Project Mailer - User contributions [en]

User talk:Grlucas

2025-05-01T02:48:12Z

KForeman: /* Final Project */

{{Talk header}}
[[/Archive 202504/]]

== Final edits ==
Hello, my article is complete: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Ernest_and_Norman_(Exit_Music)|Ernest and Norman (Exit Music)]]
:{{Reply to|Flowersbloom}} great, thank you. I made some corrections. Please be sure to sign your talk page posts. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Good evening, Dr. Lucas. Below is the link to my edited article:
https://projectmailer.net/pm/User:ASpeed/sandbox
:{{Reply to|ASpeed}} great. Let me know when it’s finished and posted, and I’l have a look. It appears as if you still have a bit of work to do. Please be sure to sign your talk page posts. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Good evening, @[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]. I have completed most of my Remediation Articles, but I still show issues for the one named, "[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman,_Papa,_and_the_Autoerotic_Construction_of_Woman|Norman, Papa, and the Autoerotic Construction of Woman]].

Based on the latest updates, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Battles_for_Regard,_Writerly_and_Otherwise|Battles for Regard, Writerly and Otherwise]] looks good with exception of including a '''category'''.
:{{Reply to|ALedezma}} this one is good. I made some corrections before removing the banner, mostly in your sources. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

May you let me know if there is anything I can do on my end to resolve the issues with the first [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman,_Papa,_and_the_Autoerotic_Construction_of_Woman|article]]?

[[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 21:47, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|ALedezma}} looking very good, but some sources missing page numbers. Please see to those. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

:::Thank you @[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] . I will review those and respond when complete. [[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 22:47, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::::@[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]. Thank you for your feedback. A review of article additions was made for source pages. [[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 20:22, 11 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::{{Reply to| ALedezma}} ok, looking good. I made some corrections. There's one final thing to do: no footnotes should appear in the notes section; use {{tl|harvtxt}} instead; I did one to show you how to use the template. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:39, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
::::::@[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] Changes were done to footnote sources. Thank you! [[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 19:59, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas I finished my remediation article https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer%27s_The_Fight:_Hemingway,_Bullfighting,_and_the_Lovely_Metaphysics_of_Boxing&action=edit [[User:TWietstruk|TWietstruk]] ([[User talk:TWietstruk|talk]]) 19:44, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| TWietstruk}} good work so far, but there is more to do: placement of footnotes (eliminate spaces around them and punctuation always goes ''before'' the footnote.); proofread for typos; fix all red errors at the bottom (most of these are from errors in sourcing); works cited entries should be bulleted list and eliminate space between entries. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:05, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Final edit and no errors with some help from @NRMMGA5108, @JKilchenmann. Please mark me as complete. On to help someone else with the things I've learned
https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer%27s_The_Fight:_Hemingway,_Bullfighting,_and_the_Lovely_Metaphysics_of_Boxing&action=edit [[User:TWietstruk|TWietstruk]] ([[User talk:TWietstruk|talk]]) 17:52, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas I have finished my assigned remediation article: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Jive-Ass_Aficionado:_Why_Are_We_in_Vietnam%3F_and_Hemingway%27s_Moral_Code#cite_note-FOOTNOTEHemingway2003-24
Username ADear.
:{{Reply to|ADear}} thank you. I have marked this as complete. Please be sure you sign your talk page posts correctly. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:05, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I have finished remediating my assigned article. Please review it at your earliest convenience. The link is here: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer's_Mythmaking_in_An_American_Dream_and_“The_White_Negro”|Norman Mailer's Mythmaking in An American Dream and “The White Negro”]]—[[User:Erhernandez|Erhernandez]] ([[User talk:Erhernandez|talk]]) 08:52, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Erhernandez}} well done! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. I removed your banner after making a few corrections. Please have a look over it and move on to the next thing. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:06, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I transferred and edited my article. Can you look at it and remove the banner? Here's the link: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Authorship_and_Alienation_in_Death_in_the_Afternoon_and_Advertisements_for_Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself]] ( [[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 13:02, 28 March 2025 (EDT) )
:{{Reply to| APKnight25}} looking good! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. Next, eliminate all "fang" quotes in the article and add “real quotation marks.” Your sources should be a bulleted list. And there should be no space before a citation. You’re almost finished! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:21, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Reinventing the Wheel" Mailer Article for Review ==

Dr. Lucas,

My [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Reinventing_a_New_Wheel:_The_Films_of_Norman_Mailer|article]] is ready for review.

Thank you!
[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 15:29, 29 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|TPoole}} great! Could you include a link to it? Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:07, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
::OK, I [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer|found it]]. Looking really good. Great work. There are some citation issues that need to be seen to. The two red categories at the bottom should not be there; they will go away when the citations errors are corrected. Eliminate any quotation mark "fangs" in the text and replace them with “real quotation marks.” Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:14, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:::@Grlucas, what are the citation issues? Which ones need correcting? [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 17:31, 31 March 2025 (EDT)
::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} When you click your citations, they should jump to the works cited entry they correspond to. Several of yours do not, indicated by the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” at the bottom. You also have a "CS1 maint: Unrecognized language" error that will likely be cleared up when you fix the citation issues. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:55, 1 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::@Grlucas, I have tried correcting the sfn codes in my citations. I was able to get the 2 web citations to link correctly. But for some reason, I cannot get the Mailer 1967 film Wild 90 citation to link to the reference list. Please advise. [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 20:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
::::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} OK, all fixed and published. Thanks. Please move on to another remediation. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:46, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of: "Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer’s Left Conservatism and the Problematic of 'Totalitarianism'" ==

Dr. Lucas

I finished the remediation of the following article:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Contradictory_Syntheses:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Left_Conservatism_and_the_Problematic_of_%E2%80%9CTotalitarianism%E2%80%9D

It is ready for your review. Thank you.
[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 19:04, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} looks great. I made some tweaks to the references and some throughout, like changing ' and " to real apostrophes and quotation marks. A bit more clean-up, but you might want to check over it again. I removed the under-construction banner. Well one. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 21:32, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edit ==

Thank you for your comments on my remediation of
"[[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself.]]"

I've eliminated the "fang quotes" and changed them to “real quotation marks.” This was a very fascinating tip that taught me something new. It's something I've never noticed before but now always will.

I also put my sources in a bulleted list and removed the space before the citations. I think I'm all set now.
:{{Reply to|APKnight25}} great work! Please help other editors to complete the volume. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:34, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Firearms in the Works of Hemingway and Mailer'' ==

[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]

Hi Dr. Lucas,

I believe I have done everything for the Remediation of my article. Please let me know if there is anything else I need to do.

I will also link the article below:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Firearms_in_the_Works_of_Hemingway_and_Mailer

Thank you,
Caitlin Vinson
:{{Reply to|CVinson}} great work so far. Your references must use templates, please. Blockquotes must also be done correctly. No spaces or line breaks before or after the {{tl|pg}} template. Footnote placement is also off (punctuation goes before the footnote; no spaces before or after the footnote). I will add the abstract and url. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:30, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Hi Dr. Lucas, I believe there have been some updates made to the project. I believe I have also updated the works cited section to show correct templates. Please let me know if there is anything further that I need to do. Thank you, Caitlin.
::{{reply to| CVinson}} please sign your talk page posts correctly. Thanks. You still need to do some work on the sources. Use the <code>|author-mask=1</code> in your template for repeated author names. Also, you must eliminate the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” message at the bottom. No spaces or returns before or after the {{tl|pg}} call, as I already mentioned above. No parenthetical citations should be left, either; those should all be remediated to footnotes. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:50, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:::{{Reply to|Grlucas}} I have updated the sources and updated the in-text citations. I am still having trouble with the "Harv and Sfn no-target errors." I have not been successful in fixing this error and have tried multiple ways to fix it. —[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 8:18, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

::::{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Hi Dr. Lucas, I see that I still have a red X for my remediation assignment. Is there something else I am still missing? —[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:35, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::{{reply to| CVinson}} sorry, I'm just getting back to it. There are quite a few punctuation errors. Some left out and others appear after the {{tl|sfn}}. I'm trying to correct those I see, but you should have a look, too. Page is designated as <code>p=</code> in {{tl|sfn}}, not <code>pg=</code>; and a span of pages needs <code>pp=</code>. Again, I have tried to correct these. I removed the banner, but please have another look through. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:01, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norman Mailer Today'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up my remediation article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Norman Mailer Today|Norman Mailer Today]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 18:20, 3 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Kamyers}} Great work! Please help your fellow editors finish the volume, or pick something to work on in [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010|Volume 4]]. Thanks, and well done. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:00, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of “The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’” ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished my remediation of Jennifer Yirinec's article: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”|The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.”]] Thank you for your assistance with the article. It is ready for its final review! [[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 10:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} a stellar job. Well done. I removed the banner, so you can move on to another article. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:12, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediations ==
Dr. Lucas, I have begun work on the tributes for volume 5. [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Grace Notes|Grace Notes]] by Stephen Borkowski is ready for its final review.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 12:58, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} Well done! Banner removed, url added. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:18, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

==Oohh Normie Final Edits==
Hi Dr. Lucas, I have finished my article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/"Oohh_Normie_—_You're_Sooo_Hemingway":_Mailer_Memories_and_Encounters|Oohh Normie, You're Sooo Hemingway]]. Please let me know if there is anything I need to fix. [[User:Tbara4554|Tbara4554]] ([[User talk:Tbara4554|talk]]) 20:01, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Tbara4554}} thank you. I made some corrections and removed the banner. You might want to have another look over it. Please move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:53, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Harlot's Ghost, Bildungsroman, Masculinity and Hemingway ==

Dr. Lucas,

The following article is ready for your review. Thanks.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Harlot%27s_Ghost,_Bildungsroman,_Masculinity_and_Hemingway

[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 21:22, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} excellent. Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:39, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== I am done with this ==

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Situating_Hemingway:_Mailer,_Style,_Ethics
:Received. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:29, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Review PM Article ==

Hi Dr. Lucas, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Hemingway_to_Mailer_—_A_Delayed_Response_to_The_Deer_Park|here]] is my remediated article, ready for review![[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 12:21, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Hobbitonya}} great work. I have removed the banner, so you are good to move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:20, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Project ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have finished my remedidation project and I am ready for it to be reviewed. '''Article link''': [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe#Works_Cited|Piling On: Norman Mailer's Utilization of Marilyn Monroe]

Thanks,

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 13:04, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} good work so far. Please remove wikilinks. Change ' and " to typographical apostrophes and quotation marks. And all red errors at the bottom of the page need to be taken care of. These are likely all from coding errors in your sources. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:24, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have removed the wikilinks, changed to the correct typographic style and updated my sources.
'''Article link''': [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe#Works_Cited|Piling On: Norman Mailer's Utilization of Marilyn Monroe] Thanks, [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 21:55, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

[I forgot to fill out the summary box. I am adding my summary]
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} you're getting there! It looks great. You must eliminate all the red errors at the bottom. These appear when there are errors in your citations. Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:15, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

@{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have tried everything I can think of and I still have harv and sfn no-target errors and harv and sfn multiple-target errors and cs1 uses editors parameter. Do I not include the editor? [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 16:03, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have managed to get rid of two of the red target errors. I am still working on finding the harv sfn multiple target error. Thanks, [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 20:37, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have tried everything i can think of to remove the last red error flag. I had to turn it in. I don't know that else I can do in this situation. I was given citation that did not follow any of the given formats. [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 21:45, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} all parenthetical citations must be remediated to {{tl|sfn}}; none of yours are. Get these done, then we can worry about the errors. (Some notes on sources: any generic <code><nowiki>{{citation}}</nowiki></code> will not be correct. I see you have a book review by Marshall that has no source (I tried to find the original and cannot; this is a weird citation; I'll continue to look for it). There's also one that looks like a film that should use the [[w:Template:Cite AV media|<code>Cite AV media</code> template]].) Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:16, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Submission ==

Hello!
Here's my remediated article; [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/The_Devil's_Party:_Reading_and_Wreaking_Vengeance_in_The_Castle_in_the_Forest|The Devil's Party: Reading and Wreaking Vengeance in ''The Castle in the Forest'']].
Thanks! Please let me know if there's anything I can review or correct.
[[User:Maggiemrogers|Maggiemrogers]] ([[User talk:Maggiemrogers|talk]]) 13:23, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Maggiemrogers}} nice work! Banner removed, so please move on to something else in the volume. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:39, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Vol. 4: Rumors of Grace article remediated ==

I believe I have completed remediation of ''[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Rumors_of_Grace:_God-Language_in_Hemingway_and_Mailer|Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer]]'', vol. 4. I was having last-minute trouble with sfn errors for sources without authors, but Justin Kilchenmann helped me out, so I think they are fixed.
:{{Reply to|Sherrilledwards}} You have done a remarkable job—a real Herculean effort! Footnotes should not go in any notes. See those I changed; the others should be changed in the same way. I have done some, but the others have to be fixed, I'm afraid. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:20, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to|Grlucas}}I believe I have completed these fixes, so the article is again ready for review. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 15:49, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
:::{{Reply to| Sherrilledwards}} truly exceptional work—a model remediation! Marked as complete. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:30, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Inside Norman Mailer ==

Hi Dr. Lucas - I have finished remediating the article, [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Inside Norman Mailer|Inside Norman Mailer]]. Please let me know if I need to make any adjustments. Thank you! [[User:Chelsey.brantley|Chelsey.brantley]] ([[User talk:Chelsey.brantley|talk]]) 18:09, 7 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Chelsey.brantley}} good work! Please help with another article from volume 4. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:36, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed: Norman Mailer: Playboy Magazine ==

I hope I am doing this is right. I have finished remediating my article about Norman Mailer and its in my designated sandbox [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer:_Playboy_Magazine_Heavyweight here.]
If there are any last minute edits, let me know. I got the last of the errors removed yesterday. And I believe we are on the same page with leaving the in-line citations for ''Playboy'' to be as is, since the author didn't put them down in the works cited. [[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 20:14, 7 April 2025 (EDT)Nina Mizner
:{{Reply to|NrmMGA5108}} looking good! So, the parenthetical citations still in the article, I'm assuming, are there because of those missing sources? Please check your page numbers; some seem to be off. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:04, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} I found the page number error and its corrected, and yes all the parenthetical citations should be referencing issues of the ''playboy'' magazine, which were not listed in the works cited. --[[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 20:54, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| NrmMGA5108}} it looks great. I removed the banner! Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:29, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed Remediation From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity? ==

Greeting Dr. Lucas,

I have made the adjustment that you mentioned.

I also made additional edits to my short footnotes and noticed that my citations did not link to my references - which has been fixed.

I have tested all of my citations, and they all work.

Here is my article by Alexander Hicks, ''From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity?''

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/From_Here_to_Eternity_and_The_Naked_and_the_Dead:_Premiere_to_Eternity%3F

Have a great day.
:{{Reply to| THarrell}} Please always sign your talk page posts. Several “quoted items” in the article appear as ‘quoted items’; these must be corrected, please. No spaces or returns should surround {{tl|pg}} calls. Multiple page numbers should look like this <code><nowiki>{{sfn|Moretti|1996|pp=11-14}}</nowiki></code>; note the double <code>pp</code>. There seem to be many typos. I corrected some for you, but you must see to the rest. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:16, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Greetings,

Are these the only additional corrections that need to be made? This is different from what you mentioned before.

I just want to be sure that I have hit everything.

Also can you verify what other typos you are seeing, I have ran through this twice.

If something is spelt a certain way, for example "Soljer", I have left it that way. Since it is mentioned like that in the article.
—[[User:THarrell|THarrell]] ([[User talk:THarrell|talk]]) 06:49, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Greetings,

I have gone through and fixed all of the short footnotes.

I have gone line by line with a ruler to look at any typos, and fixed the words that I found that had a dash in them/needed to be lowercased.

I have also fixed the quotations.

—[[User:THarrell|THarrell]] ([[User talk:THarrell|talk]]) 12:31, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| THarrell}} much better. Periods go inside quotations marks; I think I fixed these, but please check. Also, there are no spaces before footnotes; again, I did a find/replace, but you should check. Also, check that all titles of novels are italicized (if it's italicized in the PDF, then it has to be italicized in the remediation, including abbreviations, like ''Naked''); I fixed a couple. Also, no extra spaces; there should only be a single blank space between paragraphs. There are quite a few little details that needed (need?) fixing. I removed the banner, but please check my work. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 12:41, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon” ==

Greetings Dr. Lucus,

My article is ready for your review. Thank you.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer%E2%80%99s_%E2%80%9CFootnote_to_Death_in_the_Afternoon%E2%80%9D)
:{{Reply to| KForeman}} it's coming along. Please ''always'' sign your talk page posts. Right up top, there are errors. Please use the real {{tl|pg}}, like all the other articles. Citations need to be fixed. All parenthetical citations must be converted. You still have quite a bit of work to do. All red sections need to be seen to and corrected. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:20, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
@Grlucs, per your suggestions, I've made the corrections. Please review. I look forward to your feedback. Thank you.
:{{Reply to| KForeman}} looking better. All parenthetical page numbers should be removed and added to the {{tl|sfn}}. Check your page numbers in {{tl|pg}}. Footnotes should have no spaces around them; periods and commas go ''inside'' quotation marks and before the footnotes. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:28, 19 April 2025 (EDT)
@Grlucs, per your suggestions, I've made changes, please review. Thank you.

=Remediation of "Cluster Seeds and the Mailer Legacy"=
Hello, Dr. Lucas. I have completed the remediation of [https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Cluster_Seeds_and_the_Mailer_Legacy&oldid=18200| my article], and it is ready for your review. Thank you!—[[User:ADavis|ADavis]] ([[User talk:ADavis|talk]]) 11:32, 8 April 2025 (EDT)@ADavis
:{{Reply to| ADavis}} got it. I think I check it yesterday and removed the banner then. Please move on to another piece. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediating Article: Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing Volume 4. ==

Hello Dr. Lucas,

I have completed remediating my article. Here is the link [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing|The Mailer Review: Volume 4: Mailer, Hemingway, Boxing (2010)]] [[User:JBrown|JBrown]] ([[User talk:JBrown|talk]]) 13:01, 8 April 2025 (EDT)JBrown
:{{Reply to|JBrown}} a good start, but all parenthetical citations need to be footnotes. Also, check your headers. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norris Church Mailer'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up remediating the article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norris Church Mailer|Norris Church Mailer]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 13:42, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Kamyers}} awesome work! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edits Completed and Ready for Review ==

Dr. Lucas, I have completed my assigned remediation article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Looking_at_the_Past:_Nostalgia_as_Technique_in_The_Naked_and_the_Dead_and_For_Whom_the_Bell_Tolls|Looking at the Past: Nostalgia as Technique in The Naked and the Dead and For Whom the Bell Tolls]]. Please review at your convenience. I enjoyed working on this assignment. I look forward to your suggestions and feedback. All the best, Danielle (DBond007)
:{{Reply to| DBond007}} ok, good work. Please remove all the external links. Links to Wikipedia are not necessary, but if used, they need to be done correctly. There should be no spaces before {{tl|sfn}}. May sure all your ' and " are actually typographical apostrophes and quotation marks. Remove any superfluous spaces and line breaks; these mess up the formatting. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Thank you. I will get started on these revisions immediately. Thanks for the feedback and your time. :)[[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 11:30, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| Grlucas}} I have completed all the requested revisions and ready for review round 2. Thank you again![[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 12:10, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:::{{Reply to|DBond007}} looking better! There are still items to be seen to, like titles on novels and magazines need to appear like they do in the original: if it's italicized in the PDF, it must be italicized on the web. I added the epigram for you and corrected that pesky citation. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:41, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| Grlucas}}I have completed edits. I went through and took out quotes around The Time Machine, except for one instance that the author uses them. All my other titles seem to correspond to the original article. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you for the epigram and the pesky citation correction. Best, [[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 15:25, 17 April 2025 (EDT)
:::{{Reply to|DBond007}} received, and good work. I had to clean up the sources a bit, so you might want to have a look. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:42, 18 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| Grlucas}}I went back and reviewed some of the other articles marked complete to compare and look for remaining revisions. I made one change on Works Cited and also added the page numbers to correspond to the pdf. Let's try this again. Again, I *believe I am finished with this article. Best,[[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 10:36, 18 April 2025 (EDT)

Hopefully this works!. I'm not sure how to reply to other threads, but I was scrolling through the PDF and noticed the publisher is Iowa Pres? Just curious if it's supposed to be Iowa Press? [[User:Wverna|Wverna]] ([[User talk:Wverna|talk]]) 22:33, 18 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Wverna}} I'm not sure what you're talking about. Perhaps if you included a link to the article? See [[w:Help:Talk pages|Talk page guidelines]] if you don't know how to use them. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:33, 19 April 2025 (EDT)
Just kidding, I responded to the wrong "Bell Tolls' article. I was referring to this one: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Tolls_of_War:_Mailerian_Sub-Texts_in_For_Whom_the_Bell_Tolls sorry about that! [[User:Wverna|Wverna]] ([[User talk:Wverna|talk]]) 17:49, 19 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed the remediation assignment ==

Good evening Dr. Lucas,

I hope I am doing this right. Here is the link for my completed Remediation articles: [http://The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Encounters_with_Mailer Encounters with Mailer].

&

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Effects_of_Trauma_on_the_Narrative_Structures_of_Across_the_River_and_Into_the_Trees_and_The_Naked_and_the_Dead

I look forward to reading your feedback.

All the best,

Patrick Riley
:{{Reply to|Priley1984}} thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:40, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Project Submission: An Expected Encounter in an Unexpected Place ==

Link:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer:_An_Expected_Encounter_in_an_Unexpected_Place

Winnie Verna
:{{Reply to|Wverna}} received, thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:51, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== E.Mosley ==

Good evening, @Grlucas. I have completed my Remediation Articles[[https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/On_Reading_Mailer_Too_Young]]. The article I had was " On Reading Mailer Too Young Volume 4, 2010
:{{Reply to| Essence903m}} thank you. I had to fix and clean-up quite a bit. Your saves also do not include summaries. When you move on to your next article, please be more careful and follow the instructions. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:12, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Kynndra Watson ==

Good Evening, @grlucas. i have completed my Remediation articles: Volume 5: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Making_Masculinity_and_Unmaking_Jewishness:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Voice_in_Wild_90_and_Beyond_the_Law and Volume 4: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer,_Hemingway,_and_the_%E2%80%9CReds%E2%80%9D.

Thank you.
:{{Reply to| KWatson}} thank you, and this is a good start, but there are still many items that need to be cleaned up, like footnote indications (They go after punctuation), citation errors (all the red errors at the bottom need to be seen to), extra spaces and ALL CAPS need to be removed. Please see other completed articles for models. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:18, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/What Would Be the Fun of That?|"What Would Be the Fun of That?"]] by Peter Alson.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:33, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} awesome! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:21, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== “Remembering Norris Church” Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Remembering Norris Church|“Remembering Norris Church”]] by John Bowers.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 16:17, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} and again, excellent! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:22, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== “The Norris I Knew” Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/The Norris I Knew|“The Norris I Knew”]] by Christopher Busa.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:04, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} rockin’! 👍🏼 —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:24, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Norris Mailer" Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Norris Mailer|"Norris Mailer"]] by Nancy Collins.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:35, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} thanks again. You’re tearing it up. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:32, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Rise Above It" Tribute Remediation ==

Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Rise Above It|"Rise Above It"]] by David Ebershoff—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 11:12, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} excellent. Many thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:15, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed Additional Articles ==

Hello, Dr. Lucas. I have remediated [https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Tributes_to_Norris_Church_Mailer/A_View_Through_the_Prism&oldid=18744|"A View Through the Prism"], [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Tributes_to_Norris_Church_Mailer/Lip_Liner|"Lip Liner"], and [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/The_Living_Room_Show#|"The Living Room Show"] in Volume 5. They are ready for your review. Thank you!—[[User:ADavis|ADavis]] ([[User talk:ADavis|talk]]) 12:31, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|ADavis}} great work. Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:26, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Submission notification sent 29 March ==

@grlucas

Dr. Lucas - I sent a Talk Page notification that I had completed the page I remediated on 29 March. The table indicates I haven't done anything yet. I sent it from the Talk Page from the article site. I don't see a response from that notification, but I had received one from you earlier in the process.
I don't understand what happened.

[[User:LogansPop22|LogansPop22]] ([[User talk:LogansPop22|talk]]) 14:54, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|LogansPop22}} sorry if I missed that. [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Hemingway and Women at the Front: Blowing Bridges in The Fifth Column, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Other Works|this article]], right? It's looking great, though all the parenthetical citations must be converted to footnotes using {{tl|sfn}} and some of the author names in your notes should use {{tl|harvtxt}}. I added the "citations" section for you. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:39, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law ==

@Grlucas, I have made some additional edits to this [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Making_Masculinity_and_Unmaking_Jewishness:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Voice_in_Wild_90_and_Beyond_the_Law article] in Volume 5 by correcting most of the citations. There are 2 that still do not work, but I think that is because the sources are incomplete.

[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 21:16, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| TPoole}} Looking really good, and this is a complicated one. A couple of things: no spaces or line breaks before or after {{tl|pg}}; I removed the spaces before {{tl|sfn}}, but you might want to check them; there are some typos, like missing spaces before some parentheses; no footnotes should appear in the notes section: use {{tl|harvtxt}} instead. And all the red errors at the bottom need to be cleared up. Great work so far! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:00, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Red Error-Gone ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}I have deleted all the sfn's and the red error is gone. I don't know why I didn't think about this days ago.

