A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon.

Review of A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon. Edited by Miriam Mandel. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004. 360 pp. Hardcover $90.

My favorite sentence in Miriam Mandel's intriguing collection of twelve essays appears in the final essay. Keneth Kinnamon's opening line in his chapter about the "legacy" of Death in the Afternoon reads: "All modern American taurine literature, comes from one book by Ernest Hemingway called Death in the Afternoon" (283). Part of the pleasure in Kinnamon's sentence lies in its good-natured parodic tickle. Although laughter lies beyond the parameters of Death in the Afternoon, its fleeting presence was most welcome after almost three hundred pages of understandable but none the less steady and sometimes tiresome solemnity. That said, Mandel and her scholarly companions (seven women and four men) traverse a vast territory in this, the most extensive exploration to date of Hemingway's longest and most complex work of non-fiction. In her introduction, Mandel identifies four main roads along which her companions travel, each intended to indicate direction and set boundaries. Delimitations cannot, of course, contain or explain so protean a work, but despite bumps and detours along the way, Mandel's roadmap does help. This review therefore follows her road markers.

1. Compositions, Sources, and Backgrounds

Hemingway began writing the text in mid-winter, 1930, then worked rigorously until its publication a year and a half later. What had begun as an illustrated treatise on the bullfight suffered delays along the way, one caused by a broken arm, yet another by a summer in Spain gathering photographs. Once the book was complete& Hemingway determined to play a role (albeit a futile one) helping to market ,a book already more or less orphaned by Scribner's uncertain advertising strategies, by the Depression, and by a predictable American lack of interest in bullfighting. Reviews were acceptable but neither they nor sales were comparable with those that had greeted The Sun Also Rises or A Farewell to Arms.

These and other interesting details abound in Robert W Trogdon's revealing essay, "The Composition, Revision, Publication, and Reception of Death in the Afternoon." Most notable, however, are his accounts of late textual revisions, some perhaps the result of advice from John Dos Passos (but not definitively. See Linda Wagner-Martin, below, p. 72). They include the still not adequately explained insertion of "A Natural History of the Dead" and alterations in the dialogue with the Old Lady, moderating some of its nastiness.

The dramatic climax of revision occurs in the final two chapters where Hemingway shifts his focus from the arena to the salon, from bullfighting to writing. The last two galleys of Chapter 20 discriminate between the local colorist, the commercial artist, and the writer who creates rather than describes. These passages, Trogdon says, reveal Hemingway as determined "to set the trend in literature and not merely to pander to the public's desires" (30). For whatever reason--commercial pressure, personal doubts--the entire revision was omitted from the published version. The composition of Death in the Afternoon is an exciting tale, and Trogdon tells it well.

Literary sources and background rather than textual alterations engage the other contributors to this section. Hemingway's failure to mention Lord Byron anywhere in Death in the Afternoon piques Lisa Tyler's interest. The, omission is indeed striking since Hemingway, despite denials of influence, had read in and about Byron since adolescence, and delighted, in references to himself as "the American Byron." In "'Devout Again by Cynicism': Lord Byron and Don Juan in Death in the Afternoon," Tyler sallies forth in relentless pursuit of parallels, her aim: to establish a near-sibling identity between the author/heroes of Don Juan and Death in the Afternoon. Witness in brief some of the evidence: each was handsome, suffered physical handicaps, but was physically aggressive; each was a hedonist (from cross-dressing to bi-sexuality, Pantagruelian exploits in meat and drink); each was awed by and drawn to the horrors of war; each relished virulent attacks against fellow writers; each indulged in digressive literary forms and held to self-assured insistence upon dour world views. Finally--with a bow to ala expert witness, Kay Redfield Jamison--both were probably bi-polar!

Gertrude Stein provides Linda Wagner-Martin somewhat more substantial evidence in "'I like you less and less': The Stein Subtext in Death in the Afternoon." Whereas Hemingway's debts to Byron ate at best inferential, those to Stein are more nearly factual--and therefore less forgivable. Stein's admiration for the bullfighter Joselito (which she relates on the first page of Death in the Afternoon--the only place she appears by name) and her own early appreciation of Spain and its culture (Geography and Plays, 1922) may have spurred Hemingway to outdo her without ever acknowledging debt. Besides, and much worse, Stein resembled his mother, martinets both, in manner and mien. For such sin, no redemption. Wagner-Martin details with exuberance Stein's hellish penance.

