Running with the Bulls

by Michael Corrigan

It had been my wish for some time to see the San Fermín Festival in Pamplona, Spain. The festival, including the running of the bulls or encierro, became famous in 1926 with Ernest Hemingway’s novel, The Sun Also Rises. When my stepson, Gus, attended school in Zaragosa, it seemed a reality.  
Hemingway returned to Pamplona as a sixty-year-old man and had this warning in a book called The Dangerous Summer:

“Pamplona is no place to bring your wife…Of course… if she can drink wine all day and all night and dance with any groups of  strangers who invite her, if she does not mind things being spilled on her, if she adores continual noise and music and loves fireworks, especially those that fall close to her or burn her clothes, if she thinks it is sound and logical to see how close you can come to being killed by bulls for fun and for free, if she doesn’t catch cold when she is rained on and appreciates dust, likes disorder and irregular meals and never needs to sleep and still keeps clean and neat without running water, then bring her. You’ll probably lose her to a better man than you” (Hemingway, 136)

I read this passage aloud to my wife, Karen, and she was amused.

“It means a lot to you,” she said “I want to see my son and Gus is fluent in Spanish. Let’s go.”

This impressed me since I knew Karen didn’t relish large crowds.

“Let’s hope that ‘better man’ doesn’t show up.”

Pamplona is a medieval fortress town with winding, narrow flagged streets. It is located in Navarra, Spain, a Basque province. Hemingway described the festival as “exploding.” He was right. It suddenly “explodes” on 6 July and ends on 14 July. It is eight days of continuous noise, music, drinking, dancing, an all-hours riotous celebration that will exhaust anyone over twenty, and not just wives. Visiting the famous festival proved a difficult but memorable experience. On opening day when no bulls ran, Karen sat under a table in a packed room while mobs of revelers gathered in the plaza. The noise level was intense and hypnotic. Police chased some men away who displayed an anti-government banner in Basque and photos of political prisoners. I heard the word “ETA.” I would hear that name again.

Despite eighty years plus since the publication of Hemingway’s novel, his descriptions remain remarkably accurate. The Iruña Café where Jake Barnes drinks with Lady Brett and the other alcoholic expatriates still operates, and the Ayuntamiento or City Hall Plaza where the inebriated crowd waits for the bulls still stands. Twin statues of Hercules armed with a club look down from the old building lined with balconies. Each morning beginning on July seventh, the police plant posts and erect a fence to contain the raucous crowd. Many runners wear white clothing with red belts and red neckerchiefs. The Basques wear yellow shirts. Empty bottles litter the plaza. Just before 8:00 AM, runners wave bottles, singing and chanting and swaying with their own wave. Spectators look through the fence or watch from the many balconies.

Karen and I had a room overlooking the plaza, and we heard the crowd noise coming through the window at first light.  What we didn’t know was that the landlady had rented out the balcony of our room to spectators, so strangers were walking through the small bedroom just before the bulls began their run. It was a startling intrusion.

“Who the hell are you? Quien es?”

“Buenos días,” one man said. “Con permiso.”

We quickly dressed and joined them on the balcony.

Pamplona City Hall (photo courtesy of Michael Corrigan)

It is a stirring sight. The runners are jammed tightly into the plaza. Some run ahead to get a head start. The first rocket goes off indicating the bulls are ready to go. A second rocket signals that officials have released the bulls from a corral behind a nearby church where Jake and Brett sat for a quiet moment. The crowd falls silent, and then the bulls appear. There is a moment of shocked recognition between animals and humans. After a collective shout, it’s a mad dash, the bulls chasing the runners toward the distant bullring (or Plaza de Toros) where the bulls will die that night. A bust of Hemingway sits in front of the bullring. Medics line the route. Four huge steers trot behind the bulls stepping over those knocked down or gored in the frantic rush through the narrow streets. There is much ground to cover on the slippery cobble-stoned streets before reaching the bullring. The steers will finally calm the bulls.

The morning we watched, a young Australian man was butted by a bull and went down but made the mistake of getting up only to get hit, again. He survived. A young black man wore a Chicago Bulls tee-shirt and a pair of horns on his cap. He waited until the bulls appeared, cursed, and ran for his life. The summer before our arrival, an American woman was killed in the plaza as the race began. Last summer of 2007, a bull separated from the pack and ran in the wrong direction, goring six people. A runner can hug the walls in the hopes the bulls will slide to the outside on the turns, but a bull can also trap a runner in a doorway. With one hook of the horns, the victim is lifted up and over the bull’s head and tossed to the street. A “cornada” is serious business.

Anyone who runs with the bulls, athletic or not, fast or slow, takes a huge risk. Runners have also been killed in the bullring itself. It is a tradition, however, and what is this famous fiesta without the adrenaline rush of running with dangerous bulls? The bars are packed, the music and dancing continuous, trucks coming by periodically to pick up the piles of discarded bottles. That summer, the Basque separatist group called ETA kidnapped a Pamplona legislator, but no one could read or bothered to translate their demands written in Basque and they executed the young man. Pamplona shut down for a day. That pause was unusual. For eight days, the festival rarely takes a break.

