In chapter eight of my book, Into The Arena: The World Of The Spanish Bullfight, I wrote the following about the followers of bullfighting from countries where it is not indigenous:
[A]s a general rule, foreign fans of national pastimes have a jealous and possessive streak about their adopted subject which is usually charmless and sometimes downright neurotic. The Spanish on the other hand, fully confident that the bullfight is theirs, can afford to be more generous with it.
The number of times I have been interrogated, patronised and downright insulted by middle-aged Englishmen who have ‘devoted their life to the bulls’ I reckon goes into double figures. The number of times this has been done to me by a Spanish bullfighter, breeder or aficionado is much easier to estimate: it is zero.
Also, the form these Anglo aficionados’ love for bullfighting takes always seems more than a little unhealthy. This is usually because it is passionless and numeric, e.g. ‘Juan Gomez, “El Numero”, was gored 4 times and awarded 61 ears in 1982, up from 3 and 47 on the season before, but 6 per cent and 12 per cent down respectively from his decade average.’ This type of aficionado I call the the ‘blood anorak’. Another type is passionate about it in a very different way: ‘Have you seen how much weight “El Guapo” has put on? I’m amazed he can get into his suit of lights at all. And don’t get me started on the colour scheme he has his team in.’ These aficionados I shall avoid calling anything.
Now, in part this was written for effect: it is no in-depth sociological study of the nature of aficionamong non-Spaniards. However, as a sketch, it has a great deal of truth in it. I have many more friends now among non-Spanish aficionados than when I wrote that, but a great many of those derive not from post-bullfight chats in Andalusia, but from the more turbulent streets of Pamplona where people prove their passion with their bodies on the cobbles in the morning, and so tend not to concentrate on drear minutiae orcorrida-weary posturing in the evening.
Like all true statements, it annoyed quite a few people. As George Orwell wrote: “journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.” I have no idea if it was in part the cause of annoyance among certain senior members of the Club Taurino of London – despite the fact that this, the only mention of it in the book, is to praise it – but after this cabal of ill-wishers was revealed to me in a series of emails by one of them, I resigned my briefly held membership.
I had actually only joined the CTL at the end of 2008 to assist in research for the book. The club itself did nothing to aid my work, although individual members did via other media, especially a taurine email group I was invited to join by the late Jeff Pledge. I resigned from the CTL less than two years later, at about the time my book was shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book Of The Year 2011, which I doubt much endeared me to these self-appointed Pharisees of the Temple of English aficion.
However, I maintained good relations with the membership in general, a good and fair review of my book was written in their magazine, La Divisa, and a letter praising it while obliquely referencing the ill-will in the club’s higher echelons was also published.
In return, I arranged the membership to have bullfighting lessons with my friend and mentor, the former matador Eduardo Dávila Miura, and tried to assist them in meeting members of the bullfighting world whom I knew and they were having difficulty accessing like Spain’s finest breeder of bulls, Álvaro Núñez (del Cuvillo) and the matador José Marí Manzanares. I had even begun to think I had overreacted by resigning my membership, as many members insisted I had, and was wondering if I should rejoin.
And then a 4,700-word attack on my work and character appeared in the club magazine, La Divisa, written by its editor Jock Richardson, which was sufficiently bad that members of the club actually contacted me to tell me about it. I asked Richardson for a copy – I do not know him, but we are both part of that taurine email group – and on receipt, I informed him that I would be contacting my lawyers to initiate legal proceedings the next working day for a piece of published writing contravening the Defamation Act of 1996.
Once again friendships intervened and I have decided that bankrupting and closing – with my legal fees alone, if not the damages – the only club centring around bullfighting in my home country would be a cruel and extreme reaction. However, I simply cannot wait for a quarterly magazine to print the necessary apologies, retractions and rebuttals by me, hence I am writing this here. So, with Richardson’s consent, I enclose below his “temporary” apology which goes in the ‘club news’ section of the next issue of La Divisa (the full apology has yet to be composed) followed by my own answer to his article, an article which was tellingly titled: “Into the Arena by Alexander Fiske-Harrison – a blood anorak’s view.”
