Between sport and tragedy: Hemingway's passion for bullfighting

ABSTRACT

‘It is a sport’ writes Hemingway on the subject of bullfights in public places, ‘a very wild and primitive sport and, mainly, a true sport of amateurs. I fear however that because of danger of death which it implies, it never has great success among the sporting-men of America and England’ (Death in the afternoon, Gallimard, 1938, p. 27). Hemingway was interested in sport since his young age: athletic, a follower of sports at Oak Park's High School, fascinated by horse racing and later an enthusiast for deep sea fishing, hunting, boxing etc, in other words what we would call today the ‘extreme sports’, he had a passion for bullfighting in Spain, which he tested, although unsuccessfully. In his papers for the Toronto Weekly Star, his novel The Sun also rises published in 1926, and especially in his essay Death in the afternoon, a true treaty of bullfighting, he undertakes a close study of the specific techniques of this very particular sport; yet what interests him most of all is its artistic value. Art or sport? Such is the key question that he poses throughout the pages of this work, which are actually a deep reflection on the origins of the sport and the finality of art; the relations between sport and art are quite complex and, according to him, have to be reconsidered, since writing for him is also linked to moral and physical effort, and is even a kind of ‘intimate bullfighting’.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Thierry Ozwald ‘Maître de conférences’ HDR. Specialist of Stendhal and Mérimée's works, of the genre of the short novel too. He's in charge of the publication of part of Joseph Kessel's complete works for Pléiade collection.

Notes

1 In particular Wirt Williams, The Tragic Art of Ernest Hemingway (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1981); Ángel Capellán, Hemingway and the Hispanic world (UMI Research Press, 1985); Tony Castro, Looking for Hemingway: Spain, the Bullfights, and a Final Rite of Passage (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016); Debra A. Moddelmog and Suzanne del Gizzo, eds., Ernest Hemingway in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2013); Pierre Dupuy, Hemingway et l’Espagne (Paris: La Renaissance du Livre, 2001).

2 Written in collaboration with Sydney Franklin.

3 Paris, Gallimard, collection de la Pléiade, 1966 for Volume I, 1969 for Volume II, presented, compiled and annotated by Roger Asselineau.

4 Here, the author refutes the opinion of Jean Prévost in his preface to the French version of The Sun Also Rises (Le Soleil se lève aussi) in 1933 (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), 11. Jean Prévost indeed points out, although a little peremptorily in our opinion, that ‘Hemingway was nothing of a moralist and only a little of an analyst’. Much has been written since the 1950s on death, the sacred, and sport in his work: See in particular Melvin Backman, ‘Hemingway: The Matador and the Crucified’, in Modern Fiction Studies, 1955; Tom Burnam, ‘Primitivism and Masculinity in the Works of Ernest Hemingway’, in Modern Fiction Studies, 1955; Joseph Prud’Homme, Hemingway on Politics and Rebellion (New York: Routledge, 2010).

5 See Chapter I, 3.

6 See 36.

7 See 71. We must remember that, after the War, there was a rise in spectator sport, including blood sports, and many men seemed to be as unaffected as Jake and his colleagues.

8 Ibid., 81.

9 Ibid., loc.cit.

10 Ibid., 91. Cf. 131: Likewise in Pamplona, Mike Campbell and Brett Ashley ‘went to the pelota’.

11 They have to walk across an icy river. ‘It was a long walk and the country was very fine, but we were tired when we came down the steep road that led out of the wooded hills into the valley of the Rio de la Fábrica’ (118).

12 Ibid., 120.

13 See 125: ‘We found a stream with a pool deep enough to swim in’. They still go swimming in San Sebastian after the psychological drama that has just taken place. Such is the epilogue contained in Chapter XIX (235 and 237): on two occasions, Jake succumbs sensually to the pleasures of swimming in the ‘harbor’ or ‘bay’ of San Sebastian, la Concha, diving and swimming out to the raft, but this time he is alone. A magnificent moment of solitude and introspection; yet even here his obsession with challenge takes over: ‘I thought I would like to swim across the bay but I was afraid of cramp’ (238).

14 Ibid., 125.

15 Ibid., 191–2.

16 Ibid., 238.

17 L’Auto-Vélo, newspaper founded by Henri Desgrange, known for his clearly anti-Dreyfusard convictions, was the main daily (then weekly) sports newspaper in France from 1900 to 1944. It was predecessor to L’Équipe and the founder of the Tour de France.

18 Reference here is to the work of Georges Bataille, composed mainly after the Second World War. Bataille had moreover attended a fatal bullfight in Madrid in 1922, which left him traumatised. It should be noted that in 1946, he published a critical text in Actualité concerning For Whom the Bell Tolls.

