. "We called each other this to skip emotion," Hemingway adds.
Image from https://stevenewmanwriter.medium.com/ernest-hemingway-the-dangerous-summer-85ad28d5b03

The year is 1959. A few years before, Hemingway had returned to Spain for the first time since the fall of the socialist regime there. Now he was back again, on assignment from Life magazine to cover bullfighting. In the autumn of his years, could he rekindle his passion for a sport that had meant so much to him as a younger man?

The chance to see “a new generation of fighters” drew him:

I had known their fathers, some of them very well, but after some of them died and others lost out to fear or other causes I had resolved never to have a bullfighter for a friend again because I suffered too much for them and with them when they could not cope with the bull from fear or the incapacity that fear brings.

That resolution died a quick death, it seems. Antonio Ordóñez emerges early on as someone Hemingway cannot spend enough time watching, in or out of the bullring. When he is on the road, Hemingway shares the ride. When he is injured, Hemingway is at his hospital bedside, smelling used bandages for signs of infection.

This access might have allowed Hemingway some conversations about what it was that drew his friend to become a torero. But Hemingway is too much in awe to question Ordóñez about anything. He writes about the man like a puppy with a pencil.

Danger and the matador: Both Ordonez and Dominquin were injured badly in the course of the book, thus its title. "Today he was going to pay out for every advantage he had ever taken of any bull with the sword," is how Hemingway foreshadows one serious goring.
Image from https://www.aljazeera.com/sports/2016/9/10/thousands-in-spains-madrid-call-for-bullfighting-ban

Dominguin, by contrast, is presented fighting weaker bulls and employing clumsy tricks to rouse the crowd. Hemingway had had a friendly relationship with the older matador, but the narrative reveals a chill forming as his favoritism for Ordóñez became clear:

I did not bother Miguel nor ask any questions because he knew I was in Antonio’s camp now. We were still good friends but since I had seen his work and studied him with different types of bulls I was convinced he was a great bullfighter and Antonio was an all-time great fighter.

The more he praises Ordóñez, the deeper you sense Hemingway plugging into his younger, more vital self. He may not sell you, but he sold himself. “What a man Ernesto would be if he could only write,” Dominquin says late in the narrative, a quip with an ocean of meaning.

In a long introduction that takes up more than a sixth of the book, James A. Michener claims Hemingway misrepresented the true situation on the ground that summer of 1959. Ordóñez was not so great as Hemingway made him out to be, nor was Dominquin so humbled. Michener adds that Hemingway “abused the position of the writer” by siding so heavily with Ordóñez. No argument here.

I wondered at times how much of the rivalry was in Hemingway’s head. After all, bullfighting is not a competitive sport, at least not how in the way it goes down. Did Dominquin really need to prove himself the way Ordóñez did? If he didn’t live up to his past greatness after years out of the ring, would the public be unforgiving or pleased by what they got?

Dominquin takes in a bullfight in the company of his then-lover, Ava Gardner, sometime in the 1950s. Although Ava was married to Frank Sinatra, their romance became the stuff of legend before ultimately burning itself out.
Image from https://www.larazon.es/cultura/cuando-ava-no-quiso-casarse-con-dominguin-KJ11094824/

Whatever its objective merit, the rivalry gets played up by the author to the near-exclusion of other vital themes, the first of these being Hemingway’s return to Spain.

There is a daunting moment early in the book, during his first visit back in 1953, when Hemingway is stopped by a guard who recognizes his name. When Hemingway reluctantly admits to being the famous writer, the guard proclaims himself an admirer and offers help with customs.

It is not clear whether Hemingway ran into any trouble for supporting the losing side against the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. For an infamous fascist, Franco ran his nation under a loose rein. Hemingway seems to have been threatened more by high blood pressure or a blocked aorta than authoritarian oppression:

We drank sangria, red wine with fresh orange and lemon juice in it, served in big pitchers and ate local sausages to start with, fresh tuna, fresh prawns, and crisp fried octopus tentacles that tasted like lobster. Then some ate steaks and others roasted or grilled chicken with saffron yellow rice with pimentos and clams in it. It was a very moderate meal by Valencian standards and the woman who owned the place was worried that we would go away hungry.

