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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. The intent might have been to influence the Mexican elites (Schell 260). 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.
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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. Mailer uses a nonconventional approach to his prose (Messenger 86).
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.
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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. Due to Mailer’s personal and competitive demeanor, he included the essay in the book, then later distanced himself from the project (Messenger 86).
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.
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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. Although it may not be intended, Mailer’s writing closely bears a resemblance to Hemingway’s (Gutierrez 3). 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”). For years, Mailer has worked to develop his prose to become a prized writer (Gutierrez 5)
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.
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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.
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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? “Something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man” (Bullfight 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).
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 Spanis, we say: “Vaya usted a saber,” which is not far from“Go figure.” Mailer’s bold, outspoken, and prolific personality was reflected in his writing style. He was unafraid to express his thoughts, regardless of how controversial or risky they might be (Adams 7).
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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.
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.
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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 to Spain in the 1960s, and his impossible 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 amusing the specialist.
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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 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 me 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 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 the 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.
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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 alternative 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. Mailer’s fascination with Hemingway’s works inspired him to pursue similar ambitions in his writing (Rodriquez 97).
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Works Cited
Brand, Anthony. "'Far From Simple': The Published Photographs in Death in the Afternoon. "A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon. Ed. Mirian Mandel. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004. Print.
Daley, Robert. Bullfight. Bonanza Books, 1958. Print.
Farber, Bernad. "My Life Inside.". Esquire September, 1988. Print.
Hemingway, Ernest. Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. New York: Scribner, 1987. Print.
----. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Scribner, 1932. Print.
----. For Whom the Bell Tolls. New York: Scribner, 1941. Print.
Kehoe, Vincent J-R. Wine, Women & Toros. New York: Hastings House, 1961. Print.
Kinnamon, Keneth. "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon. Ed. Miriam Mandel. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004. Print.
Lennon, J. Michael. "Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007.". The Mailer Review 2.1 (2008): 515-17. Print.
Mailer, Norman. The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer. New York: CBS Records/Macmillan, 1967. Print.
----. The Deer Park. New York: Vintage, 1997. Print.
- ↑ Schell, William. "Lions, Bulls, and Baseball: Colonel RC Pate and Modern Sports Promotion in Mexico." Journal of Sport History 20.3 (1993): 259-275.
- ↑ Gutierrez, Donald. "The Champ of the World and the Champ of the Word: Norman Mailer's" The Fight"." Aethlon 5.1 (1987): 1.
- ↑ Messenger, Christian K. "Norman Mailer: Boxing and the Art of His Narrative." MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 33 no. 1, 1987, p. 85-104. Project MUSE
- ↑ Adams, Laura Gail. Norman Mailer's Aesthetics of Growth. Diss. 1972.
- ↑ Rodríguez, Emilio Cañadas. "Norman Mailer and Truman Capote: A Brief Account of Parallel Lives." 2008,