Riding the Yellow Trolley Car

by William Kennedy

  The Dangerous Summer, as centerpiece to Hemingway’s final tragedy, does stand alone. It is novella-length, 45,000 words, with an introduction by James Michener that defines terms necessary for understanding the bullfight world as Hemingway describes it. Mr. Michener is reverential to the memory of Hemingway, but as an aficionado of the bulls himself he finds fault with Hemingway’s conclusions.

  Mr. Michener had access to the entire original manuscript and says it is so excessively detailed that most readers would not finish it. Hemingway knew it was far too long. Mr. Hotchner went to see him in Havana and reported that Hemingway, not trusting Life’s editors to cut his work, had labored for twenty-one full days by himself and cut only 278 words.

  Hemingway plaintively asked for Mr. Hotchner’s help in the cutting but then strangely rejected all suggested cuts with explanations in writing to Mr. Hotchner, who was in the same room with him. Hemingway’s mind was out of control and would get progressively worse. His vaunted ability to leave out what was irrelevant, his great talent for synthesis, were malfunctioning.

  Mr. Hotchner pressed on, but Hemingway continued to resist. “What I’ve written is Proustian in its cumulative effect, and if we eliminate detail we destroy that effect,” he told Mr. Hotchner.

  On the fourth day of talk Hemingway yielded, the editing began, and 54,916 words were excised. These are Mr. Hotchner’s figures, and they differ somewhat from Mr. Michener’s; but then Mr. Hotchner did the cutting. The residual manuscript went to Life and formed the basis for the three articles. Charles A. Scribner, Jr., said earlier this year that he tried to cut the script to publishable size in later years, eventually giving it to a Scribner editor named Michael Pietsch, who reduced it to its present size, “a wonderful job” by Mr. Scribner’s lights.

  And so here is Hemingway—who derided F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “gigantic, preposterous” outline for The Last Tycoon and wrote that Fitzgerald would never have finished the book—unable to finish his own runaway journalism. Here is Hemingway—calling Thomas Wolfe the “over-bloated Lil Abner of literature” and saying that if Wolfe’s editor (and his own), Maxwell Perkins of Scribners, “had not cut one-half million words out of Mr. Wolfe everybody would know how he was”—psychopathically viewing his own rampant verbosity as sacrosanct.

  Nevertheless, I concur with Mr. Scribner that Mr. Pietsch has done a wonderful editing job. Hemingway was very cuttable, and the book is indeed wonderful; but the question remains: Whose wonderfulness is it? Is it half Hemingway? Hemingway by thirds? Should the byline read: “Words Put In by Hemingway, Words Taken Out by Hotchner and Pietsch”? When the same issue was raised with Thomas Wolfe about his reliance on Maxwell Perkins to produce a coherent book, Wolfe left Perkins, even left Scribners, to assert his independence.

  The question is not easily answered, for there is another question: Does it really matter, in terms of what the finished book is? And just what is the book? When I began reading it, I felt instantly in the presence of the old Hemingway wit. At the Spanish border in 1953, his first return to Spain since the Spanish Civil War, he expects hostility because he fought against Franco. A border policeman asks: “Are you any relation of Hemingway the writer?” And Hemingway answers, “Of the same family.” Instead of enmity he finds warm welcome, and the policeman has read all of his books.

  He quickly takes us into the bullring and gives us a lesson in how to cheat at bullfighting. You shave the bull’s horns so they are sensitive and he is not so deadly with them; or you use a young bull who does not yet know how to use his horns; or you drop a heavy sack of feed on the small of the bull’s back so his hind legs are weakened and he is a diminished threat to the bullfighter. Hemingway accused the managers of the once-great Manolete of shaving horns, and when the articles appeared in Life, Hemingway was attacked by Spanish aficionados and idolators of Manolete.

