Hemingway’s Vendetta - The New Yorker

On June 4, 1952, Ernest Hemingway stood at his typewriter at Finca Vigía, his home outside Havana, and wrote to one of his favorite correspondents, Harvey Breit, of the Times Book Review. The letter wanders from topic to topic: his favorite saint (St. Jude), some has-beens of American literature (John Dos Passos and John Steinbeck), and why he stands while typing. “I write standing up because sitting down broadens the ass,” he says. “I have had a narrow, hard ass all of my life and I keep it and a good left hook as other writers preserve their clippings and I hope to be buried with both of them.”

Hemingway also brings up a thirty-year-old writer and former bullfighter named Barnaby Conrad. Conrad fought bulls in Spain in the mid-nineteen-forties, and published his first novel, “The Innocent Villa,” in 1948. He had sent it to Hemingway, along with a fan letter. “He sounded like a good, straight kid,” Hemingway tells Breit, “and I am pretty sure he did whatever he said he did with bulls.” He says he meant to reply, but wasn’t sure what to say about “not a very good novel.” He clipped Conrad’s letter inside the book and forgot about it.

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Now Hemingway has received Conrad’s newly published second novel, “Matador.” It’s bound to be derivative of his own meditation on bullfighting, “Death in the Afternoon,” he tells Breit: “Death” is the ur-text, the book that derives from the art itself, whereas all subsequent books derive from “Death”; and, on the whole, “I am not proud of what it has begotten.” As for “Matador,” “I can’t tell about this book until I read it and I hope the hell it is good.”

Seven days later, on June 11th, Hemingway is back at the typewriter, addressing the same correspondent about the same young novelist. Now that he has read “Matador,” the good, straight kid has become a fraud, a defamer, and, worst of all, a gentleman. The letter is so unhinged that he tells Breit to return it without showing anyone else. He has already written one draft too incautious to send at all.

If Hemingway let off steam in his June 11th letter, it soon built up again. Over the next five years, he bad-mouthed Conrad to his Scribner's editor Wallace Meyer, his fellow bullfighting aficionado Rupert Bellville, the Chicago Tribune literary editor Fanny Butcher, the New York Post columnist Leonard Lyons, and C.W. Wilcox of Scribner’s Bookstore, in addition to Breit. Conrad, oblivious, continued sending him gushing letters.

As a boy in Hillsborough, California, near San Francisco, Conrad was drawn to what he called the Hemingway model of the intellectual man’s man. While studying art in Mexico City one summer during college, he began attending bullfights. At his third fight, he jumped into the ring, which was illegal but not uncommon, and made rudimentary passes using his Brooks Brothers raincoat as a cape. He got out intact; the raincoat didn’t. A Mexican matador offered to teach him the fundamentals of bullfighting, but during one lesson a bull struck him from behind, smashed his leg—Conrad later said his knee made a sound “like a popping log in a fireplace”—and broke several fingers. Back in the United States, he underwent surgery, and had to wear a brace and walk with a cane. His applications to the V-12 Navy College Training Program and a volunteer ambulance service were both rejected.

After graduating from Yale, Conrad joined the State Department as a code clerk and then got posted to Spain as a vice-consul, in late 1943. There, he befriended two of the towering matadors of the century, Juan Belmonte and Manolete, and began training with them. When Conrad was knocked down at a practice session, Belmonte ran to help him while Manolete lured the animal away. In 1945, billed as Niño de California, Conrad appeared on a program with Belmonte. He ultimately fought about thirty times, ten on programs with Belmonte, and considered resigning from the State Department to become a full-time matador, but another knee injury foreclosed that possibility. When he left Spain, at the end of 1945, Belmonte and Manolete both came to Seville to see him off.

Back in the United States, Conrad turned his adventures in Spain into “The Innocent Villa,” published in 1948 to mixed reviews. He then wrote a novel about a legendary bullfighter on the day of his last fight. Although the book includes a disclaimer that all its characters, apart from a brief appearance by Belmonte, are fictional, its protagonist is transparently based on Manolete, who had been fatally gored in 1947. Published in 1952, “Matador” became a best-seller.

Part of “Matador”’s appeal grew out of Conrad’s experiences in Spain. Reviewers and feature writers stressed that he had studied under renowned bullfighters, entered the ring, and—the intellectual man’s man—emerged to tell what it was really like.