I did not reproduce the review of my book by the vegetarian animal rights philosopher Mark Rowlands in The Times Literary Supplement, only the exchange of letters in that publication which ensued in which Professor Rowlands at least began to acknowledge his lack of knowledge and research on the subject – and thus lack of suitability as a reviewer – on the website of my book here. For the same reasons – the propagation of error – I will not reproduce Richardson’s article, only the consequences of it. I will conclude here by saying that it is to me a blinding neon sign that I took the right path with Into The Arena when all its reviews by those with no axe to grind – from the animal-loving Daily Mail to the stately Times, the highbrow Literary Review to the free morning paper Metro – were excellent, while a self-confessed “blood anorak” and an academic who once tried to force his pet wolf to be a vegetarian have attempted so strongly to savage it.
from Jock Richardson
INTO THE ARENA
In my editorial in La Divisa No 205, I spelled out my updated editorial policy. In it I wrote, as number 2. “Every Member of the CTL has the right to space in the pages of La Divisa to express their views on the Fiesta and the Club and to report their taurine experiences in the manner that they feel suitable with the sole proviso that nothing will be published in the magazine that has the potential to offend members of the CTL, the afición as a whole or members of el mundillo taurino. (That I have not been totally successful in the latter objective has only been pointed out to me on one occasion; I have very, very seldom had to refuse to publish something; and only infrequently have I had to negotiate amendments to remove potential offence.) From time to time, I will encourage the body of the membership to contribute to their magazine by exhortations in the pages of La Divisa.”
Judging from the letter above from Robert Elms and discussions I have had with Alexander Fiske-Harrison, and on reflection upon them, it becomes clear that I very soon departed from my own policy in the article I wrote on Into the Arena by making remarks that were offensive to each of them. In Alexander’s case, I suggested he had lack of respect for the Fiesta and its protagonists and that he might have intentionally used information that was wrong to make a point. I am now persuaded that it is possible to respect the Fiesta greatly and at the same time to make errors in statements about it, and that it is possible to use faulty information inadvertently. These are things that I should have realised before I wrote the article. I am very sorry that I broke my own policy on this matter and promise that I will endeavour never to do so again.
I intend to make a full apology to Alexander in the next issue of La Divisa and to give him space to express his views on my article.
So what exactly is Jock Richardson apologising for? Well, this is how his article began:
It was Ernest Hemingway who advised us to “Develop a built-in bullshit detector”. I doubt whether anyone can ever have a fully developed one. I was glad mine was at least partly-developed by the time I got to the end of the first page of Into the Arena by Alexander Fiske Harrison. Unfortunately, its constant warning signal, a message in my head saying “that cannot be correct” to a large extent spoiled my reading of the book. I scarcely got through a page without it sounding.
Fortunately, the book has already been dealt with positively in the pages of La Divisa and it has been for at least some of our members a jolly good read. It may well have been so for me had the factual content been convincing. But I have most of the characteristics of what Fiske-Harrison calls the “blood anorak”…
And so begins this pedant’s charter, which, just as Professor Rowlands had reviewed a book that wasn’t there in his slot in The TLS – he seemed to think I had written a rigorous philosophical monograph in defence of bullfighting – so Richardson does the same for the encylopaedia of tauromachy he treats my book as though it were.
However, this is exactly what the book is not. It is a personal memoir of two years spent in the world of the bulls. I report on what I saw and felt. I clearly state at the beginning that I had seen six corridas and have read a few authors on bullfighting who wrote in English as I spoke no Spanish back then – Ernest Hemingway, Kenneth Tynan, Barnaby Conrad, Sydney Franklin, Norman Mailer etc. I was chosen for exactly this reason by my publishers – on this topic, experts are intrinsically morally compromised in the readers’ eyes, as well as often being dull – along with my academic background in biology and moral philosophy and my professional one in journalism and theatre, as actor and playwright. Most of all I was commissioned for my writing style, which – along with the fact that I became friends with various bullfighters and bull-breeders, trained alongside many, fought and killed a bull myself – is what has given my book a more public airing than anything on bullfighting in English for a long, long time. (Jason Webster, the author of numerous books on Spain including Duende: In Search Of Flamenco, is quoted on the cover saying: “arguably the most engaging study of bullfighting since Hemingway’s Death In The Afternoon.)