[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe|Gladstein-Monroe]]

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 23:07, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|MerAtticus}} getting closer. A few things: you should use <code>|author-mask=1</code> for repeated author names in your works cited; all parenthetical citations need to be replaced with footnotes using {{tl|sfn}}; must punctuation in your sources need to be removed as the templates do that for you; and you need to use {{tl|harvtxt}} for citations in your endnotes. Also, letters and films have their own templates. I did a couple of these for you as examples. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:14, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Remembering Norris" Tribute Remediation ==

Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Remembering Norris|"Remembering Norris"]] by Margo Howard.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:20, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} excellent! Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:35, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

== Norman Mailer: From Orgone Accumulator to Cancer Protection for Schizophrenics ==

Dr. Lucas,

The following article is ready for your review:
https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer:_From_Orgone_Accumulator_to_Cancer_Protection_for_Schizophrenics

I was unable to find the correct format for the first works cited entry under Mailer. It is a reprint of a magazine article. Thank you. [[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 16:28, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} you are a master remediator! Thank you for going above and beyond. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:44, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

==Tolls of War: Mailerian Sub-Texts in For Whom the Bell Tolls, Trust & Sparring with Norman==
Dr. Lucas, these were some of the smaller ones, so I went ahead and knocked them out. They are ready for review: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Sparring with Norman|Sparring with Norman]], [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Trust|Trust]], and [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tolls of War: Mailerian Sub-Texts in For Whom the Bell Tolls|Tolls of War: Mailerian Sub-Texts in For Whom the Bell Tolls]]. —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 10:27, 13 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Kamyers}} all excellent—above and beyond! Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:56, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing'' ==

Hi everyone,
I am currently helping with the article, [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Death,_Art,_and_the_Disturbing:_Hemingway_and_Mailer_and_the_Art_of_Writing Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing]. It still has a good bit to go, if anyone wants to help out.
—[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 5:17 PM, 13 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|CVinson}} thanks! I added the author info. I'm not sure many will see your request; you might want to post it on the forum. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 14:56, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Thank you for adding the author information and I have posted the request in the forum. Thank you! —[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:CVinson|talk]]) 6:53 PM, 14 April 2025 (EDT)

== Mimi and Mercer ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have corrected the Mimi Gladstein [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Piling On: Norman Mailer’s Utilization of Marilyn Monroe]] and removed all the red errors. I also have finishe the Erin Mercer article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Automatons and the Atomic Abyss: The Naked and the Dead]], except the ''The Naked and the Dead'' in the display title. An error occured.
[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 19:26, 13 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} good work. There should be no footnotes in the endnotes, please. Since this is the only thing to correct, I have removed the banner, but please let me know when you made that final correction. Thanks! (I will respond about your second article shortly.) —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 14:59, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} your second article looks good. Could you use the [[w:Template:Cite interview|Template:Cite interview]] for interviews. I did one for you. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 16:33, 14 April 2025 (EDT)

== Through the Lens of the Beatniks Remediation ==

Hello, Dr. Lucas! I've completed the remediation of [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Through_the_Lens_of_the_Beatniks:_Norman_Mailer_and_Modern_American_Man’s_Quest_for_Self-Realization#CITEREFNaked1992|Through the Lens of the Beatniks]]. I wasn't able to get the letter citations exactly how I thought they should be. If there's anything I'm missing, please let me know! Thanks! [[User:Maggiemrogers|Maggiemrogers]] ([[User talk:Maggiemrogers|talk]]) 10:09, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Maggiemrogers}} got it! It looks great. I made some format changes, but you did a great job! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 15:58, 14 April 2025 (EDT)

== Finish Mimi ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}

I have made the final edit to Mimi and removed the footnotes from the endnotes. [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe]] [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 15:50, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} you removed all the citations. Only '''footnotes''' need to be removed, but citations need to stay. I did the first note for you (now erased, but you can see it in the history) so you could see how it was done. You can also see [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer|this one]]. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 16:52, 14 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed? All You Need is Glove ==

Hi Dr. Lucas, I believe the book review, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/All_You_Need_is_Glove|All You Need is Glove]] is done and ready for review! [[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 19:10, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Hobbitonya}} awesome work! Banner removed, and many thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:08, 16 April 2025 (EDT)

== Harv and Sfn no-target ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I changed the citations in the article to interview and I tried a few things to get rid of the Harv and Sfn no-target with little luck. [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Automatons_and_the_Atomic_Abyss:_The_Naked_and_the_Dead]]
[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 21:04, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} this was because your interviews had no dates. Most are from Lennon's book, published in 1988. I added the dates to the citations, but the sfn footnotes need to be fixed to correspond with those. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:24, 16 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} OK, between your fixes and my little tweaks, this one is finished! Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:50, 17 April 2025 (EDT)

== Erros fixed ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have fixed all citation errors in both articles and added the harvtxt. Atomic Abyss still has the Pages using duplicate arguments in template calls error.
[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Automatons_and_the_Atomic_Abyss:_The_Naked_and_the_Dead]]
:{{Reply to|MerAtticus}} see above. These still need fixing. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:35, 16 April 2025 (EDT)

[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe]]
:{{Reply to|MerAtticus}} this one looks great! Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:35, 16 April 2025 (EDT)

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 08:23, 15 April 2025 (EDT)

== completed: Advertisements for Others ==

Thanks to some classmates helping with the finishing touches, my second article should be ready. [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Advertisements_for_Others:_The_Blurbs_of_Norman_Mailer|Advertisements for Others.]]
--[[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 19:24, 17 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to| NrmMGA5108}} received, and thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:15, 18 April 2025 (EDT)

== Two Poems Vol 4 Ready? ==

Hi Dr. Lucas! I think these two poems are ready for review: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/The Boxer in the Park|The Boxer in the Park]] and Norman Mailer and [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer_and_Ernest_Hemingway_Do_Not_Box_in_Heaven|Ernest Hemingway Do Not Box in Heaven]]. The second on says the display title is wrong, but again, I don't know what I am missing there. Thank you![[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 09:05, 18 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Hobbitonya}} excellent! Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:56, 18 April 2025 (EDT)

== A Dialogue Essay on Mailer and Hemingway ==

Hey,

I see that [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/A Dialogue Essay on Mailer and Hemingway|A Dialogue Essay on Mailer and Hemingway]] is missing text. Can you email me a copy or link it as a reply, so I can remediate this article. [[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 09:44, 18 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| APKnight25}} you may download both volumes’ PDFs on the [https://forum.grlucas.net/t/project-mailer-assignments-remediation-project/88/3?u=grlucas forum]. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:40, 18 April 2025 (EDT)

== Almost complete ==

@grlucas
I've made a ton of progress.
The only thing I have left is going through all of the links to do away with harvtxt and sfn target error and an error for extra text in the author section. I fixed the error about using an "en" dash between years.
I'll still be working on it until tomorrow night, but please take a look: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Hemingway_and_Women_at_the_Front:_Blowing_Bridges_in_The_Fifth_Column,_For_Whom_the_Bell_Tolls,_and_Other_Works

@grlucas
I’ve gotten rid of the second of three error messages. Still looking for the harvtxt sfn target error.
[[User:LogansPop22|LogansPop22]] ([[User talk:LogansPop22|talk]]) 14:45, 20 April 2025 (EDT)

@grlucas
I’ve gone through every citation. Did the YEARa and YEARb designations. Made sure there weren’t extra spaces or missing {, |, or anything else.
I’ve corrected everything I can find after extensive proofreading. I still have the harvtxt and sfn no target error.
Here it is: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Hemingway_and_Women_at_the_Front:_Blowing_Bridges_in_The_Fifth_Column,_For_Whom_the_Bell_Tolls,_and_Other_Works
[[User:LogansPop22|LogansPop22]] ([[User talk:LogansPop22|talk]]) 19:50, 20 April 2025 (EDT)

== Articles complete ==

@grlucas
I have also made a lot of progress with my articles and luckily received a last minute assit from a few of my class mates. I beleive both volumes to be complete: Vol 4: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer,_Hemingway,_and_the_%E2%80%9CReds%E2%80%9D (Which I believe has already been submitted) and Volume 5: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Making_Masculinity_and_Unmaking_Jewishness:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Voice_in_Wild_90_and_Beyond_the_Law (I just received the final error correction from a fellow student.

I also started working on this Vol 4 article once I got back into the system: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Style,_Politics,_and_Hemingway%27s_Spanish_Civil_War_Dispatches in my sandbox https://projectmailer.net/pm/User:KWatson/sandbox but another user has already completed it.

Please review my articles and advise what else is needed from me. Thank you [[User:KWatson|KWatson]] ([[User talk:KWatson|talk]]) 15:37, 19 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| KWatson}} OK, I already checked the [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and the “Reds”|Peppard article]]. For [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law|the Cohen]], the notes are still not quite right. Citations must be logically inserted. Instead of <blockquote>Mary V. Dearborn writes that Mailer picked up Yiddish at home from his parents, “enough so that many years later, in Germany, he was able to ask for directions in this language and be understood.” {{harvtxt|Dearborn|1999|p=14}}</blockquote> it should be <blockquote>Mary V. {{harvtxt|Dearborn|1999|p=14}} writes that Mailer picked up Yiddish at home from his parents, “enough so that many years later, in Germany, he was able to ask for directions in this language and be understood.” </blockquote> See the difference? Please be meticulous on these. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:57, 20 April 2025 (EDT)

== Additional edits ==

Hello! I reformatted all in text citations, did some editing, and added page numbers to [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing|Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing]]- could you please take a look at the updated page and see if there's anything additional that it needs?

I was also wondering: on this page, I had also recieved confirmation from you that my [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/The American Civil War in The Naked and the Dead and Across the River and Into the Trees|originally assigned article]] was complete, and the banner could be removed. However, it is still showing as an X on the page, and I am unable to find the comment from you! Could you please clarify if anything needs to be fixed? Thanks so much!
[[User:KaraCroissant|KaraCroissant]] ([[User talk:KaraCroissant|talk]]) 16:25, 19 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| KaraCroissant}} good! I was making quite a few corrections on “[[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing|Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing]],” but I stopped, figuring you might want to finish it. Put footnotes directly after the quotations, not all at the end of sentences. No spaces or line breaks before or after {{tl|pg}}. Use <code>|author-mask=1</code> with repeated author names in works cited entries, titles of books must be italicized like they are in the original text, etc. Thanks. After a few fixes, I removed the banner for the [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/The American Civil War in The Naked and the Dead and Across the River and Into the Trees|Meredith article]]. Well done. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:20, 20 April 2025 (EDT)

== Civil War..Dispatched. ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}

I believe the Hemingway's Spanish Civil War is complete except the harvtext were not working. [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Style,_Politics,_and_Hemingway's_Spanish_Civil_War_Dispatches]]
[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 17:37, 19 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} I made many small corrections. Please view them in the history and continue in the same way. This one just needs a bit more attention. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:33, 20 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation, Vol. 4 & 5 ==

For your review,

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norris_Church_Mailer:_An_Artist_from_Arkansas

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Imagining_Evil:_The_Sardonic_Narrator_of_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Last_Novel (Wasn't sure whether or not to add the dinkus)

[[User:Wverna|Wverna]] ([[User talk:Wverna|talk]]) 11:15, 20 April 2025 (EDT)

== Hemingway ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}} I revised early this morning and I have gone back through it this afternoon. Hopefully it looks okay. Any ciations in the notes at this point is beyond my understanding of the topic. [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Style,_Politics,_and_Hemingway's_Spanish_Civil_War_Dispatches]]

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 14:11, 20 April 2025 (EDT)

== Combat ==
Hello
For your review [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/What_Norman_Mailer_Taught_Me_about_Combat|What Norman Mailer Taught Me about Combat].
Completed by me and @Flowersbloom
[[User:Tbara4554|Tbara4554]] ([[User talk:Tbara4554|talk]]) 18:45, 20 April 2025 (EDT)

== Article Completed ==

Hi Dr. Lucas - I have finished the article [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/“A_Noble_Pursuit”:_The_Armies_of_the_Night_as_Outside_Agitator|“A Noble Pursuit”: The Armies of the Night as Outside Agitator]]. Please let me know if any changes are needed. Thanks!--[[User:Chelsey.brantley|Chelsey.brantley]] ([[User talk:Chelsey.brantley|talk]]) 19:13, 20 April 2025 (EDT)

== A Dialogue Essay on Mailer and Hemingway ==

I believe I have finished remediating this [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/A Dialogue Essay on Mailer and Hemingway|article]]. [[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 22:44, 20 April 2025 (EDT)

== Volume 4 ==

https://projectmailer.net/pm/User:JBawlson/sandbox
Hi Dr. Lucas! I've finished remediating my article.

== Diligently Continuing to Remediate ==

Hi, I remediated the article, [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norman vs. Ernest: Influence and Identity|Norman vs. Ernest: Influence and Identity]].

I'm not sure if it will count towards the editing grade because it is overdue, but I wanted to keep editing volume 4. I really would like to get it to complete status.

I am having a major error, and I'm positive it has to do with the roman numeral citations. Please help me out with this if you can.

Ex. p=xii–xiii --[[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 15:22, 24 April 2025 (EDT)

Disregard the sfn error. I found a solution. --[[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 07:53, 25 April 2025 (EDT)

== Further Remediation ==

I'm currently remediating the article, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/A_Visionary_Hermeneutic_Appropriation:_Meditations_on_Hemingway’s_Influence_on_Mailer|A Visionary Hermeneutic Appropriation: Meditations on Hemingway’s Influence on Mailer]] I've complete a good chunk of it, but it is very long. I will try to finished it this weekend. I'm not sure if anyone else is still remediating in an attempt to finish the volumes. When I finish this article, there will be no more left in Volume 4. I'm not sure about volume 5 yet and will investigate later. I did have to create the page from scratch, so there is no "under construction" notice. --[[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 15:23, 25 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| APKnight25}} that is very kind of you. I appreciate all of the extra work, but do not kill yourself. I don't believe that anyone else is working; see [[Special:RecentChanges]]. That said, any additional will look very good for your evaluation. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 16:15, 25 April 2025 (EDT)

== Finished Remediating A Visionary Hermeneutic Appropriation: Meditations on Hemingway’s Influence on Mailer ==

I believe that I'm finished remediating [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/A_Visionary_Hermeneutic_Appropriation:_Meditations_on_Hemingway’s_Influence_on_Mailer|A Visionary Hermeneutic Appropriation: Meditations on Hemingway’s Influence on Mailer]]. I think that all of Volume 4 is remediated. This was a really fun and informative experience, so thank you. I wish future students well in editing volumes. --[[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 14:05, 28 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| APKnight25}} awesome! Again, that you ''so'' much for going above-and-beyond. I’m glad you enjoyed it—I do, too. 😀 —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 12:03, 29 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Project ==

@Grlucus

*Group Participation:
I participated with the group on Mailer’s The Prisoner of Sex. I added sources to the bibliography and also added to the section in the sandbox for “Principal Characters.” This section required a bullet list of characters and a paragraph to discuss the role they played in the story.

User:GradStudent74/The Prisoner of Sex - Wikipedia

User:GradStudent74/The Prisoner of Sex/Bibliography - Wikipedia

*Article for Individual Development:
I chose to edit an article about my hometown because it has a rich history. I enjoyed reading the article and learned many things that I never knew.

Talk:Bridgeport, Connecticut - Wikipedia

Bridgeport, Connecticut - Wikipedia

User:Poeticjewel

User talk:Grlucas

2025-05-01T02:45:45Z

KForeman: /* Final Project */

{{Talk header}}
[[/Archive 202504/]]

== Final edits ==
Hello, my article is complete: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Ernest_and_Norman_(Exit_Music)|Ernest and Norman (Exit Music)]]
:{{Reply to|Flowersbloom}} great, thank you. I made some corrections. Please be sure to sign your talk page posts. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Good evening, Dr. Lucas. Below is the link to my edited article:
https://projectmailer.net/pm/User:ASpeed/sandbox
:{{Reply to|ASpeed}} great. Let me know when it’s finished and posted, and I’l have a look. It appears as if you still have a bit of work to do. Please be sure to sign your talk page posts. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Good evening, @[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]. I have completed most of my Remediation Articles, but I still show issues for the one named, "[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman,_Papa,_and_the_Autoerotic_Construction_of_Woman|Norman, Papa, and the Autoerotic Construction of Woman]].

Based on the latest updates, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Battles_for_Regard,_Writerly_and_Otherwise|Battles for Regard, Writerly and Otherwise]] looks good with exception of including a '''category'''.
:{{Reply to|ALedezma}} this one is good. I made some corrections before removing the banner, mostly in your sources. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

May you let me know if there is anything I can do on my end to resolve the issues with the first [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman,_Papa,_and_the_Autoerotic_Construction_of_Woman|article]]?

[[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 21:47, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|ALedezma}} looking very good, but some sources missing page numbers. Please see to those. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

:::Thank you @[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] . I will review those and respond when complete. [[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 22:47, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::::@[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]. Thank you for your feedback. A review of article additions was made for source pages. [[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 20:22, 11 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::{{Reply to| ALedezma}} ok, looking good. I made some corrections. There's one final thing to do: no footnotes should appear in the notes section; use {{tl|harvtxt}} instead; I did one to show you how to use the template. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:39, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
::::::@[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] Changes were done to footnote sources. Thank you! [[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 19:59, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas I finished my remediation article https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer%27s_The_Fight:_Hemingway,_Bullfighting,_and_the_Lovely_Metaphysics_of_Boxing&action=edit [[User:TWietstruk|TWietstruk]] ([[User talk:TWietstruk|talk]]) 19:44, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| TWietstruk}} good work so far, but there is more to do: placement of footnotes (eliminate spaces around them and punctuation always goes ''before'' the footnote.); proofread for typos; fix all red errors at the bottom (most of these are from errors in sourcing); works cited entries should be bulleted list and eliminate space between entries. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:05, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Final edit and no errors with some help from @NRMMGA5108, @JKilchenmann. Please mark me as complete. On to help someone else with the things I've learned
https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer%27s_The_Fight:_Hemingway,_Bullfighting,_and_the_Lovely_Metaphysics_of_Boxing&action=edit [[User:TWietstruk|TWietstruk]] ([[User talk:TWietstruk|talk]]) 17:52, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas I have finished my assigned remediation article: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Jive-Ass_Aficionado:_Why_Are_We_in_Vietnam%3F_and_Hemingway%27s_Moral_Code#cite_note-FOOTNOTEHemingway2003-24
Username ADear.
:{{Reply to|ADear}} thank you. I have marked this as complete. Please be sure you sign your talk page posts correctly. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:05, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I have finished remediating my assigned article. Please review it at your earliest convenience. The link is here: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer's_Mythmaking_in_An_American_Dream_and_“The_White_Negro”|Norman Mailer's Mythmaking in An American Dream and “The White Negro”]]—[[User:Erhernandez|Erhernandez]] ([[User talk:Erhernandez|talk]]) 08:52, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Erhernandez}} well done! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. I removed your banner after making a few corrections. Please have a look over it and move on to the next thing. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:06, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I transferred and edited my article. Can you look at it and remove the banner? Here's the link: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Authorship_and_Alienation_in_Death_in_the_Afternoon_and_Advertisements_for_Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself]] ( [[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 13:02, 28 March 2025 (EDT) )
:{{Reply to| APKnight25}} looking good! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. Next, eliminate all "fang" quotes in the article and add “real quotation marks.” Your sources should be a bulleted list. And there should be no space before a citation. You’re almost finished! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:21, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Reinventing the Wheel" Mailer Article for Review ==

Dr. Lucas,

My [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Reinventing_a_New_Wheel:_The_Films_of_Norman_Mailer|article]] is ready for review.

Thank you!
[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 15:29, 29 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|TPoole}} great! Could you include a link to it? Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:07, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
::OK, I [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer|found it]]. Looking really good. Great work. There are some citation issues that need to be seen to. The two red categories at the bottom should not be there; they will go away when the citations errors are corrected. Eliminate any quotation mark "fangs" in the text and replace them with “real quotation marks.” Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:14, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:::@Grlucas, what are the citation issues? Which ones need correcting? [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 17:31, 31 March 2025 (EDT)
::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} When you click your citations, they should jump to the works cited entry they correspond to. Several of yours do not, indicated by the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” at the bottom. You also have a "CS1 maint: Unrecognized language" error that will likely be cleared up when you fix the citation issues. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:55, 1 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::@Grlucas, I have tried correcting the sfn codes in my citations. I was able to get the 2 web citations to link correctly. But for some reason, I cannot get the Mailer 1967 film Wild 90 citation to link to the reference list. Please advise. [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 20:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
::::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} OK, all fixed and published. Thanks. Please move on to another remediation. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:46, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of: "Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer’s Left Conservatism and the Problematic of 'Totalitarianism'" ==

Dr. Lucas

I finished the remediation of the following article:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Contradictory_Syntheses:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Left_Conservatism_and_the_Problematic_of_%E2%80%9CTotalitarianism%E2%80%9D

It is ready for your review. Thank you.
[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 19:04, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} looks great. I made some tweaks to the references and some throughout, like changing ' and " to real apostrophes and quotation marks. A bit more clean-up, but you might want to check over it again. I removed the under-construction banner. Well one. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 21:32, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edit ==

Thank you for your comments on my remediation of
"[[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself.]]"

I've eliminated the "fang quotes" and changed them to “real quotation marks.” This was a very fascinating tip that taught me something new. It's something I've never noticed before but now always will.

I also put my sources in a bulleted list and removed the space before the citations. I think I'm all set now.
:{{Reply to|APKnight25}} great work! Please help other editors to complete the volume. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:34, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Firearms in the Works of Hemingway and Mailer'' ==

[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]

Hi Dr. Lucas,

I believe I have done everything for the Remediation of my article. Please let me know if there is anything else I need to do.

I will also link the article below:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Firearms_in_the_Works_of_Hemingway_and_Mailer

Thank you,
Caitlin Vinson
:{{Reply to|CVinson}} great work so far. Your references must use templates, please. Blockquotes must also be done correctly. No spaces or line breaks before or after the {{tl|pg}} template. Footnote placement is also off (punctuation goes before the footnote; no spaces before or after the footnote). I will add the abstract and url. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:30, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Hi Dr. Lucas, I believe there have been some updates made to the project. I believe I have also updated the works cited section to show correct templates. Please let me know if there is anything further that I need to do. Thank you, Caitlin.
::{{reply to| CVinson}} please sign your talk page posts correctly. Thanks. You still need to do some work on the sources. Use the <code>|author-mask=1</code> in your template for repeated author names. Also, you must eliminate the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” message at the bottom. No spaces or returns before or after the {{tl|pg}} call, as I already mentioned above. No parenthetical citations should be left, either; those should all be remediated to footnotes. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:50, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:::{{Reply to|Grlucas}} I have updated the sources and updated the in-text citations. I am still having trouble with the "Harv and Sfn no-target errors." I have not been successful in fixing this error and have tried multiple ways to fix it. —[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 8:18, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

::::{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Hi Dr. Lucas, I see that I still have a red X for my remediation assignment. Is there something else I am still missing? —[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:35, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::{{reply to| CVinson}} sorry, I'm just getting back to it. There are quite a few punctuation errors. Some left out and others appear after the {{tl|sfn}}. I'm trying to correct those I see, but you should have a look, too. Page is designated as <code>p=</code> in {{tl|sfn}}, not <code>pg=</code>; and a span of pages needs <code>pp=</code>. Again, I have tried to correct these. I removed the banner, but please have another look through. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:01, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norman Mailer Today'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up my remediation article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Norman Mailer Today|Norman Mailer Today]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 18:20, 3 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Kamyers}} Great work! Please help your fellow editors finish the volume, or pick something to work on in [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010|Volume 4]]. Thanks, and well done. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:00, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of “The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’” ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished my remediation of Jennifer Yirinec's article: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”|The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.”]] Thank you for your assistance with the article. It is ready for its final review! [[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 10:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} a stellar job. Well done. I removed the banner, so you can move on to another article. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:12, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediations ==
Dr. Lucas, I have begun work on the tributes for volume 5. [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Grace Notes|Grace Notes]] by Stephen Borkowski is ready for its final review.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 12:58, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} Well done! Banner removed, url added. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:18, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

==Oohh Normie Final Edits==
Hi Dr. Lucas, I have finished my article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/"Oohh_Normie_—_You're_Sooo_Hemingway":_Mailer_Memories_and_Encounters|Oohh Normie, You're Sooo Hemingway]]. Please let me know if there is anything I need to fix. [[User:Tbara4554|Tbara4554]] ([[User talk:Tbara4554|talk]]) 20:01, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Tbara4554}} thank you. I made some corrections and removed the banner. You might want to have another look over it. Please move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:53, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Harlot's Ghost, Bildungsroman, Masculinity and Hemingway ==

Dr. Lucas,

The following article is ready for your review. Thanks.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Harlot%27s_Ghost,_Bildungsroman,_Masculinity_and_Hemingway

[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 21:22, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} excellent. Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:39, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== I am done with this ==

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Situating_Hemingway:_Mailer,_Style,_Ethics
:Received. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:29, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Review PM Article ==

Hi Dr. Lucas, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Hemingway_to_Mailer_—_A_Delayed_Response_to_The_Deer_Park|here]] is my remediated article, ready for review![[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 12:21, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Hobbitonya}} great work. I have removed the banner, so you are good to move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:20, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Project ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have finished my remedidation project and I am ready for it to be reviewed. '''Article link''': [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe#Works_Cited|Piling On: Norman Mailer's Utilization of Marilyn Monroe]

Thanks,

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 13:04, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} good work so far. Please remove wikilinks. Change ' and " to typographical apostrophes and quotation marks. And all red errors at the bottom of the page need to be taken care of. These are likely all from coding errors in your sources. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:24, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have removed the wikilinks, changed to the correct typographic style and updated my sources.
'''Article link''': [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe#Works_Cited|Piling On: Norman Mailer's Utilization of Marilyn Monroe] Thanks, [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 21:55, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

[I forgot to fill out the summary box. I am adding my summary]
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} you're getting there! It looks great. You must eliminate all the red errors at the bottom. These appear when there are errors in your citations. Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:15, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

@{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have tried everything I can think of and I still have harv and sfn no-target errors and harv and sfn multiple-target errors and cs1 uses editors parameter. Do I not include the editor? [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 16:03, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have managed to get rid of two of the red target errors. I am still working on finding the harv sfn multiple target error. Thanks, [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 20:37, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have tried everything i can think of to remove the last red error flag. I had to turn it in. I don't know that else I can do in this situation. I was given citation that did not follow any of the given formats. [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 21:45, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} all parenthetical citations must be remediated to {{tl|sfn}}; none of yours are. Get these done, then we can worry about the errors. (Some notes on sources: any generic <code><nowiki>{{citation}}</nowiki></code> will not be correct. I see you have a book review by Marshall that has no source (I tried to find the original and cannot; this is a weird citation; I'll continue to look for it). There's also one that looks like a film that should use the [[w:Template:Cite AV media|<code>Cite AV media</code> template]].) Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:16, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Submission ==

Hello!
Here's my remediated article; [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/The_Devil's_Party:_Reading_and_Wreaking_Vengeance_in_The_Castle_in_the_Forest|The Devil's Party: Reading and Wreaking Vengeance in ''The Castle in the Forest'']].
Thanks! Please let me know if there's anything I can review or correct.
[[User:Maggiemrogers|Maggiemrogers]] ([[User talk:Maggiemrogers|talk]]) 13:23, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Maggiemrogers}} nice work! Banner removed, so please move on to something else in the volume. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:39, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Vol. 4: Rumors of Grace article remediated ==

I believe I have completed remediation of ''[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Rumors_of_Grace:_God-Language_in_Hemingway_and_Mailer|Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer]]'', vol. 4. I was having last-minute trouble with sfn errors for sources without authors, but Justin Kilchenmann helped me out, so I think they are fixed.
:{{Reply to|Sherrilledwards}} You have done a remarkable job—a real Herculean effort! Footnotes should not go in any notes. See those I changed; the others should be changed in the same way. I have done some, but the others have to be fixed, I'm afraid. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:20, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to|Grlucas}}I believe I have completed these fixes, so the article is again ready for review. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 15:49, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
:::{{Reply to| Sherrilledwards}} truly exceptional work—a model remediation! Marked as complete. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:30, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Inside Norman Mailer ==

Hi Dr. Lucas - I have finished remediating the article, [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Inside Norman Mailer|Inside Norman Mailer]]. Please let me know if I need to make any adjustments. Thank you! [[User:Chelsey.brantley|Chelsey.brantley]] ([[User talk:Chelsey.brantley|talk]]) 18:09, 7 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Chelsey.brantley}} good work! Please help with another article from volume 4. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:36, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed: Norman Mailer: Playboy Magazine ==

I hope I am doing this is right. I have finished remediating my article about Norman Mailer and its in my designated sandbox [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer:_Playboy_Magazine_Heavyweight here.]
If there are any last minute edits, let me know. I got the last of the errors removed yesterday. And I believe we are on the same page with leaving the in-line citations for ''Playboy'' to be as is, since the author didn't put them down in the works cited. [[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 20:14, 7 April 2025 (EDT)Nina Mizner
:{{Reply to|NrmMGA5108}} looking good! So, the parenthetical citations still in the article, I'm assuming, are there because of those missing sources? Please check your page numbers; some seem to be off. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:04, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} I found the page number error and its corrected, and yes all the parenthetical citations should be referencing issues of the ''playboy'' magazine, which were not listed in the works cited. --[[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 20:54, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| NrmMGA5108}} it looks great. I removed the banner! Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:29, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed Remediation From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity? ==

Greeting Dr. Lucas,

I have made the adjustment that you mentioned.