Making Stein the "Old Lady" is Wagner-Martin's most risky but also most persuasive stratagem, reducing Stein to the status of tourist, "more interested in the bodies of the young bullfighters than in their consummate arte," (62) or, rather liking the goring of the horse: "It seemed so sort of homey" [DIA 64]. She fares no better about writing, annoyed that "A Natural History of the Dead" failed to be like the Whittier's Snow Bound the Author had promised her. Before Stein disappears from the text, however, Wagner Martin insists that Hemingway demeaned her yet once more, mocking her lumpish appearance and intruding (ed., marginally credible) innuendo about her sexuality--not her lesbianism but a hint of her interest in the Author (68).

In Hemingway's gift copy to Stein, signed, "from her pal," he inscribed as well, "A Bitch is a Bitch is a Bitch is a Bitch" (62), No evidence exists that Stein ever opened the book.

Miriam Mandel's essay, "Subject and Author: The Literary Backgrounds of Death in the Afternoon," advises a reconsideration of how readers approach his non-fiction, urging a shift in emphasis from foreground to background. Why, she asks, do we read Death in the Afternoon? Not only because his treatise on bullfighting is the best available or deepens how we understand art, music, religion, or mob psychology. Nor entirely because it affords new insights into Hemingway's life, his aesthetic theories, his thoughts about death and love and war. What matters as well is that readers examine--as they have with his fiction--the reading that lay behind his creation of Death in the Afternoon, an enormous body of work that endowed his book with a resonance beyond any of its predecessors.

To enable such study, Mandel provides two annotated bibliographical lists, each focused on bullfighting and Spain, books and journals dating from the 18th century to the publication in 1932 of Death in the Afternoon. The first list is in English, the second in Spanish, French, and English, and works Hemingway owned or read are asterisked. Mandel's annotations make fascinating reading, especially those on Gautier, Bret Harte, Merimee, and Havelock Ellis. Not to be ignored is the entry about Waldo Frank's Virgin Spain (which Hemingway reviles in Death in the Afternoon) in which Mandel refers the reader to her own earlier volume, Complete Annotations: "which is comprehensive and scholarly, even if the prose is occasionally purple" (109)

2. Reading Texts, Paratexts, and Absence

Two of the essays in this section explore the written text of Death in the Afternoon, each, however, from an unusual and unexpected vantage point. Two others begin where the text ends--with photographs. The final contribution reaches beyond text and picture to "paratext"--relevant materials gathered before and after the text itself.

How real can Hemingway's "real thing"--his label for ultimate fulfillment in the bullring and at the writing desk--be for a foreigner, no matter how respected he is by Spanish aficionados. Peter Messent poses the question in "'The Real Thing" Representing the Bullfight and Spain in Death in the Afternoon." Messent denies Hemingway that reality, allowing him only a role as a "translator" explicating "the rituals of one culture for another" (126). Unlike the Spaniard, Hemingway 'is a wealthy tourist able to leave whenever he wishes, his "real thing" merely a subjective translation for an American audience rather than an objective image of reality, his Spain and bullfight at best a synecdochic representation of the "real thing."

To flesh his argument, Messent contrasts the order and coherence of the bullfight with the random grotesqueries described in "A Natural History of the Dead." Death is the terminus in each, but the bullfighter grips till the end physical and mental wholeness, a cleanliness denied those sundered in body and mind by the random brutality of war. In its landscape, its culture, and its bullfight, Spain becomes for Hemingway the "real thing," the embodiment of a healthy world no longer available in America.

Messent's argument is intricate, brilliant, and probably offensive to both Anglo-American as well as Spanish readers. What it does, however, is deconstruct and redefine "the real thing." What semiotician could ask for more?

Beatriz Penas Ibanez's essay, "'Very Sad but Very Fine': Death in the Afternoon's Imagist Interpretation of the Bullfight Text," reads the bullfight as not merely ritualistic but allegorical. More than a struggle to the death between natural force (the bull) and social force (the bullfighter), its images conjure socio-political, philosophical, and sexual conflicts. Since most of her readings wholly confound me, I shall be brief and hope the reader fares better than I. Perhaps they can accept her parallel between the Spanish popular audience at a bullfight displacing the aristocracy and the west-bound immigrant at last exerting power over the Native American. Or support her contention that Hemingway believed the bullfight to be an image of modern society wherein the "national entity represented by the cultural icon, the bullfighter, must perforce dominate, subjugate, and even exploit its citizens"(149). Ayn Rand's architect mutated to torero?