Spanish cuisine is a wonder like no other, and Hemingway provides a chef's tour when not watching the bulls. "The wine was as good as when you were twenty-one, and the food as marvelous as always," he writes of Pamplona.
Image from https://photodune.net/item/sumptuous-spanish-feast-including-ham-grilled-prawns-cheese-and-tapas/46670757

Say what you will about Hemingway, he was in his element in Spain and knew how to paint vibrant word pictures for the reader. There is some of the same wan humor and warmth you get reading his more famous posthumous memoir, A Moveable Feast. He describes the dangerous roads, a delicious roadside picnic, and a pair of post-coital cranes.

Occasionally he visits a bar where we watch him get good and drunk with his friends, and hear out a loudmouth who calls him a has-been. Depression was a constant companion, as we know from the fact he committed suicide two years later, but Spain offered a brief oasis from the worst of that condition:

There were the same songs and good new ones that cracked and suddenly pounded onto the drums and the pipes. The faces that were young once were old as mine but everyone remembered how we were. The eyes had not changed and nobody was fat. No mouths were bitter no matter what the eyes had seen. Bitter lines around the mouth are the first signs of defeat. Nobody was defeated.

He also visits an old battlefield of the Spanish Civil War, noting how quickly the signs of combat fade. “I thought how a bulldozer does more violence to a hill than the death of a brigade,” he writes.

Part 1 of "The Dangerous Summer was featured on the cover of Life magazine. Reaction to the heavily-edited two-part series was fairly negative. "We've read all this before," is how James Michener summarizes it in his introduction.
Image from https://www.allposters.com/-sp/LIFE-Hemingway-Dangerous-Summer-Posters_i14505264_.htm 

The book never strays for long from the arena, however. Hemingway’s accounts of the fighting dazzle with flashy claims, but lack for color or depth. Not that Death In The Afternoon was very detailed; what made that book so special was the wide lens it gave to what bullfighting is, to capture so many different aspects and connect it to a metaphor for life.

Here, what was objective becomes subjective. Either he tells us how well Ordóñez performed on a given day, or else how he was undone by hard winds or a clumsy picador injuring the bull too early. Several times Hemingway complains how a local magistrate withheld the cutting of ear or tail in recognition of Ordóñez’s achievement that afternoon.

There is just too much hyperbole: “The murmuring started in the crowd and then the shouting began on each incredibly beautiful pass. Then Antonio was doing it all to music and keeping it as pure as mathematics and as warm, as exciting and as stirring as love. I knew he loved bulls and I knew he understood them as a scientist.”

A veronica is when a matador incites a bull to make a close pass at him while controlling the animal's path with his cape. According to Hemingway, this was Ordonez's specialty: "It was the complete naturalness and the classic simplicity as he watched the death go by him as though he was overseeing it..." Here we see Ordonez's grandson Francisco Rivera Ordonez at work in 2007.
Photo by Cristina Quicler from https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna29736302

However he tries to present it, bullfighting is not a competitive sport. Yes, the matador can die in the ring, but he doesn’t score points against other matadors so much as by seizing the moment in a way that makes it live in the minds of those who observe it. As he put it in Death In The Afternoon: It is an art that deals with death, and death wipes it out.

I wondered after reading it how Ordóñez and Dominquin felt about the way they were presented. I doubt it was all in Hemingway’s head, but they must have felt some awkwardness at family gatherings.

According to Michener, the version of this that appeared in Life magazine in 1960 was significantly cut down from Hemingway’s manuscript. Much of the same treatment seemed to have occurred here. Normally I would wonder at what was left on the cutting room floor, so to speak, with a writer I admire describing a land I love. But the stifling two-man show you get here, with occasional attention paid to one of their taurine victims, isn’t something I needed to read more about.