Not so, according to Hemingway. Conrad is “very skillful,” he tells Breit in the June 11th letter, but “he would never convince the boys.” The “Matador” author photo shows Conrad by a poster for one of his bullfights, and the last line is “Entrada por invitación.” If it was an invitation-only fight, Hemingway says, then “nobody was fighting nothing for money and the bulls were calves.” A calf presented nothing like the mortal danger of a full-grown bull, and killing one in the ring “is the worst form of chickenshit I know.” Hemingway further suggests that Conrad is not just a fraud but a fop, the “Gentleman Calf-Sticker” and the “Dean Acheson of bull fighting,” a reference to the patrician Secretary of State. “Gentleman” was an insult; Hemingway once told the editor Maxwell Perkins that F.Scott Fitzgerald was always a gentleman but “never a man.”

In “Death in the Afternoon,” Hemingway had called bullfighting “the only art in which the artist is in danger of death.” He tells Breit in the June 11th letter that he had fought “the hard way” during Pamplona’s famous bullfighting festival, the Fiesta de San Fermín, entering the ring “six mornings straight” for seven years (a number he would inflate to eleven years in a subsequent letter), facing “every sort of bitch and bastard animal” that had fought “as many as 20 times” in amateur events. (Animals that have fought previously are more dangerous, because they may have figured out that the cape is just a distraction.) This wasn’t calf-sticking, he says: “People got killed for nothing every morning.” Even so, he knew his limits. The matador Maera tried to persuade him to enter the ring with “one famous educated cow” by saying, “Ernesto you son of a bitch you could not be killed by a more distinguished animal.” But, he recalls, “I did not want any part of her.” Some people begged him to stay out of the ring altogether, before it was too late, he says, while others remarked that “if we get killed in July we do not have to be rained on and broke in October.”

As Hemingway acknowledged elsewhere, though, the Pamplona festival was hardly a showplace for grace under pressure. It featured an early-morning melee in which several hundred men would enter the ring. A heifer, a steer, or occasionally a young bull would be released, usually with its horns covered. The men would taunt and tease the animal until it charged, and then either cape it or run. Some men would get knocked down, butted, or trampled. Hemingway’s friend Donald Ogden Stewart broke several ribs in 1924, but “he was in no real danger,” Hemingway would write a few years later, adding, “It was a rough Spanish game but no rougher than boxing or professional football.”

In several descriptions of these amateur events, including some of his own, Hemingway sounds less like a matador than a rodeo clown. When he jumped on the back of one animal, according to his friend Gerald Murphy, it collapsed beneath his weight. In “Death in the Afternoon,” Hemingway claims that, to avoid getting injured, he once grabbed a bull’s horns and rode around the ring on its muzzle while spectators laughed uproariously. In the nineteen-fifties, the Spanish writer José Luis Castillo-Puche asked about his experience in the bullring. Hemingway replied that “even my friends thought it was a laugh riot.”

Hemingway’s prominence in the history of Spanish bullfighting, of course, stems from the page, not the ring. The first year he attended the Pamplona festival, in 1923, he claimed that he and his wife, Hadley, were the only English speakers there. When he wrote about bullfighting that year in the Toronto Star Weekly, he figured that readers needed a pronunciation guide: “‘Ole!’—pronounced Oh-Lay!—roared the crowd.” Through his articles, novels, short stories, and “Death in the Afternoon,” he introduced much of the English-speaking world to bullfighting. Everyone who wrote about the topic thereafter toiled in his shadow, and knew it.

Conrad certainly knew it: “Death in the Afternoon” introduced him to bullfighting, as he noted in his letters to Hemingway. But he proceeded to learn a great deal on his own by living in Spain, befriending matadors, and entering the ring. Hemingway followed Spanish bullfighting during visits to Spain between 1923 and 1931. Conrad knew it more intensely for a shorter time, while living there between 1943 and 1945. Though a decade separated their sojourns in Spain, the two men shared friends and acquaintances there. Conrad, accordingly, wasn’t just one more writer working in Hemingway’s shadow. He knew people Hemingway had written about—and Hemingway was aware of it. In “Death in the Afternoon,” Belmonte is the object of sweeping generalizations and grand judgments. Conrad got the impression that Hemingway and Belmonte must have spent extended time together and known each other well; Belmonte, however, said they had met only a few times. Conrad could compare the real Belmonte with the “Death in the Afternoon” “Belmonte.” He might try to do the same with Hemingway and “Hemingway.”