19 See 148: ‘Cohn was never drunk’.

20 See 152. Paul Johnson shows that this is one of the author's features: ‘[In 1948] he admitted drinking sixteen [Papa-Doubles (the Havana drink named after him, a mixture of rum, grapefruit and maraschino)] in one night. He boasted to his publisher that he had begun an evening with absinthe, dispatched a bottle of wine at dinner, switched to a vodka session, then ‘battened it down with whiskys and soda till 3 am’ […] There was a strong element of public bravado in his drinking’. (Intellectuals, HarperCollins, 1988, ‘The Deep Waters of Ernest Hemingway’), 169.

21 See Chapter II, 9.

22 (Paris: Gallimard, 1938). It was a case of settling a score with Aldous Huxley (191–192).

23 See 54.

24 See Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969), Volume I, 1899–1936, IV, Chapter 17, 126: ‘Although he often said that nothing else could touch bullfighting, Ernest's passion for other sports continued unabated’. Baker also highlights the fact that prior to the publication of The Sun Also Rises, Alfred Flechtheim gave Hemingway ‘an advance on a book on bullfighting’, which would be the third of a series devoted to sport (after horses and boxing).

25 Death in the Afternoon, 214–16.

26 Ibid., 217.

27 Ibid., 221.

28 Ibid., Chapter Two, 16.

29 See 97.

30 Apollinaire, ‘Le Voyageur’ (in Alcools).

31 Ibid., 245.

32 Ibid., 209.

33 See Chapter IV, 43.

34 The Ronda Festival, from May 20 to 22 (not to be confused with its summer replica, the feria held at the beginning of September which was introduced at a later stage) continues to commemorate these historical events, and bullfighting still occupies a preponderant place there.

35 Jake says he is ‘technically’ a Catholic (124) … We may remember here just how much Hemingway was affected by his upbringing: ‘The moral code of broadstream Protestantism was minutely enforced by both parents and any infringements severely punished […] His mother wanted him to be a conventional Protestant hero, non-smoking, non-drinking, chaste before marriage, faithful within it and at all times to honour and obey his parents, especially his mother’ (Paul Johnson, Intellectuals, 144).

36 See 213.

37 See more particularly La Violence et le Sacré (Paris, Grasset, 1972) and Le Bouc émissaire (Paris, Grasset, 1982).

38 Ibid., loc.cit.

39 The Sun Also Rises, Chapter XVIII, 216.

40 Death in the Afternoon, 91–2.

41 Ibid., 166–7. On the subject, it is interesting to read the short story L’Invincible (in Espagne et taureaux) which is the best possible illustration of this.

42 See Death in the Afternoon, Chapter Two, 24: ‘Sometimes […] the populace [gets] out of control ; everyone swarming on [the bull] at once with knives, daggers, butcher knives and rocks; a man perhaps between his horns, being swung up and down, another flying through the air, surely several holding his tail, a swarm of choppers, thrusters and stabbers pushing into him, laying on him or cutting up at him until he sways and goes down. All amateur or group killing is a very barbarous, messy, though exciting business and is a long way from the ritual of the formal bullfight’.

43 See 232.

44 Ibid., 152.

45 They are unable to consider themselves as real aficionados and, as a result, feel somewhat ashamed of themselves. (cf. The Sun Also Rises, 115 and 132).

46 ‘Go and commit suicide with the bulls’ is how Bill sees the encierros. As for Brett, she is fascinated by the violence of the bull (cf. 139).

47 The novel, similar to Stendhal's Armance, may also be read as an allegory of powerlessness.

48 The virulent short story entitled The Mother of a Queen (in the collection Winner Take Nothing, New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1933) clearly establishes the link between the prospectless, failed matador and homosexuality.

49 Ibid., ch. XVIII, 215. See also, in Death in the Afternoon, the whole discussion on the subject with the old lady (Chapter Seven, 64).

50 Ibid., 210.

51 Ibid., 203.

52 Ibid., 184.

53 Ibid., 141.

54 See 114.

55 Ibid., 162.

56 Death in the Afternoon, Chapter One, 11.

57 The Sun Also Rises, 53.

58 Ibid., 205.

59 Ibid., 197.

60 Death in the Afternoon, 22.

61 It seems that sport is perceived as degenerescence, a form of weakness: Cohn, for example, abandons tennis straight off when he begins to court Brett Ashley who has a knack of emasculating her lovers (cf. The Sun Also Rises, 45).

62 A secularised, desacralized (or rather dys-sacralized), asepticized and somewhat puritanic means. On the subject, see how the fight between an Austrian boxer and a Black American boxer degenerates into a settling of scores outside the ring (The Sun Also Rises, 71).

63 In The Sun Also Rises, the members of the small group of American tourists size each other up according to both their sporting qualifications and military service record: ‘Were you in the war?’ Robert Cohn defiantly asks Mike Campbell (134). See also Carlos Baker, Hemingway, A Life History, op.cit., II, Chapter 5, 38: ‘I Was an Awful Dope When I Went to the Last War’ said Hemingway in 1942. ‘I can remember just thinking that we were the home team and the Austrians were the visiting team’ (letter to Maxwell Perkins).

64 Described itself as a parody of the heroic Spanish universe (see the bragging of a cycling team manager concerning the Tour de France, 236).