Ernest Hemingway never watched life from the sidelines. Whether dodging bullets in Spain or hunting lions in Africa, he wanted to be where things happened – where the stakes were real.
So when Death in the Afternoon landed in 1932, it wasn’t just a book about bullfighting. It was Hemingway’s field guide to fear, ritual, and what he called “the only art in which the artist is in danger of death.”
For Hemingway, that made bullfighting the purest test of courage and of truth; he approached the bullring like a cathedral.
In its rituals, he saw something sacred: man confronting mortality with grace and precision.
“The knowledge that every man must finally acknowledge death,” he wrote, “and live his life in the face of it, makes all men equal.” To read Death in the Afternoon is to enter Hemingway’s private religion – a belief that beauty, danger, and honesty are inseparable.
Hemingway didn’t romanticise bullfighting so much as dissect it. He studied every motion, every pass of the cape, every shimmer of sunlight on the bull’s back.
What fascinated him wasn’t cruelty but control – the way a matador could turn chaos into choreography.
“If a man’s death means anything,” he wrote, “it is because of the way he faces it.” That sentence could serve as Hemingway’s epitaph. Whether in Spain, Paris, or Key West, he sought people who lived and died with style.
Yet beneath the bravado runs a surprising tenderness; Hemingway’s gaze is clinical but never cold.
He doesn’t glorify death; he tries to understand it. The bullring becomes a mirror for his own work: a space where failure is public, courage is tested, and truth is not up for debate.
Hemingway adored Spain – its stillness and violence, its light and fatalism. The Spain of Death in the Afternoon isn’t just a backdrop; it’s a character.
The book smells of garlic and leather, of dust and blood drying in the sun. He writes of toreros like Belmonte and Maera with the reverence of a poet describing saints.
Their skill isn’t brute force but grace – that elusive quality Hemingway spent his career chasing.
Later, in For Whom the Bell Tolls, the same reverence would shift from matadors to soldiers. But the idea remained the same: dignity in the face of annihilation.
Spain taught him something essential – that to live fully, one must stand close to danger and remain calm.
For Hemingway, that wasn’t just philosophy; it was a writing method. His sentences, stripped of excess, mirror the matador’s economy of movement.
There’s rhythm and danger in his syntax, as if each word was chosen with a flick of the wrist just before the bull charges.
At its heart, Death in the Afternoon isn’t about bulls at all. It’s about art – and the courage it demands.
“All good books”, Hemingway wrote, “are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened.” That paradox defines his work: fiction more real than reality, achieved through precision and restraint.
Like the matador, the writer steps into the ring knowing that failure – sentimentality, falsehood, fear – will kill the performance.
When Hemingway writes about courage, he’s really writing about life. The matador’s deadly grace mirrors the artist’s own tightrope walk between beauty and destruction.
The danger gives the art its charge. Hemingway believed that a writer must risk something of himself on every page – that honesty is a form of bloodletting.
Few modern readers share Hemingway’s passion for the corrida, but the larger question still stands: how do we face life and death without flinching? Hemingway’s answer was simple and brutal. You prepare. You step into the light. And you tell the truth.
He once said he wanted to write “one true sentence.” In Death in the Afternoon, he found a way to live one.
Feature Image Credit: Simon & Schuster
Current Gaming & Tech Editor
Instagram: @dylan.byline
Email: dylanburt2005@gmail.com
