Looking for Hemingway by Castro Tony;

Author:Castro, Tony;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 4746934
Publisher: Lyons Press

10Bullfighting as Art

Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter’s honor.

—ERNEST HEMINGWAY

ERNEST HEMINGWAY’S FRIEND AND BIOGRAPHER A. E. HOTCHNER ONCE said that in Spain, Ernest used bullfighting as his way to cool out from his writing—bullfighting and everything surrounding bullfighting, from the drinking and eating to the touring and the ambiance of the corridas. Mary Hemingway, much like his three former wives, could never fully understand Ernest’s obsession with a sport, if it were that, that could be so brutally cruel to animals. But for some reason, Hemingway became obsessed with bullfighting from the moment he attended his first corrida—the glorification of blood, the matador’s artistry of passes with the cape, and finally, the sword and the art of the kill. For Hemingway, it seemed to be working out some personal philosophy about death, which he explored in The Sun Also Rises and again in Death in the Afternoon. Would Hemingway, if he had been able, have chosen to become a matador over a writer? Had this been part of the death wish—rushing into war, even if only as an ambulance driver, when he had been denied admission as a soldier, or the heroics beyond reporting in the Spanish Civil War and again in World War II?

Never was the kinship between obsession and the need for diversion in Hemingway truer than during the summer of 1959 in Spain, following the mano a mano between Antonio Ordoñez and Luis Miguel Dominguín. Hemingway was there to write about their much-anticipated showdown in the bullring, and it would prove to be both the inspiration and the distraction that his withering talents needed. It was more than three decades since he had first ventured to Spain from Paris, where he lived with Hadley on the Left Bank at the Hotel Jacob, 74 rue Cardinal Lemoine, and later at 113 rue Notre Dame des Champs. That had been the young, supremely confident Hemingway without much more than newspaper bylines and short stories to his credit. He had become arguably the world’s greatest man of letters of the twentieth century up to that time, though he was now simply an old luminary, increasingly struggling to make his way through the mental cobwebs of time.

In 1923, sitting at Gertrude Stein’s flat at 27 rue de Fleurus, Hemingway had been urged to go to Pamplona, as she enticed him with stories of how the locals ran with the bulls through the streets in the morning, then partied with the matadors before they killed the bulls in the evening. It took only one visit to Pamplona for it to become an obsession that Hemingway would never be able to shake, nor would he want to. In 1923, though, Pamplona was barely in its infancy compared to what it would become. Now it has become the famous home of the Feria de San Fermín, largely because of Hemingway and the incredible fame it gained from The Sun Also Rises.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.