Reviewed by: Beyond Death in the Afternoon: A Meditation on Tragedy in the Corrida by Allen Josephs Steve Paul Beyond Death in the Afternoon: A Meditation on Tragedy in the Corrida. By Allen Josephs. Wickford, RI: New Street Communications. 29pp. Paperback $9.95. Ernest Hemingway witnessed his first corrida in May 1923. Traveling from Paris to Spain, he was encouraged by one of his new mentors, Gertrude Stein, who had preceded him at the bullring spectacles that he came to absorb and glorify. “Getting a lot of dope by living at the bull fighter’s pensione, ‘Aguilar,’” he reports to Stein (Letters 2 21–22). He spent about two weeks touring to Ronda, Seville, Granada and back to Madrid, watching bull fights, getting to know toreros, and immersing himself in what would become a lifelong pursuit. “Boxing looks paler and paler,” he explained to Stein as his newfound fandom took hold (Letters 2 22). And to his father later that month, he writes that he has gathered material that would “make some very fine stories some day”; he adds in a line that demonstrates his rapidly developing sense of expertise: “If there’s ever anything you want to know about bullfighting ask me” (Letters 2 24). Hemingway’s earliest published fiction reflects this interest in Spain and the bullring. His first book of short stories, the American version of In Our Time, includes a handful of vignettes describing incidents in the bullfighting world. And The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway’s first novel, turns dramatically on its characters’ journey to Spain for the fiesta of San Fermín and their encounters in the culture of the bullfight. “All the characters in the novel are measured according to their reactions to the corrida,” Allen Josephs has written (“Sensibility” 231). [End Page 135] As a scholar and one of the founders and a past president of the Hemingway Society, Allen Josephs has built a career on his passion for Hemingway’s great Spanish project, which was an Iberian immersion in life and experience that lasted for the rest of his life. “To understand how and why Spain affected him so deeply is to explore the most profound mysteries of Hemingway’s craft, both as stylist and as creator of narrative fiction,” Josephs maintains (“Sensibility” 221). Furthermore, he asserts, Hemingway’s discovery of bullfighting coincided and directly infused the writing style he was beginning to craft in the early 1920s. One doesn’t understand Hemingway, Josephs suggests, without understanding the techniques, rituals, and art of the corrida and its most revered practitioners. Josephs extends this fundamental and radical thought, as well as his numerous previous ventures into the subject, in the elegant and deeply felt chap-book essay, Beyond Death in the Afternoon: A Meditation on Tragedy in the Corrida. “The corrida may be our truest atavism, in the figurative sense of that word,” he writes. “Only by mastering nature have we lived. Only by killing have we lived. Not to recognize this fact of our existence is to live a lie” (1). Josephs draws profitably from numerous Spanish sources and two landmark American studies to place the “ritual and reality” of corrida, bullfights, and bullfighters in a continuum that begins with the ancients and some of the mythic wellsprings of literature. His meditation considers the nature of tragedy and how Hemingway contextualized death and the bullring, especially in The Sun Also Rises and Death in the Afternoon. Is it tragedy when a torero dies heroically in the ring or more so if he fails to die in the midst of his practice and instead suffers an ignoble death years later? This, he affirms, is one of Hemingway’s essential questions, which Josephs considers in the lives of toreros throughout the twentieth century. Among those considered is Hemingway’s version of the real life Juan Belmonte in The Sun Also Rises: “People went to the corrida to see Belmonte, to be given tragic sensations, and perhaps to see the death of Belmonte” (3). As Josephs recounts, the tragedy of Belmonte occurred when he “came out of retirement, was not killed, and shot himself many years later—the year after Hemingway did. Belmonte was as...