Hence the reviews of Into The Arena in the national press: “a compelling read, unusual for its genre, exalting the bullfight as pure theatre.” (Sunday Telegraph), “his eye-witness reports of bullfights are particularly good. He transposes the spectacle into words with great success, conveying the drama of the corrida while explaining individual moves and techniques with eloquence and precision.” (Literary Review), “his descriptions of the fights are compelling and lyrical, and his explanation of different uses of the matador’s capes is illuminating. One begins to understand what has captivated Spaniards for centuries” (Mail on Sunday), “the outcome is a debut that provides an engrossing introduction to Spain’s “great feast of art and danger” (Sunday Times).
And this is not just confined to the UK, this is from The Australian:
“Which is not to say his descriptions of the corrida aren’t at times incredibly engaging. But the quality that makes Hemingway’s final chapter the most intoxicating pervades Fiske-Harrison’s in its entirety: less a handbook than a memoir, less Death in the Afternoon than The Sun Also Rises,Into The Arena pulses with the writer’s love of the world and the people he has found himself among.”
Nor just were such things written by in newspaper by superficially interested journalists. Joe Distler, the great American bull-runner, wrote the following in La Busca, the magazine of the association Taurine Bibliophiles of America:
Alexander Fiske-Harrison has penned one of the most engaging books on the Bulls I have ever read… Alexander comes to Spain, meets several young toreros including Juan José Padilla and Cayetano, and Eduardo Dávila Miura, befriends them and they help him on his Quixote-like quest to fight a Bull. The story is riviting as one feels every failure, every success, every thrill as he heads toward a confrontation with a three-year-old toro bravo.
But the book is so much more; like The Swords of Spain, it brings you into the world of the Bulls in such an intimate way you feel you must book a ticket on the next plane to Spain. I am not a traditional book reviewer and this is a rare outing for me in this genre so forgive a rather hackneyed presentation of a book that deserves so much more.
When my wife, Nancy, arrived at our house on the Med for her summer vacation, I had a stack of books, as I always do, piled high for her summer reads. She chanced upon Alexander’s and, like me, read it cover to cover. ‘This kid has really got it,’ she said. He sure has and I advise any and all aficionados to get a copy of Into The Arena as quickly as you can, open a bottle of Rioja, sit back and traverse with pleasure the world we so love.
So what did Richardson see in my prose that was so different to these other readers? (Distler submitted this review to Richardson for publication in La Divisa as well. It was turned down.) Exactly what is this “bullshit” that you can find on “nearly every page”?
Well, the first example he brings up is from the first paragraph of my fourteen page prologue. In it I say,
“Madrid is the head of the bullfighting world, where money is aggregated and policy decided, but its heart is in Seville. This is where it was born, among the pastures where the bulls are created.”
Although this is a figurative sentence, employing the trope common since Plato of comparing things – in this case cities – to parts of a body, it does have some form of reference and this is what I intended that reference to be: Madrid is where the Spanish crown and parliament reside and the regulations of the bullfight are Royal Decrees. When I was writing, bullfighting came under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of the Interior, which is a part of that Madrid-based government. It is also where the head (note that word) offices of the two main bull-breeding associations are, and the head offices of the all the national papers in which the bullfighting journalists write as well as the television stations. Spain is a highly regionalised country, and bullrings are usually run by localempresarios – although the biggest and most important one is in Madrid – but in so far as there is a head of the world of bullfighting, it is hard to see how it could not be Madrid. It is certainly patently false to say that someone saying this is writing “bullshit,” although it might be fair to question how important that head is, given the level of regional autonomy.
