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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.

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 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 creditless 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 although 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.

But what part 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. 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”(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; however, without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will” (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’S’s 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. 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”).

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? 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.” 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.” 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)” (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 howls, he whistles, the 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, 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)? 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). 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). The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death— humiliation.