I also made additional edits to my short footnotes and noticed that my citations did not link to my references - which has been fixed.

I have tested all of my citations, and they all work.

Here is my article by Alexander Hicks, ''From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity?''

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/From_Here_to_Eternity_and_The_Naked_and_the_Dead:_Premiere_to_Eternity%3F

Have a great day.
:{{Reply to| THarrell}} Please always sign your talk page posts. Several “quoted items” in the article appear as ‘quoted items’; these must be corrected, please. No spaces or returns should surround {{tl|pg}} calls. Multiple page numbers should look like this <code><nowiki>{{sfn|Moretti|1996|pp=11-14}}</nowiki></code>; note the double <code>pp</code>. There seem to be many typos. I corrected some for you, but you must see to the rest. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:16, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Greetings,

Are these the only additional corrections that need to be made? This is different from what you mentioned before.

I just want to be sure that I have hit everything.

Also can you verify what other typos you are seeing, I have ran through this twice.

If something is spelt a certain way, for example "Soljer", I have left it that way. Since it is mentioned like that in the article.
—[[User:THarrell|THarrell]] ([[User talk:THarrell|talk]]) 06:49, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Greetings,

I have gone through and fixed all of the short footnotes.

I have gone line by line with a ruler to look at any typos, and fixed the words that I found that had a dash in them/needed to be lowercased.

I have also fixed the quotations.

—[[User:THarrell|THarrell]] ([[User talk:THarrell|talk]]) 12:31, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| THarrell}} much better. Periods go inside quotations marks; I think I fixed these, but please check. Also, there are no spaces before footnotes; again, I did a find/replace, but you should check. Also, check that all titles of novels are italicized (if it's italicized in the PDF, then it has to be italicized in the remediation, including abbreviations, like ''Naked''); I fixed a couple. Also, no extra spaces; there should only be a single blank space between paragraphs. There are quite a few little details that needed (need?) fixing. I removed the banner, but please check my work. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 12:41, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon” ==

Greetings Dr. Lucus,

My article is ready for your review. Thank you.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer%E2%80%99s_%E2%80%9CFootnote_to_Death_in_the_Afternoon%E2%80%9D)
:{{Reply to| KForeman}} it's coming along. Please ''always'' sign your talk page posts. Right up top, there are errors. Please use the real {{tl|pg}}, like all the other articles. Citations need to be fixed. All parenthetical citations must be converted. You still have quite a bit of work to do. All red sections need to be seen to and corrected. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:20, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
@Grlucs, per your suggestions, I've made the corrections. Please review. I look forward to your feedback. Thank you.
:{{Reply to| KForeman}} looking better. All parenthetical page numbers should be removed and added to the {{tl|sfn}}. Check your page numbers in {{tl|pg}}. Footnotes should have no spaces around them; periods and commas go ''inside'' quotation marks and before the footnotes. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:28, 19 April 2025 (EDT)
@Grlucs, per your suggestions, I've made changes, please review. Thank you.

=Remediation of "Cluster Seeds and the Mailer Legacy"=
Hello, Dr. Lucas. I have completed the remediation of [https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Cluster_Seeds_and_the_Mailer_Legacy&oldid=18200| my article], and it is ready for your review. Thank you!—[[User:ADavis|ADavis]] ([[User talk:ADavis|talk]]) 11:32, 8 April 2025 (EDT)@ADavis
:{{Reply to| ADavis}} got it. I think I check it yesterday and removed the banner then. Please move on to another piece. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediating Article: Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing Volume 4. ==

Hello Dr. Lucas,

I have completed remediating my article. Here is the link [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing|The Mailer Review: Volume 4: Mailer, Hemingway, Boxing (2010)]] [[User:JBrown|JBrown]] ([[User talk:JBrown|talk]]) 13:01, 8 April 2025 (EDT)JBrown
:{{Reply to|JBrown}} a good start, but all parenthetical citations need to be footnotes. Also, check your headers. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norris Church Mailer'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up remediating the article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norris Church Mailer|Norris Church Mailer]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 13:42, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Kamyers}} awesome work! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edits Completed and Ready for Review ==

Dr. Lucas, I have completed my assigned remediation article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Looking_at_the_Past:_Nostalgia_as_Technique_in_The_Naked_and_the_Dead_and_For_Whom_the_Bell_Tolls|Looking at the Past: Nostalgia as Technique in The Naked and the Dead and For Whom the Bell Tolls]]. Please review at your convenience. I enjoyed working on this assignment. I look forward to your suggestions and feedback. All the best, Danielle (DBond007)
:{{Reply to| DBond007}} ok, good work. Please remove all the external links. Links to Wikipedia are not necessary, but if used, they need to be done correctly. There should be no spaces before {{tl|sfn}}. May sure all your ' and " are actually typographical apostrophes and quotation marks. Remove any superfluous spaces and line breaks; these mess up the formatting. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Thank you. I will get started on these revisions immediately. Thanks for the feedback and your time. :)[[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 11:30, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| Grlucas}} I have completed all the requested revisions and ready for review round 2. Thank you again![[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 12:10, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:::{{Reply to|DBond007}} looking better! There are still items to be seen to, like titles on novels and magazines need to appear like they do in the original: if it's italicized in the PDF, it must be italicized on the web. I added the epigram for you and corrected that pesky citation. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:41, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| Grlucas}}I have completed edits. I went through and took out quotes around The Time Machine, except for one instance that the author uses them. All my other titles seem to correspond to the original article. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you for the epigram and the pesky citation correction. Best, [[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 15:25, 17 April 2025 (EDT)
:::{{Reply to|DBond007}} received, and good work. I had to clean up the sources a bit, so you might want to have a look. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:42, 18 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| Grlucas}}I went back and reviewed some of the other articles marked complete to compare and look for remaining revisions. I made one change on Works Cited and also added the page numbers to correspond to the pdf. Let's try this again. Again, I *believe I am finished with this article. Best,[[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 10:36, 18 April 2025 (EDT)

Hopefully this works!. I'm not sure how to reply to other threads, but I was scrolling through the PDF and noticed the publisher is Iowa Pres? Just curious if it's supposed to be Iowa Press? [[User:Wverna|Wverna]] ([[User talk:Wverna|talk]]) 22:33, 18 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Wverna}} I'm not sure what you're talking about. Perhaps if you included a link to the article? See [[w:Help:Talk pages|Talk page guidelines]] if you don't know how to use them. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:33, 19 April 2025 (EDT)
Just kidding, I responded to the wrong "Bell Tolls' article. I was referring to this one: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Tolls_of_War:_Mailerian_Sub-Texts_in_For_Whom_the_Bell_Tolls sorry about that! [[User:Wverna|Wverna]] ([[User talk:Wverna|talk]]) 17:49, 19 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed the remediation assignment ==

Good evening Dr. Lucas,

I hope I am doing this right. Here is the link for my completed Remediation articles: [http://The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Encounters_with_Mailer Encounters with Mailer].

&

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Effects_of_Trauma_on_the_Narrative_Structures_of_Across_the_River_and_Into_the_Trees_and_The_Naked_and_the_Dead

I look forward to reading your feedback.

All the best,

Patrick Riley
:{{Reply to|Priley1984}} thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:40, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Project Submission: An Expected Encounter in an Unexpected Place ==

Link:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer:_An_Expected_Encounter_in_an_Unexpected_Place

Winnie Verna
:{{Reply to|Wverna}} received, thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:51, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== E.Mosley ==

Good evening, @Grlucas. I have completed my Remediation Articles[[https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/On_Reading_Mailer_Too_Young]]. The article I had was " On Reading Mailer Too Young Volume 4, 2010
:{{Reply to| Essence903m}} thank you. I had to fix and clean-up quite a bit. Your saves also do not include summaries. When you move on to your next article, please be more careful and follow the instructions. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:12, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Kynndra Watson ==

Good Evening, @grlucas. i have completed my Remediation articles: Volume 5: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Making_Masculinity_and_Unmaking_Jewishness:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Voice_in_Wild_90_and_Beyond_the_Law and Volume 4: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer,_Hemingway,_and_the_%E2%80%9CReds%E2%80%9D.

Thank you.
:{{Reply to| KWatson}} thank you, and this is a good start, but there are still many items that need to be cleaned up, like footnote indications (They go after punctuation), citation errors (all the red errors at the bottom need to be seen to), extra spaces and ALL CAPS need to be removed. Please see other completed articles for models. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:18, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/What Would Be the Fun of That?|"What Would Be the Fun of That?"]] by Peter Alson.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:33, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} awesome! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:21, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== “Remembering Norris Church” Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Remembering Norris Church|“Remembering Norris Church”]] by John Bowers.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 16:17, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} and again, excellent! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:22, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== “The Norris I Knew” Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/The Norris I Knew|“The Norris I Knew”]] by Christopher Busa.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:04, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} rockin’! 👍🏼 —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:24, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Norris Mailer" Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Norris Mailer|"Norris Mailer"]] by Nancy Collins.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:35, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} thanks again. You’re tearing it up. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:32, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Rise Above It" Tribute Remediation ==

Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Rise Above It|"Rise Above It"]] by David Ebershoff—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 11:12, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} excellent. Many thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:15, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed Additional Articles ==

Hello, Dr. Lucas. I have remediated [https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Tributes_to_Norris_Church_Mailer/A_View_Through_the_Prism&oldid=18744|"A View Through the Prism"], [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Tributes_to_Norris_Church_Mailer/Lip_Liner|"Lip Liner"], and [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/The_Living_Room_Show#|"The Living Room Show"] in Volume 5. They are ready for your review. Thank you!—[[User:ADavis|ADavis]] ([[User talk:ADavis|talk]]) 12:31, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|ADavis}} great work. Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:26, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Submission notification sent 29 March ==

@grlucas

Dr. Lucas - I sent a Talk Page notification that I had completed the page I remediated on 29 March. The table indicates I haven't done anything yet. I sent it from the Talk Page from the article site. I don't see a response from that notification, but I had received one from you earlier in the process.
I don't understand what happened.

[[User:LogansPop22|LogansPop22]] ([[User talk:LogansPop22|talk]]) 14:54, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|LogansPop22}} sorry if I missed that. [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Hemingway and Women at the Front: Blowing Bridges in The Fifth Column, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Other Works|this article]], right? It's looking great, though all the parenthetical citations must be converted to footnotes using {{tl|sfn}} and some of the author names in your notes should use {{tl|harvtxt}}. I added the "citations" section for you. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:39, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law ==

@Grlucas, I have made some additional edits to this [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Making_Masculinity_and_Unmaking_Jewishness:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Voice_in_Wild_90_and_Beyond_the_Law article] in Volume 5 by correcting most of the citations. There are 2 that still do not work, but I think that is because the sources are incomplete.

[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 21:16, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| TPoole}} Looking really good, and this is a complicated one. A couple of things: no spaces or line breaks before or after {{tl|pg}}; I removed the spaces before {{tl|sfn}}, but you might want to check them; there are some typos, like missing spaces before some parentheses; no footnotes should appear in the notes section: use {{tl|harvtxt}} instead. And all the red errors at the bottom need to be cleared up. Great work so far! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:00, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Red Error-Gone ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}I have deleted all the sfn's and the red error is gone. I don't know why I didn't think about this days ago.

[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe|Gladstein-Monroe]]

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 23:07, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|MerAtticus}} getting closer. A few things: you should use <code>|author-mask=1</code> for repeated author names in your works cited; all parenthetical citations need to be replaced with footnotes using {{tl|sfn}}; must punctuation in your sources need to be removed as the templates do that for you; and you need to use {{tl|harvtxt}} for citations in your endnotes. Also, letters and films have their own templates. I did a couple of these for you as examples. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:14, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Remembering Norris" Tribute Remediation ==

Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Remembering Norris|"Remembering Norris"]] by Margo Howard.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:20, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} excellent! Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:35, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

== Norman Mailer: From Orgone Accumulator to Cancer Protection for Schizophrenics ==

Dr. Lucas,

The following article is ready for your review:
https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer:_From_Orgone_Accumulator_to_Cancer_Protection_for_Schizophrenics

I was unable to find the correct format for the first works cited entry under Mailer. It is a reprint of a magazine article. Thank you. [[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 16:28, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} you are a master remediator! Thank you for going above and beyond. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:44, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

==Tolls of War: Mailerian Sub-Texts in For Whom the Bell Tolls, Trust & Sparring with Norman==
Dr. Lucas, these were some of the smaller ones, so I went ahead and knocked them out. They are ready for review: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Sparring with Norman|Sparring with Norman]], [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Trust|Trust]], and [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tolls of War: Mailerian Sub-Texts in For Whom the Bell Tolls|Tolls of War: Mailerian Sub-Texts in For Whom the Bell Tolls]]. —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 10:27, 13 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Kamyers}} all excellent—above and beyond! Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:56, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing'' ==

Hi everyone,
I am currently helping with the article, [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Death,_Art,_and_the_Disturbing:_Hemingway_and_Mailer_and_the_Art_of_Writing Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing]. It still has a good bit to go, if anyone wants to help out.
—[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 5:17 PM, 13 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|CVinson}} thanks! I added the author info. I'm not sure many will see your request; you might want to post it on the forum. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 14:56, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Thank you for adding the author information and I have posted the request in the forum. Thank you! —[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:CVinson|talk]]) 6:53 PM, 14 April 2025 (EDT)

== Mimi and Mercer ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have corrected the Mimi Gladstein [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Piling On: Norman Mailer’s Utilization of Marilyn Monroe]] and removed all the red errors. I also have finishe the Erin Mercer article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Automatons and the Atomic Abyss: The Naked and the Dead]], except the ''The Naked and the Dead'' in the display title. An error occured.
[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 19:26, 13 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} good work. There should be no footnotes in the endnotes, please. Since this is the only thing to correct, I have removed the banner, but please let me know when you made that final correction. Thanks! (I will respond about your second article shortly.) —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 14:59, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} your second article looks good. Could you use the [[w:Template:Cite interview|Template:Cite interview]] for interviews. I did one for you. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 16:33, 14 April 2025 (EDT)

== Through the Lens of the Beatniks Remediation ==

Hello, Dr. Lucas! I've completed the remediation of [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Through_the_Lens_of_the_Beatniks:_Norman_Mailer_and_Modern_American_Man’s_Quest_for_Self-Realization#CITEREFNaked1992|Through the Lens of the Beatniks]]. I wasn't able to get the letter citations exactly how I thought they should be. If there's anything I'm missing, please let me know! Thanks! [[User:Maggiemrogers|Maggiemrogers]] ([[User talk:Maggiemrogers|talk]]) 10:09, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Maggiemrogers}} got it! It looks great. I made some format changes, but you did a great job! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 15:58, 14 April 2025 (EDT)

== Finish Mimi ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}

I have made the final edit to Mimi and removed the footnotes from the endnotes. [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe]] [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 15:50, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} you removed all the citations. Only '''footnotes''' need to be removed, but citations need to stay. I did the first note for you (now erased, but you can see it in the history) so you could see how it was done. You can also see [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer|this one]]. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 16:52, 14 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed? All You Need is Glove ==

Hi Dr. Lucas, I believe the book review, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/All_You_Need_is_Glove|All You Need is Glove]] is done and ready for review! [[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 19:10, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Hobbitonya}} awesome work! Banner removed, and many thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:08, 16 April 2025 (EDT)

== Harv and Sfn no-target ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I changed the citations in the article to interview and I tried a few things to get rid of the Harv and Sfn no-target with little luck. [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Automatons_and_the_Atomic_Abyss:_The_Naked_and_the_Dead]]
[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 21:04, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} this was because your interviews had no dates. Most are from Lennon's book, published in 1988. I added the dates to the citations, but the sfn footnotes need to be fixed to correspond with those. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:24, 16 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} OK, between your fixes and my little tweaks, this one is finished! Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:50, 17 April 2025 (EDT)

== Erros fixed ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have fixed all citation errors in both articles and added the harvtxt. Atomic Abyss still has the Pages using duplicate arguments in template calls error.
[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Automatons_and_the_Atomic_Abyss:_The_Naked_and_the_Dead]]
:{{Reply to|MerAtticus}} see above. These still need fixing. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:35, 16 April 2025 (EDT)

[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe]]
:{{Reply to|MerAtticus}} this one looks great! Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:35, 16 April 2025 (EDT)

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 08:23, 15 April 2025 (EDT)

== completed: Advertisements for Others ==

Thanks to some classmates helping with the finishing touches, my second article should be ready. [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Advertisements_for_Others:_The_Blurbs_of_Norman_Mailer|Advertisements for Others.]]
--[[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 19:24, 17 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to| NrmMGA5108}} received, and thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:15, 18 April 2025 (EDT)

== Two Poems Vol 4 Ready? ==

Hi Dr. Lucas! I think these two poems are ready for review: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/The Boxer in the Park|The Boxer in the Park]] and Norman Mailer and [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer_and_Ernest_Hemingway_Do_Not_Box_in_Heaven|Ernest Hemingway Do Not Box in Heaven]]. The second on says the display title is wrong, but again, I don't know what I am missing there. Thank you![[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 09:05, 18 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Hobbitonya}} excellent! Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:56, 18 April 2025 (EDT)

== A Dialogue Essay on Mailer and Hemingway ==

Hey,

I see that [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/A Dialogue Essay on Mailer and Hemingway|A Dialogue Essay on Mailer and Hemingway]] is missing text. Can you email me a copy or link it as a reply, so I can remediate this article. [[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 09:44, 18 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| APKnight25}} you may download both volumes’ PDFs on the [https://forum.grlucas.net/t/project-mailer-assignments-remediation-project/88/3?u=grlucas forum]. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:40, 18 April 2025 (EDT)

== Almost complete ==

@grlucas
I've made a ton of progress.
The only thing I have left is going through all of the links to do away with harvtxt and sfn target error and an error for extra text in the author section. I fixed the error about using an "en" dash between years.
I'll still be working on it until tomorrow night, but please take a look: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Hemingway_and_Women_at_the_Front:_Blowing_Bridges_in_The_Fifth_Column,_For_Whom_the_Bell_Tolls,_and_Other_Works

@grlucas
I’ve gotten rid of the second of three error messages. Still looking for the harvtxt sfn target error.
[[User:LogansPop22|LogansPop22]] ([[User talk:LogansPop22|talk]]) 14:45, 20 April 2025 (EDT)

@grlucas
I’ve gone through every citation. Did the YEARa and YEARb designations. Made sure there weren’t extra spaces or missing {, |, or anything else.
I’ve corrected everything I can find after extensive proofreading. I still have the harvtxt and sfn no target error.
Here it is: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Hemingway_and_Women_at_the_Front:_Blowing_Bridges_in_The_Fifth_Column,_For_Whom_the_Bell_Tolls,_and_Other_Works
[[User:LogansPop22|LogansPop22]] ([[User talk:LogansPop22|talk]]) 19:50, 20 April 2025 (EDT)

== Articles complete ==

@grlucas
I have also made a lot of progress with my articles and luckily received a last minute assit from a few of my class mates. I beleive both volumes to be complete: Vol 4: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer,_Hemingway,_and_the_%E2%80%9CReds%E2%80%9D (Which I believe has already been submitted) and Volume 5: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Making_Masculinity_and_Unmaking_Jewishness:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Voice_in_Wild_90_and_Beyond_the_Law (I just received the final error correction from a fellow student.

I also started working on this Vol 4 article once I got back into the system: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Style,_Politics,_and_Hemingway%27s_Spanish_Civil_War_Dispatches in my sandbox https://projectmailer.net/pm/User:KWatson/sandbox but another user has already completed it.

Please review my articles and advise what else is needed from me. Thank you [[User:KWatson|KWatson]] ([[User talk:KWatson|talk]]) 15:37, 19 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| KWatson}} OK, I already checked the [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and the “Reds”|Peppard article]]. For [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law|the Cohen]], the notes are still not quite right. Citations must be logically inserted. Instead of <blockquote>Mary V. Dearborn writes that Mailer picked up Yiddish at home from his parents, “enough so that many years later, in Germany, he was able to ask for directions in this language and be understood.” {{harvtxt|Dearborn|1999|p=14}}</blockquote> it should be <blockquote>Mary V. {{harvtxt|Dearborn|1999|p=14}} writes that Mailer picked up Yiddish at home from his parents, “enough so that many years later, in Germany, he was able to ask for directions in this language and be understood.” </blockquote> See the difference? Please be meticulous on these. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:57, 20 April 2025 (EDT)

== Additional edits ==

Hello! I reformatted all in text citations, did some editing, and added page numbers to [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing|Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing]]- could you please take a look at the updated page and see if there's anything additional that it needs?

I was also wondering: on this page, I had also recieved confirmation from you that my [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/The American Civil War in The Naked and the Dead and Across the River and Into the Trees|originally assigned article]] was complete, and the banner could be removed. However, it is still showing as an X on the page, and I am unable to find the comment from you! Could you please clarify if anything needs to be fixed? Thanks so much!
[[User:KaraCroissant|KaraCroissant]] ([[User talk:KaraCroissant|talk]]) 16:25, 19 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| KaraCroissant}} good! I was making quite a few corrections on “[[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing|Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing]],” but I stopped, figuring you might want to finish it. Put footnotes directly after the quotations, not all at the end of sentences. No spaces or line breaks before or after {{tl|pg}}. Use <code>|author-mask=1</code> with repeated author names in works cited entries, titles of books must be italicized like they are in the original text, etc. Thanks. After a few fixes, I removed the banner for the [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/The American Civil War in The Naked and the Dead and Across the River and Into the Trees|Meredith article]]. Well done. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:20, 20 April 2025 (EDT)

== Civil War..Dispatched. ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}

I believe the Hemingway's Spanish Civil War is complete except the harvtext were not working. [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Style,_Politics,_and_Hemingway's_Spanish_Civil_War_Dispatches]]
[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 17:37, 19 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} I made many small corrections. Please view them in the history and continue in the same way. This one just needs a bit more attention. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:33, 20 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation, Vol. 4 & 5 ==

For your review,

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norris_Church_Mailer:_An_Artist_from_Arkansas

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Imagining_Evil:_The_Sardonic_Narrator_of_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Last_Novel (Wasn't sure whether or not to add the dinkus)

[[User:Wverna|Wverna]] ([[User talk:Wverna|talk]]) 11:15, 20 April 2025 (EDT)

== Hemingway ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}} I revised early this morning and I have gone back through it this afternoon. Hopefully it looks okay. Any ciations in the notes at this point is beyond my understanding of the topic. [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Style,_Politics,_and_Hemingway's_Spanish_Civil_War_Dispatches]]

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 14:11, 20 April 2025 (EDT)

== Combat ==
Hello
For your review [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/What_Norman_Mailer_Taught_Me_about_Combat|What Norman Mailer Taught Me about Combat].
Completed by me and @Flowersbloom
[[User:Tbara4554|Tbara4554]] ([[User talk:Tbara4554|talk]]) 18:45, 20 April 2025 (EDT)

== Article Completed ==

Hi Dr. Lucas - I have finished the article [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/“A_Noble_Pursuit”:_The_Armies_of_the_Night_as_Outside_Agitator|“A Noble Pursuit”: The Armies of the Night as Outside Agitator]]. Please let me know if any changes are needed. Thanks!--[[User:Chelsey.brantley|Chelsey.brantley]] ([[User talk:Chelsey.brantley|talk]]) 19:13, 20 April 2025 (EDT)

== A Dialogue Essay on Mailer and Hemingway ==

I believe I have finished remediating this [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/A Dialogue Essay on Mailer and Hemingway|article]]. [[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 22:44, 20 April 2025 (EDT)

== Volume 4 ==

https://projectmailer.net/pm/User:JBawlson/sandbox
Hi Dr. Lucas! I've finished remediating my article.

== Diligently Continuing to Remediate ==

Hi, I remediated the article, [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norman vs. Ernest: Influence and Identity|Norman vs. Ernest: Influence and Identity]].

I'm not sure if it will count towards the editing grade because it is overdue, but I wanted to keep editing volume 4. I really would like to get it to complete status.