However, when the G10 group of top matadors recently delivered over half a million signatures in order to begin the process to make bullfighting a matter of protected cultural interest and federally overturn the ban in Catalonia, where did they deliver those signatures to? Madrid.
The statement that Seville is the heart of bullfighting is harder to quantify as it is to talk of its birth – things evolve into other things, nothing but Greek goddesses are born fully formed. What do I mean by the bullfight having its heart there? Well, in my impressionistic travelogue, it is my impression that bullfighting pumps more through the veins of Andalusia than old Castille, despite the higher population levels in Castille meaning there are more fights. Also, there are more bull-breeding ranches, I believe, in Andalucia, than any other region of Spain, with the greatest density in Seville province itself. I might be wrong about that – although I am not in terms of members of the most important breeders association the Unión de Criadores de Toros de Lidia.
Which feeds into my rather poetic idea, you might say, that the bullfight was born there because that is where the bulls are born. As does the fact that of the crop of the three first famous bullfighters on foot – Costillares, Pepe Hillo and Pedro Romero – they were born in that order and the first two were born in Seville, while Pedro Romero was born in Ronda, less than 80 miles south east of Seville, still deep in Andalusia.
Furthermore, when I personally think of bullfighting, what I really think of is the style whose invention is attributed to Juan Belmonte, who was also born in Seville (as was his rival and friend, Joselito, who was regarded as the zenith of the opposing, then “classical” style).
So, if we want to start waiving our “bullshit detectors” at general impressionistic sentence at the beginnings of books, guess what? It turns out this one stands up. If you want to start talking about older style combats between men and bulls then we can go to the Song of the Cid and Castille or Navarre, or, you can go to Mithraic rites and bull-dancers in Crete. However, I wrote the book, and I define the frame of reference for my sweeping, figurative introductory sentences.
So, again I ask, where is this bullshit on nearly every page? Well, I looked through the rest of the prologue and couldn’t find any. Indeed, I looked through the whole book and found that given that most of it is composed from my impressions as eye witness at the time – staying with matadors, with bull-breeders, and training and fighting on the ground myself – Richardson not only could not know because he was not there, but could not know because he has never been there. And I begin to wonder if that is not what is fuelling his attack from the very beginning. Certainly his “nearly every page” falls foul of his own “bullshit” criteria.
On the second page of chapter one, though, he does find a couple of errors which I do find embarrassing, as do my publishers whose own fact-checker clearly did not pick up on them. I wrote:
“La Maestranza was begun in 1759, when the gently Borbón Carlos III inherited a solid Imperial throne and a growing economy and population. It was the first structure built to house an audience of this size since the Roman gladiatorial arenas, and came more than a century before the great Victorian football stadia of Britain. Las Ventas, by contrast, came a century and a half later. It was opened as part of the Great Exposition of 1929 by Alfonso XIII.”
In fact, La Maestranza was not begun in 1759, although that was the summer Carlos III took the throne, but eighteen months later. I think I was misled by reading of the bullfights in the plaza del Arenal in November 1759 after Carlos III repealed a ban on the spectacle (making Richardson’s comment: “there was no need for a bullring in Seville that year” another false one.)
However, there is no denying that that will not be the date in the next edition of the book and I regret that it is there in the first. I missed it – constraints of time and finance may have been a cause, for me and my publishers, but that is not a reason – and I take full responsibility. The Maestrantes and their families have been extremely gracious to me as a guest in Seville and it is ill-fitting that the only English text on bullfighting in their quarter-millenium old bullfighting library should have their birth year wrong, albeit by a few months. (You can see the thankyou letter for it from the head of the Maestrantes, the Teniente de Hermano Mayor on my Spanish blog here.)
As for saying Las Ventas was “opened” in 1929, that was also wrong of me to say. It was completedin 1929, but not inaugurated with a bullfight until 1931. And also, Richardson is right that the time between the dates of the deaths of the matadors Paquirri and El Yiyo was 11 months and 3 days, not 12 months and 6 days. Again, this is embarrassing, Paquirri being the father of my friend, the matador Cayetano Rivera Ordóñez, and El Yiyo killed the bull that killed him. (Not that I wrote the dates wrongly, only the number of days between them.)
