Hemingway and Goya

After his combat experience in World War i Hemingway sought visual analogues that would inspire his writing and found them most significantly in Francisco Goya’s stark images of suffering. In “A Natural History of the Dead” Hemingway wanted to equal the clarity and intensity that Goya had achieved in The Disasters of War (published thirty-five years after his death in 1863). Hemingway’s story first appeared in his bullfighting book Death in the Afternoon (1932) and was reprinted, without the irritating interruptions of the Author and Old Lady, as a separate story in his collection Winner Take Nothing (1933). This unusual story is a perfect example of how Hemingway transformed Goya’s visual qualities in his own verbal art. His favorite Spanish painter was closer to him, in defiant and combative temperament, than any other artist.

Though Goya painted royal portraits in brilliant colors, he is also famous for his satiric etchings in black and white. He even advocated limiting the palette in order to intensify its visual effects and wrote, “in art there is no need for color; I see only light and shade. Give me a crayon, and I will paint your portrait.” Hemingway’s praise in Death in the Afternoon of Goya’s use of chiaroscuro was a way of heightening the significance of his own work: “Goya did not believe in costume but he did believe in blacks and grays, in dust and in light, in high places rising from the plains, in the country around Madrid, in movement, in his own cojones, in painting, in etching, and in what he had seen, felt, touched, handled, smelled, enjoyed, drunk, mounted, suffered, spewed-up, lain-with, suspected, observed, loved, hated, lusted, feared, detested, admired, loathed, and destroyed. Naturally no painter has been able to paint all that but he tried.” His allusion here to the movement, spectacle, and drama in Goya’s thirty-three etchings in Tauromaquia (the art of bullfighting, 1816), like his use of the Spanish “cojones” for “balls,” made this alien subject more culturally acceptable to American readers. Hemingway’s powerful catalogue of active verbs, so different from his normally austere style, suggests his desire to live fully both the macho and the artistic life. In a vertiginous passage he celebrated the artist’s portrayal of the arid high plateau of Castile, his sexual energy (in “cojones,” “mounted,” “lain-with,” and “lusted”), his direct appeal to four of the five senses (“seen, felt … smelled … drunk”) and his intense passions.

Edmund Wilson in the Dial of 1924 was characteristically perceptive in his review (the first American review of Hemingway) of the small-press pamphlet, composed of eighteen short untitled chapters, in our time. Noting the writer’s affinity with the Spanish painter, Wilson wrote: “His bull-fight sketches have the dry sharpness and elegance of the bull-fight lithographs [i.e., etchings] of Goya. And, like Goya, he is concerned first of all with making a fine picture.” Goya and Hemingway convey the most intense emotions, one in razor-sharp lines, the other in diamond-cut prose.

Hemingway paid tribute to Goya by using names in his own fiction that were closely connected to the artist. Goya painted frescoes in the cathedral of Nuestra Señora de Pilar in Zaragoza, where the Virgin Mary was said to have appeared atop a pillar (pilar), and the aged artist’s country house outside Madrid was called “La Quinta del Sordo” (the deaf man’s villa). Hemingway named his boat the Pilar, and Pilar and El Sordo appear as characters in the guerrilla band in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940).

Though Hemingway did not mention Goya’s most striking and notorious picture, the Naked Maja (with her fringe of pubic hair), he admired Goya’s realistic and symbolic paintings of cruelty and repression. Goya’s Inquisition and Procession of Flagellants portray the perverse connection between religion and torture. In Saturn Devouring One of His Sons a gigantic, shaggy, wide-eyed, open-mouthed, ravenous, demonic god, clutching his helpless victim, has gnawed an arm and head off the bloody torso and is feasting on the torn flesh...