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Hemingway and the Bulls
On TV today, I watched the running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain just after putting down William White’s wonderful collection of Ernest Hemingway dispatches, By-Line: Ernest Hemingway.
It was a fitting concidence because the book contains some great stuff Hemingway wrote on bull fighting for the Toronto Star Weekly back in 1923.
Here’s a bit of what Papa wrote:
“In Pamplona, a white-walled, sun-baked town high up in the hills of Navarre, is held in the first two weeks of July each year the World’s Series of bull fighting…
“Every morning during the bull fighting festival of San Fermin at Pamplona the bulls that are to fight in the afternoon are released from their corrals at six o’clock in the morning and race through the main street of the town for a mile and a half to the pen. The men who run ahead of them do it for the fun of the thing. It has been going on each year since a couple of hundred years before Columbus had his historic interview with Queen Isabella in the camp outside of Granada.”
White’s collection is wonderful to dip into. Another coincidence is that I’m reading it in the month of Hemingway’s death – July 1961. He’d tried electric shock treatments for depression. They destroyed his ability to write, and so he shot himself.
There’s a wonderful piece from the Transatlantic Review of 1924, in which Hemingway writes of the death of another great writer, Joseph Conrad.
“What is there you can write about him now that he is dead?” Hemingway begins.
He goes on with a Canadian angle:
“In Sudbury, Ontario, I bought three back numbers of the Pictorial Review and read The Rover, sitting up in bed in the Nickle Range Hotel. When morning came I had used up all my Conrad like a drunkard, I had hoped it would last me the trip, and felt like a young man has blown his patrimony. But, I thought, he will write more stories. He has lots of time.”
I’ve stayed in the Nickle Range Hotel. But wow, we all wish we could write like that!