So far, no bullshit as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, i.e. nonsense, rubbish. Instead, an opinion about heads and hearts Richardson disagrees with and a couple of unfortunately fumbled dates. Where is the bullshit?
Next Richardson takes a large chunk of my text as an example and dismisses it as “bumkum” (OED def.: Empty clap-trap oratory; ‘tall talk’; humbug.) Now, I do not know if it is because my prose is unclear – although my editors and various other readers had no issue with the passage in question – of if Richardson’s almost eight decades of wisdom are hanging heavily on his cognitive faculties, but in this passage I quite clearly describe a vet treating a recently pardoned black bull at the ranch El Grullo.
The photographer – who brought me to the ranch while a vet was treating a bull, when it was very definitely not open to the public (whatever Richardson says) – and I ask if this bull is Idílico, a bull famously fought by José Tomás in Barcelona and pardoned earlier that year. The farm manager said it was not, and pointed to a field of calves where I could not see Idílico, until the farmhands went in on horseback to ‘ride him’ out so the vet could see how he was doing. This is the photograph I then took of Idílico and that vet.
Richardson says that I am not telling the truth about “meeting” Idílico – this photo giving that the lie - nor about the other bull, saying “the other recently pardoned Núñez del Cuvillo bull was Mirón, pardoned on 18 August 2007 by Jesulín de Ubrique,” and so he would have had no wounds by November 2008 .
However, even the most basic Google search for indultado, ‘pardoned’, bulls from Núñez del Cuvillo in 2008 brings up both Idílico and Lanzafuegos, who was pardoned in Tarifa in Cádiz province on August 8th, 2008, after being fought by Javier Conde. If one looks at the photo below taken by the photographer, Nicolás Haro, of the other pardoned bull being treated the day I was at the ranch, and the footage of the same vet treating Lanzafuegos, you can see the identical colouring and horn shape. The footage is at the bottom of the web page here.
It seems that the editor of La Divisa is not only claiming to know what he does not, but in publishing tacitly claiming to have done at least rudimentary research. The term bullshit springs to mind.
Of course, I am not saying I am flawless myself. I did note down the wrong stretch of road on my way to meet those bulls as the Route of the Bull, and how I managed to write “100 years earlier” about Longshanks’s expulsion of the Jews from England rather than 200, I will never know. As for my not noticing the countryside of Aragon on my train from Barcelona to Pamplona to run the bulls, well, I had other things on my mind. However, Richardson indulges in deeply misleading figurative phrasing himself when he says:
“But this is the work of a man who can… place Enrique Morena de la Cova’s palace in the non-existent Palmas del Río (p70).”
To imply that the insertion of an unnecessary “s” makes Palma del Río in Córdoba province “non-existent” is to mistake the difference between misspelling and making things up. It will also mislead readers who do not know that Richardson is childishly exagerating my error.
Richardson comes to the end of this list of minor mistakes by me, and notably larger ones by himself, and says:
“It should be clear by now that Fiske-Harrison has precious little respect for his readers. He does not much respect the Fiesta about which he writes or the people about whom he is writing.”
This is beyond laughably pedantic, and moves into the area of actively defamatory, especially for someone who continues to work with people in the Fiesta as I do. For example, I am currently writing and co-producing a for-cinema documentary on one major matador, while writing a long feature for a mass-market magazine on another. The fact is that this statement is patently false: these people are my friends, and they have my respect and affection, as I have theirs, not least because I have shared the sand of the bullring with them – something Richardson has never, in 78 years as an aficionado got round to doing (more on this later).
Please note that while much of the work I have done on bullfighting has indeed been paid – such as my book, along with the documentary and article mentioned above, as well as others in The Times,Daily Telegraph, Prospect magazine and so on – much of it has not, such as when I have spoken in about bullfighting on Al-Jazeera, CNN and the BBC (the two former before I even had a book to promote.)
