I’ve just finished Death in the Afternoon and it has changed my perspective on writing and passion.
I started reading the book because I was curious about why people had such a love for the cruel sport of bullfighting and also wanted to read some of Hemingway’s non-fiction.
Hemingway was famously a lover of deep-sea fishing and big game hunting, but above all, nothing captured him like bullfighting.
The book is written describing his time in Spain spent at bullfights. He describes the fights in meticulous detail and the culture behind them.
The long descriptions of the specifics of bullfighting were tedious at times, but I began to realise that within this was the true magic of the book.
On the surface, the book is about bullfighting, but underneath it’s an example of a passion — a passion so great that a man wrote an entire novel about it, just to try and explain what he saw in it.
What aficion means
A lover of bullfighting was known as an aficionado. We use the word now for any expert or connoisseur, but back then it was more linked to bullfighting.
‘Afición’ is Spanish for hobby, but the true translation is much deeper.
Some further definitions below give a flavour. It’s derived from the word ‘aficionar’ meaning to have an affection.
It’s a word which blends all of these definitions.
Death in the Afternoon was published in 1932, but I think Hemingway defines what aficion means best six years earlier in his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises:
Aficion means passion. An aficionado is one who is passionate about the bullfights. All the good bullfighters stayed at Montoya's hotel; that is, those with aficion stayed there.
The commercial bullfighters stayed once, perhaps, and then did not come back. The good ones came each year. In Montoya's room were their photographs. The photographs were dedicated to Juanito Montoya or to his sister.
The photographs of bullfighters Montoya had really believed in were framed. Photographs of bullfighters who had been without aficion Montoya kept in a drawer of his desk. They often had the most flattering inscriptions. But they did not mean anything. One day Montoya took them all out and dropped them in the waste-basket. He did not want them around.
We often talked about bulls and bullfighters. I had stopped at the Montoya for several years. We never talked for very long at a time. It was simply the pleasure of discovering what we each felt. Men would come in from distant towns and before they left Pamplona stop and talk for a few minutes with Montoya about bulls. These men were aficionados.
Those who were aficionados could always get rooms even when the hotel was full. Montoya introduced me to some of them. They were always very polite at first, and it amused them very much that I should be an American. Somehow it was taken for granted that an American could not have aficion. He might simulate it or confuse it with excitement, but he could not really have it.
When they saw that I had aficion, and there was no password, no set questions that could bring it out, rather it was a sort of oral spiritual examination with the questions always a little on the defensive and never apparent, there was this same embarrassed putting the hand on the shoulder, or a "Buen hombre." But nearly always there was the actual touching. It seemed as though they wanted to touch you to make it certain.
Montoya could forgive anything of a bullfighter who had aficion. He could forgive attacks of nerves, panic, bad unexplainable actions, all sorts of lapses. For one who had aficion he could forgive anything.
Haters will say that aficionados could perhaps be pretentious or esoteric, but I like to think that it is something more than that.
Furthermore, this unspoken bond based on aficion that Hemingway describes I have personally found to be true.
If you meet someone who is into the same things as you at the same level, there is an immediate understanding, that goes beyond what you say to each other.
Comparison to wine
In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway makes the comparison between a bullfighting aficionado and a wine connoisseur.
I think this passage explains the development of a passion, and how passions find you.
As in all arts the enjoyment increases with the knowledge of the art, but people will know the first time they go, if they go open-mindedly and only feel those things they actually feel and not the things they think they should feel, whether they will care for the bullfights or not.
They may not care for them at all, no matter whether the fight should be good or bad, and all explanation will be meaningless beside the obvious moral wrongness of the bullfight, just as people could refuse to drink wine which they might enjoy because they did not believe it right to do so.
The comparison with wine drinking is not so far-fetched as it might seem.
Wine is one of the most civilized things in the world and one of the natural things of the world that has been brought to the greatest perfection, and it offers a greater range for enjoyment and appreciation than, possibly, any other purely sensory thing which may be purchased.
One can learn about wines and pursue the education of one's palate with great enjoyment all of a lifetime, the palate becoming more educated and capable of appreciation and you having constantly increasing enjoyment and appreciation of wine even though the kidneys may weaken, the big toe become painful, the finger joints stiffen, until finally, just when you love it the most you are finally forbidden wine entirely.
Just as the eye which is only a good healthy instrument to start with becomes, even though it is no longer so strong and is weakened and worn by excesses, capable of transmitting constantly greater enjoyment to the brain because of the knowledge or ability to see that it has acquired.