Karen, a bit claustrophobic, was disturbed by the thick crowds. In one packed smoky bar, a young drunken man approached Karen demanding a dance, and then he pawed her roughly. I told him to back away, and mentioned that Karen was my “esposa.” The young drunk, handsome with dark curly hair, either didn’t understand or didn’t take me seriously. Perhaps Hemingway’s comment about losing one’s woman to a “better man” had some truth. Then Gus stepped in and in his quiet way told the drunk to leave his mother alone. The surprised “borracho” was apologetic and offered to buy us drinks. Karen told the story years later with some amusement, recalling how her two “favorite men” guarded her honor in Pamplona.

Left: Encierro. Right: Michael Corrigan and his wife Karen in Pamplona. (photos courtesy of Michael Corrigan)

We stayed for two days and I was not disappointed. I felt a certain literary flashback drinking and sitting at the Iruña Café and looking around for the ghost of Hemingway and his ill-fated friends from that summer of 1925 when he first conceived his celebrated book. It was easy to visualize Jake Barnes, impotent from the war, drinking and watching the drunken Mike baiting Robert Cohn who lusted after the woman they all loved: Lady Brett Ashley. The bullfight in The Sun Also Rises describes beautifully the clean line of Hemingway’s writing style.

Regarding the actual bullfights, it was a bad day for the bulls.

One bullfighter was overweight and lost his balance. He did not resemble the handsome matador of Hemingway’s novel. The first bull came out and crashed into the wall, breaking his neck. Another bull was frightened by the banderillero with his barbed banderillas and fled the ring. Later, the same bull reappeared painted to look different, but the crowd recognized the cowardly bull. They jeered. The replacement bull wasn’t much better. The only truly successful fight was a mounted bullfighter who kept his horse just beyond the reach of the charging bull’s horns and finally killed his bull with a hurled lance. It was a spectacular display.

We left Pamplona, glad to have seen the festival and glad to leave. There were some quiet moments having lunch or coffee in small cafes, and the outdoor Iruña Café is pleasant, but the madness of Pamplona does not stop until the festival ends. Hemingway’s warning is accurate. It is impossible to sleep, and the festival will wear you down with the dust and the noise and endless parades and the drinking. We eventually found rest with French friends in a small southern France village.

Pamplona was the first of three out-of-country trips Karen and I took together, the second to Paraguay to witness Gus’s wedding, the last to Ireland before we lost Karen in 2005. I will never return to Pamplona, though the memories remain strong. For young people, the San Fermín Festival will be the adventure of a lifetime. Just remember that running with the bulls, even cowardly ones, could be fatal. Of course, if one survives, it provides more tales than a fun safe trip to Disneyland.

Rediscovering Papa

by Michael Corrigan

Hemingway Memorial (photo courtesy of Michael Corrigan)

Ernest Hemingway is buried in Ketchum, Idaho, yet few of my students seem aware of Hemingway’s contribution to American literature or his Idaho connection. Hemingway, nicknamed “Papa,” became famous for his simplicity and clarity; he was a counterpoint to that other American master, the expansive Mississippi bard William Faulkner.

Years ago I visited Papa’s grave with a friend and local Boise guitarist, John Hansen. We found the grave stone under a layer of snow. Hemingway and his last wife, Mary, are buried between two trees. Nearby lies the grave of a friend killed in a 1939 duck hunting accident. Hemingway’s eulogy for the dead hunter supplied words for the memorial plaque below Hemingway’s bust in Sun Valley, just up the road from Ketchum. The bust in profile faces a distant valley with many golf courses, and a river not unlike the trout steams Hemingway fished and celebrated in simple but evocative prose.  The words mention the fall and “high windless skies” and leaves “yellow on the cottonwoods.” In 1940 Hemingway finished For Whom the Bell Tolls in room 206 at the Sun Valley Lodge.

I recently found three Hemingway novels translated into French at a bookstall along the Seine. I am still partial to the first novel, The Sun Also Rises, which made the running of the bulls in Pamplona immensely popular to this day. Returning to America, I re-read Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, a touching account of Hemingway’s life when he was a struggling young writer living in Paris. This was one of the last two nostalgic books he wrote (the other was about Spain) before taking his life with a shotgun—July of 1961 in Ketchum.  

Perhaps Ernest Hemingway’s personal legend of macho “courage under fire” overshadowed the work, at times, but I did my master’s orals in part on his novels and short stories and felt a strong connection.  In 1990 I married Karen Lea Smith Stroschein at the Hemingway memorial. Karen and I then visited Pamplona and saw the encierro or running of the bulls. Papa’s spirit seemed to stalk those narrow flagged streets crowded during the San Fermín Festival. To sit at the Café Iruña was to evoke that powerful first novel about tragic love and a “lost generation.”

Hemingway’s Ketchum house is off limits to visitors since the residents do not want traffic from Hemingway aficionados. One day, however, I hope the house is available. There is the Keats house in Hampstead, London, and the Keats-Shelley house in Rome. Faulkner’s house in Oxford, Mississippi, draws thousands of visitors. One can visit the chancel of Trinity Church in Stratford upon Avon and stand at Shakespeare’s grave.  William Blake has his cottage in Chichester, England, and though the current owner also discourages visitors, the residents proudly display a plaque over a pub doorway where Blake was arrested for sedition after criticizing a British soldier.

For now, Hemingway’s memorial will suffice; look for a wooden sign by the road and then walk down a narrow path. In the summer, bring some wine and cheese and enjoy Hemingway’s bust and listen to the running brook beneath the monument and feel the breeze blowing through the leaves on the cottonwoods.
I lost my wife in 2005. On our wedding anniversary in 2006, I placed her ashes in the little flowing brook. For me, the Hemingway Memorial is a sacred place.