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1925 - Hemingway (right from center)
tempts the padded horned bull |
HEMINGWAY AND BULLFIGHTING
[Excerpts from José Luis Castillo-Puche's Hemingway in Spain:A Personal Reminiscence of Hemingway's Years in Spain .]
Since in the bullring Ernesto hoped to find not only the grace note of aft that embellishes life, but also the breath of immortality that would enable him to tolerate the nothingness of existence, the bullring came to be the one path of escape he attempted to follow.
...he had hung out above all in the callejon--the passageway for the matadors behind the wooden fence--seeking to learn the secret of Spanish stoicism.
The matador is like the celebrant of a sort of sacred rite, to use Hemingway's definition, or the depository of a sacred treasure, to use an irreverent but similar figure of speech. The torero is death's intermediary: he has the power to both give and receive it. And on approaching the mystery of death, it is not only his own death but a death that belongs to all those in the plaza de toros who are willing and able to receive it.
The bullfight involves a kind of liturgical emotion; it is a moving sacrifice that is almost religious in character.
"Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bullfighters." The Sun Also Rises
When Ernesto said that 'a crucifixion of six carefully selected Christs will take place in the Monumental Golgatha of Madrid,' he wasn't being blasphemous.
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Hemingway's first meeting with Antonio Ordóñez
Son of the bullfighter Niño de la Palma,who was the model for the young matador and hero of The Sun Also Rises. |
Bullfighting was a miraculous solution for him...he began to see life as the great corrida because it is so unpredictable. The corrida might be a few trancelike moments of great valor, an instant of serenity...it may also be helplessness, a ridiculous lack of guts, craven cowardice in the face of the brave bull.
You can't read For Whom the Bell Tolls without Ernesto or Robert Jordan or the guerrillas mentioning something to have to do with the bullring. Event the Spanish Civil War was only an extended metaphor to Ernesto: one long, tragic bullfight.
"Tell me, do you believe in God?"
And Ernesto replied in that half-joking, half-serious way of his, "Well, God to me is like the greatest killer of bulls ever."
"Life is one big bullring and there isn't anyway out of the ring for anyone."
I think one of the most naive things he ever did was to allow himself to get involved with the rivalries between toreros, and even worse, to begin inventing them--the great duel between Ordonez and Dominaguin, for instance.
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Goya - The Bullfight
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
What pained me to the most was realizing how badly Ernesto had been duped, misled and exploited by the bullfighting crowd, for though tauromachy is an art, it is also a cruel, pitiless world. How obvious it now was that the whole Dangerous Summer affair had been a snare and a delusion, a cheap trick, a farce that had been a major factor in precipitating Ernesto's ultimate fatal fit of depression and his utter disgust with everything.