The 40s: The Story of a Decade (78 page)

“I say the brain directs everything in the body,” Franklin said. “It’s all a matter of what’s in your mind.”

“You’re something of a psychosomaticist,” said the psychiatrist.

“Nah, all I say is if you control your brain, your brain controls the whole works,” said Franklin.

The psychiatrist asked if the theory applied to bullfighting.

“You’ve got something there, Doc,” said Franklin. “Bullfighting is basic. It’s a matter of life and death. People come to see you take long chances. It’s life’s biggest gambling game. Tragedy and comedy are so close together they’re part of each other. It’s all a matter of noblesse oblige.”

The psychiatrist looked solemn. Another bull came into the ring, and a matador executed a
verónica.
It was not a good one. The matador should hold the cape directly before the bull’s face, one hand close to his own body, the other away from his body, stretching the cape, then pull it away from the bull’s face in such a manner that when the animal follows it, he passes directly in front of him. This matador held both hands far away from his body, and the bull passed at some distance from him. The crowd whistled and shouted insults. “Look at that, Doc,” said Franklin. “There’s a guy who doesn’t have the faintest grasp of noblesse oblige.”

The psychiatrist cleared his throat. The bullfight, he said, might be looked upon as a plastic model of Freud’s concept of the mind and its three divisions: the id, the uncivilized brute in man; the ego, a combination of environment, which has tamed the id, and of the id itself; and the super-ego, the conscience, often represented by the father or the mother, who approves or disapproves. He suggested that the id might be represented by the bull, the ego by the bullfighter, and the super-ego by the whistling and hooting crowd. “Many things you do in life,” he added, “are a projection, or model, of what is going on in your mind. For instance, you might be fighting bulls because internally you have a conflict
between your id and ego, id and super-ego, or ego and super-ego, or possibly a conflict between your combined id and ego and your super-ego. The bullfight, then, might be a good model of your state of mind.”

“Nah,” said Franklin. “If I had my life to live all over again, I’d do exactly the same thing. Do you grasp my point?”

The psychiatrist thought it over for a while, then said yes, he believed he did.

After the bullfight, Franklin, in saying goodbye to the British psychiatrist, advised him to take care of himself. “If you can’t be good, be careful, Doc,” he said.

· · ·

In general, Franklin says, he likes the life of a bullfighter because of the number of things he can pack into it. “You come into a town, and the moment you arrive, be it by plane, ship, train, or car, everybody is there to receive you,” he says. “You barely have time to change your clothes before it’s a high old round of banquets and dinners. You don’t pay for a thing; others consider it a privilege to pay for you. You’re yanked out to go swimming, hunting, fishing, and riding, and if you don’t know how to do those things, others consider it a privilege to teach you, to satisfy your every whim and desire. The select of all the professions like to be seen with you.” “They’re never alone,” Hemingway says morosely of bullfighters. “What Ernest has in mind when he says that is that all the sexes throw themselves at you,” Franklin explains. “I never went in for that night-owl stuff. I never let myself become detoured. Many of them allow themselves to become so detoured they never get back on the main highway.”

Chaval’s attitude toward the bullfighter’s life is rather different. “I just like to scare girls,” he says. “Boy, I bring the bull so close to me, the girls, they scream. Boy, I get a kick out of making girls scream.”

Franklin used to lecture Chaval on the significance of noblesse oblige in bullfighting to help the young man stay on the main highway. “I am alive today only because I was in
perfect
condition when I had my accidents in the ring,” he sternly told Chaval, who had night-owl inclinations.

“Jeez, Sidney, all you gotta do in the ring is show you’re brave,” said Chaval. “That’s what girls like, when you’re brave.”

