Quadsville

In Friday's QCTIMES I read this headline for a 'contributed' news piece "Jury says driveway dweller guilty of clutter."  The story tells of a Cook County "man who is living in the driveway of his foreclosed home."

I'm thinking immediately this is right out of Raymond Carver the short-story writer who was so influential in the direction the American short story took after a period of innovation (that I didn't especially like).

In "Why Don't You Dance?" from his collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Carver describes the exact situation.  A man has moved all his furniture to the driveway after an apparent rupture in his relationship with his wife, and while he's at the market buying whiskey and beer, a young couple furnishing an apartment at the beginning of their relationship stops to look the furniture over thinking the arrangement of belongings is a yard sale.  They are the only ones to stop of many who slow down while driving by to look out of curiosity.

Surely, the man in Schaumburg sees his share of gawkers.

The kids try the man out with offers and he agrees to every price they suggest.  "Everything goes," he says.  I think perhaps they cannot believe their good fortune.  He asks twenty-five for the TV but says Yes when the girl asks if he'd take fifteen.  Everything's plugged in, "connected," so they can watch the TV and try the blender and turn on the lights.  It's laid out just as it was indoors.

He serves the couple a whiskey, and the boy is soon feeling the alcohol, and when the man suggests that the couple dance to the record they've put on the player, the boy is good for only a couple tunes.  Then the girl dances with the man.  The neighbors are now watching them and the girl is uneasy but the man says not to worry, it's his place:  "They thought they'd seen everything over here.  But they haven't seen this, have they?" he said.

Carver is describing the dissolution of one marriage and the beginnings of another, and the girl in subsequent weeks is haunted by the event and grapples for meaning in it but finally she 'quits trying.'

Carver lived what he wrote and went through some rough times because of his devotion to writing while raising a family, and gone now of cancer over a decade ago, he'd find many in his straits nowadays, as with this unfortunate man in Illinois.

(Raymond Carver.  What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Stories.   Vintage paperback).

The second safari story to receive the acclaim that helped lift Hemingway out of the emotional depths following disparaging reviews for Green Hills of Africa is "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber."

Macomber unlike Harry of "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" is a "gentleman."  And Macomber's issue with death is not an obsession but a situational problem: cowardice when faced with the charge of a gut-shot lion and a wounded water buffalo.

Macomber runs when faced with the charging lion but next day conquers his fear of death and stands bravely in the path of the buffalo he kills moments before his wife kills him with a shot Hemingway's omniscient narrator tells us is meant to kill the buffalo and save Macomber.

These words recited by the cold-blooded white hunter Wilson to explain the change that comes over Macomber from the coward of the lion to the courageous hunter of the water-buffalo charge are also likely the theme of the story:

"By my troth, I care not; a man can die but once; we owe God a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for next."

The Macombers, Francis and Margot, are the quintessential intimate enemies.  She is at first moved to sympathize with her husband's humiliating experience but then realizes that knowledge of his cowardice is an advantage, something perhaps to hold over him.  They've nearly separated before, appeared on the society page as an 'on-the-verge' item, and all that binds them is the power of his wealth over her and her beauty over him.

So, given her unrelenting caustic remarks  subsequent to Francis' cowardice and her slipping out to sleep that night with the white hunter, it is not surprising that the white hunter's remarks after she shoots Macomber indicate Wilson's belief that Margot murdered her husband.

The critics, however, haven't resolved that issue - did Margot murder Francis or was the shooting the accident the omniscient narrator says it is?

Ernest Hemingway.  The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories.  New York: Scribners paperback.

In 1936, Hemingway was severely depressed.  He was deeply disappointed by the generally negative reviews received by his non-fiction novel Green Hills of Africa.  He complained of insomnia, impotence, and a desire to blow his "lousy head off."  (Donaldson, Scott.  The Cambridge Companion to Ernest Hemingway).   But the critical acclaim given two of his stories that year might have saved his life:  "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber."  Both stories are based on the safari experiences recorded in Green Hills of Africa and both reflect Hemingway's obsession with death.

In "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," Hemingway's protagonist Harry, an author on safari with his wealthy wife, contracts gangrenous infection in a scratch he fails properly to treat.  Two weeks later he is severely debilitated, and though he is without the pain he experienced in the early stages of the infection, he begins to experience troubling thoughts concerning his imminent death.  The experiences become more convincing as the death of tissue that occurs with gangrene gets worse.

