The Culture Vulture

Ernest Hemingway is fourth on The Culture Vulture’s list of top 5 writers about Spain. Here he tells us more about the man and his books.

The journalist turned novelist wrote two first-class books about bullfighting, The Sun Also Rises (published as Fiesta in England), a novel, and Death in the Afternoon, a non-fiction work. He also wrote a novel about the Spanish Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and his only play The Fifth Column.

Bullfighting was Hemingway’s passion. He would go to the bull-running and bullfights at the Fiesta de San Fermín in Pamplona (Navarra) every July, and he spent a lot of time in Ronda, the birthplace of bullfighting on foot, and has a street in the Andalusian town named after him, Paseo de Hemingway, which runs round the back of the Parador.

I was recovering in hospital in Germany from an appendix operation, aged 21, when I was introduced to Hemingway. His books about bullfighting kindled an interest in bullfighting which remains with me to this day.

After Germany I subsequently went to San Fermín in Pamplona two years running in the early 1970s. It was there that I saw the young Paquirri for the first time. He went on to become the top torero of his generation, but sadly died in the ring at the end of his career.

When I ended up living in Ronda some 35 years later I got the opportunity to follow in Hemingway's footsteps, so to speak.

Biography

Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, journalist, and sportsman. His economical and understated style—which he termed the iceberg theory—had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his adventurous lifestyle and his public image brought him admiration from later generations.

Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and he was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature. He published seven novels, six short-story collections, and two non-fiction works. Three of his novels, four short-story collections, and three nonfiction works were published posthumously.

Hemingway was raised in Illinois, USA. After high school, he was a reporter for a few months for The Kansas City Star before leaving for the Italian Front to enlist as an ambulance driver in World War I.

In 1918, he was seriously wounded and returned home.

In 1921, he married Hadley Richardson, the first of four wives. They moved to Paris where he worked as a foreign correspondent and fell under the influence of the modernist writers and artists of the 1920s' "Lost Generation" expatriate community.

Hemingway's debut novel The Sun Also Rises was published in 1926.

In 1927 he divorced Richardson, and married Pauline Pfeiffer. They divorced after he returned from the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), which he covered as a journalist and which was the basis for his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940).

Martha Gellhorn became his third wife in 1940. He and Gellhorn separated after he met Mary Welsh in London during World War II.

He almost died in 1954 after plane crashes on successive days, with injuries leaving him in pain and ill health for much of the rest of his life.

In 1959 he committed suicide.

Spanish Civil War

In 1937, Hemingway left for Spain to cover the Spanish Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA).

Hemingway was joined in Spain by journalist and writer Martha Gellhorn, who he had met in Key West a year earlier.

Late in 1937, while in Madrid with Martha, Hemingway wrote his only play, The Fifth Column, as the city was being bombarded by Francoist forces. He returned to Key West for a few months, then back to Spain twice in 1938, where he was present at the Battle of the Ebro, the last republican stand, and he was among the British and American journalists who were some of the last to leave the battle as they crossed the river.

The Sun Also Rises

The Sun Also Rises, first published in 1926, and titled Fiesta in England, the novel captures the moods, feelings, and attitudes of a hard-drinking, fast-living group of disillusioned expatriates in post-war France and Spain.

The novel follows a group of young American and British expatriates as they wander through Europe in the mid-1920s. They are all members of the cynical and disillusioned Lost Generation, who came of age during World War I (1914–18).

Two of the novel’s main characters, Lady Brett Ashley and Jake Barnes, typify the Lost Generation. Jake, the novel’s narrator, is a journalist and World War I veteran. During the war Jake suffered an injury that rendered him impotent. (The title of the novel obliquely references Jake’s injury and what no longer rises because of it.)

After the war Jake moved to Paris, where he lives near his friend, the Jewish author Robert Cohn.

Jake’s former lover, Brett, also lives in Paris. Jake and Brett met and fell in love during the war, when Brett, a volunteer nurse, helped treat Jake’s injuries. Although it is not said explicitly, it is implied that they are not together because Jake is impotent and Brett unwilling to give up sex.

When Cohn confesses his romantic interest in Brett to Jake, Jake cautions him against pursuing a relationship with Brett, who is engaged to be married to Mike Campbell, a Scottish war veteran. Both Brett and Cohn eventually leave Paris: Brett sets off for San Sebastian, a beach resort in the Spanish Basque country, and Cohn for the countryside.

A few weeks after their departure, the writer Bill Gorton (another of Jake’s friends) arrives in Paris. Together, Jake and Bill decide to go to Spain to attend the Fiesta de San Fermín in Pamplona to see the running of the bulls and the bullfights.

Before they leave, Jake and Bill run into Brett, who has recently returned from Spain, and her fiancé, Mike. Brett and Mike ask to accompany Jake and Bill to Pamplona. In private Brett reveals to Jake that she spent the last few weeks in Spain with Cohn.

Bill and Jake take a train to the south of France, where they meet Cohn. Bill, Jake, and Cohn travel together to Pamplona, where they are eventually joined by Brett and Mike. They stay at a local hotel owned by a man named Montoya.

Montoya is a bullfighting enthusiast, and he is eager to introduce the foreigners to the sport. Brett and Jake are especially captivated by the bullfights, and Brett is captivated by a 19-year-old bullfighter named Pedro Romero. While Mike, Cohn, and, incidentally, Jake spar over Brett, Brett runs off to Madrid with Romero.