  We soon meet Ordóñez, the son of Cayetano Ordóñez, who was Hemingway’s friend in the 1920s and the model for the bullfighter Pedro Romero in The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway tells Ordóñez he is better than his father. “I could see he had the three great requisites for a matador: courage, skill in his profession and grace in the presence of the danger of death.” But in the same paragraph, after Ordóñez asks to see him, Hemingway tells himself: “Don’t start being friends with bullfighters again and especially not with this one when you know how good he is and how much you will have to lose if anything happens to him.” But Hemingway doesn’t heed his own advice, could not heed it. He was in the grip of a compulsion to return to bullfighting, to revisit Pamplona, the setting of The Sun Also Rises, where he had become a mythic figure, and to re-create the past when he was living so well, writing so well.

  He also meets the capable enemy, Dominguín, and describes him in a fine sentence: “Luis Miguel was a charmer, dark, tall, no hips, just a touch too long in the neck for a bullfighter, with a grave mocking face that went from professional disdain to easy laughter.” There is a bronze life-size statue of Dominguín in his own home, and Hemingway finds this odd but uses it to define his qualified vision of Dominguín: “I thought Miguel looked better than his statue although his statue looked just a little bit nobler.”

  Hemingway returns to Spain in 1959 and very early on establishes the Dominguín-Ordóñez rivalry. Ordóñez emerges as a saintly fighter, who even when the bulls are stupid can work with them until they are brave. “His second bull was difficult too but he rebuilt him.”

  Dominguín alternates between being brave, noble and talented, and being a cheat: He “really loved to fight bulls and he forgot about being rich when he was in the ring. But he wanted the odds in his favor and the odds were the tampering with the horns.”

  Hemingway and his entourage traverse Spain by car, and he exults in victory like a great hunter: “We were like a happy tribe after a successful raid or a great killing.” Along the way, as always in his best works, he celebrates food and wine and companionship and evokes a vivid sense of place in both present time and in memory.

  These moments also serve as changes of pace from the tense reporting on the rivalry, the bulls, the wounds, the pain, the ascension toward the exalted climax. The competition peaks at Málaga on August 14, 1959, with both matadors triumphing over their bulls. Hemingway even approves of Dominguín.

  “He made two series of eight naturales [passes with a small red cloth] in beautiful style and then on a right-hand pass with the bull coming at him from the rear, the bull had him.… The horn seemed to go into his body and the bull tossed him a good six feet or more into the air. His arms and legs were spread wide, the sword and muleta were thrown clear and he fell on his head. The bull stepped on him trying to get the horn into him and missed him twice.… He was up in an instant. The horn had not gone in but had passed between his legs … and there was no wound. [He] paid no attention to what the bull had done to him and waving everyone away went on with his faena [work].”

  Dominguín goes on also to be overshadowed by Ordóñez in the fourth mano a mano at Ciudad Real, and Hemingway ends the chapter on a note of negative suspense: that Dominguín will now go on to Bilbao “to be destroyed.”

  The final chapter is a triumph—for Hemingway. He throws aside journalistic convention and as novelist enters into the heads of the matadors as they battle to the conclusion Hemingway knew was inevitable.

  On Dominguín: “Too many things were piling up and he was running out of luck. It was one thing to live to be the number one in the world in his profession.… It was another thing to be almost killed each time he went out to prove it.”

  On Ordóñez: “A bullfighter can never see the work of art that he is making. He has no chance to correct it as a painter or a writer has.… He can only feel it and hear the crowd’s reaction to it.… The public belonged to him now. He looked up at them and let them know, modestly but not humbly, that he knew it. [He] was happy that he owned them.”

  So that, in brief, is the book and while I have lived remote from bullfighting all my
life, have next to no personal interest in it and tend to identify with the bulls, I think nevertheless that “The Dangerous Summer” is one of the best sports books I have ever read. Not everyone could agree. Dominguín, who retired in 1961 and came back to the bulls in 1971, said in a 1972 book about him by Keith Botsford that Hemingway was “a commonplace bore … a crude and vulgar man” who “knew nothing about fighting bulls.” He dismissed Ordóñez as a “cowardly fighter” with “feet of clay all the way up to his brain.”