I am having a major error, and I'm positive it has to do with the roman numeral citations. Please help me out with this if you can.

Ex. p=xii–xiii --[[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 15:22, 24 April 2025 (EDT)

Disregard the sfn error. I found a solution. --[[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 07:53, 25 April 2025 (EDT)

== Further Remediation ==

I'm currently remediating the article, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/A_Visionary_Hermeneutic_Appropriation:_Meditations_on_Hemingway’s_Influence_on_Mailer|A Visionary Hermeneutic Appropriation: Meditations on Hemingway’s Influence on Mailer]] I've complete a good chunk of it, but it is very long. I will try to finished it this weekend. I'm not sure if anyone else is still remediating in an attempt to finish the volumes. When I finish this article, there will be no more left in Volume 4. I'm not sure about volume 5 yet and will investigate later. I did have to create the page from scratch, so there is no "under construction" notice. --[[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 15:23, 25 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| APKnight25}} that is very kind of you. I appreciate all of the extra work, but do not kill yourself. I don't believe that anyone else is working; see [[Special:RecentChanges]]. That said, any additional will look very good for your evaluation. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 16:15, 25 April 2025 (EDT)

== Finished Remediating A Visionary Hermeneutic Appropriation: Meditations on Hemingway’s Influence on Mailer ==

I believe that I'm finished remediating [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/A_Visionary_Hermeneutic_Appropriation:_Meditations_on_Hemingway’s_Influence_on_Mailer|A Visionary Hermeneutic Appropriation: Meditations on Hemingway’s Influence on Mailer]]. I think that all of Volume 4 is remediated. This was a really fun and informative experience, so thank you. I wish future students well in editing volumes. --[[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 14:05, 28 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| APKnight25}} awesome! Again, that you ''so'' much for going above-and-beyond. I’m glad you enjoyed it—I do, too. 😀 —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 12:03, 29 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Project ==
@poeticjewel

@Grlucus

*Group Participation:
I participated with the group on Mailer’s The Prisoner of Sex. I added sources to the bibliography and also added to the section in the sandbox for “Principal Characters.” This section required a bullet list of characters and a paragraph to discuss the role they played in the story.

User:GradStudent74/The Prisoner of Sex - Wikipedia

User:GradStudent74/The Prisoner of Sex/Bibliography - Wikipedia

*Article for Individual Development:
I chose to edit an article about my hometown because it has a rich history. I enjoyed reading the article and learned many things that I never knew.

Talk:Bridgeport, Connecticut - Wikipedia

Bridgeport, Connecticut - Wikipedia

User talk:Grlucas

2025-05-01T02:42:33Z

KForeman: /* Final Project */

{{Talk header}}
[[/Archive 202504/]]

== Final edits ==
Hello, my article is complete: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Ernest_and_Norman_(Exit_Music)|Ernest and Norman (Exit Music)]]
:{{Reply to|Flowersbloom}} great, thank you. I made some corrections. Please be sure to sign your talk page posts. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Good evening, Dr. Lucas. Below is the link to my edited article:
https://projectmailer.net/pm/User:ASpeed/sandbox
:{{Reply to|ASpeed}} great. Let me know when it’s finished and posted, and I’l have a look. It appears as if you still have a bit of work to do. Please be sure to sign your talk page posts. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Good evening, @[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]. I have completed most of my Remediation Articles, but I still show issues for the one named, "[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman,_Papa,_and_the_Autoerotic_Construction_of_Woman|Norman, Papa, and the Autoerotic Construction of Woman]].

Based on the latest updates, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Battles_for_Regard,_Writerly_and_Otherwise|Battles for Regard, Writerly and Otherwise]] looks good with exception of including a '''category'''.
:{{Reply to|ALedezma}} this one is good. I made some corrections before removing the banner, mostly in your sources. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

May you let me know if there is anything I can do on my end to resolve the issues with the first [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman,_Papa,_and_the_Autoerotic_Construction_of_Woman|article]]?

[[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 21:47, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|ALedezma}} looking very good, but some sources missing page numbers. Please see to those. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

:::Thank you @[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] . I will review those and respond when complete. [[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 22:47, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::::@[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]. Thank you for your feedback. A review of article additions was made for source pages. [[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 20:22, 11 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::{{Reply to| ALedezma}} ok, looking good. I made some corrections. There's one final thing to do: no footnotes should appear in the notes section; use {{tl|harvtxt}} instead; I did one to show you how to use the template. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:39, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
::::::@[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] Changes were done to footnote sources. Thank you! [[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 19:59, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas I finished my remediation article https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer%27s_The_Fight:_Hemingway,_Bullfighting,_and_the_Lovely_Metaphysics_of_Boxing&action=edit [[User:TWietstruk|TWietstruk]] ([[User talk:TWietstruk|talk]]) 19:44, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| TWietstruk}} good work so far, but there is more to do: placement of footnotes (eliminate spaces around them and punctuation always goes ''before'' the footnote.); proofread for typos; fix all red errors at the bottom (most of these are from errors in sourcing); works cited entries should be bulleted list and eliminate space between entries. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:05, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Final edit and no errors with some help from @NRMMGA5108, @JKilchenmann. Please mark me as complete. On to help someone else with the things I've learned
https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer%27s_The_Fight:_Hemingway,_Bullfighting,_and_the_Lovely_Metaphysics_of_Boxing&action=edit [[User:TWietstruk|TWietstruk]] ([[User talk:TWietstruk|talk]]) 17:52, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas I have finished my assigned remediation article: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Jive-Ass_Aficionado:_Why_Are_We_in_Vietnam%3F_and_Hemingway%27s_Moral_Code#cite_note-FOOTNOTEHemingway2003-24
Username ADear.
:{{Reply to|ADear}} thank you. I have marked this as complete. Please be sure you sign your talk page posts correctly. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:05, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I have finished remediating my assigned article. Please review it at your earliest convenience. The link is here: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer's_Mythmaking_in_An_American_Dream_and_“The_White_Negro”|Norman Mailer's Mythmaking in An American Dream and “The White Negro”]]—[[User:Erhernandez|Erhernandez]] ([[User talk:Erhernandez|talk]]) 08:52, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Erhernandez}} well done! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. I removed your banner after making a few corrections. Please have a look over it and move on to the next thing. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:06, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I transferred and edited my article. Can you look at it and remove the banner? Here's the link: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Authorship_and_Alienation_in_Death_in_the_Afternoon_and_Advertisements_for_Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself]] ( [[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 13:02, 28 March 2025 (EDT) )
:{{Reply to| APKnight25}} looking good! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. Next, eliminate all "fang" quotes in the article and add “real quotation marks.” Your sources should be a bulleted list. And there should be no space before a citation. You’re almost finished! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:21, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Reinventing the Wheel" Mailer Article for Review ==

Dr. Lucas,

My [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Reinventing_a_New_Wheel:_The_Films_of_Norman_Mailer|article]] is ready for review.

Thank you!
[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 15:29, 29 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|TPoole}} great! Could you include a link to it? Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:07, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
::OK, I [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer|found it]]. Looking really good. Great work. There are some citation issues that need to be seen to. The two red categories at the bottom should not be there; they will go away when the citations errors are corrected. Eliminate any quotation mark "fangs" in the text and replace them with “real quotation marks.” Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:14, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:::@Grlucas, what are the citation issues? Which ones need correcting? [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 17:31, 31 March 2025 (EDT)
::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} When you click your citations, they should jump to the works cited entry they correspond to. Several of yours do not, indicated by the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” at the bottom. You also have a "CS1 maint: Unrecognized language" error that will likely be cleared up when you fix the citation issues. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:55, 1 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::@Grlucas, I have tried correcting the sfn codes in my citations. I was able to get the 2 web citations to link correctly. But for some reason, I cannot get the Mailer 1967 film Wild 90 citation to link to the reference list. Please advise. [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 20:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
::::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} OK, all fixed and published. Thanks. Please move on to another remediation. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:46, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of: "Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer’s Left Conservatism and the Problematic of 'Totalitarianism'" ==

Dr. Lucas

I finished the remediation of the following article:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Contradictory_Syntheses:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Left_Conservatism_and_the_Problematic_of_%E2%80%9CTotalitarianism%E2%80%9D

It is ready for your review. Thank you.
[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 19:04, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} looks great. I made some tweaks to the references and some throughout, like changing ' and " to real apostrophes and quotation marks. A bit more clean-up, but you might want to check over it again. I removed the under-construction banner. Well one. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 21:32, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edit ==

Thank you for your comments on my remediation of
"[[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself.]]"

I've eliminated the "fang quotes" and changed them to “real quotation marks.” This was a very fascinating tip that taught me something new. It's something I've never noticed before but now always will.

I also put my sources in a bulleted list and removed the space before the citations. I think I'm all set now.
:{{Reply to|APKnight25}} great work! Please help other editors to complete the volume. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:34, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Firearms in the Works of Hemingway and Mailer'' ==

[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]

Hi Dr. Lucas,

I believe I have done everything for the Remediation of my article. Please let me know if there is anything else I need to do.

I will also link the article below:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Firearms_in_the_Works_of_Hemingway_and_Mailer

Thank you,
Caitlin Vinson
:{{Reply to|CVinson}} great work so far. Your references must use templates, please. Blockquotes must also be done correctly. No spaces or line breaks before or after the {{tl|pg}} template. Footnote placement is also off (punctuation goes before the footnote; no spaces before or after the footnote). I will add the abstract and url. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:30, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Hi Dr. Lucas, I believe there have been some updates made to the project. I believe I have also updated the works cited section to show correct templates. Please let me know if there is anything further that I need to do. Thank you, Caitlin.
::{{reply to| CVinson}} please sign your talk page posts correctly. Thanks. You still need to do some work on the sources. Use the <code>|author-mask=1</code> in your template for repeated author names. Also, you must eliminate the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” message at the bottom. No spaces or returns before or after the {{tl|pg}} call, as I already mentioned above. No parenthetical citations should be left, either; those should all be remediated to footnotes. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:50, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:::{{Reply to|Grlucas}} I have updated the sources and updated the in-text citations. I am still having trouble with the "Harv and Sfn no-target errors." I have not been successful in fixing this error and have tried multiple ways to fix it. —[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 8:18, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

::::{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Hi Dr. Lucas, I see that I still have a red X for my remediation assignment. Is there something else I am still missing? —[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:35, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::{{reply to| CVinson}} sorry, I'm just getting back to it. There are quite a few punctuation errors. Some left out and others appear after the {{tl|sfn}}. I'm trying to correct those I see, but you should have a look, too. Page is designated as <code>p=</code> in {{tl|sfn}}, not <code>pg=</code>; and a span of pages needs <code>pp=</code>. Again, I have tried to correct these. I removed the banner, but please have another look through. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:01, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norman Mailer Today'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up my remediation article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Norman Mailer Today|Norman Mailer Today]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 18:20, 3 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Kamyers}} Great work! Please help your fellow editors finish the volume, or pick something to work on in [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010|Volume 4]]. Thanks, and well done. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:00, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of “The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’” ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished my remediation of Jennifer Yirinec's article: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”|The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.”]] Thank you for your assistance with the article. It is ready for its final review! [[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 10:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} a stellar job. Well done. I removed the banner, so you can move on to another article. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:12, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediations ==
Dr. Lucas, I have begun work on the tributes for volume 5. [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Grace Notes|Grace Notes]] by Stephen Borkowski is ready for its final review.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 12:58, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} Well done! Banner removed, url added. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:18, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

==Oohh Normie Final Edits==
Hi Dr. Lucas, I have finished my article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/"Oohh_Normie_—_You're_Sooo_Hemingway":_Mailer_Memories_and_Encounters|Oohh Normie, You're Sooo Hemingway]]. Please let me know if there is anything I need to fix. [[User:Tbara4554|Tbara4554]] ([[User talk:Tbara4554|talk]]) 20:01, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Tbara4554}} thank you. I made some corrections and removed the banner. You might want to have another look over it. Please move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:53, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Harlot's Ghost, Bildungsroman, Masculinity and Hemingway ==

Dr. Lucas,

The following article is ready for your review. Thanks.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Harlot%27s_Ghost,_Bildungsroman,_Masculinity_and_Hemingway

[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 21:22, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} excellent. Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:39, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== I am done with this ==

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Situating_Hemingway:_Mailer,_Style,_Ethics
:Received. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:29, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Review PM Article ==

Hi Dr. Lucas, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Hemingway_to_Mailer_—_A_Delayed_Response_to_The_Deer_Park|here]] is my remediated article, ready for review![[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 12:21, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Hobbitonya}} great work. I have removed the banner, so you are good to move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:20, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Project ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have finished my remedidation project and I am ready for it to be reviewed. '''Article link''': [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe#Works_Cited|Piling On: Norman Mailer's Utilization of Marilyn Monroe]

Thanks,

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 13:04, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} good work so far. Please remove wikilinks. Change ' and " to typographical apostrophes and quotation marks. And all red errors at the bottom of the page need to be taken care of. These are likely all from coding errors in your sources. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:24, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have removed the wikilinks, changed to the correct typographic style and updated my sources.
'''Article link''': [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe#Works_Cited|Piling On: Norman Mailer's Utilization of Marilyn Monroe] Thanks, [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 21:55, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

[I forgot to fill out the summary box. I am adding my summary]
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} you're getting there! It looks great. You must eliminate all the red errors at the bottom. These appear when there are errors in your citations. Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:15, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

@{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have tried everything I can think of and I still have harv and sfn no-target errors and harv and sfn multiple-target errors and cs1 uses editors parameter. Do I not include the editor? [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 16:03, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have managed to get rid of two of the red target errors. I am still working on finding the harv sfn multiple target error. Thanks, [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 20:37, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have tried everything i can think of to remove the last red error flag. I had to turn it in. I don't know that else I can do in this situation. I was given citation that did not follow any of the given formats. [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 21:45, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} all parenthetical citations must be remediated to {{tl|sfn}}; none of yours are. Get these done, then we can worry about the errors. (Some notes on sources: any generic <code><nowiki>{{citation}}</nowiki></code> will not be correct. I see you have a book review by Marshall that has no source (I tried to find the original and cannot; this is a weird citation; I'll continue to look for it). There's also one that looks like a film that should use the [[w:Template:Cite AV media|<code>Cite AV media</code> template]].) Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:16, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Submission ==

Hello!
Here's my remediated article; [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/The_Devil's_Party:_Reading_and_Wreaking_Vengeance_in_The_Castle_in_the_Forest|The Devil's Party: Reading and Wreaking Vengeance in ''The Castle in the Forest'']].
Thanks! Please let me know if there's anything I can review or correct.
[[User:Maggiemrogers|Maggiemrogers]] ([[User talk:Maggiemrogers|talk]]) 13:23, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Maggiemrogers}} nice work! Banner removed, so please move on to something else in the volume. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:39, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Vol. 4: Rumors of Grace article remediated ==

I believe I have completed remediation of ''[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Rumors_of_Grace:_God-Language_in_Hemingway_and_Mailer|Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer]]'', vol. 4. I was having last-minute trouble with sfn errors for sources without authors, but Justin Kilchenmann helped me out, so I think they are fixed.
:{{Reply to|Sherrilledwards}} You have done a remarkable job—a real Herculean effort! Footnotes should not go in any notes. See those I changed; the others should be changed in the same way. I have done some, but the others have to be fixed, I'm afraid. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:20, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to|Grlucas}}I believe I have completed these fixes, so the article is again ready for review. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 15:49, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
:::{{Reply to| Sherrilledwards}} truly exceptional work—a model remediation! Marked as complete. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:30, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Inside Norman Mailer ==

Hi Dr. Lucas - I have finished remediating the article, [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Inside Norman Mailer|Inside Norman Mailer]]. Please let me know if I need to make any adjustments. Thank you! [[User:Chelsey.brantley|Chelsey.brantley]] ([[User talk:Chelsey.brantley|talk]]) 18:09, 7 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Chelsey.brantley}} good work! Please help with another article from volume 4. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:36, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed: Norman Mailer: Playboy Magazine ==

I hope I am doing this is right. I have finished remediating my article about Norman Mailer and its in my designated sandbox [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer:_Playboy_Magazine_Heavyweight here.]
If there are any last minute edits, let me know. I got the last of the errors removed yesterday. And I believe we are on the same page with leaving the in-line citations for ''Playboy'' to be as is, since the author didn't put them down in the works cited. [[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 20:14, 7 April 2025 (EDT)Nina Mizner
:{{Reply to|NrmMGA5108}} looking good! So, the parenthetical citations still in the article, I'm assuming, are there because of those missing sources? Please check your page numbers; some seem to be off. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:04, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} I found the page number error and its corrected, and yes all the parenthetical citations should be referencing issues of the ''playboy'' magazine, which were not listed in the works cited. --[[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 20:54, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| NrmMGA5108}} it looks great. I removed the banner! Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:29, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed Remediation From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity? ==

Greeting Dr. Lucas,

I have made the adjustment that you mentioned.

I also made additional edits to my short footnotes and noticed that my citations did not link to my references - which has been fixed.

I have tested all of my citations, and they all work.

Here is my article by Alexander Hicks, ''From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity?''

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/From_Here_to_Eternity_and_The_Naked_and_the_Dead:_Premiere_to_Eternity%3F

Have a great day.
:{{Reply to| THarrell}} Please always sign your talk page posts. Several “quoted items” in the article appear as ‘quoted items’; these must be corrected, please. No spaces or returns should surround {{tl|pg}} calls. Multiple page numbers should look like this <code><nowiki>{{sfn|Moretti|1996|pp=11-14}}</nowiki></code>; note the double <code>pp</code>. There seem to be many typos. I corrected some for you, but you must see to the rest. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:16, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Greetings,

Are these the only additional corrections that need to be made? This is different from what you mentioned before.

I just want to be sure that I have hit everything.

Also can you verify what other typos you are seeing, I have ran through this twice.

If something is spelt a certain way, for example "Soljer", I have left it that way. Since it is mentioned like that in the article.
—[[User:THarrell|THarrell]] ([[User talk:THarrell|talk]]) 06:49, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Greetings,

I have gone through and fixed all of the short footnotes.

I have gone line by line with a ruler to look at any typos, and fixed the words that I found that had a dash in them/needed to be lowercased.

I have also fixed the quotations.

—[[User:THarrell|THarrell]] ([[User talk:THarrell|talk]]) 12:31, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| THarrell}} much better. Periods go inside quotations marks; I think I fixed these, but please check. Also, there are no spaces before footnotes; again, I did a find/replace, but you should check. Also, check that all titles of novels are italicized (if it's italicized in the PDF, then it has to be italicized in the remediation, including abbreviations, like ''Naked''); I fixed a couple. Also, no extra spaces; there should only be a single blank space between paragraphs. There are quite a few little details that needed (need?) fixing. I removed the banner, but please check my work. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 12:41, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon” ==

Greetings Dr. Lucus,

My article is ready for your review. Thank you.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer%E2%80%99s_%E2%80%9CFootnote_to_Death_in_the_Afternoon%E2%80%9D)
:{{Reply to| KForeman}} it's coming along. Please ''always'' sign your talk page posts. Right up top, there are errors. Please use the real {{tl|pg}}, like all the other articles. Citations need to be fixed. All parenthetical citations must be converted. You still have quite a bit of work to do. All red sections need to be seen to and corrected. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:20, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
@Grlucs, per your suggestions, I've made the corrections. Please review. I look forward to your feedback. Thank you.
:{{Reply to| KForeman}} looking better. All parenthetical page numbers should be removed and added to the {{tl|sfn}}. Check your page numbers in {{tl|pg}}. Footnotes should have no spaces around them; periods and commas go ''inside'' quotation marks and before the footnotes. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:28, 19 April 2025 (EDT)
@Grlucs, per your suggestions, I've made changes, please review. Thank you.

=Remediation of "Cluster Seeds and the Mailer Legacy"=
Hello, Dr. Lucas. I have completed the remediation of [https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Cluster_Seeds_and_the_Mailer_Legacy&oldid=18200| my article], and it is ready for your review. Thank you!—[[User:ADavis|ADavis]] ([[User talk:ADavis|talk]]) 11:32, 8 April 2025 (EDT)@ADavis
:{{Reply to| ADavis}} got it. I think I check it yesterday and removed the banner then. Please move on to another piece. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediating Article: Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing Volume 4. ==

Hello Dr. Lucas,

I have completed remediating my article. Here is the link [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing|The Mailer Review: Volume 4: Mailer, Hemingway, Boxing (2010)]] [[User:JBrown|JBrown]] ([[User talk:JBrown|talk]]) 13:01, 8 April 2025 (EDT)JBrown
:{{Reply to|JBrown}} a good start, but all parenthetical citations need to be footnotes. Also, check your headers. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norris Church Mailer'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up remediating the article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norris Church Mailer|Norris Church Mailer]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 13:42, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Kamyers}} awesome work! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edits Completed and Ready for Review ==

Dr. Lucas, I have completed my assigned remediation article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Looking_at_the_Past:_Nostalgia_as_Technique_in_The_Naked_and_the_Dead_and_For_Whom_the_Bell_Tolls|Looking at the Past: Nostalgia as Technique in The Naked and the Dead and For Whom the Bell Tolls]]. Please review at your convenience. I enjoyed working on this assignment. I look forward to your suggestions and feedback. All the best, Danielle (DBond007)
:{{Reply to| DBond007}} ok, good work. Please remove all the external links. Links to Wikipedia are not necessary, but if used, they need to be done correctly. There should be no spaces before {{tl|sfn}}. May sure all your ' and " are actually typographical apostrophes and quotation marks. Remove any superfluous spaces and line breaks; these mess up the formatting. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Thank you. I will get started on these revisions immediately. Thanks for the feedback and your time. :)[[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 11:30, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| Grlucas}} I have completed all the requested revisions and ready for review round 2. Thank you again![[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 12:10, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:::{{Reply to|DBond007}} looking better! There are still items to be seen to, like titles on novels and magazines need to appear like they do in the original: if it's italicized in the PDF, it must be italicized on the web. I added the epigram for you and corrected that pesky citation. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:41, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| Grlucas}}I have completed edits. I went through and took out quotes around The Time Machine, except for one instance that the author uses them. All my other titles seem to correspond to the original article. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you for the epigram and the pesky citation correction. Best, [[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 15:25, 17 April 2025 (EDT)
:::{{Reply to|DBond007}} received, and good work. I had to clean up the sources a bit, so you might want to have a look. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:42, 18 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| Grlucas}}I went back and reviewed some of the other articles marked complete to compare and look for remaining revisions. I made one change on Works Cited and also added the page numbers to correspond to the pdf. Let's try this again. Again, I *believe I am finished with this article. Best,[[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 10:36, 18 April 2025 (EDT)

Hopefully this works!. I'm not sure how to reply to other threads, but I was scrolling through the PDF and noticed the publisher is Iowa Pres? Just curious if it's supposed to be Iowa Press? [[User:Wverna|Wverna]] ([[User talk:Wverna|talk]]) 22:33, 18 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Wverna}} I'm not sure what you're talking about. Perhaps if you included a link to the article? See [[w:Help:Talk pages|Talk page guidelines]] if you don't know how to use them. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:33, 19 April 2025 (EDT)
Just kidding, I responded to the wrong "Bell Tolls' article. I was referring to this one: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Tolls_of_War:_Mailerian_Sub-Texts_in_For_Whom_the_Bell_Tolls sorry about that! [[User:Wverna|Wverna]] ([[User talk:Wverna|talk]]) 17:49, 19 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed the remediation assignment ==

Good evening Dr. Lucas,

I hope I am doing this right. Here is the link for my completed Remediation articles: [http://The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Encounters_with_Mailer Encounters with Mailer].

&

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Effects_of_Trauma_on_the_Narrative_Structures_of_Across_the_River_and_Into_the_Trees_and_The_Naked_and_the_Dead

I look forward to reading your feedback.

All the best,

Patrick Riley
:{{Reply to|Priley1984}} thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:40, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Project Submission: An Expected Encounter in an Unexpected Place ==

Link:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer:_An_Expected_Encounter_in_an_Unexpected_Place

Winnie Verna
:{{Reply to|Wverna}} received, thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:51, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== E.Mosley ==

Good evening, @Grlucas. I have completed my Remediation Articles[[https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/On_Reading_Mailer_Too_Young]]. The article I had was " On Reading Mailer Too Young Volume 4, 2010
:{{Reply to| Essence903m}} thank you. I had to fix and clean-up quite a bit. Your saves also do not include summaries. When you move on to your next article, please be more careful and follow the instructions. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:12, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Kynndra Watson ==

Good Evening, @grlucas. i have completed my Remediation articles: Volume 5: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Making_Masculinity_and_Unmaking_Jewishness:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Voice_in_Wild_90_and_Beyond_the_Law and Volume 4: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer,_Hemingway,_and_the_%E2%80%9CReds%E2%80%9D.

Thank you.
:{{Reply to| KWatson}} thank you, and this is a good start, but there are still many items that need to be cleaned up, like footnote indications (They go after punctuation), citation errors (all the red errors at the bottom need to be seen to), extra spaces and ALL CAPS need to be removed. Please see other completed articles for models. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:18, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/What Would Be the Fun of That?|"What Would Be the Fun of That?"]] by Peter Alson.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:33, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} awesome! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:21, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== “Remembering Norris Church” Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Remembering Norris Church|“Remembering Norris Church”]] by John Bowers.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 16:17, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} and again, excellent! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:22, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== “The Norris I Knew” Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/The Norris I Knew|“The Norris I Knew”]] by Christopher Busa.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:04, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} rockin’! 👍🏼 —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:24, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Norris Mailer" Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Norris Mailer|"Norris Mailer"]] by Nancy Collins.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:35, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} thanks again. You’re tearing it up. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:32, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Rise Above It" Tribute Remediation ==

Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Rise Above It|"Rise Above It"]] by David Ebershoff—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 11:12, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} excellent. Many thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:15, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed Additional Articles ==

Hello, Dr. Lucas. I have remediated [https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Tributes_to_Norris_Church_Mailer/A_View_Through_the_Prism&oldid=18744|"A View Through the Prism"], [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Tributes_to_Norris_Church_Mailer/Lip_Liner|"Lip Liner"], and [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/The_Living_Room_Show#|"The Living Room Show"] in Volume 5. They are ready for your review. Thank you!—[[User:ADavis|ADavis]] ([[User talk:ADavis|talk]]) 12:31, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|ADavis}} great work. Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:26, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Submission notification sent 29 March ==

@grlucas

Dr. Lucas - I sent a Talk Page notification that I had completed the page I remediated on 29 March. The table indicates I haven't done anything yet. I sent it from the Talk Page from the article site. I don't see a response from that notification, but I had received one from you earlier in the process.
I don't understand what happened.