After the festival ends, Jake, Mike, and Bill leave Pamplona. After a night in the south of France, Jake decides to return to Spain. He soon receives a telegram from Brett asking for help in Madrid. Jake immediately goes to Madrid, where he learns that Brett sent Romero away for fear of corrupting him.

The novel ends unspectacularly, with Jake and Brett talking in a taxi in Madrid. In the final lines of the novel, Brett tells Jake she thinks they could have had a wonderful time together. Jake replies, “Yes, isn’t it pretty to think so?”

In Ronda (Málaga) there is a real estate agency named after him, plus a driving school, a car park and a pub. A street also bears his name, and there is a statue in his honour in the grounds of the Hotel Reina Victoria. The same hotel also houses a little museum in the room where he stayed in 1912-13. Room 208.

Who was this person? Here Pablo de Ronda gives us an insight into the life and work of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

Rainer Maria Rilke was born in Prague, then in Czechoslovakia, in 1875. He was raised as a girl for the first few years of his life by his devoutly Catholic mother to ‘replace’ a dead sister. Later he was sent to school at a military academy, which he hated.

In Munich he met Russian-born psychoanalyst and author Lou Andreas Salomé, who remained a strong intellectual influence on Rilke for the rest of his life. When their affair ended, Rilke lived briefly in an artists’ colony in Worpswede, near Bremen. There he met and later married the sculptor Clara Westhoff, but the couple soon separated, and Rilke remained deeply ambivalent about intimate relationships for the rest of his life.

In 1902 he moved to Paris but although Rilke lived in Paris on and off for more than a decade, he experienced the city as an ordeal.

In late 1912 Rilke had a titanic case of writer’s block. Unable to find poetic inspiration, he left his home in Paris and travelled south to Toledo, hoping its dramatic architecture, celebrated landscape and the paintings of El Greco would reignite his creativity. But the inspiration he was seeking eluded him. Instead, he was gripped by a profound sense of alienation.

Rilke travelled on to Cordoba and Seville, but his sense of alienation only deepened. On a whim he took a train to Ronda, where he took a room in the Hotel Reina Victoria, built in the 19th century to attract well-to-do British tourists from Gibraltar.

Looking out over the deep ravine which divides the city in two, Rilke was transfixed by the landscape. Writing enthusiastically to another of his female friends, he praised the “strong and splendid air” of Ronda, and the mountains which “spread out like a psalter you could sing psalms from”.

The epithet for Ronda, Ciudad Soñada (City of Dreams) is attributed to Rilke: “... He buscado por todas partes la ciudad soñada y al fin la he encontrado en Ronda.”  (“… I have sought everywhere the city of my dreams, and I have finally found it in Ronda.”)

In Ronda his poetry finally began to flow.

‘For Rilke, Ronda was a place of liberation,’ says Tony Stephens, one of the world’s foremost Rilke scholars, and emeritus professor of German at Sydney University.  ‘The poems he wrote there are quite experimental. He kept them back from his publisher. One of the great poems he wrote there, The Spanish Trilogy, wasn’t published until after his death.’

Rilke is arguably the best-known German poet, and a towering figure in 20^th century literature. His stay in Ronda proved to be a turning point in his poetic development, but the poems he wrote there have only rarely been translated, and are almost unknown in English.

In fact, Rilke made some of the most daring and innovative poetry of the early 20^th century thrive during his stay in Ronda. In The Spanish Trilogy, written in the weeks from December 1912 to January 1913, he achieves, at least temporarily, the unity of self and world which was the ultimate goal of his tormented pilgrimage.

Why Rilke chose not to publish this remarkable poem in his lifetime remains a mystery. But this and some of the other poems he wrote in Ronda, such as The Raising of Lazarus and The Sixth Elegy, certainly restored his confidence.

Read new translations of Rilke's poems by Tony Stephens and Tom Morton

The Spanish Trilogy

The Sixth Elegy

The Raising of Lazarus

In 2012, the Real Maestranza de Caballería de Ronda, a cultural institute within the world’s oldest functioning bullring, commissioned a special edition of Spanish translations of the letters and poems Rilke wrote in Ronda and an essay by Stephens to mark the centenary of Rilke’s visit.  

The director of the institute, Ignacio Herrera de La Muela, agrees with Stephens that Rilke is primarily a European, rather than a purely Austrian or German poet, with a unique place in the literary and cultural landscape of the 20th century. De La Muela must be onto something; the centenary volume, En Ronda. Cartas y Poemas, was voted one of the best books in Spanish that year— a sign that Rilke’s unique poetic voice continues to speak to readers nearly a century after his death.

In the last years of his life, after the First World War, Rilke finally settled in the French speaking part of Switzerland, in a chateau which his patron Werner Reinhart placed at his disposal.  Until then, says Stephens, Rilke ‘constantly roamed Europe on a tormented pilgrimage’. He never worked, relying on the generosity of patrons and his long suffering publisher, who also footed the bill for his stay in Ronda.

Footnote

The Reina Victoria hotel was taken over by the Catalonia Hotels group and was remodelled in 2013. As a result Room 208 is no longer the Rilke Museum. However, a few preserved artefacts have been made into a tiny exhibition of Rilke’s realia behind a glass display case. There are a couple of books, a photo of the poet and a framed page of something he’d written in German. Intriguingly there is also an old copy of his hotel bill.