  In Iberia, Mr. Michener reports on the latter-day Ordóñez, the man Hemingway said could be one of the greatest matadors of all time. In a corrida at Pamplona the crowd dislikes his work and so Ordóñez spitefully kills the bull in a disgraceful way. “It was a shame-filled conclusion to a shameful performance,” Mr. Michener says, and the crowd chants: “¡Ordóñez, Ordóñez, sinvergüenza! Ordóñez, Ordóñez, paga la prensa” (“Ordóñez, Ordóñez, shameless one! Ordóñez, Ordóñez, pays the newspapers”—to write well of him).

  Mr. Castillo-Puche, who was close to Hemingway, argues in Hemingway in Spain that the mano a mano series was a publicity stunt, that Hemingway was suckered by the promoters and that Ordóñez used him to advance his career.

  All of that may be true, and in the last judgment by the bulls of history, Hemingway may be gored in his journalistic femoral artery. But that is irrelevant to why this is an important and wonderful book. The value emerges from the subtext, which seems to have two principal elements: the drive to write this book and the behavior of the writer as he reports and writes it.

  How does a man fight the dying of the light? Is it really with rage? Mr. Castillo-Puche writes: “I saw [Hemingway] get all confused, tear up whole sections of his manuscript, rip up photographs or fling them across the room in a fit of temper, swear at those present in the room and others elsewhere, and swear at himself.”

  Also, while they are at the Pamplona fiesta, Hemingway, Ordóñez and other friends make “prisoners” of two young American women and keep them in thrall for a month. Hemingway writes that “turning up with a couple of prisoners is sometimes ill-received in marital circles.” Mr. Castillo-Puche says that Hemingway’s relations with all the young women in Spain that year were very chaste, but Hemingway’s wife, Mary, was less than thrilled, especially when Hemingway took yet another “prisoner,” a young Irish woman named Valery Danby-Smith, who, Mary says in her autobiography, “became Ernest’s secretary-handmaiden.” Miss Danby-Smith remained close to Hemingway until his death and eventually married his son Gregory.

  Mary writes that in the new situation, a “nonstop circus,” she became “inaudible” to Hemingway. Soon she “seemed also to be invisible, a worthless quality in a wife,” and so returned to Cuba and wrote Hemingway that she was leaving him. He cabled his respect for her views but disagreed profoundly with her decision to leave. “Still love you” he added, and she stayed on until the end.

  The pursuit of young women, the vicarious life as a matador, the preening before hordes of autograph-seekers in Pamplona, everything is monkey glandular to Hemingway: “The wine was as good as when you were twenty-one, and the food as marvelous as always. There were the same songs and good new ones.… The faces that were young once were old as mine but everyone remembered how we were.”

  The self-portrait and the portrait-in-the-round from the other books emerge with great clarity. The mano a mano is also a story made to order for the dying man’s need not to die. He creates Ordóñez as an immortal, for isn’t that the status of all the very best dead people?

  Hemingway went to Spain searching for youth and found mortality and madness. But what is clear is that this story, these sentences and paragraphs, however truncated from the original, are not the work of a lunatic, and could not have been written by anyone except Hemingway or his spirit. If this work had been publishable, or even conceivable, at this length and with this quality during his lifetime, he might not have shot himself. But that’s not how it was.

  It is only over Hemingway’s dead body that this book could have come to be. And I think it very clever of Hemingway’s spirit to relent about the editing and come back to Scribners to tell the folks there how to prepare the text.

  1985

  J. P. Donleavy:

  Captivated by Ginger: A Non-Interview

  There was a man

  Who made a boat

  To sail away

  And it sank

  Grunt and Growl

  Spit and scowl

  You poor pigs

  Are just foul.

  The author of the verse is J. P. (James Patrick) Donleavy, forty-two, a hero. He wrote the novel The Ginger Man, from which the poems above are taken, and need write nothing else to preserve hero status. Few men make such a contribution. Last week The Ginger Man was again out of stock at a local bookstore. Last week you had to get on the waiting list to get the book from the public library.

