Olé! Olé!
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.