There are gorgeous pages in Ernest Hemingway’s book about bullfights—big humor and reckless straight talk of what things are, genuinely heavy ferocity against prattle of what they are not. Hemingway is a full-sized man hewing his way with flying strokes of the poet’s broad axe which I greatly admire. Nevertheless, there is an unconscionable quantity of bull—to put it as decorously as possible—poured and plastered all over what he writes about bullfights. By bull I mean juvenile romantic gushing and sentimentalizing of simple facts.



For example, it is well known and fairly obvious that bulls do not run and gallop about the pasture; they stand solid “dominating the landscape with their confidence” as Hemingway brilliantly says. Therefore when they have dashed about the ring some minutes, tossed a few horses, repeatedly charged and attempted to gore a man and thrown their heads off because he turned out to be a rag, they soon get winded and their tongues hang out and they pant. Certain bulls, however, for reasons more or less accidental, go through the ordeal in a small area without much running and therefore get tired in the muscles before they get winded. These bulls do not hang their tongues out and pant. This plain fact, which would be obvious to anybody without smoke in his eyes, is romanticized by Hemingway to mean that some bulls are so “brave” that they will never let their tongues out, but hold their mouths “tight shut to keep the blood in” even after they are stabbed to death and until they drop. This is not juvenile romanticism, it is child’s fairy-story writing. And yet Hemingway asks us to believe that what drew him to bullfights was the desire to learn to put down “what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced.”

In pursuit of this rigorous aim he informs us that bullfights are “so well ordered and so strongly disciplined by ritual that a person feeling the whole tragedy cannot separate the minor comic-tragedy of the horse so as to feel it emotionally.” And he generalizes: “The aficionado, or lover of the bullfight, may be said, broadly, then, to be one who has this sense of the tragedy and ritual of the fight so that the minor aspects are not important except as they relate to the whole.” Which is just the kind of sentimental poppycock most regularly dished out by those Art nannies and pale-eyed professors of poetry whom Hemingway above all men despises. Hemingway himself makes plain all through his book that the performance itself is not an artistic tragedy as often as one time out of a hundred. When it is, there is about one man out of a thousand in the grandstand who would know what you were talking about if you started in on “the whole tragedy” as opposed to the “minor comic-tragedy of the horse.” The aficionado, or bullfight fan, is the Spanish equivalent of the Amer ican baseball fan. He reacts the same way to the same kind of things. If you could get the authorization to put on a bullfight in the Yankee Stadium, you would see approximately the same crowd there that you do now, and they would behave, after a little instruction from our star reporters and radio announcers, just about the way the Spanish crowd behaves. And they would not be—”broadly”—the kind of people, if there are such people, who can see an infuriated bull charge across a bull ring, ram his horns into the private end of a horse’s belly and rip him clear up to the ribs, lifting and tossing his rider bodily in the air and over against the fence with the same motion, and keep their attention so occupied with the “whole tragedy” that they cannot “separate” this enough to “feel it emotion ally.” Bullfights are not wholly bad, but sentimentalizing over them in the name of art-form and ritual is.

Whatever art may be, a bullfight is not art in exactly that particular which exempts art from those rules of decent conduct which make life possible and civilization a hope—namely, that its representations are not real. A bullfight—foolishly so called by the English for it does not except for a moment resemble a fight—is real life. It is men tormenting and killing a bull; it is a bull being tormented and killed.

And if it is not “art” in a sense to justify Hemingway’s undiscriminating recourse to that notion, still less is it “tragedy” in a sense to sustain the elevated emotions which he hopes to pump over it with this portentous term.