Among her other "imagistic" queries: Does the bull's maleness, in counterpoint to the bullfighter's feminine delicacy of body and dress, conjure an image of Hemingway's androgyny? Does Hemingway's admiration for the old-fashioned values of the bullfight signify his disenchantment with Darwin, Freud, and Marx? And, finally, there is' Ibanez's description of Death in the Afternoon as "a super iceberg-text"--bullfight the tip, Spain its support to the water line, and, totally submerged, "we can find America and the American literary scene, unvoiced and invisible but bearing most of the iceberg's weight"(157).

Perhaps. And perhaps from Ibanez's depths, one day I may see the tip of Hemingway's iceberg.

Sometimes, photography is a measurable blessing. The two chapters that close this section are so blessed. In the first, "'Far from Simple' The Published Photographs in Death in the Afternoon," Anthony Brand tells of Hemingway's efforts and frustrations in gathering photographs for the book. He collected four hundred, spent his own money, then watched in dismay as Perkins and Scribner's cut him back to eighty-one. Along the way, he had to reduce his matadors from sixty at the outset to twenty-six at publication. The second essay, "Deleted 'Flashes': The Unpublished Photographs of Death in the Afternoon," reproduces thirteen of the photographs Hemingway had reluctantly to discard.

Brand's brief and focused narrative stresses Hemingway's determination to keep his reader close to the action, looking straight at it--no angles, no trick photography. What Hemingway demanded of his reader, Brand insists, was: "to look at the bull, the bullfighter, and the interaction between them" (170). Several of the photographs are of the man or the bull alone but most fix on interaction. His choice of bullfighters was personal, those who most interested him, the ones he admired, like Maera and Belmonte, but also those he disliked, like Chicuelo and Cagancho. A final and deserving observation notes that humor, often evident in Death in the Afternoon, finds no place in Hemingway's photo-essay. Teaching one how to look at the significant parts of a bullfight does not allow for jokes: "The photo-essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of Death in the Afternoon" (182).

I leave to the reader Nancy Bredendick's discriminations between paratext, peritext, and epitext in her "How Paratexts Narrow the Gap Between Reader and Text in Death in the Afternoon." I can only select a few examples from her engrossing account of how so-called peripheral materials (e.g., paratexts)--a title or a dust jacket, a frontispiece and dedication, the table of contents at the outset and the bibliographical note at the end--all contribute to defining what kind of book Hemingway had in mind when he wrote Death in the Afternoon.

Her expositions are generally terse and compelling; witness her inquiry into why Hemingway avoided 'Guide' or 'Manual' as a title, each a valid alternative. Instead, he chose a title "both thematically specific and poetically suggestive," more suitable perhaps for a novel or even a poem. Elsewhere too, Bredendick amplifies the oblique subtleties inherent in choices that compel the reader "to see Death in the Afternoon as a work of art with a bullfight manual imbedded in it" (210) The dust jacket, for example, an ebullient, mass-cultural oil painting of a bull chasing a banderillero over a barrera, combines with the frontispiece, Juan Gris's cubist masterwork, The Bullfighter, a complex "intellectual" work, to highlight Hemingway's faith that "the bullfight encompasses mass culture; and fine art; and its audience includes highbrow and lowbrow alike" (217).

Some problems in the paratexts Bredendick fails to resolve. A Table of Contents that makes no mention of subject matter in the twenty chapters committed to the bullfight is justified with the lame excuse that "it invites us to read the book simultaneously for pleasure and instruction" (220). The difficulty of explaining a non-existent index was happily resolved when Miram Mandel took the time and effort to create one. What Brendendick has done, however, is valuable. She has taught readers how to use paratools.

3. On Authorship and Art

In the first of two essays in this section, Hilary K. Justice's "'Prejudiced through Experience': Death in the Afternoon and the Problem of Authorship" undertakes and, despite excessive reliance upon the graceless jargon of "metacriticism," manages to discriminate between use of "author" and "writer." She interlards her analyses of exchanges between the Author and the Old Lady with reportage of Hemingway's actual experiences in publishing, demeaning encounters that made him aware that an "Author" is no more than a public figure, a professional performer. In the dialogue between the Author and the Old Lady, her insensitivity and stupidity undermine his responsibility to explicate--to her and to the reader--the niceties of bullfighting. No longer a detached observer, he has become a performer, a character in burlesque. And, as Hemingway says, "...a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature" ([DIA,191], (249). Not until Hemingway rids his text of both the "Author and the Old Lady" can he become a "writer" or, as Justice puts it, find and focus "on the detail that enables him to transform experience into writing" (246). In brief, to become an artist.

