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You are here: Home Leisure Arts & Culture Hemingway graces the Sanfermines bullfight

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14/07/2008Hemingway graces the Sanfermines bullfight

Hemingway graces the Sanfermines bullfight Ernest Hemingway’s grandson spends his first trip to Pamplona trying to figure out why bullfighting captivated the novelist.

PAMPLONA - "The chances are that the first bullfight any spectator attends may not be a good one artistically; for that to happen there must be good bullfighters and good bulls; artistic bullfighters and poor bulls do not make interesting fights..." So wrote Ernest Hemingway in his treatise on bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon.

While that book has been on the sharp end of plenty of criticism from bullfighting experts over the decades, nobody could accuse Hemingway of not being acquainted with his subject. The first corrida the writer witnessed in Pamplona was in summer of 1923.

Yet to make a name for himself as a heavyweight writer, Hemingway was deeply affected by the fiesta, and he returned again and again over the following years. His early visits would provide the raw material for his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, much of which is set in Pamplona.

The book made the yearly running of the bulls in the northern Spanish town a world-famous event.

The Sun Also Rises follows a group of foreigners who are visiting Sanfermines. The narrator, Jake Barnes, is an impotent WWI veteran who is in love with the married Brett Ashley. The friends destroy themselves with cruelty, infidelity and emotional immaturity, filling the void with alcohol, partying and casual sex.

During his second visit to Sanfermines, in 1924, Hemingway witnessed the first recorded death of a runner at the horns of a bull, 22-year-old Esteban Domeño, an episode included in the novel.

Published in 1926, The Sun Also Rises catapulted Hemingway, and Pamplona's annual festival, to international fame.

Ever since, hordes of young men and women have arrived in Navarre from abroad, inspired by the curt prose of Hemingway and seeking to relive the adventures of Jake Barnes.

Although generations of Americans in their twenties have come to Pamplona each year in early July to live out the thrills portrayed in the book, Hemingway's grandson has waited until the age of 47 - last week - to come see for himself what the excitement is all about.

He has done so at the invitation of the Los Gatos social club, one of several local "peñas" that work all year round to promote and celebrate the Sanfermines festival.

John Hemingway arrives at 7.35am, just in time to catch the early-morning encierro - or bull run. Dressed in white and wearing a red kerchief around his neck, as tradition dictates, he walks into number 12, Plaza del Castillo, up to the second floor and into a sociedad gastronómica - a cooking club typical of the Basque Country and Navarre - where two balconies offer privileged views on Calle Estafeta, one of the main streets of the encierro route.

Looking out onto the same streets that his grandfather covered for the Canadian weekly The Toronto Star, John Hemingway says in fluent Spanish that he "flipped his lid" with Monday's dangerous run.

He was standing near the Plaza del Ayuntamiento, where the bulls injured several people before moving on. "I was shocked at seeing a group of drunken kids just a few minutes earlier who obviously had no idea of the kind of danger they were in," he says.

Later, John Hemingway has his picture taken at one of the balconies of Hotel La Perla, where his grandfather stayed during his last visits to Pamplona - in 1953 and 1959.

This legendary establishment reopened last September with a five-star rating, but the employee at the reception desk, Fernando Hualde, is the same man who has been here for the last 35 years. A self-taught historian, Hualde has written several books about the American Nobel Prize winner.

"Hemingway stayed in Room 217, which is now Room 201, with views out onto Calle Estafeta. Before 1953 he was in the same room to watch the bullfighters putting on their outfits. At the time he would have paid just 60 or so pesetas a night. The same room now costs EUR 1,605 during the Sanfermines," Hualde explains.

In 1968, Pamplona City Hall unveiled a plaque which paid tribute to the writer who had done so much for the city's reputation and tourist industry: "To Ernest Hemingway, Nobel Laureate in Literature, friend of this city and admirer of its fiestas, which he discovered and brought fame to."

Death in the Afternoon, published in 1932, cemented his reputation as bullfighting connoisseur, and though Hemingway's last visit to Spain was in 1959, he had been planning to return. After his death in 1961, two tickets to the upcoming Sanfermines bullfights were discovered in his desk drawer.

"Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death," he wrote, "and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter's honour."

text by El Pais / Georgina Higueras
photos by google


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