The Hemingway Review

“‘I started it all, but I doubt if it would have gone quite so far off the track if Hemingway hadn’t come on the scene and, as usual, got the picture all wrong’”—so noted Luis Miguel Dominguín later in his life, in response to Hemingway’s rendering of his 1959 mano a mano series with Antonio Ordóñez (Mandel 61). Dominguín and other Spanish aficionados took some umbrage at Hemingway’s (mis)representation of the matadors’ joint corridas and individual talents in his serialized and posthumous versions of the text. As Miriam Mandel shows throughout her excellent study, The Dangerous Summer says as much about Hemingway’s life, creative struggles, and tastes as it does about the cape work and cultural roots of its two protagonists. “Everything [. . . ] had changed in the quarter-century since Hemingway last saw bullfights, and to him, of course, that meant that everything was worse. Had he seen the great years of Dominguín’s and [Manuel Rodríguez Sánchez’s] careers, he might have come to appreciate their talents and art, their innovations and stylistic excellences. But [End Page 143] now, mourning the old days, he could find solace only in the slow, classical cape of Antonio Ordóñez” (4).

Mandel’s book is an excellent scholarly companion to both The Dangerous Summer and her Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon: The Complete Annotations (Scarecrow 2002). Mandel elucidates the historical and cultural significance of the names, dates, themes, and personages Hemingway addresses in The Dangerous Summer. In order to ground her work firmly in Hemingway’s text, Mandel “annotate[d] all the [. . .] names of people, places, and constructs that are mentioned in the text” (xiv). “[T]he point of this book,” Mandel continues, “is to supply missing or absent information that was available to Hemingway but is not easily available to the reader. This is a sort of specialist’s encyclopedia, not a general reference book” (xvi)—one complete with numerous photographs of key people and places in Spain, seventy-nine pages of endnotes and references, and very informative explanations.

Mandel begins with a helpful “User’s Guide,” in which she explains her criteria for annotating Hemingway’s text and structuring her own. Although she primarily works with the 1985 Scribner’s edition, she has examined every version of The Dangerous Summer, including the typescript, Life (September 1960), and Life en español (October–November 1960), as well as Hemingway’s Sports Illustrated article about Ordóñez and Dominguín, “A Matter of Wind” (August 1959), in addition to other Hemingway texts and numerous secondary sources. “[E]very detail in Hemingway’s [book] yields important information” about Spain, the corrida, the matadors, The Dangerous Summer, and Hemingway himself, hence Mandel’s rich, exhaustive annotations (xxv). In particular, “place names”—such as those of towns, hotels, and restaurants—“are markers for historical events and political commentary that form a muted subtext” implying “markers of taurine acceptance and authority” (xxiii). Such “markers,” as Mandel further clarifies for us, underpin Hemingway’s mode of plotting a cultural and political geography of Spain.

The introduction gives a comprehensive overview of The Dangerous Summer, the historical and professional context of the Spanish corrida, the state of Hemingway’s own life as he followed the mano a mano series, and the writing and revision of his text. Mandel gives us many relevant and thoroughly documented facts about bulls, bullfighting practices, taurine laws (Reglamento), and the purpose of all bullfighters in a cuadrilla, from [End Page 144] the banderilleros to the picador. Mandel also historicizes some of the corruption Hemingway witnessed and then lamented in his text, such as the shaving and dulling of bulls’ horns (afeitado) and the use of “smaller, younger, weaker” bulls (medio-toros) (16–18).

While contextualizing The Dangerous Summer, Mandel always anchors her readings in the text itself, including Hemingway’s seemingly intentional choice to “exalt Antonio Ordóñez at the expense of Luis Miguel Dominguín” (68). In this case, she complicates such matters as Hemingway’s declarations that Dominguín had been “destroyed” and “there was not any question anymore who was the best if you had seen the fights and if you had seen Antonio at Bilbao” (TDS 189, 205). As Mandel notes, “the Bilbao goring forced Dominguín to cancel many appearances that year and shortened his next season, but most of his forty-two corridas in 1960 were excellent” (69). That Ordóñez and Dominguín “were not childish competitors for a prize” but “separate, distinct, and distinguished figuras del toreo” could be lost in a cursory reading of The Dangerous Summer (68), given Hemingway’s biased casting of the matadors and their apparent rivalry. Mandel helps us understand how and why Hemingway synecdochically established 1959 as the year in Ordóñez’s and Dominguín’s careers, regardless of their previous and subsequent successes. She locates some of Hemingway’s partiality in favor of Ordóñez in the author’s reluctant recognition of “the difference between what was and what was desired,” which one sees throughout his somewhat wistful text (5).