Drawing upon her own experience in film and art, Amy Vondrak in "'The Sequence of Motion and Fact': Cubist Collage and Filmic Montage in Death in the Afternoon" limns Hemingway's efforts to forge for his nonfiction tools as useful as those he had developed for his fiction. Her ingenious contention is that, inspired by developments in film and art, Hemingway shaped to his purpose implements from each. Collage, for example, made possible using materials from outside sources--photographs of the bullfight juxtaposed with paintings--all testimony that "Old styles, like old verities, no longer sufficed" (261). Hemingway's variants on cubist collage suggest that he "had internalized the consequences of Einsteinian physics," a suggestion I find problematic and dubious.

From filmic montage, drawing upon heterogeneous literary materials, Hemingway created what Vondrak labels "literary montage,' mingling genres--from autobiography to journalism, from travel to history, and the like his goal not chaos but order, "to redraw violent death as art" (263). Citing Hemingway's superbly controlled telling of Maera's performance despite a fractured wrist, she describes it as a narrative that "makes a sculpture out of the encounter between bull and man" (263). Perhaps, but why is it "montage" rather than plain old "narrative?" Nor am I more enlightened when she turns again to Einsteinian physics, certain that early in Chapter 20 (271), when Hemingway tells of a timeless moment he had failed to describe, he crashes through linear time to a "filmic fourth dimension." Her appreciation is a lyrical O altitudo, but I doubt that at that moment Hemingway either drew upon Einstein or achieved a "fourth dimension."

4. And What Came After

The first voice in this review, Keneth Kinnamon holds the stage alone in the final section, the only one in which Death in the Afternoon appears only as a monument to be judged for its impact upon its successors. Considering that the most recent bibliography (through 1999) of books in English about bullfighting numbers about two thousand titles, Kinnamon's "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon: Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrad," wisely settled upon Mailer and Conrad.

Mailer is at once an exemplary and an absurd bearer of that legacy--a lifelong admirer of Hemingway and the bullfight, a prodigious if often undisciplined talent, and an intemperate macho personality that Kinnamon correctly identifies as having often seemed a "comic parody" of his model. In neither of Mailer's excursions into bullfighting does he prove worthy of his model. The hero of The Deer Park (1935) fails as a matador and a writer, settling at last in a New York loft where he teaches bullfighting and seduces women. The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative (1967) is a photographic essay that follows the stages of a Mexican corrida and a weak matador in a narrative that Kinnamon rightly dismisses as deserving its place in Mailer's "Bureau of Abandoned Projects" (Bullfight, 6).

Barnaby Conrad was never more than a journeyman writer, but he wrote well and often about the bullfight. His La Fiesta Brava: The Art of the Bull Ring (1953) is, Kinnamon insists, though not comparable to Death in the Afternoon as a philosophical treatise, stronger as a "practical introduction." Other works by Conrad also have real merit: Matador, a novel about Manolete's last day, encompasses conflicts--love, alcohol, rivalries--and, at last, the courage he brings to his final corrida. Conrad's coffee-table book, Hemingway's Spain (1989) is a picture book about Spain and the bullfight with the focus where it should be, on the bullfight. Kinnamon's fair-minded conclusion is that though Mailer is a greater writer, Conrad wrote "more on the bulls than any other writer in English, and only Hemingway has written better" (299).

For Barnaby Conrad, the legacy of Death in the Afternoon lay in a power that "changed my life, [and] shaped my life...." No less compelling is Miriam Mandel's pride in A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon. In the dosing lines of her Introduction she credits this as "the first book to scrutinize an individual volume of that large body of Hemingway's work" which is non-fiction, the genre Michael Reynolds delineated as "the most neglected part of his canon." Mandel's team of scholarly picadors, banderilleros, and matadors has done much to compensate for that neglect. My own comments have, I fear, made clear that I do not believe that each essay has led me successfully through Hemingway's taurine labyrinth. But in one way or another, each has challenged me to rethink long-held and often antiquated attitudes. I'm not about to yield but I am listening and I am reading.

--Arthur Waldhorn, Professor Emeritus, The City College of New York.