[[User:LogansPop22|LogansPop22]] ([[User talk:LogansPop22|talk]]) 14:54, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|LogansPop22}} sorry if I missed that. [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Hemingway and Women at the Front: Blowing Bridges in The Fifth Column, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Other Works|this article]], right? It's looking great, though all the parenthetical citations must be converted to footnotes using {{tl|sfn}} and some of the author names in your notes should use {{tl|harvtxt}}. I added the "citations" section for you. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:39, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law ==

@Grlucas, I have made some additional edits to this [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Making_Masculinity_and_Unmaking_Jewishness:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Voice_in_Wild_90_and_Beyond_the_Law article] in Volume 5 by correcting most of the citations. There are 2 that still do not work, but I think that is because the sources are incomplete.

[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 21:16, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| TPoole}} Looking really good, and this is a complicated one. A couple of things: no spaces or line breaks before or after {{tl|pg}}; I removed the spaces before {{tl|sfn}}, but you might want to check them; there are some typos, like missing spaces before some parentheses; no footnotes should appear in the notes section: use {{tl|harvtxt}} instead. And all the red errors at the bottom need to be cleared up. Great work so far! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:00, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Red Error-Gone ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}I have deleted all the sfn's and the red error is gone. I don't know why I didn't think about this days ago.

[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe|Gladstein-Monroe]]

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 23:07, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|MerAtticus}} getting closer. A few things: you should use <code>|author-mask=1</code> for repeated author names in your works cited; all parenthetical citations need to be replaced with footnotes using {{tl|sfn}}; must punctuation in your sources need to be removed as the templates do that for you; and you need to use {{tl|harvtxt}} for citations in your endnotes. Also, letters and films have their own templates. I did a couple of these for you as examples. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:14, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Remembering Norris" Tribute Remediation ==

Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Remembering Norris|"Remembering Norris"]] by Margo Howard.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:20, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} excellent! Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:35, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

== Norman Mailer: From Orgone Accumulator to Cancer Protection for Schizophrenics ==

Dr. Lucas,

The following article is ready for your review:
https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer:_From_Orgone_Accumulator_to_Cancer_Protection_for_Schizophrenics

I was unable to find the correct format for the first works cited entry under Mailer. It is a reprint of a magazine article. Thank you. [[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 16:28, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} you are a master remediator! Thank you for going above and beyond. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:44, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

==Tolls of War: Mailerian Sub-Texts in For Whom the Bell Tolls, Trust & Sparring with Norman==
Dr. Lucas, these were some of the smaller ones, so I went ahead and knocked them out. They are ready for review: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Sparring with Norman|Sparring with Norman]], [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Trust|Trust]], and [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tolls of War: Mailerian Sub-Texts in For Whom the Bell Tolls|Tolls of War: Mailerian Sub-Texts in For Whom the Bell Tolls]]. —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 10:27, 13 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Kamyers}} all excellent—above and beyond! Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:56, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing'' ==

Hi everyone,
I am currently helping with the article, [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Death,_Art,_and_the_Disturbing:_Hemingway_and_Mailer_and_the_Art_of_Writing Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing]. It still has a good bit to go, if anyone wants to help out.
—[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 5:17 PM, 13 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|CVinson}} thanks! I added the author info. I'm not sure many will see your request; you might want to post it on the forum. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 14:56, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Thank you for adding the author information and I have posted the request in the forum. Thank you! —[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:CVinson|talk]]) 6:53 PM, 14 April 2025 (EDT)

== Mimi and Mercer ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have corrected the Mimi Gladstein [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Piling On: Norman Mailer’s Utilization of Marilyn Monroe]] and removed all the red errors. I also have finishe the Erin Mercer article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Automatons and the Atomic Abyss: The Naked and the Dead]], except the ''The Naked and the Dead'' in the display title. An error occured.
[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 19:26, 13 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} good work. There should be no footnotes in the endnotes, please. Since this is the only thing to correct, I have removed the banner, but please let me know when you made that final correction. Thanks! (I will respond about your second article shortly.) —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 14:59, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} your second article looks good. Could you use the [[w:Template:Cite interview|Template:Cite interview]] for interviews. I did one for you. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 16:33, 14 April 2025 (EDT)

== Through the Lens of the Beatniks Remediation ==

Hello, Dr. Lucas! I've completed the remediation of [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Through_the_Lens_of_the_Beatniks:_Norman_Mailer_and_Modern_American_Man’s_Quest_for_Self-Realization#CITEREFNaked1992|Through the Lens of the Beatniks]]. I wasn't able to get the letter citations exactly how I thought they should be. If there's anything I'm missing, please let me know! Thanks! [[User:Maggiemrogers|Maggiemrogers]] ([[User talk:Maggiemrogers|talk]]) 10:09, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Maggiemrogers}} got it! It looks great. I made some format changes, but you did a great job! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 15:58, 14 April 2025 (EDT)

== Finish Mimi ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}

I have made the final edit to Mimi and removed the footnotes from the endnotes. [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe]] [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 15:50, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} you removed all the citations. Only '''footnotes''' need to be removed, but citations need to stay. I did the first note for you (now erased, but you can see it in the history) so you could see how it was done. You can also see [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer|this one]]. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 16:52, 14 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed? All You Need is Glove ==

Hi Dr. Lucas, I believe the book review, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/All_You_Need_is_Glove|All You Need is Glove]] is done and ready for review! [[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 19:10, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Hobbitonya}} awesome work! Banner removed, and many thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:08, 16 April 2025 (EDT)

== Harv and Sfn no-target ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I changed the citations in the article to interview and I tried a few things to get rid of the Harv and Sfn no-target with little luck. [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Automatons_and_the_Atomic_Abyss:_The_Naked_and_the_Dead]]
[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 21:04, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} this was because your interviews had no dates. Most are from Lennon's book, published in 1988. I added the dates to the citations, but the sfn footnotes need to be fixed to correspond with those. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:24, 16 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} OK, between your fixes and my little tweaks, this one is finished! Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:50, 17 April 2025 (EDT)

== Erros fixed ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have fixed all citation errors in both articles and added the harvtxt. Atomic Abyss still has the Pages using duplicate arguments in template calls error.
[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Automatons_and_the_Atomic_Abyss:_The_Naked_and_the_Dead]]
:{{Reply to|MerAtticus}} see above. These still need fixing. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:35, 16 April 2025 (EDT)

[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe]]
:{{Reply to|MerAtticus}} this one looks great! Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:35, 16 April 2025 (EDT)

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 08:23, 15 April 2025 (EDT)

== completed: Advertisements for Others ==

Thanks to some classmates helping with the finishing touches, my second article should be ready. [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Advertisements_for_Others:_The_Blurbs_of_Norman_Mailer|Advertisements for Others.]]
--[[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 19:24, 17 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to| NrmMGA5108}} received, and thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:15, 18 April 2025 (EDT)

== Two Poems Vol 4 Ready? ==

Hi Dr. Lucas! I think these two poems are ready for review: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/The Boxer in the Park|The Boxer in the Park]] and Norman Mailer and [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer_and_Ernest_Hemingway_Do_Not_Box_in_Heaven|Ernest Hemingway Do Not Box in Heaven]]. The second on says the display title is wrong, but again, I don't know what I am missing there. Thank you![[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 09:05, 18 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Hobbitonya}} excellent! Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:56, 18 April 2025 (EDT)

== A Dialogue Essay on Mailer and Hemingway ==

Hey,

I see that [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/A Dialogue Essay on Mailer and Hemingway|A Dialogue Essay on Mailer and Hemingway]] is missing text. Can you email me a copy or link it as a reply, so I can remediate this article. [[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 09:44, 18 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| APKnight25}} you may download both volumes’ PDFs on the [https://forum.grlucas.net/t/project-mailer-assignments-remediation-project/88/3?u=grlucas forum]. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:40, 18 April 2025 (EDT)

== Almost complete ==

@grlucas
I've made a ton of progress.
The only thing I have left is going through all of the links to do away with harvtxt and sfn target error and an error for extra text in the author section. I fixed the error about using an "en" dash between years.
I'll still be working on it until tomorrow night, but please take a look: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Hemingway_and_Women_at_the_Front:_Blowing_Bridges_in_The_Fifth_Column,_For_Whom_the_Bell_Tolls,_and_Other_Works

@grlucas
I’ve gotten rid of the second of three error messages. Still looking for the harvtxt sfn target error.
[[User:LogansPop22|LogansPop22]] ([[User talk:LogansPop22|talk]]) 14:45, 20 April 2025 (EDT)

@grlucas
I’ve gone through every citation. Did the YEARa and YEARb designations. Made sure there weren’t extra spaces or missing {, |, or anything else.
I’ve corrected everything I can find after extensive proofreading. I still have the harvtxt and sfn no target error.
Here it is: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Hemingway_and_Women_at_the_Front:_Blowing_Bridges_in_The_Fifth_Column,_For_Whom_the_Bell_Tolls,_and_Other_Works
[[User:LogansPop22|LogansPop22]] ([[User talk:LogansPop22|talk]]) 19:50, 20 April 2025 (EDT)

== Articles complete ==

@grlucas
I have also made a lot of progress with my articles and luckily received a last minute assit from a few of my class mates. I beleive both volumes to be complete: Vol 4: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer,_Hemingway,_and_the_%E2%80%9CReds%E2%80%9D (Which I believe has already been submitted) and Volume 5: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Making_Masculinity_and_Unmaking_Jewishness:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Voice_in_Wild_90_and_Beyond_the_Law (I just received the final error correction from a fellow student.

I also started working on this Vol 4 article once I got back into the system: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Style,_Politics,_and_Hemingway%27s_Spanish_Civil_War_Dispatches in my sandbox https://projectmailer.net/pm/User:KWatson/sandbox but another user has already completed it.

Please review my articles and advise what else is needed from me. Thank you [[User:KWatson|KWatson]] ([[User talk:KWatson|talk]]) 15:37, 19 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| KWatson}} OK, I already checked the [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and the “Reds”|Peppard article]]. For [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law|the Cohen]], the notes are still not quite right. Citations must be logically inserted. Instead of <blockquote>Mary V. Dearborn writes that Mailer picked up Yiddish at home from his parents, “enough so that many years later, in Germany, he was able to ask for directions in this language and be understood.” {{harvtxt|Dearborn|1999|p=14}}</blockquote> it should be <blockquote>Mary V. {{harvtxt|Dearborn|1999|p=14}} writes that Mailer picked up Yiddish at home from his parents, “enough so that many years later, in Germany, he was able to ask for directions in this language and be understood.” </blockquote> See the difference? Please be meticulous on these. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:57, 20 April 2025 (EDT)

== Additional edits ==

Hello! I reformatted all in text citations, did some editing, and added page numbers to [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing|Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing]]- could you please take a look at the updated page and see if there's anything additional that it needs?

I was also wondering: on this page, I had also recieved confirmation from you that my [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/The American Civil War in The Naked and the Dead and Across the River and Into the Trees|originally assigned article]] was complete, and the banner could be removed. However, it is still showing as an X on the page, and I am unable to find the comment from you! Could you please clarify if anything needs to be fixed? Thanks so much!
[[User:KaraCroissant|KaraCroissant]] ([[User talk:KaraCroissant|talk]]) 16:25, 19 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| KaraCroissant}} good! I was making quite a few corrections on “[[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing|Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing]],” but I stopped, figuring you might want to finish it. Put footnotes directly after the quotations, not all at the end of sentences. No spaces or line breaks before or after {{tl|pg}}. Use <code>|author-mask=1</code> with repeated author names in works cited entries, titles of books must be italicized like they are in the original text, etc. Thanks. After a few fixes, I removed the banner for the [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/The American Civil War in The Naked and the Dead and Across the River and Into the Trees|Meredith article]]. Well done. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:20, 20 April 2025 (EDT)

== Civil War..Dispatched. ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}

I believe the Hemingway's Spanish Civil War is complete except the harvtext were not working. [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Style,_Politics,_and_Hemingway's_Spanish_Civil_War_Dispatches]]
[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 17:37, 19 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} I made many small corrections. Please view them in the history and continue in the same way. This one just needs a bit more attention. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:33, 20 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation, Vol. 4 & 5 ==

For your review,

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norris_Church_Mailer:_An_Artist_from_Arkansas

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Imagining_Evil:_The_Sardonic_Narrator_of_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Last_Novel (Wasn't sure whether or not to add the dinkus)

[[User:Wverna|Wverna]] ([[User talk:Wverna|talk]]) 11:15, 20 April 2025 (EDT)

== Hemingway ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}} I revised early this morning and I have gone back through it this afternoon. Hopefully it looks okay. Any ciations in the notes at this point is beyond my understanding of the topic. [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Style,_Politics,_and_Hemingway's_Spanish_Civil_War_Dispatches]]

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 14:11, 20 April 2025 (EDT)

== Combat ==
Hello
For your review [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/What_Norman_Mailer_Taught_Me_about_Combat|What Norman Mailer Taught Me about Combat].
Completed by me and @Flowersbloom
[[User:Tbara4554|Tbara4554]] ([[User talk:Tbara4554|talk]]) 18:45, 20 April 2025 (EDT)

== Article Completed ==

Hi Dr. Lucas - I have finished the article [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/“A_Noble_Pursuit”:_The_Armies_of_the_Night_as_Outside_Agitator|“A Noble Pursuit”: The Armies of the Night as Outside Agitator]]. Please let me know if any changes are needed. Thanks!--[[User:Chelsey.brantley|Chelsey.brantley]] ([[User talk:Chelsey.brantley|talk]]) 19:13, 20 April 2025 (EDT)

== A Dialogue Essay on Mailer and Hemingway ==

I believe I have finished remediating this [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/A Dialogue Essay on Mailer and Hemingway|article]]. [[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 22:44, 20 April 2025 (EDT)

== Volume 4 ==

https://projectmailer.net/pm/User:JBawlson/sandbox
Hi Dr. Lucas! I've finished remediating my article.

== Diligently Continuing to Remediate ==

Hi, I remediated the article, [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norman vs. Ernest: Influence and Identity|Norman vs. Ernest: Influence and Identity]].

I'm not sure if it will count towards the editing grade because it is overdue, but I wanted to keep editing volume 4. I really would like to get it to complete status.

I am having a major error, and I'm positive it has to do with the roman numeral citations. Please help me out with this if you can.

Ex. p=xii–xiii --[[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 15:22, 24 April 2025 (EDT)

Disregard the sfn error. I found a solution. --[[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 07:53, 25 April 2025 (EDT)

== Further Remediation ==

I'm currently remediating the article, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/A_Visionary_Hermeneutic_Appropriation:_Meditations_on_Hemingway’s_Influence_on_Mailer|A Visionary Hermeneutic Appropriation: Meditations on Hemingway’s Influence on Mailer]] I've complete a good chunk of it, but it is very long. I will try to finished it this weekend. I'm not sure if anyone else is still remediating in an attempt to finish the volumes. When I finish this article, there will be no more left in Volume 4. I'm not sure about volume 5 yet and will investigate later. I did have to create the page from scratch, so there is no "under construction" notice. --[[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 15:23, 25 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| APKnight25}} that is very kind of you. I appreciate all of the extra work, but do not kill yourself. I don't believe that anyone else is working; see [[Special:RecentChanges]]. That said, any additional will look very good for your evaluation. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 16:15, 25 April 2025 (EDT)

== Finished Remediating A Visionary Hermeneutic Appropriation: Meditations on Hemingway’s Influence on Mailer ==

I believe that I'm finished remediating [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/A_Visionary_Hermeneutic_Appropriation:_Meditations_on_Hemingway’s_Influence_on_Mailer|A Visionary Hermeneutic Appropriation: Meditations on Hemingway’s Influence on Mailer]]. I think that all of Volume 4 is remediated. This was a really fun and informative experience, so thank you. I wish future students well in editing volumes. --[[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 14:05, 28 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| APKnight25}} awesome! Again, that you ''so'' much for going above-and-beyond. I’m glad you enjoyed it—I do, too. 😀 —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 12:03, 29 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Project ==
@poeticjewel

@Grlucus

*Group Participation:
I participated with the group on Mailer’s The Prisoner of Sex. I added sources to the bibliography and also added to the section in the sandbox for “Principal Characters.” This section required a bullet list of characters and a paragraph to discuss the role they played in the story.

User:GradStudent74/The Prisoner of Sex - Wikipedia

User:GradStudent74/The Prisoner of Sex/Bibliography - Wikipedia

*Article for Individual Development:
I chose to edit an article about my hometown because it has a rich history. I enjoyed reading the article and learned many things that I never knew.

Talk:Bridgeport, Connecticut - Wikipedia

Bridgeport, Connecticut - Wikipedia

User talk:Grlucas

2025-05-01T02:40:45Z

KForeman: /* Final Project */ new section

User talk:Grlucas

2025-04-25T02:56:58Z

KForeman: /* Remediation for “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon” */

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-25T02:49:38Z

KForeman:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{byline
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| url = http://prmlr.us/mr04jos
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} }}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan, {{sfn|Lennon|2008}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.”{{sfn|Kehoe|1961}} They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges.” {{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín,”) an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''.”{{sfn|Brand|2004}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.{{sfn|Lennon|2008}}

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932.{{sfn| Hemingway |1932}} That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”, which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Mailer|1997}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”). {{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater?{{sfn|Brand|2004}} These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)”.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”(3-4)?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd”(4-5).{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter”(3).{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Because Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'':{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.” Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”{{sfn|Daley|1966}}

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? {{sfn|Daley|1966}} “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]”. And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech.” {{sfn|Hemingway|1932}} Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (13-14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns”(14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver, a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1932}}

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. {{sfn|Daley|1966}} Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog.” {{sfn|Buckley|1958|p=14}} When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=213}} Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.

== Citations ==
{{Reflist|15em}}

== Works Cited ==
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |title=A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Buckley | first1 = Peter
| title = Bullfight
| publisher = Bonanza Books
| date = 1958
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = The Swords of Spain
| publisher = New York Daily Press
| date = 1966
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title= "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway|
|first=Ernest |date=1932 |title= "Death in the Afternoon" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1941 |title= "For Whom the Bell Tolls" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title="Wine, Women & Toros" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |title= "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title="Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007"|url= |location= |publisher= The Mailer Review 2.1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-25T02:41:35Z

KForeman:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{byline
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| url = http://prmlr.us/mr04jos
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} }}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan, {{sfn|Lennon|2008}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.”{{sfn|Kehoe|1961}} They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges.” {{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín,”) an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''.”{{sfn|Brand|2004}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.{{sfn|Lennon|2008}}

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932.{{sfn| Hemingway |1932}} That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”, which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Mailer|1997}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”). {{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater?{{sfn|Brand|2004}} These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)”.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”(3-4)?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd”(4-5).{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter”(3).{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Because Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'':{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.” Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”{{sfn|Daley|1966}}

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? {{sfn|Daley|1966}} “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]”. And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech.” {{sfn|Hemingway|1932}} Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (13-14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns”(14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver, a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1932}}

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. {{sfn|Daley|1966}} Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog.” {{sfn|Buckley|1958|p=14}} When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=213}} Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.

== Citations ==
{{Reflist|15em}}

== Works Cited ==
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |title=A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Buckley | first1 = Peter
| title = Bullfight
| publisher = Bonanza Books
| date = 1958
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = The Swords of Spain
| publisher = New York Daily Press
| date = 1966
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title= "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway|
|first=Ernest |date=1932 |title= "Death in the Afternoon" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1941 |title= "For Whom the Bell Tolls" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title="Wine, Women & Toros" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |title= "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title="Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007"|url= |location= |publisher= The Mailer Review 2.1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-25T02:32:21Z

KForeman:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{byline
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| url = http://prmlr.us/mr04jos
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} }}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan, {{sfn|Lennon|2008}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.”{{sfn|Kehoe|1961}} They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges.” {{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín,”) an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''.”{{sfn|Brand|2004}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.{{sfn|Lennon|2008}}

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932.{{sfn| Hemingway |1932}} That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”, which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Mailer|1997}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”). {{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater?{{sfn|Brand|2004}} These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)”.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”(3-4)?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd”(4-5).{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter”(3).{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Because Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'':{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.” Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”{{sfn|Daley|1966}}

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? {{sfn|Daley|1966}} “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]”. And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech.” {{sfn|Hemingway|1932}} Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (13-14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns”(14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver, a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932}}

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. {{sfn|Daley|1966}} Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958|p=14}} When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=213}} Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.

== Citations ==
{{Reflist|15em}}

== Works Cited ==
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |title=A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Buckley | first1 = Peter
| title = Bullfight
| publisher = Bonanza Books
| date = 1958
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = The Swords of Spain
| publisher = New York Daily Press
| date = 1966
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title= "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway|
|first=Ernest |date=1932 |title= "Death in the Afternoon" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1941 |title= "For Whom the Bell Tolls" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title="Wine, Women & Toros" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |title= "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title="Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007"|url= |location= |publisher= The Mailer Review 2.1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-25T02:29:05Z

KForeman:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{byline
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| url = http://prmlr.us/mr04jos
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} }}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan, {{sfn|Lennon|2008}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.”{{sfn|Kehoe|1961}} They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges.” {{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín,”) an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''.”{{sfn|Brand|2004}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.{{sfn|Lennon|2008}}

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932.{{sfn| Hemingway |1932}} That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”, which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Mailer|1997}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”). {{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater?{{sfn|Brand|2004}} These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)”.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”(3-4)?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd”(4-5).{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter”(3).{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Because Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'':{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.” Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”{{sfn|Daley|1966}}

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? {{sfn|Daley|1966}} “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]”. And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” .{{sfn|Hemingway|1932}} Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (13-14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns”(14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver, a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932}}

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. {{sfn|Daley|1966}} Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958|p=14}} When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=213}} Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.

== Citations ==
{{Reflist|15em}}

== Works Cited ==
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |title=A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Buckley | first1 = Peter
| title = Bullfight
| publisher = Bonanza Books
| date = 1958
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = The Swords of Spain
| publisher = New York Daily Press
| date = 1966
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title= "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway|
|first=Ernest |date=1932 |title= "Death in the Afternoon" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1941 |title= "For Whom the Bell Tolls" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title="Wine, Women & Toros" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |title= "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title="Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007"|url= |location= |publisher= The Mailer Review 2.1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-25T02:24:25Z

KForeman:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{byline
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| url = http://prmlr.us/mr04jos
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} }}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan, {{sfn|Lennon|2008}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.”{{sfn|Kehoe|1961}} They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges”. {{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''”.{{sfn|Brand|2004}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.{{sfn|Lennon|2008}}

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932.{{sfn| Hemingway |1932}} That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”, which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Mailer|1997}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”). {{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater?{{sfn|Brand|2004}} These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)”.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”(3-4)?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd”(4-5).{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter”(3).{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Because Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'':{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.” Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”{{sfn|Daley|1966}}

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? {{sfn|Daley|1966}} “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]”. And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” .{{sfn|Hemingway|1932}} Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (13-14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns”(14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver, a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932}}

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. {{sfn|Daley|1966}} Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958|p=14}} When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=213}} Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.

== Citations ==
{{Reflist|15em}}

== Works Cited ==
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |title=A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Buckley | first1 = Peter
| title = Bullfight
| publisher = Bonanza Books
| date = 1958
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = The Swords of Spain
| publisher = New York Daily Press
| date = 1966
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title= "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway|
|first=Ernest |date=1932 |title= "Death in the Afternoon" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1941 |title= "For Whom the Bell Tolls" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title="Wine, Women & Toros" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |title= "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title="Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007"|url= |location= |publisher= The Mailer Review 2.1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-25T02:10:46Z

KForeman:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{byline
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| url = http://prmlr.us/mr04jos
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} }}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan, {{sfn|Lennon|2008}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.”{{sfn|Kehoe|1961}} They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges”. {{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''”.{{sfn|Brand|2004}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.{{sfn|Lennon|2008}}

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932.{{sfn| Hemingway |1932}} That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”,{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Mailer|1997}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”). {{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater?{{sfn|Brand|2004}} These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)”.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”(3-4)?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd”(4-5).{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter”(3).{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Because Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'':{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.” Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”{{sfn|Daley|1966}}

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? {{sfn|Daley|1966}} “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]”. And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” .{{sfn|Hemingway|1932}} Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (13-14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns”(14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver, a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932}}

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. {{sfn|Daley|1966}} Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958|p=14}} When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=213}} Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.

== Citations ==
{{Reflist|15em}}

== Works Cited ==
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |title=A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Buckley | first1 = Peter
| title = Bullfight
| publisher = Bonanza Books
| date = 1958
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = The Swords of Spain
| publisher = New York Daily Press
| date = 1966
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title= "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway|
|first=Ernest |date=1932 |title= "Death in the Afternoon" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1941 |title= "For Whom the Bell Tolls" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title="Wine, Women & Toros" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |title= "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title="Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007"|url= |location= |publisher= The Mailer Review 2.1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-25T02:03:48Z

KForeman:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{byline
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| url = http://prmlr.us/mr04jos
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} }}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan, {{sfn|Lennon|2008}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.”{{sfn|Kehoe|1961}} They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges”. {{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''”.{{sfn|Brand|2004}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.{{sfn|Lennon|2008}}

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932.{{sfn| Hemingway |1932}} That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”,{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Mailer|1997}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”). {{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater?{{sfn|Brand|2004}} These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)”.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”(3-4)?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd”(4-5).{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter”(3).{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Because Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'':{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.”{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”{{sfn|Daley|1966}}

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? {{sfn|Daley|1966}} “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]”. And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” .{{sfn|Hemingway|1932}} Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (13-14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns”(14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver, a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932}}

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. {{sfn|Daley|1966}} Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958|p=14}} When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=213}} Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.

