My shortlisted story for Le Prix Hemingway 2016

I have had put up the original English version of my short story, ‘The Unbroken’, which was a finalist for the twelfth Le Prix Hemingway in France this year. The anthology of the best dozen of the shortlisted stories was published yesterday in which it features under its French title, ‘Les Invincibles.’ It is set in the Paris of 1958 and Pamplona of 1959, and features many real characters from that time, including the author Ernest Hemingway, the New York Herald Tribune columnist Art Buchwald and the WWII veteran of Iwo Jima and bull-runner Matt Carney. It is at ‘The Pamplona Post’ online here.

P.S. I have also put up a ten thousand word essay on the history, ethics, technique and art of bullfighting at ‘The Last Arena’, online here.

Farewell To Fiesta

‘Ghost Bull’. A herd of Spanish fighting bulls is herded through the dawn forests to Cuéllar by hundeds of horsemen at the beginning of the most ancient ‘encierro’ – bull-run – in Spain. (Photo: Chloe Drakari-Phillips)

 

This year was my fifth at the Feria de Nuestra Señora del Rosario in Cuéllar in Castile y León, Spain, running with bulls in the oldest encierros in all Spain. When I first arrived in 2012 the town opened its arms to me and so when I left I wrote an article in the regional newspaper, El Norte de Castilla titled ‘Thank you, Cuéllar, from London‘. The following year the headline was ‘And again thank you, Cuéllar, from London‘. Then in 2014 it was ‘See you soon Cuéllar‘.

However, the following year I broke my ribs running with the cattle there and forgot to write, so this year I made sure my article came out early, on the opening Sunday of the fair, the day I arrived. It is reprinted in English below (the original Spanish is online here.)

There is Fiesta and Feria in Cuéllar

In 1923 Ernest Hemingway arrived in Pamplona and witnessed the great explosion of life that is the Fiesta of San Fermin, through the heart of which a path was carved from the corrals to the plaza by the Feria del Toro.

By the time he returned in 1959 the city was so changed he almost didn’t recognise it. He wrote that “40,000 tourists have been added. There were not 20 tourists when I first went there nearly four decades ago.”

The article as it appeared. The photo is of AFH in my days as a bullfighter in 2010 by Nicolás Haro.

When I arrived sixty years later – to the day – there were over a million tourists. And although sanfermines has been like a father to my afición – with the southern elegance of April in Seville as its mother – Cuéllar is a far older and more personal thing than those spectacular parents. Which is why I have come here every year since I met the sculptor Dyango Velasco on the opening Saturday of the feria in 2012.

Since then I have never come alone. Over the years I have come with a strange and wondrous mix of people to your town. In 2013 I brought to your town of the horse the Earl of Westmorland, whose father was Master of Horse to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, and along with him the greatest jockey my country ever produced, Richard Dunwoody, who won the most dangerous horserace in England, the Grand National, not once but twice.

Nicolás Osorio & AFH (jacket) in 2013 (Photo: Graeme Galloway)

The following year I brought Nicolás Osorio, eldest son of the Duke of Alburquerque, whose ancestral castle embraces your town in its arms. His grandfather did not win the British Grand National, despite riding in it twenty or so times as an amateur. He did, however, become famous for breaking more bones in it than any other jockey and was nicknamed the “Iron Duke”, not, like Wellington, for his political resolve, but for all the metal pins and plates that kept his skeleton together.

This year I come with more foreigners than ever, some of whom Cuéllar knows, and some of whom are new. There is that great photographer of wars and bulls, Jim Hollander of European Pressphoto Agency, who returns having been awarded the EHToro prize for writing about the encierros – ‘bull-runs’ – of Cuéllar last year and having just been named “guirri del año” by Mikel Urmeneta in Pamplona this year.

Jim Hollander in the forests of Cuéllar (Photo: Chloe Drakari-Phillips)

To celebrate the publication of his book Pizarra To Pamplona: Across Spain On Horseback (available to purchase here), about his childhood travels with his father, Gino Hollander – a great taurine painter whose work covers the walls of the Casa Misericordia in Pamplona – Jim will be photographing the encierro of Cuéllar for the world’s press from the back of one of its horses with me providing the words from the horse next door.

In the streets we will have the great Texan rodeo champion who moved and married to become your neighbour and a university professor in Valladolid. Larry Belcher, who is already familiar to readers of these pages following his 40^th anniversary in the encierros of Spain (as is his wife Dr Ana Cerón of the hospital there.)

Noel Chandler and Alexander Fiske-Harrison, Pamplona, July 2013 (Photo: David Penton)

AFH with Juan José Padilla at his home (Photo: Nicolás Haro)

Alongside these veteran taurinos, there will be younger faces too (having turned 40 this year I do not include mine.) There is Jordan Tipples from Wales, who has the heart of a lion, and follows in the tradition of that great Welsh runner of bulls and aficionado, Noel Chandler, whose death last year we mourn still.

It is Noel who taught me the philosophy of the first foreign runner to be accepted by locals, a veteran of the Marine Corps in the Second World War, Matt Carney, whose children Allen and Deirdre I run with in Pamplona. This is that one must not run for glory, but for the joy of it. (This lesson is too often forgotten today, as is the lesson I was given by my first teacher in the plaza, Juan José Padilla, who said to me after he had lost his eye in Zaragoza in 2011: “scars are not medals of honour, but the marks of our mistakes.” This sort of pride has no place in the plaza or the street.)