Not that one needed to be a potential fact checker to provoke an unfatherly response from Papa. Throughout his career, Hemingway sniped at other writers—his juniors (Conrad, James Jones), his mentors (Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein), and his contemporaries (Fitzgerald, William Faulkner). He punched up, down, and sidewise. His manly posturing fit a pattern, too. Reviewing “Death in the Afternoon,” in 1933, Max Eastman likened his style to “wearing false hair on the chest.” When they encountered each other a few years later, Hemingway struck Eastman across the face with a book.

Along with being a calf-sticking impostor, Conrad, according to Hemingway, was a malicious defamer. Pacote, the Manolete-like protagonist of “Matador,” is Spain’s greatest bullfighter and plans to retire after one last fight. After his girlfriend calls him a coward, he gets drunk but sobers up before entering the ring and gives the greatest performance of his life. As Pacote delivers the fatal thrust with his sword, the bull raises its head and gores him. He dies in the infirmary.

Hemingway can’t see past the drunkenness. If Manolete was sober as he entered the ring for his final fight, the book is a malicious libel, he tells Breit in the June 11th letter. He tells Butcher, Lyons, and Wilcox the same thing. In a July 15th letter, he urges Breit to write a magazine article about “Matador”’s slanders and their reception in Spain, given that “the Spanish regard Manolete with practically a religious veneration,” and offers to provide “detailed suggestions how you might build it.” Breit apparently didn’t take him up on it. If “Matador” did provoke any controversy in Spain, Conrad doesn’t mention it in his two memoirs, “Fun While It Lasted” and “Name Dropping,” nor in his autobiographical articles.

Eight years after “Matador,” Hemingway himself issued a harsher indictment against Manolete. In 1960, Life featured his three-part account of the 1959 Spanish bullfighting season, later gathered into a book called “The Dangerous Summer,” which proved to be his last major work published during his lifetime. In it, he blames Manolete, dead since 1947, for debasing bullfighting through vulgar showmanship and outright cheating. Hemingway may have seen his accusation as broadly comparable to the one he saw in “Matador”: dishonor. But there’s a difference between drinking before entering the ring once and corrupting bullfighting for years. There are differences, too, between “Matador,” a work of fiction, and “The Dangerous Summer,” a work of nonfiction; and between Conrad, a novice novelist when he wrote “Matador,” and Hemingway, a Nobel laureate in literature when he wrote “The Dangerous Summer.”

Hemingway’s accusations caused an uproar in Spain and attracted coverage in the United States. Manolete’s friends and admirers defended him from the charge that he had sullied bullfighting—including, in a letter to Life, Barnaby Conrad. After faulting Hemingway for misconstruing Manolete’s style in the ring, he closed on a gracious note: “Mr. Hemingway still writes more interestingly on the bulls than anyone going, whether I agree with him or not.”

Did any of Hemingway’s left hooks even strike their target? Three weeks after Hemingway’s June 11th letter, Breit described Conrad as “young and handsome” in the Times Book Review. In 1956, when Conrad sought permission to quote some Hemingway writings in a bullfighting anthology, Hemingway told Meyer to refuse: “I am predjudiced [sic] against Mr. Conrad.” Scribner’s ignored Hemingway and let Conrad use brief excerpts. Hemingway famously said that “the most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector.” Perhaps, when reading Hemingway’s denunciations, his correspondents applied their own built-in, shockproof shit detectors.

Though he received no responses from Hemingway, Conrad kept sending him chatty letters. In hopes of expressing his admiration face to face, he once wrote and then phoned to ask if he could visit the Hemingways in Cuba, but Mary Hemingway told him that Ernest was ill. Conrad had no way of knowing that Hemingway was intent on avoiding him. “If I don’t meet him then, at least, I was never his pal,” Hemingway told Leonard Lyons in 1954.

Decades later, long after Hemingway’s death, in 1961, Carlos Baker, Hemingway’s biographer, told Conrad about some of the letters deriding him. After getting copies, Conrad concluded, as he told a reporter in 1991, that Hemingway had been “extremely jealous I had fought bulls and written about it.” Conrad had decorated his beach house in Carpinteria, California, with bullfighting memorabilia: a poster for a fight featuring Niño de California, the mounted head of a bull, his own charcoal sketches of Manolete and Belmonte. To the mix he added framed copies of several Hemingway letters about him originally sent to Meyer at Scribner’s. Conrad apparently didn’t know about the fevered 1952 letters to Breit. It’s a shame. Gentleman Calf-Sticker is hard to beat.♦

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