== Citations ==
{{Reflist|15em}}

== Works Cited ==
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |title=A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Buckley | first1 = Peter
| title = Bullfight
| publisher = Bonanza Books
| date = 1958
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = The Swords of Spain
| publisher = New York Daily Press
| date = 1966
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title= "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway|
|first=Ernest |date=1932 |title= "Death in the Afternoon" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1941 |title= "For Whom the Bell Tolls" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title="Wine, Women & Toros" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |title= "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title="Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007"|url= |location= |publisher= The Mailer Review 2.1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-25T01:58:13Z

KForeman:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{byline
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| url = http://prmlr.us/mr04jos
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} }}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan, {{sfn|Lennon|2008}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.”{{sfn|Kehoe|1961}} They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges”. {{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''”.{{sfn|Brand|2004}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.{{sfn|Lennon|2008}}

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932.{{sfn| Hemingway |1932}} That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”,{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Mailer|1997}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”). {{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater?{{sfn|Brand|2004}} These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)”.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”(3-4)?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd”(4-5).{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter”(3).{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Because Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'':{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.”{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”{{sfn|Daley|1966}}

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? {{sfn|Daley|1966}} “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]”. And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” .{{sfn|Hemingway|1932}} Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (13-14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns”(14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver, a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=192}}

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. {{sfn|Daley|1966}} Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958|p=14}} When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=213}} Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.

== Citations ==
{{Reflist|15em}}

== Works Cited ==
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |title=A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Buckley | first1 = Peter
| title = Bullfight
| publisher = Bonanza Books
| date = 1958
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = The Swords of Spain
| publisher = New York Daily Press
| date = 1966
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title= "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway|
|first=Ernest |date=1932 |title= "Death in the Afternoon" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1941 |title= "For Whom the Bell Tolls" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title="Wine, Women & Toros" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |title= "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title="Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007"|url= |location= |publisher= The Mailer Review 2.1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-25T01:55:37Z

KForeman:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{byline
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| url = http://prmlr.us/mr04jos
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} }}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan, {{sfn|Lennon|2008}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.”{{sfn|Kehoe|1961}} They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges”. {{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''”.{{sfn|Brand|2004}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.{{sfn|Lennon|2008|p=517}}

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932.{{sfn| Hemingway |1932}} That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”,{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Mailer|1997}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”). {{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater?{{sfn|Brand|2004}} These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)”.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”(3-4)?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd”(4-5).{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter”(3).{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Because Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'':{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.”{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”{{sfn|Daley|1966}}

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? {{sfn|Daley|1966}} “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]”. And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” .{{sfn|Hemingway|1932}} Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (13-14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns”(14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver, a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=192}}

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. {{sfn|Daley|1966}} Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958|p=14}} When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=213}} Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.

== Citations ==
{{Reflist|15em}}

== Works Cited ==
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |title=A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Buckley | first1 = Peter
| title = Bullfight
| publisher = Bonanza Books
| date = 1958
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = The Swords of Spain
| publisher = New York Daily Press
| date = 1966
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title= "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway|
|first=Ernest |date=1932 |title= "Death in the Afternoon" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1941 |title= "For Whom the Bell Tolls" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title="Wine, Women & Toros" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |title= "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title="Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007"|url= |location= |publisher= The Mailer Review 2.1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-25T01:50:38Z

KForeman:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{byline
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| url = http://prmlr.us/mr04jos
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} }}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan, {{sfn|Lennon|2008}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.”{{sfn|Kehoe|1961}} They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges”. {{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''”.{{sfn|Brand|2004}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.{{sfn|Lennon|2008|p=517}}

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932.{{sfn| Hemingway |1932}} That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”,{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Mailer|1997}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”). {{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater?{{sfn|Brand|2004}} These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)”.{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=286}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”(3-4)?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd”(4-5).{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter”(3).{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Because Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'':{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.”{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”{{sfn|Daley|1966}}

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? {{sfn|Daley|1966}} “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]”. And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” .{{sfn|Hemingway|1932}} Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (13-14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns”(14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver, a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=192}}

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. {{sfn|Daley|1966}} Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958|p=14}} When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=213}} Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.

== Citations ==
{{Reflist|15em}}

== Works Cited ==
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |title=A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Buckley | first1 = Peter
| title = Bullfight
| publisher = Bonanza Books
| date = 1958
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = The Swords of Spain
| publisher = New York Daily Press
| date = 1966
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title= "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway|
|first=Ernest |date=1932 |title= "Death in the Afternoon" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1941 |title= "For Whom the Bell Tolls" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title="Wine, Women & Toros" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |title= "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title="Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007"|url= |location= |publisher= The Mailer Review 2.1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-25T01:47:49Z

KForeman:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{byline
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| url = http://prmlr.us/mr04jos
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} }}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan, {{sfn|Lennon|2008}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.”{{sfn|Kehoe|1961}} They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges”. {{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''”.{{sfn|Brand|2004}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.{{sfn|Lennon|2008|p=517}}

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932.{{sfn| Hemingway |1932}} That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”,{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Mailer|1997}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”). {{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater?{{sfn|Brand|2004}} These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)”.{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=286}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”(3-4)?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd”(4-5).{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter”(3).{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Because Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'':{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.”{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”{{sfn|Daley|1966}}

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? {{sfn|Daley|1966}} “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]”. And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” .{{sfn|Hemingway|1932}} Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (13-14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns”(14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1987|p=176}} One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver, a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=192}}

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. {{sfn|Daley|1966}} Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958|p=14}} When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=213}} Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.

== Citations ==
{{Reflist|15em}}

== Works Cited ==
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |title=A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Buckley | first1 = Peter
| title = Bullfight
| publisher = Bonanza Books
| date = 1958
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = The Swords of Spain
| publisher = New York Daily Press
| date = 1966
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title= "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway|
|first=Ernest |date=1932 |title= "Death in the Afternoon" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1941 |title= "For Whom the Bell Tolls" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title="Wine, Women & Toros" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |title= "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title="Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007"|url= |location= |publisher= The Mailer Review 2.1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-22T04:07:17Z

KForeman:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{byline
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| url = http://prmlr.us/mr04jos
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} }}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan, {{sfn|Lennon|2008}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.”{{sfn|Kehoe|1961}} They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges”. {{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''”.{{sfn|Brand|2004|p=182}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.{{sfn|Lennon|2008|p=517}}

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932.{{sfn| Hemingway |1932}} That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”,{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Mailer|1997}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”). {{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater?{{sfn|Brand|2004}} These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)”.{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=286}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”(3-4)?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd”(4-5).{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter”(3).{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Because Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'':{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.”{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”{{sfn|Daley|1966}}

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? {{sfn|Daley|1966}} “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]”. And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” .{{sfn|Hemingway|1932}} Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (13-14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns”(14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1987|p=176}} One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver, a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=192}}

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. {{sfn|Daley|1966}} Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958|p=14}} When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=213}} Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.

== Citations ==
{{Reflist|15em}}

== Works Cited ==
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |title=A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Buckley | first1 = Peter
| title = Bullfight
| publisher = Bonanza Books
| date = 1958
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = The Swords of Spain
| publisher = New York Daily Press
| date = 1966
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title= "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway|
|first=Ernest |date=1932 |title= "Death in the Afternoon" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1941 |title= "For Whom the Bell Tolls" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title="Wine, Women & Toros" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |title= "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title="Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007"|url= |location= |publisher= The Mailer Review 2.1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-22T03:47:18Z

KForeman:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{byline
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| url = http://prmlr.us/mr04jos
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} }}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan, {{sfn|Lennon|2008}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.”{{sfn|Kehoe|1961}} They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges”. {{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''”.{{sfn|Brand|2004|p=182}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.{{sfn|Lennon|2008|p=517}}

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932.{{sfn| Hemingway |1932}} That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”,{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Mailer|1997}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”). {{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater?{{sfn|Brand|2004}} These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)”.{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=286}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”(3-4)?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd”(4-5).{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter”(3).{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Because Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'':{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.”{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”{{sfn|Daley|1966}}

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? {{sfn|Daley|1966}} “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932}} And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” .{{sfn|Hemingway|1932}} Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (13-14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns”(14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1987|p=176}} One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver, a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=192}}

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. {{sfn|Daley|1966}} Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958|p=14}} When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=213}} Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.

== Citations ==
{{Reflist|15em}}

== Works Cited ==
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |title=A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Buckley | first1 = Peter
| title = Bullfight
| publisher = Bonanza Books
| date = 1958
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = The Swords of Spain
| publisher = New York Daily Press
| date = 1966
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title= "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway|
|first=Ernest |date=1932 |title= "Death in the Afternoon" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1941 |title= "For Whom the Bell Tolls" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title="Wine, Women & Toros" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |title= "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title="Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007"|url= |location= |publisher= The Mailer Review 2.1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-22T03:36:33Z

KForeman: /* Notes */

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{byline
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| url = http://prmlr.us/mr04jos
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} }}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan, {{sfn|Lennon|2008}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.”{{sfn|Kehoe|1961}} They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges”. {{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''”.{{sfn|Brand|2004|p=182}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.{{sfn|Lennon|2008|p=517}}

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932.{{sfn| Hemingway |1932}} That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”,{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Mailer|1997}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”). {{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater?{{sfn|Brand|2004}} These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)”.{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=286}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”(3-4)?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd”(4-5).{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter”(3).{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Because Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'':{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.”{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”{{sfn|Daley|1966}}

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? {{sfn|Daley|1966}} “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=54}} And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” .{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=95}} Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (13-14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns”(14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1987|p=176}} One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver, a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=192}}

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. {{sfn|Daley|1966}} Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958|p=14}} When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=213}} Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.

== Citations ==
{{Reflist|15em}}

== Works Cited ==
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |title=A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Buckley | first1 = Peter
| title = Bullfight
| publisher = Bonanza Books
| date = 1958
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = The Swords of Spain
| publisher = New York Daily Press
| date = 1966
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title= "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway|
|first=Ernest |date=1932 |title= "Death in the Afternoon" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1941 |title= "For Whom the Bell Tolls" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title="Wine, Women & Toros" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |title= "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title="Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007"|url= |location= |publisher= The Mailer Review 2.1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-22T03:35:15Z

KForeman: /* Citations */

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{byline
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| url = http://prmlr.us/mr04jos
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} }}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan, {{sfn|Lennon|2008}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.”{{sfn|Kehoe|1961}} They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges”. {{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''”.{{sfn|Brand|2004|p=182}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.{{sfn|Lennon|2008|p=517}}

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932.{{sfn| Hemingway |1932}} That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”,{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Mailer|1997}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”). {{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater?{{sfn|Brand|2004}} These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)”.{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=286}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”(3-4)?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd”(4-5).{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter”(3).{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Because Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'':{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.”{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”{{sfn|Daley|1966}}

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? {{sfn|Daley|1966}} “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=54}} And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” .{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=95}} Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (13-14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns”(14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1987|p=176}} One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver, a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=192}}

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. {{sfn|Daley|1966}} Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958|p=14}} When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=213}} Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.

==Notes==
{{reflist}}

== Citations ==
{{Reflist|15em}}

== Works Cited ==
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |title=A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Buckley | first1 = Peter
| title = Bullfight
| publisher = Bonanza Books
| date = 1958
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = The Swords of Spain
| publisher = New York Daily Press
| date = 1966
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title= "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway|
|first=Ernest |date=1932 |title= "Death in the Afternoon" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1941 |title= "For Whom the Bell Tolls" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title="Wine, Women & Toros" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |title= "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title="Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007"|url= |location= |publisher= The Mailer Review 2.1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-22T03:17:25Z

KForeman:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{byline
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| url = http://prmlr.us/mr04jos
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} }}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan, {{sfn|Lennon|2008}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.”{{sfn|Kehoe|1961}} They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges”. {{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''”.{{sfn|Brand|2004|p=182}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.{{sfn|Lennon|2008|p=517}}

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932.{{sfn| Hemingway |1932}} That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”,{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Mailer|1997}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”). {{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater?{{sfn|Brand|2004}} These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)”.{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=286}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”(3-4)?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd”(4-5).{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter”(3).{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Because Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'':{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.”{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”{{sfn|Daley|1966}}

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? {{sfn|Daley|1966}} “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=54}} And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” .{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=95}} Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (13-14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns”(14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1987|p=176}} One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver, a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=192}}

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. {{sfn|Daley|1966}} Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958|p=14}} When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=213}} Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.

== Citations ==
{{Reflist|15em}}

== Works Cited ==
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |title=A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Buckley | first1 = Peter
| title = Bullfight
| publisher = Bonanza Books
| date = 1958
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = The Swords of Spain
| publisher = New York Daily Press
| date = 1966
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title= "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway|
|first=Ernest |date=1932 |title= "Death in the Afternoon" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1941 |title= "For Whom the Bell Tolls" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title="Wine, Women & Toros" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |title= "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title="Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007"|url= |location= |publisher= The Mailer Review 2.1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-22T03:14:23Z

KForeman:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{byline
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| url = http://prmlr.us/mr04jos
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} }}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan, {{sfn|Lennon|2008}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.”{{sfn|Kehoe|1961}} They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges”. {{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''”.{{sfn|Brand|2004|p=182}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.{{sfn|Lennon|2008|p=517}}

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932.{{sfn| Hemingway |1932}} That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”,{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=352}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”). {{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater?{{sfn|Brand|2004}} These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)”.{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=286}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”(3-4)?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd”(4-5).{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter”(3).{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Because Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'':{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.”{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”{{sfn|Daley|1966}}

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? {{sfn|Daley|1966}} “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=54}} And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” .{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=95}} Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (13-14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns”(14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1987|p=176}} One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver, a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=192}}

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. {{sfn|Daley|1966}} Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958|p=14}} When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=213}} Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.

== Citations ==
{{Reflist|15em}}

== Works Cited ==
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |title=A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Buckley | first1 = Peter
| title = Bullfight
| publisher = Bonanza Books
| date = 1958
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = The Swords of Spain
| publisher = New York Daily Press
| date = 1966
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title= "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway|
|first=Ernest |date=1932 |title= "Death in the Afternoon" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1941 |title= "For Whom the Bell Tolls" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title="Wine, Women & Toros" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |title= "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title="Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007"|url= |location= |publisher= The Mailer Review 2.1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-22T03:11:50Z

KForeman:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{byline
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| url = http://prmlr.us/mr04jos
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} }}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan, {{sfn|Lennon|2008}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.”{{sfn|Kehoe|1961}} They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges”. {{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''”.{{sfn|Brand|2004|p=182}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.{{sfn|Lennon|2008|p=517}}

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932.{{sfn| Hemingway |1932}} That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”,{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=353}} which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=352}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”). {{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater?{{sfn|Brand|2004}} These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)”.{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=286}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”(3-4)?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd”(4-5).{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter”(3).{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Because Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'':{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.”{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”{{sfn|Daley|1966}}

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? {{sfn|Daley|1966}} “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=54}} And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” .{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=95}} Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (13-14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns”(14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1987|p=176}} One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver, a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=192}}

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. {{sfn|Daley|1966}} Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958|p=14}} When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=213}} Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.

== Citations ==
{{Reflist|15em}}

== Works Cited ==
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |title=A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Buckley | first1 = Peter
| title = Bullfight
| publisher = Bonanza Books
| date = 1958
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = The Swords of Spain
| publisher = New York Daily Press
| date = 1966
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title= "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway|
|first=Ernest |date=1932 |title= "Death in the Afternoon" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1941 |title= "For Whom the Bell Tolls" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title="Wine, Women & Toros" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |title= "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title="Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007"|url= |location= |publisher= The Mailer Review 2.1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-22T03:08:22Z

KForeman:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{byline
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| url = http://prmlr.us/mr04jos
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} }}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan, {{sfn|Lennon|2008|pp=515-517}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.”{{sfn|Kehoe|1961}} They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges”. {{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''”.{{sfn|Brand|2004|p=182}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.{{sfn|Lennon|2008|p=517}}

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932.{{sfn| Hemingway |1932}} That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”,{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=353}} which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=352}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”). {{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater?{{sfn|Brand|2004}} These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)”.{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=286}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”(3-4)?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd”(4-5).{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter”(3).{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Because Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'':{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.”{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”{{sfn|Daley|1966}}

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? {{sfn|Daley|1966}} “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=54}} And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” .{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=95}} Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (13-14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns”(14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1987|p=176}} One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver, a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=192}}

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. {{sfn|Daley|1966}} Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958|p=14}} When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=213}} Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.

== Citations ==
{{Reflist|15em}}

== Works Cited ==
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |title=A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Buckley | first1 = Peter
| title = Bullfight
| publisher = Bonanza Books
| date = 1958
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = The Swords of Spain
| publisher = New York Daily Press
| date = 1966
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title= "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway|
|first=Ernest |date=1932 |title= "Death in the Afternoon" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1941 |title= "For Whom the Bell Tolls" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title="Wine, Women & Toros" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |title= "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title="Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007"|url= |location= |publisher= The Mailer Review 2.1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-22T03:06:43Z

KForeman:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{byline
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| url = http://prmlr.us/mr04jos
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=356}}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan, {{sfn|Lennon|2008|pp=515-517}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.”{{sfn|Kehoe|1961}} They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges”. {{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''”.{{sfn|Brand|2004|p=182}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.{{sfn|Lennon|2008|p=517}}

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932.{{sfn| Hemingway |1932}} That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”,{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=353}} which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=352}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”). {{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater?{{sfn|Brand|2004}} These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)”.{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=286}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”(3-4)?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd”(4-5).{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter”(3).{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Because Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'':{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.”{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”{{sfn|Daley|1966}}

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? {{sfn|Daley|1966}} “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=54}} And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” .{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=95}} Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (13-14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns”(14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1987|p=176}} One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver, a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=192}}

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. {{sfn|Daley|1966}} Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958|p=14}} When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=213}} Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.

== Citations ==
{{Reflist|15em}}

== Works Cited ==
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |title=A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Buckley | first1 = Peter
| title = Bullfight
| publisher = Bonanza Books
| date = 1958
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = The Swords of Spain
| publisher = New York Daily Press
| date = 1966
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title= "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway|
|first=Ernest |date=1932 |title= "Death in the Afternoon" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1941 |title= "For Whom the Bell Tolls" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title="Wine, Women & Toros" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |title= "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title="Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007"|url= |location= |publisher= The Mailer Review 2.1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

User talk:Grlucas

2025-04-18T23:42:33Z

KForeman: /* Remediation for “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon” */

{{Talk header}}
[[/Archive 202504/]]

== Final edits ==
Hello, my article is complete: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Ernest_and_Norman_(Exit_Music)|Ernest and Norman (Exit Music)]]
:{{Reply to|Flowersbloom}} great, thank you. I made some corrections. Please be sure to sign your talk page posts. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Good evening, Dr. Lucas. Below is the link to my edited article:
https://projectmailer.net/pm/User:ASpeed/sandbox
:{{Reply to|ASpeed}} great. Let me know when it’s finished and posted, and I’l have a look. It appears as if you still have a bit of work to do. Please be sure to sign your talk page posts. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Good evening, @[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]. I have completed most of my Remediation Articles, but I still show issues for the one named, "[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman,_Papa,_and_the_Autoerotic_Construction_of_Woman|Norman, Papa, and the Autoerotic Construction of Woman]].

Based on the latest updates, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Battles_for_Regard,_Writerly_and_Otherwise|Battles for Regard, Writerly and Otherwise]] looks good with exception of including a '''category'''.
:{{Reply to|ALedezma}} this one is good. I made some corrections before removing the banner, mostly in your sources. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

May you let me know if there is anything I can do on my end to resolve the issues with the first [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman,_Papa,_and_the_Autoerotic_Construction_of_Woman|article]]?

[[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 21:47, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|ALedezma}} looking very good, but some sources missing page numbers. Please see to those. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

:::Thank you @[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] . I will review those and respond when complete. [[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 22:47, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::::@[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]. Thank you for your feedback. A review of article additions was made for source pages. [[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 20:22, 11 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::{{Reply to| ALedezma}} ok, looking good. I made some corrections. There's one final thing to do: no footnotes should appear in the notes section; use {{tl|harvtxt}} instead; I did one to show you how to use the template. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:39, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
::::::@[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] Changes were done to footnote sources. Thank you! [[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 19:59, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas I finished my remediation article https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer%27s_The_Fight:_Hemingway,_Bullfighting,_and_the_Lovely_Metaphysics_of_Boxing&action=edit [[User:TWietstruk|TWietstruk]] ([[User talk:TWietstruk|talk]]) 19:44, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| TWietstruk}} good work so far, but there is more to do: placement of footnotes (eliminate spaces around them and punctuation always goes ''before'' the footnote.); proofread for typos; fix all red errors at the bottom (most of these are from errors in sourcing); works cited entries should be bulleted list and eliminate space between entries. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:05, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Final edit and no errors with some help from @NRMMGA5108, @JKilchenmann. Please mark me as complete. On to help someone else with the things I've learned
https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer%27s_The_Fight:_Hemingway,_Bullfighting,_and_the_Lovely_Metaphysics_of_Boxing&action=edit [[User:TWietstruk|TWietstruk]] ([[User talk:TWietstruk|talk]]) 17:52, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas I have finished my assigned remediation article: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Jive-Ass_Aficionado:_Why_Are_We_in_Vietnam%3F_and_Hemingway%27s_Moral_Code#cite_note-FOOTNOTEHemingway2003-24
Username ADear.
:{{Reply to|ADear}} thank you. I have marked this as complete. Please be sure you sign your talk page posts correctly. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:05, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I have finished remediating my assigned article. Please review it at your earliest convenience. The link is here: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer's_Mythmaking_in_An_American_Dream_and_“The_White_Negro”|Norman Mailer's Mythmaking in An American Dream and “The White Negro”]]—[[User:Erhernandez|Erhernandez]] ([[User talk:Erhernandez|talk]]) 08:52, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Erhernandez}} well done! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. I removed your banner after making a few corrections. Please have a look over it and move on to the next thing. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:06, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I transferred and edited my article. Can you look at it and remove the banner? Here's the link: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Authorship_and_Alienation_in_Death_in_the_Afternoon_and_Advertisements_for_Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself]] ( [[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 13:02, 28 March 2025 (EDT) )
:{{Reply to| APKnight25}} looking good! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. Next, eliminate all "fang" quotes in the article and add “real quotation marks.” Your sources should be a bulleted list. And there should be no space before a citation. You’re almost finished! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:21, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Reinventing the Wheel" Mailer Article for Review ==

Dr. Lucas,

My [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Reinventing_a_New_Wheel:_The_Films_of_Norman_Mailer|article]] is ready for review.

Thank you!
[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 15:29, 29 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|TPoole}} great! Could you include a link to it? Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:07, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
::OK, I [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer|found it]]. Looking really good. Great work. There are some citation issues that need to be seen to. The two red categories at the bottom should not be there; they will go away when the citations errors are corrected. Eliminate any quotation mark "fangs" in the text and replace them with “real quotation marks.” Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:14, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:::@Grlucas, what are the citation issues? Which ones need correcting? [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 17:31, 31 March 2025 (EDT)
::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} When you click your citations, they should jump to the works cited entry they correspond to. Several of yours do not, indicated by the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” at the bottom. You also have a "CS1 maint: Unrecognized language" error that will likely be cleared up when you fix the citation issues. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:55, 1 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::@Grlucas, I have tried correcting the sfn codes in my citations. I was able to get the 2 web citations to link correctly. But for some reason, I cannot get the Mailer 1967 film Wild 90 citation to link to the reference list. Please advise. [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 20:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
::::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} OK, all fixed and published. Thanks. Please move on to another remediation. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:46, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of: "Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer’s Left Conservatism and the Problematic of 'Totalitarianism'" ==

Dr. Lucas

I finished the remediation of the following article:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Contradictory_Syntheses:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Left_Conservatism_and_the_Problematic_of_%E2%80%9CTotalitarianism%E2%80%9D

It is ready for your review. Thank you.
[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 19:04, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} looks great. I made some tweaks to the references and some throughout, like changing ' and " to real apostrophes and quotation marks. A bit more clean-up, but you might want to check over it again. I removed the under-construction banner. Well one. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 21:32, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edit ==

Thank you for your comments on my remediation of
"[[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself.]]"

I've eliminated the "fang quotes" and changed them to “real quotation marks.” This was a very fascinating tip that taught me something new. It's something I've never noticed before but now always will.

I also put my sources in a bulleted list and removed the space before the citations. I think I'm all set now.
:{{Reply to|APKnight25}} great work! Please help other editors to complete the volume. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:34, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Firearms in the Works of Hemingway and Mailer'' ==

[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]

Hi Dr. Lucas,

I believe I have done everything for the Remediation of my article. Please let me know if there is anything else I need to do.