Hemingway's efforts to put these experiences into words are extraordinary attempts to express the ineffable:  How do you describe a feeling one has when one confronts one's mortality when it's not a simple feeling of the kind covered by "I'm afraid."

Here are Hemingway's words:  "Just then it occurred to him that he was going to die.  It came with a rush; not as a rush of water nor of wind, but of a sudden evil-smelling emptiness."  (The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories. p.15)

Later, "he felt death come again.  this time there  was no rush.  It was a puff, as of a wind that makes a candle flicker and the flame go tall." (p.18)  And still later when he is somewhat delirious perhaps, he asks his wife Helen if she feels anything strange; she hasn't but "he has just felt death come again."  (p.25)

In the end, "death comes and rests its head on the foot of the cot and he can smell its breath."

Hemingway was severely wounded on the Italian front in WWI.  If I remember correctly he said he felt his soul leave his body momentarily and then return.  Perhaps his obsession with death and his fascination with the experience originated in that close call.

But I suspect the feelings were a feature of his depressive illness, and because he was without the pharmaceutical help available now and chose to medicate himself with alcohol, the feelings continued and exacerbated his illness and led to his eventual suicide in 1961.

"The Snows of Kilimanjaro" is a powerful story with several italicized sections of recollections that Harry the author intended someday to include in stories.  Some of them are autobiographical and relate to Hemingway's  first wife Hadley.  Some of them relate to tragedies in war and life in the ranching West.

Hemingway through Harry laments the sloth that left many stories unwritten and the "blunting of his perceptions" that resulted from heavy drinking.  In Harry, Hemingway describes a duplicitous nature given to "earning" his bread with rich women in relationships based on lies.

Ernest Hemingway.  The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories.  New York: Scribner paperback.

I read George Orwell's memoir of the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia, in an effort to understand the political goings-on that play an important role in the plot of Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, and I found the book an interesting read in its own right.

George Orwell  joined the Loyalist side in the Spanish War in order to fight for Liberty against the Fascist takeover of the democratically-elected Government.  Fascist General Francisco Franco engineered an uprising of the Spanish Army against the elected-government on behalf of the Spanish aristocracy and the Spanish Church, according to Orwell.

The only country 'decent enough,' according to Orwell, to come to the aid of the democracy was communist, and the several political parties that work at odds to mitigate the success of Robert Jordan's mission in For Whom the Bell Tolls, are forced to toe the Communist line or lose the tools needed to win the war.  The Communist Party is given power when given the arms for distribution to the militias.  The militias were formed by the trade unions which built a line against the Fascists and protected the training of a regular army.

The line was not a continuous front but rather a staggered placing of defensive positions on hilltops that faced hilltops defended by Franco's Fascists.   The units of soldiers were made up of men with the same political beliefs.  Many of the soldiers were boys of 15, enlisted by parents for the wages the boys earned and for the bread the boys received as soldiers.  The soldiers ate better by far than the citizens who faced incredible shortages.  Orwell fought with a unit that included about thirty of his fellow countrymen.

The situation as it plays out in Hemingway was a complicated power struggle among several political parties:  the Socialists, the Anarchists, and the P.O.U.M., Party of Marxist Unification, for which Orwell fought, not because of political beliefs but by chance as an Englishman unable to speak Spanish.  Orwell joined the effort because he wanted to fight the spread of Fascism from Germany and Italy.

Orwell describes a war that was a stand-off in which a thousand bullets were expended for each man killed.  Sniper fire was a constant danger, but the artillery that could have made quick work of the positions of either army was not available.  Mortars also were not to be had.  The grenades or 'bombs' the troops were given were unreliable.  Orwell calls one type of bomb indiscriminate, unbiased, something along those lines, because they kill both the men targeted and the man throwing them.  One in four does not explode at all.

The story includes some humor.  When Orwell volunteers to return to a position his unit had held but had been forced to evacuate - two soldiers are unaccounted for and the return is an effort to recover the lost men - the Fascists discover the effort, and Orwell orders his four 'comrades' to run back to their own lines.  Orwell says the mud was so thick he was sure no one could run in it but that pursuit by a hundred armed enemy soldiers filling the night with the green fire of muzzle flash and the whiz and crack of bullets made possible speed he didn't know he could achieve.   And this is where I cracked up, in the dark he was passed by what could have been a comet shower but turned out to be the three Spaniards who had taken the lead in crossing to the enemy lines.  (This was not a display of cowardice - the men had been in the forefront of the rescue effort - but rather a lifetime of experience in dealing with the conditions in Spain).  I think the laughter was a catharsis, a release of tension built up in Orwell's account of the taking of the Fascist position.

