One Last Vivid Verano

Last year in July and previously in Paris, I sat with two friends I’d recently made in the earlier weeks for a quick and informal and relatively cheap dinner at a café. Unlike our imagined colleagues of the “Lost Generation,” we sadly didn’t enjoy an exchange rate egregiously skewed in our favor. Over moderate portions of beef tartare and wet salad, heralded by many an icy libation, we skipped across a host of subjects, primarily landing on either: (a) literature; (b) our entertaining if certainly dull love lives; or (c) plain gossip about mutual acquaintances currently—after a safety-check—absent from our immediate vicinity. Conversation unspooled naturally and without tension. Buoyed by drink, I had to raise my voice to overcome my habit of mumbling, and so probably came across as an uproarious (and quintessential) American to the surrounding Parisians. Even in evening the heat layered us with blankets of sweat.

Moved to discuss icons, I mentioned my appreciation of Hemingway. Given the setting and general gist of our interests, it appeared perfectly topical. It soon morphed into a well-spirited defense, as if the café had become a courthouse, and me, a defendant on the stand.

He is, undeniably, out of fashion. Nearly everything about the man is apparently scorned or otherwise seen as gladly outdated. He embodies a bygone figure at its most romantic and self-blinding. Many coyly observed these deficiencies of character during his own lifetime. Read Gore Vidal’s stinging rebuke of the man and of the country that made him so unfunny: “American society, literary or lay, tends to be humorless. What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?” And yet it’s precisely his contradictions, wedded to a genuine and surprisingly soft artistic sensibility, that make him a protagonist worthy of study. Ironically, this equalizes Ernest with the bullfights he loved, but only if we borrow a saying from one of his friends, Orson Welles, on the spectacles—that they are “indefensible and irresistible.” So it is with said wordsmith.

Death in the Afternoon is his most famous treatise—and probably most popular non-fictional piece—on the cruel custom (or art) of Iberia. But not his best nor his most touching.

Between ’59 and ’60, Life commissioned Hemingway to draw up a feature while in Spain. Returning to his journalistic roots, and armed with the well-honed weapons of a storyteller, Hemingway submitted seventy-five thousand words, exceeding the limit the editorial requested—thirty thousand were eventually published; the rest were edited for this book, The Dangerous Summer, by his sons many decades afterward. The result is a saga of two men—the young Antonio Ordóñez, and his brother-in-law, the aging Luis Miguel Dominguí—and of the many bulls they face, whether calves or bovine bullies, all sacrificed to sport.

Hemingway’s style is tempting to tout, not simply because I (subconsciously) wish to emulate the man’s craftsmanship, but because it crystallizes English words, making them stark and bright through contrast, like black aspens in a white desert—beautiful to see, to picture; challenging to grasp or feel. Hemingway's cool aloofness is one of his defining and most parodied characteristics as a writer and public personality, one his protagonists share. Though the shy stoicism of these characters can be misconstrued as evidence of stilted caricatures, the truth is simpler and more relatable: they struggle to distill their lives so that they, too, can grasp its meaning and gain the confidence to move ahead in life. Typical readers often gloss over this vulnerability and choose instead to focus on the masculine posturing, which is nothing but a brittle masquerade. And while it can be easy to confuse Hemingway's brevity with rigidity, or living big with writing well, the opposite is true in his introspective stories. In fact, Hemingway’s best prose is supple and flexible: a branch that only moves when the gusts of story compel it to shake leaves—or needles—onto your unsuspecting head.

A familial rivalry. A contest of blood. A self-destructive struggle for glory. All these are central elements to 'the Hemingway Myth', and to The Dangerous Summer, which remains a valuable insight into an author attempting to escape the nadir of his ability as an artist—and mostly succeeding, even if posthumously, by returning to the world of play-by-play reality.

Because the truth was Old Hemingway had left. He was by that time a shell of his former self, engaged in the slow, sudden business of cracking apart. He had to flee Finca Vígia following Castro’s Revolution, and he was a furrowed reflection of his former talent, despite earning a Nobel Prize in ’54. He was adrift. His mind began to unravel just as his body painfully struggled to put itself back together after two air crashes in Uganda. He missed the past of his youth, centered on Paris, when he’d go with friends over the Pyrenees to Pamplona.

I feel as if I somehow understand that nostalgia through reading The Dangerous Summer, which still has many of the most lucid and pointed passages he kept private until the end in Ketchum.