I will also link the article below:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Firearms_in_the_Works_of_Hemingway_and_Mailer

Thank you,
Caitlin Vinson
:{{Reply to|CVinson}} great work so far. Your references must use templates, please. Blockquotes must also be done correctly. No spaces or line breaks before or after the {{tl|pg}} template. Footnote placement is also off (punctuation goes before the footnote; no spaces before or after the footnote). I will add the abstract and url. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:30, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Hi Dr. Lucas, I believe there have been some updates made to the project. I believe I have also updated the works cited section to show correct templates. Please let me know if there is anything further that I need to do. Thank you, Caitlin.
::{{reply to| CVinson}} please sign your talk page posts correctly. Thanks. You still need to do some work on the sources. Use the <code>|author-mask=1</code> in your template for repeated author names. Also, you must eliminate the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” message at the bottom. No spaces or returns before or after the {{tl|pg}} call, as I already mentioned above. No parenthetical citations should be left, either; those should all be remediated to footnotes. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:50, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:::{{Reply to|Grlucas}} I have updated the sources and updated the in-text citations. I am still having trouble with the "Harv and Sfn no-target errors." I have not been successful in fixing this error and have tried multiple ways to fix it. —[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 8:18, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

::::{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Hi Dr. Lucas, I see that I still have a red X for my remediation assignment. Is there something else I am still missing? —[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:35, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::{{reply to| CVinson}} sorry, I'm just getting back to it. There are quite a few punctuation errors. Some left out and others appear after the {{tl|sfn}}. I'm trying to correct those I see, but you should have a look, too. Page is designated as <code>p=</code> in {{tl|sfn}}, not <code>pg=</code>; and a span of pages needs <code>pp=</code>. Again, I have tried to correct these. I removed the banner, but please have another look through. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:01, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norman Mailer Today'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up my remediation article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Norman Mailer Today|Norman Mailer Today]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 18:20, 3 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Kamyers}} Great work! Please help your fellow editors finish the volume, or pick something to work on in [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010|Volume 4]]. Thanks, and well done. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:00, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of “The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’” ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished my remediation of Jennifer Yirinec's article: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”|The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.”]] Thank you for your assistance with the article. It is ready for its final review! [[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 10:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} a stellar job. Well done. I removed the banner, so you can move on to another article. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:12, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediations ==
Dr. Lucas, I have begun work on the tributes for volume 5. [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Grace Notes|Grace Notes]] by Stephen Borkowski is ready for its final review.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 12:58, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} Well done! Banner removed, url added. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:18, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

==Oohh Normie Final Edits==
Hi Dr. Lucas, I have finished my article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/"Oohh_Normie_—_You're_Sooo_Hemingway":_Mailer_Memories_and_Encounters|Oohh Normie, You're Sooo Hemingway]]. Please let me know if there is anything I need to fix. [[User:Tbara4554|Tbara4554]] ([[User talk:Tbara4554|talk]]) 20:01, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Tbara4554}} thank you. I made some corrections and removed the banner. You might want to have another look over it. Please move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:53, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Harlot's Ghost, Bildungsroman, Masculinity and Hemingway ==

Dr. Lucas,

The following article is ready for your review. Thanks.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Harlot%27s_Ghost,_Bildungsroman,_Masculinity_and_Hemingway

[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 21:22, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} excellent. Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:39, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== I am done with this ==

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Situating_Hemingway:_Mailer,_Style,_Ethics
:Received. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:29, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Review PM Article ==

Hi Dr. Lucas, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Hemingway_to_Mailer_—_A_Delayed_Response_to_The_Deer_Park|here]] is my remediated article, ready for review![[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 12:21, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Hobbitonya}} great work. I have removed the banner, so you are good to move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:20, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Project ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have finished my remedidation project and I am ready for it to be reviewed. '''Article link''': [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe#Works_Cited|Piling On: Norman Mailer's Utilization of Marilyn Monroe]

Thanks,

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 13:04, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} good work so far. Please remove wikilinks. Change ' and " to typographical apostrophes and quotation marks. And all red errors at the bottom of the page need to be taken care of. These are likely all from coding errors in your sources. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:24, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have removed the wikilinks, changed to the correct typographic style and updated my sources.
'''Article link''': [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe#Works_Cited|Piling On: Norman Mailer's Utilization of Marilyn Monroe] Thanks, [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 21:55, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

[I forgot to fill out the summary box. I am adding my summary]
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} you're getting there! It looks great. You must eliminate all the red errors at the bottom. These appear when there are errors in your citations. Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:15, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

@{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have tried everything I can think of and I still have harv and sfn no-target errors and harv and sfn multiple-target errors and cs1 uses editors parameter. Do I not include the editor? [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 16:03, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have managed to get rid of two of the red target errors. I am still working on finding the harv sfn multiple target error. Thanks, [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 20:37, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have tried everything i can think of to remove the last red error flag. I had to turn it in. I don't know that else I can do in this situation. I was given citation that did not follow any of the given formats. [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 21:45, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} all parenthetical citations must be remediated to {{tl|sfn}}; none of yours are. Get these done, then we can worry about the errors. (Some notes on sources: any generic <code><nowiki>{{citation}}</nowiki></code> will not be correct. I see you have a book review by Marshall that has no source (I tried to find the original and cannot; this is a weird citation; I'll continue to look for it). There's also one that looks like a film that should use the [[w:Template:Cite AV media|<code>Cite AV media</code> template]].) Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:16, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Submission ==

Hello!
Here's my remediated article; [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/The_Devil's_Party:_Reading_and_Wreaking_Vengeance_in_The_Castle_in_the_Forest|The Devil's Party: Reading and Wreaking Vengeance in ''The Castle in the Forest'']].
Thanks! Please let me know if there's anything I can review or correct.
[[User:Maggiemrogers|Maggiemrogers]] ([[User talk:Maggiemrogers|talk]]) 13:23, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Maggiemrogers}} nice work! Banner removed, so please move on to something else in the volume. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:39, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Vol. 4: Rumors of Grace article remediated ==

I believe I have completed remediation of ''[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Rumors_of_Grace:_God-Language_in_Hemingway_and_Mailer|Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer]]'', vol. 4. I was having last-minute trouble with sfn errors for sources without authors, but Justin Kilchenmann helped me out, so I think they are fixed.
:{{Reply to|Sherrilledwards}} You have done a remarkable job—a real Herculean effort! Footnotes should not go in any notes. See those I changed; the others should be changed in the same way. I have done some, but the others have to be fixed, I'm afraid. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:20, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to|Grlucas}}I believe I have completed these fixes, so the article is again ready for review. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 15:49, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
:::{{Reply to| Sherrilledwards}} truly exceptional work—a model remediation! Marked as complete. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:30, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Inside Norman Mailer ==

Hi Dr. Lucas - I have finished remediating the article, [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Inside Norman Mailer|Inside Norman Mailer]]. Please let me know if I need to make any adjustments. Thank you! [[User:Chelsey.brantley|Chelsey.brantley]] ([[User talk:Chelsey.brantley|talk]]) 18:09, 7 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Chelsey.brantley}} good work! Please help with another article from volume 4. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:36, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed: Norman Mailer: Playboy Magazine ==

I hope I am doing this is right. I have finished remediating my article about Norman Mailer and its in my designated sandbox [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer:_Playboy_Magazine_Heavyweight here.]
If there are any last minute edits, let me know. I got the last of the errors removed yesterday. And I believe we are on the same page with leaving the in-line citations for ''Playboy'' to be as is, since the author didn't put them down in the works cited. [[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 20:14, 7 April 2025 (EDT)Nina Mizner
:{{Reply to|NrmMGA5108}} looking good! So, the parenthetical citations still in the article, I'm assuming, are there because of those missing sources? Please check your page numbers; some seem to be off. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:04, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} I found the page number error and its corrected, and yes all the parenthetical citations should be referencing issues of the ''playboy'' magazine, which were not listed in the works cited. --[[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 20:54, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| NrmMGA5108}} it looks great. I removed the banner! Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:29, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed Remediation From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity? ==

Greeting Dr. Lucas,

I have made the adjustment that you mentioned.

I also made additional edits to my short footnotes and noticed that my citations did not link to my references - which has been fixed.

I have tested all of my citations, and they all work.

Here is my article by Alexander Hicks, ''From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity?''

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/From_Here_to_Eternity_and_The_Naked_and_the_Dead:_Premiere_to_Eternity%3F

Have a great day.
:{{Reply to| THarrell}} Please always sign your talk page posts. Several “quoted items” in the article appear as ‘quoted items’; these must be corrected, please. No spaces or returns should surround {{tl|pg}} calls. Multiple page numbers should look like this <code><nowiki>{{sfn|Moretti|1996|pp=11-14}}</nowiki></code>; note the double <code>pp</code>. There seem to be many typos. I corrected some for you, but you must see to the rest. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:16, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Greetings,

Are these the only additional corrections that need to be made? This is different from what you mentioned before.

I just want to be sure that I have hit everything.

Also can you verify what other typos you are seeing, I have ran through this twice.

If something is spelt a certain way, for example "Soljer", I have left it that way. Since it is mentioned like that in the article.
—[[User:THarrell|THarrell]] ([[User talk:THarrell|talk]]) 06:49, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Greetings,

I have gone through and fixed all of the short footnotes.

I have gone line by line with a ruler to look at any typos, and fixed the words that I found that had a dash in them/needed to be lowercased.

I have also fixed the quotations.

—[[User:THarrell|THarrell]] ([[User talk:THarrell|talk]]) 12:31, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| THarrell}} much better. Periods go inside quotations marks; I think I fixed these, but please check. Also, there are no spaces before footnotes; again, I did a find/replace, but you should check. Also, check that all titles of novels are italicized (if it's italicized in the PDF, then it has to be italicized in the remediation, including abbreviations, like ''Naked''); I fixed a couple. Also, no extra spaces; there should only be a single blank space between paragraphs. There are quite a few little details that needed (need?) fixing. I removed the banner, but please check my work. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 12:41, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon” ==

Greetings Dr. Lucus,

My article is ready for your review. Thank you.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer%E2%80%99s_%E2%80%9CFootnote_to_Death_in_the_Afternoon%E2%80%9D)
:{{Reply to| KForeman}} it's coming along. Please ''always'' sign your talk page posts. Right up top, there are errors. Please use the real {{tl|pg}}, like all the other articles. Citations need to be fixed. All parenthetical citations must be converted. You still have quite a bit of work to do. All red sections need to be seen to and corrected. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:20, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
@Grlucs, per your suggestions, I've made the corrections. Please review. I look forward to your feedback. Thank you.

=Remediation of "Cluster Seeds and the Mailer Legacy"=
Hello, Dr. Lucas. I have completed the remediation of [https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Cluster_Seeds_and_the_Mailer_Legacy&oldid=18200| my article], and it is ready for your review. Thank you!—[[User:ADavis|ADavis]] ([[User talk:ADavis|talk]]) 11:32, 8 April 2025 (EDT)@ADavis
:{{Reply to| ADavis}} got it. I think I check it yesterday and removed the banner then. Please move on to another piece. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediating Article: Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing Volume 4. ==

Hello Dr. Lucas,

I have completed remediating my article. Here is the link [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing|The Mailer Review: Volume 4: Mailer, Hemingway, Boxing (2010)]] [[User:JBrown|JBrown]] ([[User talk:JBrown|talk]]) 13:01, 8 April 2025 (EDT)JBrown
:{{Reply to|JBrown}} a good start, but all parenthetical citations need to be footnotes. Also, check your headers. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norris Church Mailer'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up remediating the article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norris Church Mailer|Norris Church Mailer]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 13:42, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Kamyers}} awesome work! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edits Completed and Ready for Review ==

Dr. Lucas, I have completed my assigned remediation article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Looking_at_the_Past:_Nostalgia_as_Technique_in_The_Naked_and_the_Dead_and_For_Whom_the_Bell_Tolls|Looking at the Past: Nostalgia as Technique in The Naked and the Dead and For Whom the Bell Tolls]]. Please review at your convenience. I enjoyed working on this assignment. I look forward to your suggestions and feedback. All the best, Danielle (DBond007)
:{{Reply to| DBond007}} ok, good work. Please remove all the external links. Links to Wikipedia are not necessary, but if used, they need to be done correctly. There should be no spaces before {{tl|sfn}}. May sure all your ' and " are actually typographical apostrophes and quotation marks. Remove any superfluous spaces and line breaks; these mess up the formatting. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Thank you. I will get started on these revisions immediately. Thanks for the feedback and your time. :)[[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 11:30, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| Grlucas}} I have completed all the requested revisions and ready for review round 2. Thank you again![[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 12:10, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:::{{Reply to|DBond007}} looking better! There are still items to be seen to, like titles on novels and magazines need to appear like they do in the original: if it's italicized in the PDF, it must be italicized on the web. I added the epigram for you and corrected that pesky citation. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:41, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| Grlucas}}I have completed edits. I went through and took out quotes around The Time Machine, except for one instance that the author uses them. All my other titles seem to correspond to the original article. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you for the epigram and the pesky citation correction. Best, [[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 15:25, 17 April 2025 (EDT)
:::{{Reply to|DBond007}} received, and good work. I had to clean up the sources a bit, so you might want to have a look. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:42, 18 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| Grlucas}}I went back and reviewed some of the other articles marked complete to compare and look for remaining revisions. I made one change on Works Cited and also added the page numbers to correspond to the pdf. Let's try this again. Again, I *believe I am finished with this article. Best,[[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 10:36, 18 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed the remediation assignment ==

Good evening Dr. Lucas,

I hope I am doing this right. Here is the link for my completed Remediation article: [http://The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Encounters_with_Mailer Encounters with Mailer].

I look forward to reading your feedback.

All the best,

Patrick Riley
:{{Reply to|Priley1984}} thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:40, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Project Submission: An Expected Encounter in an Unexpected Place ==

Link:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer:_An_Expected_Encounter_in_an_Unexpected_Place

Winnie Verna
:{{Reply to|Wverna}} received, thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:51, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== E.Mosley ==

Good evening, @Grlucas. I have completed my Remediation Articles[[https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/On_Reading_Mailer_Too_Young]]. The article I had was " On Reading Mailer Too Young Volume 4, 2010
:{{Reply to| Essence903m}} thank you. I had to fix and clean-up quite a bit. Your saves also do not include summaries. When you move on to your next article, please be more careful and follow the instructions. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:12, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Kynndra Watson ==

Good Evening, @grlucas. i have completed my Remediation articles: Volume 5: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Making_Masculinity_and_Unmaking_Jewishness:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Voice_in_Wild_90_and_Beyond_the_Law and Volume 4: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer,_Hemingway,_and_the_%E2%80%9CReds%E2%80%9D.

Thank you.
:{{Reply to| KWatson}} thank you, and this is a good start, but there are still many items that need to be cleaned up, like footnote indications (They go after punctuation), citation errors (all the red errors at the bottom need to be seen to), extra spaces and ALL CAPS need to be removed. Please see other completed articles for models. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:18, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/What Would Be the Fun of That?|"What Would Be the Fun of That?"]] by Peter Alson.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:33, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} awesome! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:21, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== “Remembering Norris Church” Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Remembering Norris Church|“Remembering Norris Church”]] by John Bowers.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 16:17, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} and again, excellent! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:22, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== “The Norris I Knew” Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/The Norris I Knew|“The Norris I Knew”]] by Christopher Busa.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:04, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} rockin’! 👍🏼 —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:24, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Norris Mailer" Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Norris Mailer|"Norris Mailer"]] by Nancy Collins.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:35, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} thanks again. You’re tearing it up. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:32, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Rise Above It" Tribute Remediation ==

Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Rise Above It|"Rise Above It"]] by David Ebershoff—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 11:12, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} excellent. Many thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:15, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed Additional Articles ==

Hello, Dr. Lucas. I have remediated [https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Tributes_to_Norris_Church_Mailer/A_View_Through_the_Prism&oldid=18744|"A View Through the Prism"], [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Tributes_to_Norris_Church_Mailer/Lip_Liner|"Lip Liner"], and [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/The_Living_Room_Show#|"The Living Room Show"] in Volume 5. They are ready for your review. Thank you!—[[User:ADavis|ADavis]] ([[User talk:ADavis|talk]]) 12:31, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|ADavis}} great work. Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:26, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Submission notification sent 29 March ==

@grlucas

Dr. Lucas - I sent a Talk Page notification that I had completed the page I remediated on 29 March. The table indicates I haven't done anything yet. I sent it from the Talk Page from the article site. I don't see a response from that notification, but I had received one from you earlier in the process.
I don't understand what happened.

[[User:LogansPop22|LogansPop22]] ([[User talk:LogansPop22|talk]]) 14:54, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|LogansPop22}} sorry if I missed that. [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Hemingway and Women at the Front: Blowing Bridges in The Fifth Column, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Other Works|this article]], right? It's looking great, though all the parenthetical citations must be converted to footnotes using {{tl|sfn}} and some of the author names in your notes should use {{tl|harvtxt}}. I added the "citations" section for you. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:39, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law ==

@Grlucas, I have made some additional edits to this [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Making_Masculinity_and_Unmaking_Jewishness:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Voice_in_Wild_90_and_Beyond_the_Law article] in Volume 5 by correcting most of the citations. There are 2 that still do not work, but I think that is because the sources are incomplete.

[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 21:16, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| TPoole}} Looking really good, and this is a complicated one. A couple of things: no spaces or line breaks before or after {{tl|pg}}; I removed the spaces before {{tl|sfn}}, but you might want to check them; there are some typos, like missing spaces before some parentheses; no footnotes should appear in the notes section: use {{tl|harvtxt}} instead. And all the red errors at the bottom need to be cleared up. Great work so far! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:00, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Red Error-Gone ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}I have deleted all the sfn's and the red error is gone. I don't know why I didn't think about this days ago.

[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe|Gladstein-Monroe]]

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 23:07, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|MerAtticus}} getting closer. A few things: you should use <code>|author-mask=1</code> for repeated author names in your works cited; all parenthetical citations need to be replaced with footnotes using {{tl|sfn}}; must punctuation in your sources need to be removed as the templates do that for you; and you need to use {{tl|harvtxt}} for citations in your endnotes. Also, letters and films have their own templates. I did a couple of these for you as examples. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:14, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Remembering Norris" Tribute Remediation ==

Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Remembering Norris|"Remembering Norris"]] by Margo Howard.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:20, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} excellent! Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:35, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

== Norman Mailer: From Orgone Accumulator to Cancer Protection for Schizophrenics ==

Dr. Lucas,

The following article is ready for your review:
https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer:_From_Orgone_Accumulator_to_Cancer_Protection_for_Schizophrenics

I was unable to find the correct format for the first works cited entry under Mailer. It is a reprint of a magazine article. Thank you. [[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 16:28, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} you are a master remediator! Thank you for going above and beyond. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:44, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

==Tolls of War: Mailerian Sub-Texts in For Whom the Bell Tolls, Trust & Sparring with Norman==
Dr. Lucas, these were some of the smaller ones, so I went ahead and knocked them out. They are ready for review: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Sparring with Norman|Sparring with Norman]], [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Trust|Trust]], and [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tolls of War: Mailerian Sub-Texts in For Whom the Bell Tolls|Tolls of War: Mailerian Sub-Texts in For Whom the Bell Tolls]]. —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 10:27, 13 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Kamyers}} all excellent—above and beyond! Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:56, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing'' ==

Hi everyone,
I am currently helping with the article, [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Death,_Art,_and_the_Disturbing:_Hemingway_and_Mailer_and_the_Art_of_Writing Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing]. It still has a good bit to go, if anyone wants to help out.
—[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 5:17 PM, 13 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|CVinson}} thanks! I added the author info. I'm not sure many will see your request; you might want to post it on the forum. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 14:56, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Thank you for adding the author information and I have posted the request in the forum. Thank you! —[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:CVinson|talk]]) 6:53 PM, 14 April 2025 (EDT)

== Mimi and Mercer ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have corrected the Mimi Gladstein [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Piling On: Norman Mailer’s Utilization of Marilyn Monroe]] and removed all the red errors. I also have finishe the Erin Mercer article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Automatons and the Atomic Abyss: The Naked and the Dead]], except the ''The Naked and the Dead'' in the display title. An error occured.
[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 19:26, 13 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} good work. There should be no footnotes in the endnotes, please. Since this is the only thing to correct, I have removed the banner, but please let me know when you made that final correction. Thanks! (I will respond about your second article shortly.) —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 14:59, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} your second article looks good. Could you use the [[w:Template:Cite interview|Template:Cite interview]] for interviews. I did one for you. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 16:33, 14 April 2025 (EDT)

== Through the Lens of the Beatniks Remediation ==

Hello, Dr. Lucas! I've completed the remediation of [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Through_the_Lens_of_the_Beatniks:_Norman_Mailer_and_Modern_American_Man’s_Quest_for_Self-Realization#CITEREFNaked1992|Through the Lens of the Beatniks]]. I wasn't able to get the letter citations exactly how I thought they should be. If there's anything I'm missing, please let me know! Thanks! [[User:Maggiemrogers|Maggiemrogers]] ([[User talk:Maggiemrogers|talk]]) 10:09, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Maggiemrogers}} got it! It looks great. I made some format changes, but you did a great job! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 15:58, 14 April 2025 (EDT)

== Finish Mimi ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}

I have made the final edit to Mimi and removed the footnotes from the endnotes. [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe]] [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 15:50, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} you removed all the citations. Only '''footnotes''' need to be removed, but citations need to stay. I did the first note for you (now erased, but you can see it in the history) so you could see how it was done. You can also see [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer|this one]]. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 16:52, 14 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed? All You Need is Glove ==

Hi Dr. Lucas, I believe the book review, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/All_You_Need_is_Glove|All You Need is Glove]] is done and ready for review! [[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 19:10, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Hobbitonya}} awesome work! Banner removed, and many thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:08, 16 April 2025 (EDT)

== Harv and Sfn no-target ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I changed the citations in the article to interview and I tried a few things to get rid of the Harv and Sfn no-target with little luck. [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Automatons_and_the_Atomic_Abyss:_The_Naked_and_the_Dead]]
[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 21:04, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} this was because your interviews had no dates. Most are from Lennon's book, published in 1988. I added the dates to the citations, but the sfn footnotes need to be fixed to correspond with those. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:24, 16 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} OK, between your fixes and my little tweaks, this one is finished! Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:50, 17 April 2025 (EDT)

== Erros fixed ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have fixed all citation errors in both articles and added the harvtxt. Atomic Abyss still has the Pages using duplicate arguments in template calls error.
[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Automatons_and_the_Atomic_Abyss:_The_Naked_and_the_Dead]]
:{{Reply to|MerAtticus}} see above. These still need fixing. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:35, 16 April 2025 (EDT)

[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe]]
:{{Reply to|MerAtticus}} this one looks great! Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:35, 16 April 2025 (EDT)

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 08:23, 15 April 2025 (EDT)

== completed: Advertisements for Others ==

Thanks to some classmates helping with the finishing touches, my second article should be ready. [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Advertisements_for_Others:_The_Blurbs_of_Norman_Mailer|Advertisements for Others.]]
--[[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 19:24, 17 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to| NrmMGA5108}} received, and thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:15, 18 April 2025 (EDT)

== Two Poems Vol 4 Ready? ==

Hi Dr. Lucas! I think these two poems are ready for review: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/The Boxer in the Park|The Boxer in the Park]] and Norman Mailer and [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer_and_Ernest_Hemingway_Do_Not_Box_in_Heaven|Ernest Hemingway Do Not Box in Heaven]]. The second on says the display title is wrong, but again, I don't know what I am missing there. Thank you![[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 09:05, 18 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Hobbitonya}} excellent! Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:56, 18 April 2025 (EDT)

== A Dialogue Essay on Mailer and Hemingway ==

Hey,

I see that [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/A Dialogue Essay on Mailer and Hemingway|A Dialogue Essay on Mailer and Hemingway]] is missing text. Can you email me a copy or link it as a reply, so I can remediate this article. [[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 09:44, 18 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| APKnight25}} you may download both volumes’ PDFs on the [https://forum.grlucas.net/t/project-mailer-assignments-remediation-project/88/3?u=grlucas forum]. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:40, 18 April 2025 (EDT)

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-18T23:27:05Z

KForeman:

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| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| url = ...
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=356}} }}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan, {{sfn|Lennon|2008|pp=515-517}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.”{{sfn|Kehoe|1961}} They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges”. {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=1}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''”.{{sfn|Brand|2004|p=182}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.{{sfn|Lennon|2008|p=517}}

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932.{{sfn| Hemingway |1932}} That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”,{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=353}} which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=352}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”). {{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater?{{sfn|Brand|2004}} These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)”.{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=286}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”(3-4)?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd”(4-5).{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter”(3).{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Because Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'':{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.”{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”{{sfn|Daley|1966}}

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? {{sfn|Daley|1966}} “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=54}} And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” .{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=95}} Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (13-14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns”(14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1987|p=176}} One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver, a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=192}}

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. {{sfn|Daley|1966}} Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958|p=14}} When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=213}} Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.{{pg|284|285}}

== Citations ==
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |title=A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Buckley | first1 = Peter
| title = Bullfight
| publisher = Bonanza Books
| date = 1958
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = The Swords of Spain
| publisher = New York Daily Press
| date = 1966
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title= "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway|
|first=Ernest |date=1932 |title= "Death in the Afternoon" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1941 |title= "For Whom the Bell Tolls" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title="Wine, Women & Toros" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |title= "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title="Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007"|url= |location= |publisher= The Mailer Review 2.1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-18T23:21:36Z

KForeman:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
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{{byline
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| url = ...
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=356}} }}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan, {{sfn|Lennon|2008|pp=515-517}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.”{{sfn|Kehoe|1961}} They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges”. {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=1}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''”.{{sfn|Brand|2004|p=182}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.{{sfn|Lennon|2008|p=517}}

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932.{{sfn| Hemingway |1932}} That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”,{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=353}} which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=352}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”). {{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater?{{sfn|Brand|2004}} These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)”.{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=286}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”(3-4)?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd”(4-5).{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter”(3).{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Because Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'':{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.”{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”{{sfn|Daley|1966}}

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? {{sfn|Daley|1966}} “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=54}} And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” .{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=95}} Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (13-14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns”(14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1987|p=176}} One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver, a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=192}}

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. {{sfn|Daley|1966}} Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958|p=14}} When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours” (213). Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.{{pg|284|285}}

== Citations ==
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |title=A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Buckley | first1 = Peter
| title = Bullfight
| publisher = Bonanza Books
| date = 1958
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = The Swords of Spain
| publisher = New York Daily Press
| date = 1966
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title= "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway|
|first=Ernest |date=1932 |title= "Death in the Afternoon" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1941 |title= "For Whom the Bell Tolls" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title="Wine, Women & Toros" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |title= "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title="Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007"|url= |location= |publisher= The Mailer Review 2.1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-18T23:01:04Z

KForeman:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{byline
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| url = ...
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=356}} }}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan, {{sfn|Lennon|2008|pp=515-517}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.”{{sfn|Kehoe|1961}} They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges”. {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=1}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''”.{{sfn|Brand|2004|p=182}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.{{sfn|Lennon|2008|p=517}}

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932.{{sfn| Hemingway |1932}} That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”,{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=353}} which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=352}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”). {{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater?{{sfn|Brand|2004}} These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)”.{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=286}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”(3-4)?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd”(4-5).{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter”(3).{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Because Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'':{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.”{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”{{sfn|Daley|1966}}

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? {{sfn|Daley|1966}} “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=54}} And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” .{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=95}} Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (13-14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns”(14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1987|p=176}} One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver, a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=192}}

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. {{sfn|Daley|1966}} Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog” (Bullfight 14). When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours” (213). Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.{{pg|284|285}}

== Citations ==
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |title=A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Buckley | first1 = Peter
| title = Bullfight
| publisher = Bonanza Books
| date = 1958
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = The Swords of Spain
| publisher = New York Daily Press
| date = 1966
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title= "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway|
|first=Ernest |date=1932 |title= "Death in the Afternoon" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1941 |title= "For Whom the Bell Tolls" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title="Wine, Women & Toros" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |title= "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title="Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007"|url= |location= |publisher= The Mailer Review 2.1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-18T22:49:43Z

KForeman:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{byline
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| url = ...
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=356}} }}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan, {{sfn|Lennon|2008|pp=515-517}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.”{{sfn|Kehoe|1961}} They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges”. {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=1}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''”.{{sfn|Brand|2004|p=182}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.{{sfn|Lennon|2008|p=517}}

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932.{{sfn| Hemingway |1932}} That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”,{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=353}} which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=352}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”). {{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater?{{sfn|Brand|2004}} These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)”.{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=286}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”(3-4)?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd”(4-5).{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter”(3).{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Because Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'':{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.”{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”{{sfn|Daley|1966}}

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? {{sfn|Daley|1966}} “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=54}} And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” .{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=95}} Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (13-14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns”(14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1987|p=176}} One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver, a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=192}}

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog” (Bullfight 14). When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours” (213). Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.{{pg|284|285}}

== Citations ==
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |title=A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Buckley | first1 = Peter
| title = Bullfight
| publisher = Bonanza Books
| date = 1958
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = The Swords of Spain
| publisher = New York Daily Press
| date = 1966
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title= "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway|
|first=Ernest |date=1932 |title= "Death in the Afternoon" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1941 |title= "For Whom the Bell Tolls" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title="Wine, Women & Toros" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |title= "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title="Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007"|url= |location= |publisher= The Mailer Review 2.1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-18T22:45:14Z

KForeman:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{byline
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| url = ...
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=356}} }}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan, {{sfn|Lennon|2008|pp=515-517}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.”{{sfn|Kehoe|1961}} They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges”. {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=1}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''”.{{sfn|Brand|2004|p=182}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.{{sfn|Lennon|2008|p=517}}

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932.{{sfn| Hemingway |1932}} That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”,{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=353}} which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=352}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”). {{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater?{{sfn|Brand|2004}} These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)”.{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=286}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”(3-4)?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd”(4-5).{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter”(3).{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Because Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'':{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.”{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”{{sfn|Daley|1966}}

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? {{sfn|Daley|1966}} “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=54}} And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” .{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=95}} Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (13-14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns”(14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1987|p=176}} One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver, a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring” (192).

