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Hemingway’s Spain: Imagining the Spanish World ed. by Carl P. Eby, Mark Cirino

2016; Volume: 36; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/hem.2016.0028

1548-4815

Douglas Edward LaPrade,

Cuban History and Society

Reviewed by: Hemingway’s Spain: Imagining the Spanish World ed. by Carl P. Eby, Mark Cirino Douglas E. LaPrade Hemingway’s Spain: Imagining the Spanish World. Edited by Carl P. Eby and Mark Cirino. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 2016. 224pp. Cloth. $30.00. This anthology includes thirteen essays about Hemingway in Spain that began as papers presented at the Twelfth Biennial International Hemingway Conference in Ronda and Málaga, Spain, in 2006. The editors have taken special care to include essays about The Dangerous Summer and Hemingway’s short stories about the Spanish Civil War, as well as essays on Hemingway’s masterpieces about Spain. Some essays analyze Hemingway’s thorough knowledge of Spanish culture, while other essays interpret Hemingway’s Spanish quest as an introspective foray into his own conscience. Spain inspired Hemingway’s greatest literary triumphs while simultaneously exposing his personal and artistic vulnerabilities. María DeGuzmán’s essay examines the characters’ mythic identification with the Spanish earth in The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls. The essay addresses anti-Semitism and expatriation, and asserts that Robert Cohn and Robert Jordan are scapegoats in their respective novels, thus reinforcing the mythic interpretation. DeGuzmán’s essay complements her discussion of Hemingway in her book, Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire. Lisa Twomey explores the curious phenomenon of Hemingway’s interviews in Falangist periodicals in Spain in the 1950s. These interviews often focus diplomatically upon The Old Man and the Sea, which allows for polite discussion without mentioning Hemingway’s Republican sympathies during the Spanish Civil War. Twomey has gleaned the Spanish press of the Franco era to provide a sample of her comprehensive treatment of the topic in her book, Hemingway en la crítica y en la ficción de la España de postguerra. In his essay about “Hills Like White Elephants,” Russ Pottle says the dilemma facing the couple contemplating abortion is an allegory of the dichotomy between tourism and travel. The decision whether or not to abort the child provides a measure of how thoroughly the couple wants to assimilate abroad. Pottle has examined Hemingway’s manuscripts and locates the setting of the story precisely in the train station at Casetas, where Hemingway stopped when he left Pamplona after the San Fermín fiesta of 1925. The essay is rich with geographical and climatological data relevant to the story’s locale. Ian Grody’s essay is about Hemingway’s friendship with the American bullfighter Sidney Franklin. Grody asserts that both men’s attraction to the bullfight emanates from their attempt to define their own brand of masculinity. [End Page 117] The essay compares their childhoods and documents their personal and professional collaborations, including Hemingway’s discussion of Franklin in Death in the Afternoon. Grody documents the end of their friendship during the Spanish Civil War. The essay by Beatriz Penas Ibáñez traces subtle political references in The Dangerous Summer. For example, the bullfighters Ordóñez and Dominguín were brothers-in-law, so their duel becomes a fratricidal analogy to the Spanish Civil War. Furthermore, Penas Ibáñez observes that Dominguín is a friend of Franco’s son-in-law, and Franco’s wife attends the bullfight in Bilbao when both Ordóñez and Dominguín appear. Dominguín represents post-war decadence, both socially and aesthetically, while Ordóñez embodies modest social values and classical elegance in the bullring. As Hemingway follows the two bullfighters around Spain in 1959, he mentions battlefields in Spain without mentioning the Spanish Civil War, a deft application of the iceberg theory. Ben Stoltzfus asserts that Hemingway’s writings about the bullfight were influenced by Henry de Montherlant’s Les bestiaries, translated as The Bull-fighters. Montherlant’s writings draw parallels between the bullfight and the ancient cult of Mithras, which involves bulls, blood, eroticism, and the sun. Montherlant’s interpretation of the bullfight as primitive ritual influenced Hemingway, and Hemingway’s failure to acknowledge his debt to Montherlant is an example of the iceberg theory. Mithraism pervades the Catholic Church in Spain, which has always supported the bullfight in spite of periodic bans...