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I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive. The Deer Park (356)

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

THE 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. Notably, the intent might have been to influence the Mexican elites. 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 poeticmasterpiece,“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 the essay or the 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 (515), but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records and Macmillan are 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.”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” (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 photographers 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 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” (182). 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.

References

Brand, Anthony. "'Far From Simple': The Published Photographs in Death in the Afternoon. "A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon. publisher = Ed. Mirian Mandel. Rochester, NY:Camden House, 2004. Print. CS1 maint: Missing pipe (link)