Review of The Dangerous Summer

I'm glad that The Dangerous Summer is more novella than novel: it's just as long as it needs to be and no longer. (James Michener's introduction tells us that Hemingway originally wrote some 120,000 words, which were cut to 70,000 for publication in Life magazine in 1960; the published version which I read is 45,000 words. ) Michener's introduction is interesting in its own right. Among other things, he makes it clear that we should go into the book expecting Hemingway to be partial to Antonio Ordóñez over his brother-in-law and rival, Luis Miguel Dominguín. It's possible to read the book against that interpretation, but I think Michener's reading holds up.

The book covers the 1959 season of Spanish bullfighting, which runs from roughly April to October. If the bullfights are points on a map, the line connecting them is a road story: the drive from city to city, from fight to fight. The crew consists of Hemingway; his wife, Mary; Bill Davis, an American expatriate with no need for sleep who takes over the driving after their hopelessly incompetent chauffeur is dismissed; and a friend, Ed Hotchner, who doesn't seem that important ... until one of the matadors hatches a scheme to have him pose as the sobresaliente, or substitute matador, in one of his fights. The crew is to the two matadors what Deadheads are to the Grateful Dead: they follow them around all summer and catch as many of their fights as they can.

I was hypnotized by the repetition in the descriptions of the fights. That repetition doesn't come from Hemingway being repetitive. It's because he was describing something with only so much natural variation in it, and in some cases he wanted, or needed, to show us something being done the same way over and over. I'm thinking here of Antonio, the master of the cape phase of the fight. In almost every one of Antonio's fights, Hemingway describes him working the cape slowly and gracefully: more slowly than one could imagine possible, letting the bull come closer than one could imagine possible. He does this consistently with every bull, and he does it in such a way that even a bull that others would think unusable can be brought to provide a good challenge, as Antonio "teaches the bull what to do," a phrase Hemingway uses multiple times.

All that repetition emphasizes that bullfighting is a ritual procedure. A fight is a strictly formalized affair. It proceeds from the opening procession (in which the lead matadors march out into the ring accompanied their picadors and banderilleros) through the same three stages, in the same order, every time. While there is variation in how each fight proceeds, how each bull behaves, what happens to the matadors, and so on, Hemingway's prose communicates to us the unchanging nature of a sport that seems to belong to a distant, more bloodthirsty era.