Ole! Ole!

Ole! Ole!

DEATH in THE AFTERNOON--Ernest Hemingway--Scribner ($3.50).

Ernest Hemingway, first modern exponent of the school of hard-boiled irony, white hope of intelligentsiacs who pride themselves on not being softies, has built himself into that rare phenomenon of a popular author who is spoken well of by the critics. His last novel, A Farewell to Arms, received both Hollywood and high-brow huzzas. His latest book, not aimed at so wide an audience, may alienate many of his new disciples, but it is a genuinely Hemingway production. Death in the Afternoon is all about bullfighting: a complete, compendious, appreciative guide. If you have never seen a bullfight Death in the Afternoon may not turn you into an aficionado (fan), but it should make you aware that Spain's national sport is something more than a merely brutal spectacle.

In 81 photographs, all vivid, some gruesome, at the end of the book Hemingway illustrates and comments, not always with that reverence expected of devotees. "While here we have the ox built for beef and for service who might have been president with that face if he had started in some other line of work." Before he had seen any bullfights himself, Hemingway had the usual Anglo-Saxon prejudice against them, but ''I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death." Before he had seen many corridas he forgot his prejudice, became first interested, then enthusiastic. The bullfight, says Hemingway, is not really a sport but a tragedy, in which the matador is the literal hero. "Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter's honor." For a matador can fake brilliant passes, can even fool certain sections of the audience into thinking he is taking desperate chances when he is perfectly safe.

In the regular corrida six bulls are killed (20 minutes to a bull) by three matadors working alternately with their own subordinate team of picadors and banderilleros. When the bull first comes in he is played by banderillero and matador with capes. Then the mounted picadors enter, the bull charges them, often kills the horse but always gets a wound in the shoulder-muscle from the picador's lance. Next, four pairs of banderillas (barbed wooden shafts) are stuck into the top of the bull's neck by the banderilleros or, with musical accompaniment, by the matador himself. Then the matador takes the bull alone, plays him with the muleta (red cloth), kills him with a sword. If the crowd approves a matador and his suertes (manoeuvres), there are rhythmic chants of "Ole! Ole!" A bad performance brings a shower of cushions and curses. Says Hemingway: "Now the essence of the greatest emotional appeal of bullfighting is the feeling of immortality that the bullfighter feels in the middle of a great faena and that he gives to the spectators. He is performing a work of art and he is playing with death, bringing it closer, closer, closer, to himself, a death that you know is in the horns because you have the canvas-covered bodies of the horses on the sand to prove it. He gives the feeling of his immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours. Then when it belongs to both of you, he proves it with the sword."

Hemingway has seen hundreds of bullfights, all the best contemporary matadors, regards himself as an authority. He gives his frank, often violently stated opinion of all of them: the late Maera who killed one of his last bulls with a dislocated wrist, after five tries; the cowardly Cagancho who is wonderful with a bull he trusts, wretched with all others; Rafael El Gallo, famed for his final appearances and for his shamelessness in refusing even to try to kill a bull who looks at him in a way he does not like; the late great Joselito who killed 1,557 bulls, was gored badly three times, killed the fourth time; the almost crippled Belmonte (retired), "greatest living bullfighter"; Villalta, brave but "awkward looking as a praying mantis" with a difficult bull; Ortega, at present one of Spain's most acclaimed matadors, whom Hemingway characterizes as "ignorant, vulgar and low"; Lalanda. "unquestionably the master of all present fighters"; Freg, the Mexican veteran who has 72 wounds, has been given extreme unction five different times.

Hemingway deprecates the recent rule (inaugurated under Primo de Rivera) that the abdomens of horses in the bull ring must be padded. It saves the feelings of some spectators but, says Hemingway, it hurts the horses as much when the bull hits them. He admits there are essential cruelties in bullfighting but thinks the spectacle as a whole is a good and worth-while sight. "The people of Castile have great common sense. . . . They know death is the unescapable reality, the one thing any man may be sure of. ... They think a great deal about death and when they have a religion they have one which believes that life is much shorter than death. Having this feeling they take an intelligent interest in death and when they can see it being given, avoided, refused and accepted in the afternoon for a nominal price of admission they pay their money and go to the bullring. . . ."

The Author has done a little amateur bullfighting himself but "was too old, too heavy and too awkward. ... In the ring I served as little else than target or punching dummy for the bulls. . . . When I had compromised myself through awkwardness I would fall onto the bull's muzzle, clinging to his horns as the figure clings in the old picture of the Rock of Ages and with equal passion. This caused great hilarity among the spectators." After several years' expatriation, husky (200-lb.) Author Hemingway last autumn returned to the U. S., is now in Montana, has his home in Key West, Fla. A leading light of U. S. letters, his influence is far out of proportion to the amount of his published work. A rabid sportsman and anti-"literary" writer, he eschews Manhattan and its cliques, would rather fish than drink tea. At 34 he has become a U. S. legend.

*New books are news. Unless otherwise designated, all books reviewed in TIME were published within the fortnight. TIME readers may obtain any book of any U. S. publisher by sending check or money-order to cover regular retail price ($5 if price is unknown, change to be remitted) to Ben Boswell of TIME, 135 East 42nd St., New York City.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.