There is also an element of poignancy in her discussion of Hemingway’s troubled life before, during, and after that “dangerous summer”: “it was not the same Hemingway, nor the same Spain, nor the same bullfight” in the 1950s as it was when Hemingway was first drawn to the corrida, before the Spanish Civil War (3). Mandel continues to chart the biographical context of The Dangerous Summer: “Surrounded and stimulated by intense bullfighters, their followers, and his own infatuated entourage, Hemingway kept irregular hours, traveled from hotel to hotel, slept badly, ate and drank too much, neglected medical discipline” and otherwise lived with “excess and self-indulgence” (62). This perhaps accounts for the reasons that Hemingway’s (somewhat inaccurate) text directs us to Dominguín and Ordóñez as protagonists “completely independent from the narrator,” instead of indulging in the intense narrative self-focus one sees in Hemingway’s other nonfiction texts (74). [End Page 145]

As it moves from introductory matter to the annotations themselves, Mandel’s book is clear and richly interactive: one sees entries on such topics as Dominguín, Ordóñez, Barcelona, the Miura bull-breeding family (complete with insignia), St. Pilar, Spectators, and Tricks. Many of these extremely detailed entries are cross-referenced to various versions of The Dangerous Summer, Mandel’s introduction and endnotes, other annotations within the text, and Death in the Afternoon (along with Mandel’s annotations to that book). These detailed entries first explain the pertinent information, and then direct the reader back to The Dangerous Summer (with page numbers and narrative context). A particularly interactive entry is “Baseball” (Mandel 87–88) —it reads, in part:

The cross-cultural sporting motif receives more attention in the Life version of The Dangerous Summer, which retains Hemingway’s discussion of Ordóñez’s abilities as a catcher and the evolution of sport into joke; this was excised from the book version. The baseball trope is made visual in a photograph in Life en español, which shows Hotchner pitching and Ordóñez wielding a bat. Cf., the photographs of Hotchner as bullfighter [in the Scribner’s version]. See also Sports (in this volume); see Altrock, Nick (in HDIA [i.e., Mandel’s Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon: The Complete Annotations (2002)]).

The narrator uses baseball imagery in reference to Ordóñez, Hotchner, and Dominguín

(158, 180, 182, 193).

From here, one can navigate to the entries on Dominguín (140–143), Hotchner (149), Ordóñez (185–189), Sports (243), and then back to Hemingway’s text. Like many of Mandel’s entries, the one above shows The Dangerous Summer in dialogue with Hemingway’s other works, his life, Spanish history and culture, and the complexities of composing, editing, and publishing the text. From these entries, one learns a great deal about the people, places, bullfighters, bullrings, techniques, and seemingly quotidian details (food, drinks, and cars) suffusing Hemingway’s text.

The only minor drawback to the text is an occasionally repetitious style; several sentences, rhetorical questions, passages, and parenthetical comments could have been tightened in the introduction and annotations. This only pertains to the presentation of information—the substance, [End Page 146] textual analysis, and documentation of the entries and introduction are all very sound. Mandel’s work maps the history of The Dangerous Summer in a thorough and studious, but not dull or dry manner. She traces Hemingway’s rich, nuanced text from its composition and revisions for Life and Life en español, to its publication by Scribner’s. Hemingway’s feverish work on the text was taxing: “By the end of March 1960,” Mandel tells us, “the typescript was overdue, unfinished, and already at 63,562 words. It continued to grow, to almost 120,000 words, and Hemingway was unable to accomplish the necessary cutting and editing” (66). Mandel reads and presents the text as “a very complicated hybrid”; its “words were written by Hemingway, but content and shape were largely determined by other hands” (68). Mandel has greatly enhanced our understanding of the “content and shape” of The Dangerous Summer with her own scholarly “hands.” As a result, we can know a lot more about the Spanish and taurine worlds described by The Dangerous Summer, as well as the personal world in which Hemingway wrote and struggled with it. [End Page 147]