Death in the Afternoon

I’ve just read (actually re-read — first time was about 20 years ago) Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon, his 1932 study of the Spanish bullfight. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in the book, even if you have no interest in bullfighting per se, and the man certainly writes beautifully when he’s in the mood and not toppling into self-parody.

One thing that struck me in particular this time was — on the evidence of this book anyway — Hemingway’s tremendous anxiety about male same-sex attraction. There are three or four passages that engage in egregious bashing of male homosexuality, and they are all the more striking because they appear more or less apropos of nothing — all of a sudden Hemingway is for no apparent reason freaking out about some French novelist or Yale graduate or El Greco being a maricon.

I don’t know much about Hemingway’s life and have only read four or five of his books and a few short stories, but obviously you don’t have to be an expert to figure out that the guy was obsessed with, and wracked with anxiety about, what it means to be a real man. If he had been born 60 years later he would have made one hell of a war blogger (to be fair I believe he was actually wounded in WWI, so I guess that automatically disqualifies him).