The conditions the soldiers endured were horrendous.  Their 'uniforms' were a collection of shirts and jackets inadequate to the cold.  Fire was critical for warmth and there was no fuel.  Much time was spent scavenging for fire wood.  Buildings were torn apart for the wood.  The water was nasty and cigarettes became difficult to get, had to be rolled from a cheap tobacco that resembled 'chaff.'  Lice and rats made life miserable, and shelter was a dugout where room was a tight squeeze.  If you were wounded bad enough, the ambulance ride would finish you off, and if you survived the ride the conditions in the hospital would side with the enemy.   Some of the wounds were left open but protected with a muslin-covered wire frame.

When you served your time or were 'declared useless' by virtue of a wound as Orwell was, you faced political opponents of the unit you were serving with; one of Orwell's friends, the grandson of a leader of the British mine workers, was held without charges when caught with empty grenade-bombs he was taking back to England for souvenirs.

The book is considered the best on the Spanish Civil War and presents another aspect of the war -the frontline fighting - to complement Hemingway's account of guerilla activities behind the lines as well as background on the factionalism that interfered with the Loyalist effort as it is portrayed by Hemingway.

Reification is a word recently offered to me by a friend: "making an idea or concept concrete."  I don't know if I'm using it correctly when I apply it to what Hemingway does in For Whom the Bell Tolls with the notion of the oneness of mankind in the epigraph from John Donne that Hemingway uses for the novel: "Any man's death diminishes me, for I am involved in Mankind."  But he accomplishes something like that in his characterization of Robert Jordan.  I'd like to add Jesus Christ to Donne with Christ's words "Greater love hath no man than to lay down his life for his friends."

Robert Jordan is an American college instructor of Spanish who takes a leave of absence to fight for the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War.  The Republican government has been attacked by the forces of fascist General Franco, and Jordan joins the fight in his passion for "Liberty, Equality and Fraternity."  On the Loyalist side are a disparate collection of political soldiers speaking French and Russian as well as Spanish.  With Franco are Germans and Italians donated by Hitler and Mussolini.

Jordan is a specialist in demolition and is under orders to blow a bridge behind fascist lines.  The destruction of the bridge is to occur precisely when the Loyalists begin dropping bombs at daybreak on the day of a 'surprise' offensive.  Unfortunately, the element of surprise is gone with information leaked to the fascists by journalists and individuals privy to the information, and the counter-offensive that the blowing of the bridge is supposed to stop is supplied by traffic over the bridge prior to the offensive. Jordan can do nothing but send a dispatch informing the Loyalist general  that the fascists are preparing to meet the attack.

To accomplish the blowing of the bridge, Jordan joins a guerilla group holed up in a cave in the mountains not far from the gorge that the bridge spans.  In this group is the source of much of the interest in the story: the beautiful Maria with whom Jordan falls in love, the treacherous Pablo who opposes the blowing of the bridge, the wise and profane gypsy Pilar, Pablo's woman who takes over leadership of the group to support Jordan's mission and an assortment of individuals that Hemingway fleshes out with his artistry, notably for me the saintly old man Anselmo and sub-characters who gave me much laughter, the austere and proper Fernando and the gypsy Rafael.

The novel offers intrigue in the political interaction among the higher-ups in the Loyalist army and in the guerilla group with Pablo a source of concern as a spoiler of the mission with his war-weary resistance to action so close to the cave as to expose his group to fascist attention.

Love interest centers on the relationship between Robert Jordan and Maria who is the victim of an assault by a gang of fascists who killed her parents in action to take over their town.  Their relationship is a case of 'love at first sight,' and Maria is the recipient of advice from the experienced Pilar on how to make a man happy.  Pilar truly loves the girl and sees in Jordan a man capable of providing what the girl needs to overcome a residual of what is probably PTSD.

Action is a prominent part of the novel.  I was especially thrilled by the chapters devoted to the delivery of the dispatch which was entrusted to Andres who encounters Loyalist anarchists who threaten his life at the front lines and who with Gomez, an officer who takes responsibility for helping the guerilla complete his mission, has to deal with the insanity and suspicion of Commissar Andre Marty.  This episode is excitement of the highest order.

Andre Marty is based on a historical figure as is El Sordo, the leader of another guerilla band, who agrees to assist in the blowing of the bridge.  The chapter devoted to El Sordo's defense of a hill I came to think of as chancre hill is fantastic literature of battle, may be the piece of his own writing Hemingway included in an anthology of war writing that he edited.