Most bullfighters agree with Chaval, but they state their case with more dignity. A young woman who once met Carlos Arruza at a party in
Mexico City complimented him on his bravery in fighting so close to a bull. “You think I am going to be killed, but for you I am courageous in the face of death,” Arruza replied gallantly. “This is manliness. I fight to make money, but I like very much to bring the bull to his knees before me.” The fearlessness of Manolete is legendary. He specialized in the most difficult and dangerous maneuver in bullfighting—the
pase natural
, which, properly executed, requires the bull to pass perilously close to the body. He had no worthy competitors, but he always tried to outdo himself. “Manolete was a tremendous personality,” a Mexican aficionado said recently. “He never smiled.” He was gored several times before he received his fatal wound. On more than one occasion, he might have saved himself by moving an inch or two. “Why didn’t you move, Manolo?” he was asked after suffering a leg wound one afternoon. “Because I am Manolete,” he replied sombrely. Lack of fear has been attributed by some people simply to lack of imagination. Franklin disagrees with this theory. “I believe in facing facts,” he says. “If you’re a superman, you’re a superman, and that’s all there is to it.” Few of the critics who hold to the opinion that Franklin lacks artistry believe that he lacks
valentía
, or bravery. “Nobody ever lives his life all the way up except bullfighters,” Franklin says, quoting from
The Sun Also Rises.

In giving advice to Chaval on how to live his life all the way up, Franklin once said, “You’ve got to be the sun, moon, and stars to yourself, and results will follow as logically as night follows day.”

“Jeez, Sidney! I don’t get it,” Chaval replied. “All I know is I gotta kill the bull or the bull kills me.”

“Bullfighting taught me how to be the master of myself,” Franklin said. “It taught me how to discard all that was unimportant.”

“Jeez, Sidney!” said Chaval.

Franklin began to make history in the bull ring at his Spanish début, on June 9, 1929, in Seville. Aficionados who saw him fight that day wept and shouted, and talked about it for weeks afterward. “On that day, I declared, ‘Bullfighting will never again be the same,’ ” Manuel Mejías, the bullfighting father of five bullfighting sons, has said. “Sidney Franklin introduced a revolutionary style in the bull ring.” “Sidney was a glowing Golden Boy,” recalls an American lady who was at the fight. “He was absolutely without fear. He was absolutely beautiful.”

“I was carried out on the shoulders of the crowd through the gates reserved for royalty,” Franklin told Chaval ecstatically not long ago. “The history of the ring was then a hundred and ninety-nine years old. All
that time, only four fellows had ever been carried out of the ring on the shoulders of the crowd. I was the fifth. Traffic in the streets of Seville was wrecked. The next day, they passed a law prohibiting the carrying of bullfighters through the public streets. I was taken out of the ring at seven and deposited at my hotel at twelve-twenty that night. I didn’t know what I was doing or what had happened to me. I was so excited I took all my money out of a dresser drawer and threw it to the crowds on the street. The die was cast that day. I was riding on the highest cloud in this or any other world. I felt so far above anything mundane that nothing mattered. I didn’t hear anything. I didn’t see anything. I looked, but I didn’t see. I heard, but nothing registered. I didn’t care about food. I didn’t care about drink. I was perfectly satisfied to lay my head on the pillow and pass out.”

DECEMBER 12, 1948

B
efore a book can be published in Czechoslovakia, the publisher must submit an outline of it to the government for approval. Accompanying the outline must be written opinions of “responsible literary critics, scientists, or writers.” (We are quoting from a dispatch to the
Times.
) The question of who is a responsible critic or writer comes up in every country, of course. It must have come up here when the Algonquin Hotel advertised special weekend rates for “accredited writers.” We often used to wonder just how the Algonquin arrived at the answer to the fascinating question of who is an accredited writer, and whether the desk clerk required of an applicant a rough draft of an impending novel. It seems to us that the Czech government is going to be in a spot, too. No true critic or writer is “responsible” in the political sense which this smelly edict implies, and in order to get the kind of censorship the government obviously wants, the government will need to go a step further and require that the critic himself be certified by a responsible party, and then a step beyond that and require that the responsible party be vouched for. This leads to infinity, and to no books. Which is probably the goal of the Czech government.

The matter of who is, and who isn’t, a responsible writer or scientist reminds us of the famous phrase in Marxist doctrine—the phrase that is often quoted and that has won many people to Communism as a theory of life: “From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs.” Even after you have contemplated the sheer beauty of this concept, you are left holding the sheer problem of accreditation: who is needy, who is able? Again the desk clerk looms—a shadowy man. And
behind the clerk another clerk, for an accreditation checkup. And so it goes. Who shall be the man who has the authority to establish our innermost need, who shall be the one to approve the standard of achievement of which we are capable? Perhaps, as democracy assumes, every man is a writer, every man wholly needy, every man capable of unimaginable deeds. It isn’t as beautiful to the ear as the Marxian phrase, maybe, but there’s an idea there somewhere.