  Last week also J. P. Donleavy made a rare public appearance, at the Poetry Center of the YM-YWHA in New York City, and the youthful people to whom he speaks turned out in a lump to see him, hear him read from his works and hear him deliver a paper on “the tools and traumas of the writing trade.” With sideburns, beards, minis and micros, with umbrellas on the wrist and leather boots up to the thigh, with Brooks Brothers vests and Abercrombie and Fitch oversize belts, they came to see Donleavy.

  Michael J. Pollard, the unforgettable “C. W.” of Bonnie and Clyde’s movie gang, was there in his black cowboy hat, long black muffler, black boots and shoulder-length frizzy hair. Young androgynes with horn rims and rounding shoulders, sweet things with cherry-blossom smiles on the wane, knots of unkempt hippies and earnest young creative writing students with weak mustaches, disparate, all of them, all the way to their toenails, militantly individualistic, questers all for that recognizable image that would set them apart—all were joined together in this quiet, anticipatory moment in unquestioning admiration for the hero himself, the man who created Sebastian Balfe Dangerfield, that rogue.

  There never has been a rogue like Dangerfield in contemporary literature. He couldn’t be put on the screen, not yet, not in America, for he is the most unsympathetic, lying, thieving, drunken, unwashed, brawling, lecherous, foul-mouthed, godless and totally engaging fellow imaginable; and that isn’t the mixture that American filmmakers are clamoring to personify in the movies.

  But Dangerfield is the totally unrepressed hero to the young people today who spit in the eye of the world as it is, or who would like to. And the man who made Dangerfield come to life—wasn’t he, too, bound to be a bit of a rogue himself?

  Donleavy strode onto the stage of the Poetry Center in a checkered suit with matching vest, a heavy, Irish-tweedy kind of suit the horsey folk might wear; that, and a solid brown tie and purple pocket handkerchief; all that and thick, powder-gray hair, and dark beard.

  Trust no man,

  Not even your brother,

  If his hair be one color

  And his beard

  Be another.

  But should we mistrust Donleavy? He put his sheaf of paper on the dais and acquitted himself of literary pretension immediately.

  “Writing,” he said, “is turning one of your worst moments into money.” The motives for wanting to be a writer, he said, are “women and money, fun and money, and sometimes just money all alone by itself.” He said the writer dreams of himself being at home and successful in a beautiful world … the author as sailor, “with a gentle breeze and two published novels behind him.”

  He dreams of girls telling him: “Gee. Your conversation is even more beautiful than your book.… Gosh. You’re even better-looking than your photograph.” Such dreams get dreamt, he explained, at the kitchen table, over peanut butter. But the young, would-be writer knows that writing is antisocial, anticommunity, because it’s not a job, and when people ask him: what are you going to be when you grow up, he thinks: “All I can say is rich.” But he learns cunning, and says “I’m going to be a
doctor.”

  At length he writes poems, grows up, marries, fathers a baby and discovers that to continue being a writer he needs the first indispensable tool: money—“for the purchase of time, the writer’s most important ingredient …” He needs time to write the first page and “brood that I will never write a second.” But a chord is struck and you’re on your way, a writer. “Now you have a desk, typewriter, carbon paper and a vague confidence that what you have written somebody will want to read and will make Mama and Papa die of shame.”

  As a writer you slip back from the world and your old friends say: “This isn’t the same George we used to know who told us he was going to be a doctor.” But he writes on, and then one day he’s got a manuscript. He looks around for someone to show it to but all his old friends are gone on the way to higher degrees. But there is one old friend who reads it. “He says you’re crazy. You pull away the bottle of wine, and he says: Wait. Maybe you’re a genius.”

  Meanwhile, in a big skyscraper in New York sits a guy who majored in English and you send him the manuscript. He is the fellow who feels: “I read Proust in the original straight through one summer on the Cape and I’m sure there is no new Proust budding in the grass.” The publisher “finds he is glued to every word and shocked in the bargain. But he is convinced it is not literature.”

  This, said Donleavy, is an infallible rule: “What is original, vital and offered will be rejected. Everyone is searching for what is new and original, while they’re handing over a check to an agent for some imitation of last year’s big success.”