In other blogs I have mentioned Hemingway's interest in Custer and the Battle of the Little Big Horn.  Hemingway mentions brevet-General Custer in his discussion of fighting generals in Across the River and Into the Trees and mentions the Anheuser-Busch painting of Custer's Last Stand in To Have and Have Not.  In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Robert Jordan recalls his Civil-War-hero grandfather's criticism of Custer.

The battle for 'chancre hill' is surely a child of Hemingway's fondness for the Little Big Horn fight right down to the mutilations perpetrated by the attackers.     

The action in this novel was Hemingway's proof that a lifetime of threescore and ten can be compressed into 72 hours of intense living.

Check it out.

Imagine a skinny tow-headed little boy standing nervously in front of his third-grade classmates and holding a 'skinny' book, front cover out.  If you've been reading Hemingway as I have, you might agree that he's holding the book the way  St. Veronica holds the handkerchief with which she wipes the face of Our Lord and the way then that the matador holds the cape when he offers it to the bull.

It is in this spirit that I ask you to imagine the trembling lad saying "The name of my book is 'The Old Man and the Sea' by Ernest Hemingway."  Quickly though you must fast forward five decades, for the lad who loved books in elementary school reads them now from the seasoned outlook of an old man who can better appreciate the story from the author's perspective in this book.  There is a boy in the story who loves the old man, but I get ahead of myself mentioning him.

E. Hemingway wrote the book in his mid-fifties, near the end of a long career.  I've read that one of his wives, probably the last, Mary Welsh, said that life caught up with Hemingway in his fifties.  He lived hard and wrote from experience, and he'd lived beyond the ability to have the kind of experiences that he loved.  Perhaps the old Cuban fisherman Santiago who goes 'out too far' in order to end 85 days of bad luck stands in for the aging writer always striving for the Great American Novel.   He need not have worried.  QCTIMES just the other day mentioned Hemingway-look-alike contests in Key West for "Hemingway Days," and of course, no American Novel course worth its salt omits Hemingway from the reading list.

The story is simple.  The old fisherman fishes the Gulf Stream in a skiff and has lost his helper, the 'boy,' Manilo, to another boat because the old man has salao, the worst kind of luck, and has not caught a fish for almost three months.  The old man, Santiago, is failing and depends on the boy for meals and assistance and companionship when he comes in at the end of the fishing day.  Santiago goes out beyond the other boats in order to reverse his luck and hooks the Moby Dick of marlins.  The fish tows him in his fishing skiff for two days with the old man using his years of experience finally to kill the fish.  Santiago keeps the line just short of breaking, giving it out when the fish tests it and hauling in when there is slack or weakness in the fish, and he feeds on raw fish he catches on other lines.  His hands are bloodied from handling the line by the time he gets the fish alongside for harpooning, and the fish is too big to take aboard, so the old man lashes it alongside and sets sail for home.

Sharks intervene.  They begin tearing the flesh from the marlin and soon the old man is calculating the loss of the meat to the sharks against the proceeds that would 'keep him all winter.'  When finally he makes port, having navigated by the winds and the stars and the glow from the lights of Havana, the fish is a skeleton linking the head and the tail.

Hemingway always makes you feel the setting, and in The Old Man and the Sea the place is the ocean.  The water is a mile deep and you feel it when Hemingway describes the skiff's passing over into 'the well' where the ocean floor falls off to a depth of 700 fathoms.  When Santiago kills a shark it sinks through clear water, and though the old man does not look because he is feeling a profound sense of defeat, he describes watching injured  sharks become tiny as they sink in the blue.   Readers experience books differently because we bring different selves to the reading and different experiences.  I watched a shark spiral downward into the clear water of the Caribbean when I was in the Navy.  I remember watching from the bridge wing when a big shark was taking a leisurely swim along the hull of the ship while we were dead in the water for towing exercises.  The executive officer, Wild Bill Harris, asked the CO for permission to send for a gunner's mate.  He came to the bridge with an M-1 and sent the shark downward, and I watched it disappear just as Hemingway describes it.  And the phosphorescence that marks the flow of the sea as it trails back from the old man's hand over the side at night we experienced on the beach one warm night in South Carolina.  We were covered in the water with what was almost like fireflies.