So, you will forgive my verging on self-aggrandisement when I say that my respect for the Fiesta and the people central to it it has been proved in blood and sweat and I have done a damn sight more than many others I might mention, whatever levels of taurine scholarship they may have achieved at a desk in a library or from the stands of the plaza.
As for my readers, I think the reviewers without some sort of personal axe to grind – this so-called love of facts is clearly rank with something far more ad hominem – think that readers got more than their money’s worth out of what I did and described.
Do they care as Richardson does about my spelling the surname of Curro Vázquez, as Vásquez, or are they more interested in the dinner I had with this former matador turned manager to two of Spain’s greatest? Vásquez, by the way, is a perfectly valid and contemporary variant spelling of this Galician surname, just not the one used by Curro. Just as I repeated the error of noted bullfighting website Portal Taurino when I ‘made Spanish’ the surname of João Folque de Mendoça and called him de Mendoza. Are these errors annoying to me? Yes. Are they detrimental to readers understanding of the world of the Spanish bullfight? Of course not.
Richardson’s claim that these two errors, combined with the typo of putting two ‘c’s in Ricardo meant, “one sometimes wonders who the taurinos are about whom Fiske-Harrison is writing,” is pure, spiteful hyperbolic bullshit. I could just as well say that when he leaves out the accent on the ‘e’ of Juan José Padilla, as he does, I have no idea who he is talking about.
Of course, when Richardson writes “Francisco and Cayetano Ordóñez”, he really is making an error of that gravity. The two matadors called Cayetano Ordóñez were the grandfather and uncle of Cayetano Rivera Ordóñez (to whom he is actually referring), and both fought as matadors under the name “Niño de la Palma” – different people indeed.
As for Richardson saying that I spent time with Francisco Rivera Ordóñez – I never even met the man and begin to wonder whether Richardson has read this book with any closeness at all, or has just found a couple of unfortunate errors, a host of things he disagrees with, and decided to put libellous pen to CTL paper and spill onto it almost five thousand words of rancorous acid about me.
Again, I admit there are errors in what I wrote about how close together were the tragic events in the lives of the Rivera Ordóñez brothers – I put them all in 2002, they were spread a few years either side of that – and to be honest, that is just sloppy journalism.
However, at least I did not mistake the verb “to like” for the verb “to do”. I don’t doubt the Rivera Ordóñez brothers fight together quite often. That doesn’t change the fact that I have Cayetano on tape – I was interviewing him for the Sunday Times – saying “[we] don’t like to fight together, my brother and I, we don’t like to risk both of us in the ring on the same day.”
Richardson then says of a genuine mistake on my part repeating unverified a claim that Eduardo Dávila Miura had usually been in the top ten on the ranking of bullfighters during his career, “to make this one out to be anything other than a downright lie is to be generous indeed.”
I was wrong. It would have been possible to say he was more often than not in the top thirty, always in the top fifty, but he was only once in the top ten. (The line on the back cover “one of the greatest matadors of all,” was, like most cover blurbs, not written by me.) This is an error of reporting, which I didn’t check as I should because, as I explicitly say in the passage: “I regard [these rankings] as meaningless” since I view bullfighting as an artform – hence my overall impressionistic and often subjective approach to the topic. Richardson’s accusation of lying, though, is clear malicious defamation with no basis in fact.
That Richardson plans, after 78-years of jeering from the sidelines, to take advantage of Eduardo’s generosity and step onto the sand with a very small cow under his tutelage, following a series of classes for CTL members which I set up, seems in no way to have stayed his hand during this total abuse of his power as editor, using the club magazine as a mouthpiece for his own temperamental outpourings, and making the club culpable for having allowed this to be written in their name (how much it reflects the earlier mentioned cabal of senior members of the club I do not care to speculate on.)