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog” (Bullfight 14). When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours” (213). Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.{{pg|284|285}}

== Citations ==
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |title=A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Buckley | first1 = Peter
| title = Bullfight
| publisher = Bonanza Books
| date = 1958
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = The Swords of Spain
| publisher = New York Daily Press
| date = 1966
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title= "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway|
|first=Ernest |date=1932 |title= "Death in the Afternoon" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1941 |title= "For Whom the Bell Tolls" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title="Wine, Women & Toros" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |title= "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title="Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007"|url= |location= |publisher= The Mailer Review 2.1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-18T22:43:06Z

KForeman:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{byline
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| url = ...
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=356}} }}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan, {{sfn|Lennon|2008|pp=515-517}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.”{{sfn|Kehoe|1961}} They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges”. {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=1}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''”.{{sfn|Brand|2004|p=182}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.{{sfn|Lennon|2008|p=517}}

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932.{{sfn| Hemingway |1932}} That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”,{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=353}} which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=352}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”). {{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater?{{sfn|Brand|2004}} These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)”.{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=286}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”(3-4)?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd”(4-5).{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter”(3).{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Because Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'':{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.”{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”{{sfn|Daley|1966}}

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? {{sfn|Daley|1966}} “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=54}} And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” .{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=95}} Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (13-14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns”(14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1987|176}} One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver, a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring” (192).

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog” (Bullfight 14). When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours” (213). Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.{{pg|284|285}}

== Citations ==
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |title=A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Buckley | first1 = Peter
| title = Bullfight
| publisher = Bonanza Books
| date = 1958
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = The Swords of Spain
| publisher = New York Daily Press
| date = 1966
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title= "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway|
|first=Ernest |date=1932 |title= "Death in the Afternoon" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1941 |title= "For Whom the Bell Tolls" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title="Wine, Women & Toros" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |title= "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title="Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007"|url= |location= |publisher= The Mailer Review 2.1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-18T22:37:49Z

KForeman:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{byline
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| url = ...
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=356}} }}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan, {{sfn|Lennon|2008|pp=515-517}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.”{{sfn|Kehoe|1961}} They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges”. {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=1}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''”.{{sfn|Brand|2004|p=182}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.{{sfn|Lennon|2008|p=517}}

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932.{{sfn| Hemingway |1932}} That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”,{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=353}} which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=352}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”). {{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater?{{sfn|Brand|2004}} These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)”.{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=286}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”(3-4)?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd”(4-5).{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter”(3).{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Because Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'':{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.”{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”{{sfn|Daley|1966}}

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? {{sfn|Daley|1966}} “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=54}} And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” .{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=95}} Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (13-14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns”(14).{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can” (176). One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver, a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring” (192).

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog” (Bullfight 14). When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours” (213). Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.{{pg|284|285}}

== Citations ==
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |title=A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Buckley | first1 = Peter
| title = Bullfight
| publisher = Bonanza Books
| date = 1958
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = The Swords of Spain
| publisher = New York Daily Press
| date = 1966
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title= "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway|
|first=Ernest |date=1932 |title= "Death in the Afternoon" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1941 |title= "For Whom the Bell Tolls" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title="Wine, Women & Toros" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |title= "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title="Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007"|url= |location= |publisher= The Mailer Review 2.1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-18T22:35:30Z

KForeman:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{byline
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| url = ...
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=356}} }}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan, {{sfn|Lennon|2008|pp=515-517}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.”{{sfn|Kehoe|1961}} They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges”. {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=1}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''”.{{sfn|Brand|2004|p=182}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.{{sfn|Lennon|2008|p=517}}

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932.{{sfn| Hemingway |1932}} That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”,{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=353}} which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=352}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”). {{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater?{{sfn|Brand|2004}} These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)”.{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=286}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”(3-4)?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd”(4-5).{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter”(3).{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Because Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'':{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.”{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”{{sfn|Daley|1966}}

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? {{sfn|Daley|1966}} “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=54}} And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” .{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=95}} Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958|p=13-14}} The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958|p=14}}

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can” (176). One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver, a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring” (192).

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog” (Bullfight 14). When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours” (213). Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.{{pg|284|285}}

== Citations ==
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |title=A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Buckley | first1 = Peter
| title = Bullfight
| publisher = Bonanza Books
| date = 1958
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = The Swords of Spain
| publisher = New York Daily Press
| date = 1966
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title= "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway|
|first=Ernest |date=1932 |title= "Death in the Afternoon" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1941 |title= "For Whom the Bell Tolls" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title="Wine, Women & Toros" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |title= "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title="Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007"|url= |location= |publisher= The Mailer Review 2.1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-18T22:27:04Z

KForeman:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
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{{byline
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| url = ...
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=356}} }}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan, {{sfn|Lennon|2008|pp=515-517}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.”{{sfn|Kehoe|1961}} They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges”. {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=1}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''”.{{sfn|Brand|2004|p=182}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.{{sfn|Lennon|2008|p=517}}

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932.{{sfn| Hemingway |1932}} That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”,{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=353}} which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=352}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”). {{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater?{{sfn|Brand|2004}} These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)”.{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=286}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”(3-4)?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd”(4-5).{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter”(3).{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Because Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'':{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.”{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”{{sfn|Daley|1966}}

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? {{sfn|Daley|1966}} “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=54}} And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” .{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=95}} Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (Bullfight 13–14). The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns” (14).

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can” (176). One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver, a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring” (192).

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog” (Bullfight 14). When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours” (213). Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.{{pg|284|285}}

== Citations ==
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |title=A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Buckley | first1 = Peter
| title = Bullfight
| publisher = Bonanza Books
| date = 1958
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = The Swords of Spain
| publisher = New York Daily Press
| date = 1966
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title= "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway|
|first=Ernest |date=1932 |title= "Death in the Afternoon" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1941 |title= "For Whom the Bell Tolls" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title="Wine, Women & Toros" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |title= "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title="Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007"|url= |location= |publisher= The Mailer Review 2.1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-18T20:04:40Z

KForeman:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{byline
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| url = ...
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=356}} }}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan, {{sfn|Lennon|2008|pp=515-517}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.”{{sfn|Kehoe|1961}} They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges”. {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=1}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''”.{{sfn|Brand|2004|p=182}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.{{sfn|Lennon|2008|p=517}}

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932.{{sfn| Hemingway |1932}} That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”,{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=353}} which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=352}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”). {{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater?{{sfn|Brand|2004}} These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)”.{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=286}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”(3-4)?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd”(4-5).{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter”(3).{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Because Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'':{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.”{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”{{sfn|Daley|1966}}

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? {{sfn|Daley|1966}} “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=54}} And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” (95). Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (Bullfight 13–14). The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns” (14).

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can” (176). One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver, a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring” (192).

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog” (Bullfight 14). When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours” (213). Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.{{pg|284|285}}

== Citations ==
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |title=A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Buckley | first1 = Peter
| title = Bullfight
| publisher = Bonanza Books
| date = 1958
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = The Swords of Spain
| publisher = New York Daily Press
| date = 1966
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title= "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway|
|first=Ernest |date=1932 |title= "Death in the Afternoon" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1941 |title= "For Whom the Bell Tolls" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title="Wine, Women & Toros" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |title= "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title="Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007"|url= |location= |publisher= The Mailer Review 2.1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-18T20:01:44Z

KForeman:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{byline
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| url = ...
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=356}} }}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan, {{sfn|Lennon|2008|pp=515-517}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.”{{sfn|Kehoe|1961}} They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges”. {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=1}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''”.{{sfn|Brand|2004|p=182}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.{{sfn|Lennon|2008|p=517}}

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932.{{sfn| Hemingway |1932}} That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”,{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=353}} which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=352}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”). {{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater?{{sfn|Brand|2004}} These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)”.{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=286}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”(3-4)?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd”(4-5).{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter”(3).{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Because Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'':{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958|p=5}}

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.”{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”{{sfn|Daley|1966}}

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? {{sfn|Daley|1966}} “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=54}} And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” (95). Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (Bullfight 13–14). The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns” (14).

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can” (176). One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver, a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring” (192).

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog” (Bullfight 14). When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours” (213). Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.{{pg|284|285}}

== Citations ==
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |title=A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Buckley | first1 = Peter
| title = Bullfight
| publisher = Bonanza Books
| date = 1958
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = The Swords of Spain
| publisher = New York Daily Press
| date = 1966
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title= "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway|
|first=Ernest |date=1932 |title= "Death in the Afternoon" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1941 |title= "For Whom the Bell Tolls" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title="Wine, Women & Toros" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |title= "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title="Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007"|url= |location= |publisher= The Mailer Review 2.1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-18T19:55:44Z

KForeman:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{byline
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| url = ...
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=356}} }}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan, {{sfn|Lennon|2008|pp=515-517}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.”{{sfn|Kehoe|1961}} They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges”. {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=1}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''”.{{sfn|Brand|2004|p=182}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.{{sfn|Lennon|2008|p=517}}

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932.{{sfn|Hemmingway|1932}} That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”,{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=353}} which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=352}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”). {{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater?{{sfn|Brand|2004}} These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)”.{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=286}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”(3-4)?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd”(4-5).{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter”(3).{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Because Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'':{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958|p=5}}

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.”{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”{{sfn|Daley|1966}}

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? {{sfn|Daley|1966}} “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=54}} And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” (95). Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (Bullfight 13–14). The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns” (14).

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can” (176). One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver, a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring” (192).

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog” (Bullfight 14). When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours” (213). Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.{{pg|284|285}}

== Citations ==
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |title=A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Buckley | first1 = Peter
| title = Bullfight
| publisher = Bonanza Books
| date = 1958
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = The Swords of Spain
| publisher = New York Daily Press
| date = 1966
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title= "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway|
|first=Ernest |date=1932 |title= "Death in the Afternoon" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1941 |title= "For Whom the Bell Tolls" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title="Wine, Women & Toros" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |title= "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title="Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007"|url= |location= |publisher= The Mailer Review 2.1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-18T19:50:46Z

KForeman:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{byline
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| url = ...
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=356}} }}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan, {{sfn|Lennon|2008|pp=515-517}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.”{{sfn|Kehoe|1961}} They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges”. {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=1}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''”.{{sfn|Brand|2004|p=182}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.{{sfn|Lennon|2008|p=517}}

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932.{{sfn|Hemmingway|1932}} That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”,{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=353}} which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=352}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”). {{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater?{{sfn|Brand|2004}} These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)”.{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=286}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”(3-4)?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd”(4-5).{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter”(3).{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Because Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'':{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958|p=5}}

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.”{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”{{sfn|Daley|1966}}

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? {{sfn|Daley|1966}} “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]” (54). And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” (95). Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (Bullfight 13–14). The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns” (14).

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can” (176). One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver, a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring” (192).

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog” (Bullfight 14). When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours” (213). Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.{{pg|284|285}}

== Citations ==
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |title=A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Buckley | first1 = Peter
| title = Bullfight
| publisher = Bonanza Books
| date = 1958
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = The Swords of Spain
| publisher = New York Daily Press
| date = 1966
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title= "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway|
|first=Ernest |date=1932 |title= "Death in the Afternoon" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1941 |title= "For Whom the Bell Tolls" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title="Wine, Women & Toros" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |title= "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title="Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007"|url= |location= |publisher= The Mailer Review 2.1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-18T19:42:43Z

KForeman:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{byline
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| url = ...
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=356}} }}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan, {{sfn|Lennon|2008|pp=515-517}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.”{{sfn|Kehoe|1961}} They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges”. {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=1}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''”.{{sfn|Brand|2004|p=182}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.{{sfn|Lennon|2008|p=517}}

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932.{{sfn|Hemmingway|1932}} That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”,{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=353}} which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=352}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”). {{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater?{{sfn|Brand|2004}} These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)”.{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=286}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”(3-4)?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd”(4-5).{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter”(3).{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Because Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'':{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958|p=5}}

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.”{{sfn|Buckley|1958}} Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”{{sfn|Daley|1966}}

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]” (54). And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” (95). Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (Bullfight 13–14). The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns” (14).

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can” (176). One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver, a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring” (192).

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog” (Bullfight 14). When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours” (213). Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.{{pg|284|285}}

== Citations ==
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |title=A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Buckley | first1 = Peter
| title = Bullfight
| publisher = Bonanza Books
| date = 1958
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = The Swords of Spain
| publisher = New York Daily Press
| date = 1966
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title= "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway|
|first=Ernest |date=1932 |title= "Death in the Afternoon" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1941 |title= "For Whom the Bell Tolls" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title="Wine, Women & Toros" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |title= "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title="Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007"|url= |location= |publisher= The Mailer Review 2.1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-18T19:34:06Z

KForeman: /* Works Cited */

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{byline
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| url = ...
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=356}} }}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan, {{sfn|Lennon|2008|pp=515-517}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.”{{sfn|Kehoe|1961}} They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges”. {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=1}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''”.{{sfn|Brand|2004|p=182}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.{{sfn|Lennon|2008|p=517}}

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932.{{sfn|Hemmingway|1932}} That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”,{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=353}} which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=352}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”). {{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater?{{sfn|Brand|2004}} These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)”.{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=286}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”(3-4)?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd”(4-5).{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter”(3).{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Because Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'':{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958|p=5}}

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.” Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”{{sfn|Daley|1966}}

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]” (54). And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” (95). Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (Bullfight 13–14). The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns” (14).

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can” (176). One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver, a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring” (192).

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog” (Bullfight 14). When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours” (213). Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.{{pg|284|285}}

== Citations ==
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |title=A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Buckley | first1 = Peter
| title = Bullfight
| publisher = Bonanza Books
| date = 1958
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = The Swords of Spain
| publisher = New York Daily Press
| date = 1966
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title= "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway|
|first=Ernest |date=1932 |title= "Death in the Afternoon" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1941 |title= "For Whom the Bell Tolls" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title="Wine, Women & Toros" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |title= "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title="Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007"|url= |location= |publisher= The Mailer Review 2.1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-18T19:33:04Z

KForeman: /* Works Cited */

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{byline
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| url = ...
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=356}} }}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan, {{sfn|Lennon|2008|pp=515-517}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.”{{sfn|Kehoe|1961}} They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges”. {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=1}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''”.{{sfn|Brand|2004|p=182}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.{{sfn|Lennon|2008|p=517}}

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932.{{sfn|Hemmingway|1932}} That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”,{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=353}} which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=352}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”). {{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater?{{sfn|Brand|2004}} These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)”.{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=286}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”(3-4)?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd”(4-5).{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter”(3).{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Because Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'':{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958|p=5}}

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.” Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”{{sfn|Daley|1966}}

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]” (54). And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” (95). Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (Bullfight 13–14). The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns” (14).

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can” (176). One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver, a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring” (192).

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog” (Bullfight 14). When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours” (213). Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.{{pg|284|285}}

== Citations ==
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |title=A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = The Swords of Spain
| publisher = New York Daily Press
| date = 1966
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Buckley | first1 = Peter
| title = Bullfight
| publisher = Bonanza Books
| date = 1958
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title= "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway|
|first=Ernest |date=1932 |title= "Death in the Afternoon" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1941 |title= "For Whom the Bell Tolls" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title="Wine, Women & Toros" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |title= "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title="Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007"|url= |location= |publisher= The Mailer Review 2.1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-18T19:31:01Z

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{{byline
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| url = ...
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=356}} }}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan, {{sfn|Lennon|2008|pp=515-517}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.”{{sfn|Kehoe|1961}} They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges”. {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=1}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''”.{{sfn|Brand|2004|p=182}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.{{sfn|Lennon|2008|p=517}}

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932.{{sfn|Hemmingway|1932}} That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”,{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=353}} which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=352}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”). {{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater?{{sfn|Brand|2004}} These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)”.{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=286}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”(3-4)?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd”(4-5).{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter”(3).{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Because Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'':{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958|p=5}}

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.” Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”{{sfn|Daley|1966}}

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]” (54). And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” (95). Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (Bullfight 13–14). The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns” (14).

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can” (176). One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver, a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring” (192).

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog” (Bullfight 14). When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours” (213). Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.{{pg|284|285}}

== Citations ==
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |title=A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = The Swords of Spain
| publisher = New York Daily Press
| date = 1966
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title= "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway|
|first=Ernest |date=1932 |title= "Death in the Afternoon" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1941 |title= "For Whom the Bell Tolls" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title="Wine, Women & Toros" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |title= "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title="Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007"|url= |location= |publisher= The Mailer Review 2.1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-18T19:29:03Z

KForeman: /* Works Cited */

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{byline
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| url = ...
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=356}} }}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan, {{sfn|Lennon|2008|pp=515-517}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.”{{sfn|Kehoe|1961}} They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges”. {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=1}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''”.{{sfn|Brand|2004|p=182}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.{{sfn|Lennon|2008|p=517}}

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932.{{sfn|Hemmingway|1932}} That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”,{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=353}} which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=352}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”). {{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater?{{sfn|Brand|2004}} These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)”.{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=286}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”(3-4)?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd”(4-5).{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter”(3).{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Because Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'':{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958|p=5}}

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.” Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”{{sfn|Daley|1966}}

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]” (54). And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” (95). Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (Bullfight 13–14). The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns” (14).

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can” (176). One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver, a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring” (192).

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog” (Bullfight 14). When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours” (213). Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.{{pg|284|285}}

== Citations ==
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |title=A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = The Swords of Spain
| publisher = New York Daily Press
| date = 1966
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title= "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1932 |title= "Death in the Afternoon" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1941 |title= "For Whom the Bell Tolls" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title="Wine, Women & Toros" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |title= "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title="Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007"|url= |location= |publisher= The Mailer Review 2.1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-18T19:23:02Z

KForeman: /* Works Cited */

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{byline
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| url = ...
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=356}} }}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan, {{sfn|Lennon|2008|pp=515-517}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.”{{sfn|Kehoe|1961}} They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges”. {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=1}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''”.{{sfn|Brand|2004|p=182}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.{{sfn|Lennon|2008|p=517}}

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932.{{sfn|Hemmingway|1932}} That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”,{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=353}} which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=352}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”). {{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater?{{sfn|Brand|2004}} These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)”.{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=286}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”(3-4)?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd”(4-5).{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter”(3).{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Because Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'':{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958|p=5}}

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.” Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”{{sfn|Daley|1966}}

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]” (54). And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” (95). Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (Bullfight 13–14). The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns” (14).

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can” (176). One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver, a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring” (192).

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog” (Bullfight 14). When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours” (213). Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.{{pg|284|285}}

== Citations ==
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |title=A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = The Swords of Spain
| publisher = New York Daily Press
| date = 1966
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title= "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1932 |title= "Death in the Afternoon" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1941 |title= "For Whom the Bell Tolls" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title="Wine, Women & Toros" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |title= "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title="Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007"|url= |location= |publisher= The Mailer Review 2.1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-18T19:19:58Z

KForeman:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{byline
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| url = ...
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=356}} }}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan, {{sfn|Lennon|2008|pp=515-517}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.”{{sfn|Kehoe|1961}} They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges”. {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=1}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''”.{{sfn|Brand|2004|p=182}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.{{sfn|Lennon|2008|p=517}}

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932.{{sfn|Hemmingway|1932}} That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”,{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=353}} which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=352}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”). {{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater?{{sfn|Brand|2004}} These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)”.{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=286}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”(3-4)?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd”(4-5).{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter”(3).{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Because Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'':{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958|p=5}}

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.” Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”{{sfn|Daley|1966}}

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]” (54). And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” (95). Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (Bullfight 13–14). The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns” (14).

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can” (176). One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver, a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring” (192).

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog” (Bullfight 14). When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours” (213). Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.{{pg|284|285}}

== Citations ==
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |title=A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = Bullfight
| publisher = Bonanza Books
| date = 1958
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title= "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1932 |title= "Death in the Afternoon" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1941 |title= "For Whom the Bell Tolls" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title="Wine, Women & Toros" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |title= "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title="Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007"|url= |location= |publisher= The Mailer Review 2.1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-18T19:16:58Z

KForeman:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{byline
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| url = ...
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=356}} }}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan, {{sfn|Lennon|2008|pp=515-517}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.”{{sfn|Kehoe|1961}} They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges”. {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=1}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''”.{{sfn|Brand|2004|p=182}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.{{sfn|Lennon|2008|p=517}}

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932.{{sfn|Hemmingway|1932}} That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”,{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=353}} which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=352}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”). {{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater?{{sfn|Brand|2004}} These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)”.{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=286}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”(3-4)?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd”(4-5).{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter”(3).{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Because Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'':{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958|p=5}}

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.” Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]” (54). And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” (95). Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (Bullfight 13–14). The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns” (14).

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can” (176). One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver, a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring” (192).

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog” (Bullfight 14). When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours” (213). Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.{{pg|284|285}}

== Citations ==
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |title=A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = Bullfight
| publisher = Bonanza Books
| date = 1958
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title= "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1932 |title= "Death in the Afternoon" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1941 |title= "For Whom the Bell Tolls" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title="Wine, Women & Toros" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |title= "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title="Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007"|url= |location= |publisher= The Mailer Review 2.1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-18T19:15:12Z

KForeman:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{byline
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| url = ...
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=356}} }}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan, {{sfn|Lennon|2008|pp=515-517}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.”{{sfn|Kehoe|1961}} They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges”. {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=1}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''”.{{sfn|Brand|2004|p=182}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.{{sfn|Lennon|2008|p=517}}

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932.{{sfn|Hemmingway|1932}} That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”,{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=353}} which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=352}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”). {{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater?{{sfn|Brand|2004}} These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)”.{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=286}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”(3-4)?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd”(4-5).{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter”(3).{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Because Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'':{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958|p=5}}

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.” Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]” (54). And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” (95). Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (Bullfight 13–14). The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns” (14).

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can” (176). One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver, a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring” (192).

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog” (Bullfight 14). When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours” (213). Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.{{pg|284|285}}

== Citations ==
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |title=A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = Bullfight
| publisher = Bonanza Books
| date = 1958
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title= "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1932 |title= "Death in the Afternoon" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1941 |title= "For Whom the Bell Tolls" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title="Wine, Women & Toros" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |title= "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title="Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007"|url= |location= |publisher= The Mailer Review 2.1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-18T18:48:46Z

KForeman:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{byline
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| url = ...
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=356}} }}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan, {{sfn|Lennon|2008|pp=515-517}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.”{{sfn|Kehoe|1961}} They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges”. {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=1}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''”.{{sfn|Brand|2004|p=182}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.{{sfn|Lennon|2008|p=517}}

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932.{{sfn|Hemmingway|1932}} That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”,{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=353}} which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=352}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”). {{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater?{{sfn|Brand|2004}} These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)”.{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=286}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”(3-4)?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd”(4-5).{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter”(3).{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Because Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'':{{sfn|Hemingway|1987}} “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958|p=5}}

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.” Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]” (54). And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” (95). Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (Bullfight 13–14). The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns” (14).

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can” (176). One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver, a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring” (192).

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog” (Bullfight 14). When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours” (213). Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.{{pg|284|285}}

== Citations ==
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |title=A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = Bullfight
| publisher = Bonanza Books
| date = 1958
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title= "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1932 |title= "Death in the Afternoon" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1941 |title= "For Whom the Bell Tolls" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title="Wine, Women & Toros" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |title= "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title="Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007"|url= |location= |publisher= The Mailer Review 2.1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-18T18:41:52Z

KForeman:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{byline
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| url = ...
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=356}} }}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan, {{sfn|Lennon|2008|pp=515-517}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.”{{sfn|Kehoe|1961}} They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges”. {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=1}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''”.{{sfn|Brand|2004|p=182}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.{{sfn|Lennon|2008|p=517}}

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932.{{sfn|Hemmingway|1932}} That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”,{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=353}} which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=352}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”). {{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater?{{sfn|Brand|2004}} These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)”.{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=286}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”(3-4)?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd”(4-5).{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter”(3).{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man”.{{sfn|Buckley|1958|p=5}}

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.” Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]” (54). And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” (95). Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (Bullfight 13–14). The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns” (14).

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can” (176). One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver, a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring” (192).

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog” (Bullfight 14). When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours” (213). Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.{{pg|284|285}}

== Citations ==
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |title=A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = Bullfight
| publisher = Bonanza Books
| date = 1958
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title= "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1932 |title= "Death in the Afternoon" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1941 |title= "For Whom the Bell Tolls" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title="Wine, Women & Toros" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |title= "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title="Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007"|url= |location= |publisher= The Mailer Review 2.1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
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