Not so, according to Hemingway. Conrad is “very skillful,” he tells Breit in the June 11th letter, but “he would never convince the boys.” The “Matador” author photo shows Conrad by a poster for one of his bullfights, and the last line is “Entrada por invitación.” If it was an invitation-only fight, Hemingway says, then “nobody was fighting nothing for money and the bulls were calves.” A calf presented nothing like the mortal danger of a full-grown bull, and killing one in the ring “is the worst form of chickenshit I know.” Hemingway further suggests that Conrad is not just a fraud but a fop, the “Gentleman Calf-Sticker” and the “Dean Acheson of bull fighting,” a reference to the patrician Secretary of State. “Gentleman” was an insult; Hemingway once told the editor Maxwell Perkins that F. Scott Fitzgerald was always a gentleman but “never a man.”

In “Death in the Afternoon,” Hemingway had called bullfighting “the only art in which the artist is in danger of death.” He tells Breit in the June 11th letter that he had fought “the hard way” during Pamplona’s famous bullfighting festival, the Fiesta de San Fermín, entering the ring “six mornings straight” for seven years (a number he would inflate to eleven years in a subsequent letter), facing “every sort of bitch and bastard animal” that had fought “as many as 20 times” in amateur events. (Animals that have fought previously are more dangerous, because they may have figured out that the cape is just a distraction.) This wasn’t calf-sticking, he says: “People got killed for nothing every morning.” Even so, he knew his limits. The matador Maera tried to persuade him to enter the ring with “one famous educated cow” by saying, “Ernesto you son of a bitch you could not be killed by a more distinguished animal.” But, he recalls, “I did not want any part of her.” Some people begged him to stay out of the ring altogether, before it was too late, he says, while others remarked that “if we get killed in July we do not have to be rained on and broke in October.”

As Hemingway acknowledged elsewhere, though, the Pamplona festival was hardly a showplace for grace under pressure. It featured an early-morning melee in which several hundred men would enter the ring. A heifer, a steer, or occasionally a young bull would be released, usually with its horns covered. The men would taunt and tease the animal until it charged, and then either cape it or run. Some men would get knocked down, butted, or trampled. Hemingway’s friend Donald Ogden Stewart broke several ribs in 1924, but “he was in no real danger,” Hemingway would write a few years later, adding, “It was a rough Spanish game but no rougher than boxing or professional football.”

In several descriptions of these amateur events, including some of his own, Hemingway sounds less like a matador than a rodeo clown. When he jumped on the back of one animal, according to his friend Gerald Murphy, it collapsed beneath his weight. In “Death in the Afternoon,” Hemingway claims that, to avoid getting injured, he once grabbed a bull’s horns and rode around the ring on its muzzle while spectators laughed uproariously. In the nineteen-fifties, the Spanish writer José Luis Castillo-Puche asked about his experience in the bullring. Hemingway replied that “even my friends thought it was a laugh riot.”

Hemingway’s prominence in the history of Spanish bullfighting, of course, stems from the page, not the ring. The first year he attended the Pamplona festival, in 1923, he claimed that he and his wife, Hadley, were the only English speakers there. When he wrote about bullfighting that year in the Toronto Star Weekly, he figured that readers needed a pronunciation guide: “ ‘Ole!’—pronounced Oh-Lay!—roared the crowd.” Through his articles, novels, short stories, and “Death in the Afternoon,” he introduced much of the English-speaking world to bullfighting. Everyone who wrote about the topic thereafter toiled in his shadow, and knew it.

Conrad certainly knew it: “Death in the Afternoon” introduced him to bullfighting, as he noted in his letters to Hemingway. But he proceeded to learn a great deal on his own by living in Spain, befriending matadors, and entering the ring. Hemingway followed Spanish bullfighting during visits to Spain between 1923 and 1931. Conrad knew it more intensely for a shorter time, while living there between 1943 and 1945. Though a decade separated their sojourns in Spain, the two men shared friends and acquaintances there. Conrad, accordingly, wasn’t just one more writer working in Hemingway’s shadow. He knew people Hemingway had written about—and Hemingway was aware of it. In “Death in the Afternoon,” Belmonte is the object of sweeping generalizations and grand judgments. Conrad got the impression that Hemingway and Belmonte must have spent extended time together and known each other well; Belmonte, however, said they had met only a few times. Conrad could compare the real Belmonte with the “Death in the Afternoon” “Belmonte.” He might try to do the same with Hemingway and “Hemingway.”