Variations on the "Hemingway" quote:
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I've been trying to track down the source of this quote since it's possibly bogus. It seems that only autoracing or mountain climbing sites quote this, but no actual Hemingway sites do. I did run accross this interesting statement from Josh Silverstein from the timelesshemingway.com website: Since 1999, the Hemingway Quote Finder has fielded more than 5000 quote source requests and has become a phenomenon in its own right. People from all walks of life have e-mailed in quotations: professors, film production companies, government officials, and authors. If I had a dollar for each time the following quotation was submitted, I would soon corral enough money to pay my web hosting fees until the next millennium: "There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games." I've received this inquiry so many times that it prompted me to e-mail back a standard reply: This is one in a long list of quotations mysteriously attributed to Ernest Hemingway. While the general public seem to agree that this is in fact a Hemingway quotation, scholars have some reservations and for good reason. The early Hemingway did not believe that bullfighting was a sport. For him it was a tragedy. See his October 20, 1923 article titled "Bullfighting A Tragedy" reprinted in By-Line: Ernest Hemingway Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades edited by William White. Hemingway reiterates his beliefs regarding the tragedy of bullfighting in his 1932 book, Death in the Afternoon. After years of searching, I have been unsuccessful in attributing this quotation to Ernest Hemingway or to anyone else for that matter.
- Josh Silverstein |
| UPDATE! (5/17/07) |
| A fellow racer and writer for Sports Car Magazine emailed me not long ago with some interesting information about this quote: Pete-- Well, a couple of years ago I believe I stumbled across the source. No surprise that it was not Hemingway, also no surprise that it was a writer very much like Hemingway, a contemporary of Hemingway who shared similar interests -- makes it easy to mis-attribute the line. As I am told, the quote belongs to Barnaby Conrad, a writer of the same era as Hemingway and a San Francisco raconteur of some note. Mostly he did magazine articles but his books include "The Death of Manolete." He also owned a San Francisco night club for many years named El Matador, part of San Francisco's Broadway entertainment district. My source is Dan Gerber, yet another writer of the era (and still today) who also drove Cobras for a time as part of the Carroll Shelby stable. I had the pleasure to interview Gerber last year. He's also recently back racing in vintage. I was raised in San Francisco, and yes I've been to El Matador -- the place used to have a fantastic zimbalist player (think hammering directly on piano strings) who entertained diners. Sad to say I never met Conrad -- I was not yet a writer myself -- but he was large in San Francisco lore so I certainly knew about him. It doesn't surprise me at all that a quote believed from Hemingway would actually be from Conrad. --Rocky Entriken |