Our bodies all wear out in some way and we die, and I would rather have a palate that will give me the pleasure of enjoying completely a Chateaux Margaux or a Haut Brion, even though excesses indulged in the acquiring of it has brought a liver that will not allow me to drink Richebourg, Corton, or Chambertin, than to have the corrugated iron internals of my boyhood when all red wines were bitter except port and drinking was the process of getting down enough of anything to make you feel reckless.
The thing, of course, is to avoid having to give up wine entirely just as, with the eye, it is to avoid going blind.
But there seems to be much luck in all these things and no man can avoid death by honest effort nor say what use any part of his body will bear until he tries it.
This seems to have gotten away from bullfighting, but the point was that a person with increasing knowledge and sensory education may derive infinite enjoyment from wine, as a man's enjoyment of the bullfight might grow to become one of his greatest minor passions, yet a person drinking, not tasting or savoring but drinking, wine for the first time will know, although he may not care to taste or be able to taste, whether he likes the effect or not and whether or not it is good for him.
In wine, most people at the start prefer sweet vintages, Sauternes, Graves, Barsac, and sparkling wines, such as not too dry champagne and sparkling Burgundy because of their picturesque quality while later they would trade all these for a light but full and fine example of the Grand crus of Medoc though it may be in a plain bottle without label, dust, or cobwebs, with nothing picturesque, but only its honesty and delicacy and the light body of it on your tongue, cool in your mouth and warm when you have drunk it.
So in bullfighting, at the start it is the picturesqueness of the paseo, the color, the scene, the picturesqueness of farols and molinetes, the bullfighter putting his hand on the muzzle of the bull, stroking the horns, and all such useless and romantic things that the spectators like.
They are glad to see the horses protected if it saves them from awkward sights and they applaud all such moves.
Finally, when they have learned to appreciate values through experience what they seek is honesty and true, not tricked, emotion and always classicism and the purity of execution of all the suertes, and, as in the change in taste for wines, they want no sweetening but prefer to see the horses with no protection worn so that all wounds may be seen and death given rather than suffering caused by something designed to allow the horses to suffer while their suffering is spared the spectator.
But, as with wine, you will know when you first try it whether you like it as a thing or not from the effect it will have on you.
There are forms of it to appeal to all tastes and if you do not like it, none of it, nor, as a whole, while not caring for details, then it is not for you.
It would be pleasant of course for those who do like it if those who do not would not feel that they had to go to war against it or give money to try to suppress it, since it offends them or does not please them, but that is too much to expect and anything capable of arousing passion in its favor will surely raise as much passion against it.
In short, for many, wine starts (and ends) as a bitter drink that has no meaning. You might enjoy being drunk from it.
But some people will find a little more in it. As they drink more of it, they will begin to develop a passion for it, start to enjoy everything about it, and notice the nuances of the whole experience, even the bad parts. They will start to search for the ‘truest’ version.
Anyone with a passion will also have a catalogue of experiences involving that passion which they can compare to each new experience, and find new areas of appreciation.
Aficionados of anything will understand that it’s difficult to explain why they like something, but as Hemingway says, you’ll know you like something straight away from the effect it has on you.
There are aficionados wherever you look, in so many things.
Football, food, dancing, art, boxing, travelling, gardening, gaming, cycling, knitting — the list goes on. There are new passions made every day.
To those who don’t love these things, and who can only see the surface, they seem strange, but to aficionados, they make complete sense.
My aficion for writing
In many ways, reading and writing are boring.
You sit and stare at a page or a screen. You write with a pen or tap on a keyboard. Often you have to force yourself to stay interested. You sometimes get a back ache or a sore wrist.
At times, I’ve absolutely hated it.
When I used to write 30 articles of 500 words per week in my bedroom for a dentistry company (for £7 each), I still remember the bright screen light blaring into my eyes as I desperately tried to write them all before midnight. Then, I definitely hated it.
Or when I used to drive to the library with my friend for weeks during the summer to write a short, shit novel, and discovered that writing one is a process of endless suffering as you encounter plot hole after plot hole, and gradually lose your grip on the inspiration you had to start it.
These writing experiences blend together so that when I now start to write something or read something enjoyable, I’m layering over these experiences. On the surface it doesn’t seem like much.
Producing writing has an effect on me. I like seeing things written down that I’ve thought about or having my name as the author on something published. I like sitting at a desk, and sometimes staring at the wall. I enjoy tapping on a keyboard. I like rewriting sentences. I’m not sure why.
Aficion means having an appreciation for something with all its negativity regardless of what it looks like and developing a taste for something where it’s difficult to describe why you enjoy it. Only someone else who enjoys it will understand.