From here, Richardson’s self-indulgently long article combines picking up genuine errors of mine such as my quick estimate of the size of the bullring in Cazalla de la Sierra – it seats a couple of thousand not the hundreds I thought – with borderline errors – I say Pedro Romero “founded” the first bullfighting school, when he was the actually founding Maestro – to his own absurdities: he spends 230 words arguing my description of El Fandi’s pardoned bull in Sanlúcar de Barrameda is false only to finsih by writing that it was perfectly correct.
The fact that I have had to write a 6,000-word article to rebut Richardson’s less than 5,000-word article about a more than 100,000-word book tells you the relative error levels between the two of us. Also, it raises a profound question about abuse of power and “quis custodiet ipsos custodies?”, or rather “who edits the editors”. No properly run publication would allow such a bloated combination of opinion, diatribe and unfounded, slanderous claims into print. Why shouldn’t I say in my book, “that is where the bullfight really is, Andalusia. Sevilla”? That is what I believe, as do many others I know who are far more deeply involved in bullfighting than either Richardson or I. And when I write, “there’s no room for corporate logos on the suit of lights” it is in part a moral injunction, in part a generalised descriptive truth. I, like Richardson, can also think of a single counterexample to this statement and a more recent one than his, but that’s the point. It is a single example out of thousands: the exception that proves the rule.
I will finish my riposte with a few remarks from a speech I originally gave in Spanish a week ago in the main lecture theatre in the old building of the University of Seville, the former Royal Tobacco Factory made famous by Bizet’s Carmen (the full text is here). After noting that:
…if you were born in London as I was, and you must write a book on this subject which you have only the time to gain the most superficial experience of – fifty corridas, maybe a few more – how do you gain the wisdom of a lifetime? You cannot. But you try catch up by taking the advice of some good Spanish friends – to quote the great Isaac Newton, “if I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”
Those giants were the bullfighters with whom I entered the ring myself. I go on to say:
A few nights ago I was talking long into the night with a great American aficionado of the bulls who is here today, Joe Distler, and what we were talking about was the different types and sources of aficion. There is undeniably a place for the proper study of history and bloodlines, the names and dates of long dead bullfighters and all the things we find in the volumes of the esteemed Cossio. However, there is also the aficion born of proximity and first-hand experience. Joe has run every single bull-run there has been in Pamplona in the past 44 years. This has informed and expanded his aficion, not only infusing his passion but allowing him to more accurately gauge, more correctly feel the proximity of the matador to death.
I am not saying you cannot appreciate the bullfight without having been close to a bull yourself. But does it add depth to your appreciation. How much can you appreciate William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet by studying the rhythm of the words and the complexity of the metaphors, when you yourself have ever been in love?
It is in light of this that, when Richardson says in his review “I would be quite happy if I was recognized as… being passionless and numeric” I almost feel sorry for him. Almost. However, quite clearly he does have passion, and in this it is directed against me.
Although I have taken the time to write this full rebuttal, I have no animus against Richardson. I really do not care. And that is because the bullfight does not belong to him or the CTL. A French aficionado once said to me that English aficionados all too often have the possessive bitterness of the occasional lover of a woman who not only has a husband, but is also mistress of many other men, most of whom she prefers.
This is what I think of when I read Richardson saying: “Fiske Harrison should have known that the Spaniards who told him that he knew an amazing amount about los toros must have been… indulging in politeness or ego-boosting or both.”
I have never claimed to know “an amazing amount” about bulls. However, in case readers give weight to Richardson’s judgment, they should also give far greater weight to this one, from someone Spanish - although not a friend – from one of the most important bullfighting and bull-breeding families in Spain, and a notable author and amateur bullfighter himself, Rafael Peralta, writing in the newspaper La Razón last week.
Fiske-Harrison opens a new door, fundamental and necessary, to the Fiesta Brava in Anglo-Saxon culture.
A door which, as that Frenchman noted, Jock Richardson – and, through his editorship of their voice-in-print, the Club Taurino of London – would seem to rather remained firmly closed.
Alexander Fiske-Harrison