The old man's reflections on life are rich with insight and speculation.  He is not religious but promises prayers in return for success with the fish.  He wonders if killing the fish is sin.  He considers the fish his brother.  The sea above and below is peopled with friends and enemies.  The man-of-war bird is a friend who guides him to good fishing, while the Portugese man-of-war that drifts by is a reminder of stings, an enemy.  The sharks are enemies, but the mako shark is noble and brave, while the shovel-nose sharks are mindless moving appetites

Perhaps Hemingway was feeling the pressures of his personal life and invested the sharks with the evil influences that affected his ability to write.  He was working on a long novel that would cover 'the sea, land, and air,' but like the old man he was not up to the task he had set for himself.   He submitted The Old Man and the Sea for publication when it was planned  as a part of 'the sea' portion of the novel.

It's a skinny book, 120 pages, that you can read in a sitting.  It is worth your time, and I'd like to hear from you, Hemingway fans.

Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises is his first successful novel.  It was published together with a lesser work that parodied the novels of Sherwood Anderson, The Torrents of Spring.  I read The Sun Also Rises  in 1972, for an American novel course, you could say, as I read  it after reading the assigned A Farewell to Arms.  I read it this week after having just read Death in the Afternoon and The Dangerous Summer, Hemingway's bullfighting books, and my enjoyment was enhanced with a better understanding of the bullfighting that plays an important role in the book.  Also I recently watched a Hemingway mini-series that assisted my imagination in the visualizing of the characters.  (How do you visualize characters when you read?)

Hemingway's  male protagonist Jake Barnes is disabled sexually as a result of an accident and is deeply in love with a somewhat promiscuous Lady Brett Ashley who takes advantage of his love.  He is always at her beck and call and even solicits for her when she lusts after the young matador Pedro Romero.

She is the central character in that she is the attractive woman in a group of male friends that meet up in Pamplona, Spain, for the running of the bulls and the bullfights that are part of the fiesta of San Fermin; during this week-long fiesta in the 1920s, the relationships among the men are energized and affected by her  personality and behavior.

Jake is devoted to Brett and craves a physical relationship he cannot have.  He begs her to go away with him, but she refuses, reminding him of the emotional pain his injury causes them.    Mike Campbell  has journeyed from Scotland with plans to marry Brett when she gets her divorce.   Bill Gorton is Jake's good friend from the U.S., and he gets involved in the maelstrom of male conflict and interaction around Brett, with his sympathy for Jake and Mike when Brett hurts them.  Bill also tries to help the outsider in the group, Robert  Cohn, whose love for Lady Brett is based on a fling with her that has no lasting meaning for her.  Cohn becomes insanely jealous when Brett becomes romantically involved with Pedro Romero, and Cohn shakes up the party with some violent behavior that is caused not only by Brett's 'neglect' but by Mike's constant baiting with demands that Cohn leave the group where Mike says Cohn  is 'not wanted.'

Some things that occurred to me in reading The Sun Also Rises:

Hemingway's portrayal of a strong, physical aversion to gays by Jake:  Brett arrives at a bistro in the company of a group of gay men where Jake is in the company of a lady of the night he is entertaining to satisfy his need for companionship, and  Jake becomes physically ill and has to leave.

How reading the bullfighting books enhances the experience in The Sun Also Rises:  For example, the ticket booth for the bullfights advertises tickets in Sol, in Sombre, and in a 'mixture.'  In The Sun Also Rises Hemingway does not explain that the ticket prices are based on whether the seats will be in the sun, in the shade or both, during the fight.  In the sun is cheapest, in the shade most expensive, Hemingway explains in Death in the Afternoon.

Hemingway describes Pedro's killing of the bull 'recibiendo,' where the matador provokes a charge by tapping his foot and waits for the bull's momentum to power the sword thrust that mortally wounds the animal.  Hemingway devotes considerable effort in Death in the Afternoon to explain the additional danger a matador risks when killing the bull in this fashion, as the matador must lean in over the horns to follow the sword.  The import for the action in The Sun Also Rises for recibiendo relates to the risk Pedro is taking to impress Brett who is in the crowd.

Then too, The Sun Also Rises  throws light on the bullfighting books.  I do not remember Hemingway describing  the starting point of the paseo in Death in the Afternoon or in The Dangerous Summer.  The paseo is the parade when the matador and his team, his cuadrilla of toreros, march across the ring, the three matadors side by side followed single file by their toreros.   I 'assumed' the matadors and their teams lined up where the toril gives the bulls entrance to the ring, but in The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway makes that assumption explicit, and the paseo's  starting at the toril locates the presidential box, where the bullfight judge sits, to be opposite the toril.  No big deal, just interesting, to me.

