Hemingway thought not so. Conrad told Bright in a June 11 letter that he was “very skillful” but “he could never convince a child.” A photo of the author of “The Matador” shows Conrad standing next to his poster of a bullfight, with the final line “Entrada por invitación”. If this was an invitation-only contest, Hemingway said, “no one would be fighting for money, and the bulls would be just calves.” A calf posed a completely different mortal danger than a full-grown bull, and killing a calf in a boxing ring “was the worst chicken shit I know.” Hemingway further stated that Conrad was not only a liar, but also a tasseled brat, a “calf-sticker gentleman” and “the Dean Acheson of bullfighting,” referring to the aristocratic Secretary of State. “Gentleman” was an insult; Hemingway once told editor Maxwell Perkins that F. Scott Fitzgerald had always been a gentleman but “never a man.”
In “Death in the Afternoon”, Hemingway called bullfighting “the only art in which the artist is in danger of death.” He told Bright in a letter of June 11 that he had “suffered a hard fight” during Pamplona’s famous San Fermín bullfighting festival, entering the bullring “six mornings in a row” for seven consecutive years (a figure he inflated to eleven years in a subsequent letter), facing “various bitches and mongrels” who fought bulls “as many as 20 times” in amateur events. (Animals that have fought before are more dangerous, as they may view the capes as just a distraction.) It’s not stabbing calves, he says: “People are being killed every morning for no reason.” Even so, he knows his limits. Matador Maera tried to persuade him to enter the ring with “a famous educated bull,” saying: “Ernesto, you son of a bitch, you couldn’t have been killed by a more distinguished animal.” But, he recalled, “I don’t want any part of her.” Some, he said, begged him to stay away from October altogether, and had already prepared for that day
Still, as Hemingway acknowledged elsewhere, Pamplona was not the place for grace under pressure. It featured an early morning brawl where hundreds of men would enter the ring. A heifer, a bull, or occasionally a young bull is released, usually with their horns covered. The men would taunt and tease the animal until it charged, then either cloaked or fled. Some will be knocked down, hit or trampled. Hemingway’s friend Donald Ogden Stewart broke several ribs in 1924, but “he was in no real danger,” Hemingway wrote a few years later, adding, “It was a tough Spanish game, but no harder than boxing or professional football.”
In some descriptions of these amateur events, including some of his own, Hemingway sounds less like a matador and more like a rodeo clown. According to his friend Gerald Murphy, when he jumped on the back of an animal, the animal collapsed under his weight. In “Death in the Afternoon,” Hemingway claimed that to avoid injury, he once grabbed a cow by its horns and wheeled its muzzle around the ring while the audience roared with laughter. In the 1850s, the Spanish writer José Luis Castillo-Pucci asked him about his experiences in bullrings. Hemingway responded: “Even my friends thought it was a laugh.”
Hemingway’s prominence in Spanish bullfighting history certainly stems from the matador, not the bullring. In 1923, the first year he attended the Pamplona Music Festival, he claimed that he and his wife Hadley were the only English speakers there. When he wrote about the bullfighting in Toronto that year star weeklyhe felt readers needed a pronunciation guide: “‘Ole!’—pronounced Oh-Lay!—and the crowds cheered.” Through his articles, novels, short stories, and Death in the Afternoon, he introduced bullfighting to much of the English-speaking world. Everyone who has written on the subject since has toiled in his shadow and knows it.
Conrad certainly knew this: as he noted in a letter to Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon introduced him to bullfighting. But he learned a lot on his own by living in Spain, befriending bullfighters and getting into the ring. Hemingway followed Spanish bullfighting during his visits to Spain between 1923 and 1931. Conrad gained a deeper understanding of Spanish bullfighting in a relatively short period of time while living in Spain from 1943 to 1945. Although their stays in Spain were separated by ten years, the two had mutual friends and acquaintances there. Conrad is therefore more than just a writer working in Hemingway’s shadow. He knew Hemingway’s characters–and Hemingway realized this. In Death in the Afternoon, Belmont is the subject of broad generalizations and grand judgments. Conrad had the impression that Hemingway and Belmont must have spent a lot of time together and knew each other well. However, Belmont said they only met a handful of times. Conrad could compare the real Belmont to the “Belmont” in Death in the Afternoon. He might try to do the same thing with Hemingway and “Hemingway.”