Summary
American writer whose Death in the Afternoon (1932) Said calls one of the greatest American books of the twentieth century, and whose later The Dangerous Summer Said reads in “How Not to Get Gored” as the repetition in which American expertise and how-to-ism, once derived from innocence of contact, become a jaded product (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.231-232, 235-236).
Details
- Hemingway was always a relentless expert and purveyor of expertise on war, Europe, fishing, hunting, bohemia and bullfighting for early twentieth-century Americans; departing from the purity of line and severity of vision in his earliest short stores (as printed, PDF p.231), his later fiction is regularly disturbed by displays of knowledge (PDF p.231).
- Death in the Afternoon is a mammoth treatise on killing specially bred fighting bulls, standing on his obsession with death: bullfighting as the art of sustaining, prolonging and containing the encounter with death, its studious rendering of ritualized suffering recalling Kafka (PDF p.232).
- For his generation the post-war Hemingway had already become Papa, tiresome and unsufferably affected, until the 1959 Life Magazine series on the competition between Antonio Ordoñez and Luis Miguel Dominguin recalled the earlier book’s magisterial qualities (PDF p.231).
- The Dangerous Summer, drawn from the hundred thousand words of those 1959 articles, contains two contests beyond the matadors’: bullfighting then against bullfighting now, and the earlier Hemingway — obsessed with the corrida as tragedy, Spain, truth, writing and death — against the later, world-famous writer risking self-repetition and self-parody (PDF p.233).
- In 1959 American expertise has become jaded: Hemingway the character intrudes everywhere, Life’s commission transformed him into a self-conscious middleman and a pastiche of his famous earlier self, although he says “I had lost much of my old feeling for the bullfight.” (quoted PDF p.236).