In The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway includes two historical bullfighters with his fictional Romero (whose form in the bull ring is based according to Hemingway scholar Charles Oliver, on the style of Cayetano Ordonez, the father of Antonio Ordonez, one of the fighters in the rivalry featured in The Dangerous Summer, but, Hemingway stressed, he modeled  only  Romero's fictional bull-ring performance and not his behavior outside the ring, on Cayetano).

One of the historical fighters is featured in an account of a fatal goring in Death in the Afternoon.  Marcial Lalanda effected an incredibly courageous 'quite' in Death to take away a bull who was savaging a matador pinned against the wall of the ring.  Lalanda slapped and kneed the bull's face while the other toreros waved capes to draw the bull away.

The other historical fighter is Juan Belmonte.  In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway tells of Belmonte's poor treatment of the members of his cuadrilla, and in The Sun Also Rises he is a foil to Pedro;  whereas Pedro plants his feet and the horns pass close to his body, Belmonte uses tricks to give the illusion of closeness as when he brushes close by the bull's flank when it charges by.

(My wife is so surprised I'm showing interest in bullfighting:  I assured her I wouldn't want to take the interest any closer than the distance given me by the printed page).

The Dangerous Summer was 'born' in a plan by Hemingway to write an epilogue to a reprinting of Death in the Afternoon.  Life Magazine got wind of the plan and having successfully published The Old Man and the Sea in installments, asked Hemingway to write a lengthy essay on the trip to Spain that Hemingway would make at the invitation of a friend in Malaga in order to gather material for the epilogue.  Something like that anyway:  plan for an epilogue, trip to Spain, offer from Life, and the writing of the book-length manuscript that was edited down to fit the needs of the editors at Life.

The trip to Spain was made to cover a season of bullfighting featuring a rivalry between matador brothers-in-law Luis Miguel Dominguin and Antonio Ordonez.  The book records Hemingway's impressions of the bullfights that occurred that dangerous summer when the heat of the rivalry drove the brothers by marriage to greater and greater taking of risks in an effort to outdo one another in the bull ring.

Some readers complained that Hemingway just gave them old material that they'd already read in Death in the Afternoon, but the book contains some of the greatest taurine writing in literature according to James A. Michener, author of the Introduction and like Hemingway an aficionado.  Michener praises Chapter 11 for its account of bullfighting, but best for me is the final chapter and some of the writing in an earlier chapter where Hemingway records perceptions from the callejon, the passageway behind the wall that fronts the bull ring and runs in front of the barreras or front row of seats in the stands

Hemingway is so close to the action he can hear the banderillas rattling together where they hang from the bull's morilla or neck-muscle hump and hear what the matador is saying to the bull.  Hemingway does a play-by-play or pass-by-pass account of several bullfights, and the reader soon becomes aware that Hemingway is very much biased toward Antonio Ordonez.  The unevenness of Hemingway's reporting has Dominguin doing dangerous 'tricks' with the bull that please the public but that he recognizes as inferior to the poetry written with the bull by Ordonez.  Antonio Ordonez is the son of Hemingway's Death-in-the-Afternoon matador friend, Cayetano Ordonez who fought using the name of Nino de la Palma, and the old friendship influenced Hemingway surely in his feelings toward Antonio.  But the bias in the reporting gets so outrageous it had me pulling for Dominguin to win.  Hemingway writes meanly of Dominguin's ability to climb the arena to the presidential box, for example, to greet the daughter of Generalissimo Franco when the bullfighter is offering an injured leg as a reason for a likely inability to perform as well as he'd wish to in the upcoming fight.

There is some great action in these accounts.  The gorings make for exciting reading, as both matadors are hooked by bulls and hospitalized.  Dominguin is caught by a bull and tossed in the air and caught on the horns and chopped by the bull when he's dropped in the sand of the arena and rescued in a courageous quite (a quite is a 'taking away' of the bull to rescue  a fallen torero).  The matador gets up with an injury to a leg but is able to finish a fine faena, the final third of the action that includes the killing of the bull.

The book includes a fine introduction by Michener with a glossary arranged by the aspect of bullfighting to which the terms apply:  At the Arena, The Fight, The Management of the Fight, and the like, and part of the glossary from Death in the Afternoon is reprinted at the back.  There are also pages of interesting photographs.

I liked this book not only for the action but for the travel writing.  Hemingway describes driving over dangerous Spanish roads where four mountain ranges made him very nervous at times with some of the roads still bad from damage done in the Spanish Civil War.