AFH running with the bulls in the last encierro of Cuéllar 2016 (Photo courtesy of Castilla y León Televisión)

Joe Distler, Larry Belcher and me (Photo: Ana Cerón)

And then there is Chloe Drakari-Phillips. Chloe first went to Pamplona twenty-five years ago, although she is only twenty-four years old. (Her first San Fermín was when her mother was pregnant.) This adopted child of the Fiesta of San Fermín is the soul of that side of Pamplona, in all its passion and its vibrancy, who has shown me a less serious side to the taurine life of Spain, adopted child of the Feria del Toro that I am.

As part of this spirit of cooperation between local and foreigner, I have asked the principal pastor, Enrique Bayón Brandi, to join with me in arranging a “breakfast of runners” following a tradition begun in Pamplona by the great runners, and our good friends, Julen Madina and Joe Distler thirty years ago. We hope to bring a new international tradition to the oldest encierro in Spain. As a mark of respect to the bulls and those who work with them, this first will be held in honour of the memory of Victor Barrio and attended by David Mora the morning before he faces the same risks himself with the bulls with which we have just run.

The Pamplona Runner’s Breakfast 2015. Joe Distler is in sunglasses next to AFH at the back behind the matador David Mora – white polo shirt – with Julen Madina kneeling front – white t-shirt – (Photo by John Kimmich on Jim Hollander’s camera – Jim is front row holding John’s camera)

It is nice to be able to bring a tradition from Pamplona back to Cuéllar since Cuéllar is most likely the parent of Pamplona’ most famous. The 3^rd and 4^th Dukes of Alburquerque – Nicolás Osorio’s father is the 19^th Duke – were viceroys of Navarre from 1452 to 1464 about the time when encierros began to be written about in that region of Spain.

So, as I pack my old school athletics blazer with its distinctive red and white stripes in honour of the marriage of Spain’s traditions and my own, I can barely contain my excitement to once again check into the Hotel San Francisco and attend the ferias of Nuestra Señora del Rosario and the grandfather of all encierros that runs through it.

The beginning of the bull-run of Cuéllar, Spain’s oldest (Photo: Jim Hollander/EPA)

Postscript

Me, the late ‘Bomber’, the late Julen Madina and Stephen Ibarra who was with me in Spain last week, in 2012. (Photo by Deanna Ally)

On the afternoon of Tuesday, August 30th, Julen Madina died in hospital following an accident while swimming, itself following an incident in which he was badly injured in an encierro in Tudela. And so ended the life one of the most prolific and skilled runners of bulls in the history of the encierro. Although I did not get to know him as well as I might have liked, I counted him as a friend, we spent a little time together and he kindly contributed to the book I compiled, edited and co-authored along with mutual friends of ours such as Joe Distler, Miguel Ángel Eguiluz, Jokin Zuasti and photographs by Jim Hollander.

On my flight back from Madrid last week, I scribbled a few lines on a napkin to describe the simple but profound thing that is fiesta. It is not much, but I thought I would put it up here.

Farewell To Fiesta

(For N.)

Farewell to fiesta, farewell to the sun,
The candles are burned down and the bulls are all done.

But though the shrine’s empty and altars are bare,
We know the way back now and will return there.

As we grow older and some of us fall,
We’ll still lift our glasses and toast to us all.

For fiesta is in us, and those who we love,
Those still among us, and those up above.

 

Last night of the feria (Photo: Alexander Fiske-Harrison)

THE LAST ARENA: A Runner’s Breakfast

As I pack my bags for the encierros – ‘bull-runs’ – of San Sebastián de los Reyes and Cuéllar, I was about to happily announce a new tradition, that of an international Runners’ Breakfast in the latter, the oldest encierros in Spain. Here is how I put it in an article to be published in El Norte de Castilla on Sunday.

As part of this spirit of cooperation between local and foreigner, I have asked the principal pastor, Enrique Bayon Brandi, to join with me in arranging a “breakfast of runners” following a tradition begun in Pamplona by the great runners, and our good friends, Julen Madina and Joe Distler thirty years ago. We hope to bring a new international tradition to the oldest encierro in Spain. As a mark of respect to the bulls and those who work with them, this first will be held in honour of the memory of Victor Barrio and attended by the matador David Mora the morning before he faces the same risks himself with the bulls with which we have just run.

Julen Madina in the traditional red and white (with blue elbow support) leads the bulls into the ring in Pamplona

To read on click here.

The Sun Also Rises

Today my first ever article came out in The Sun – online here. Before I have always written for ‘broadsheet’ British newspapers like its News International sister paper The Times. However, after reading endless false stories about the tragic death of the Spanish matador Victor Barrio, I could not turn down the offer of a voice in Britain’s biggest selling national newspaper. 

Inevitably there are ‘casualties of truth’ in a situation like this. I was commissioned to write at 3pm to complete the piece by 6pm. In Pamplona. Having run with the bulls that morning. And drunk all day. After four identical days. 

I am not a matador, which is a professional title, which was explained in my writing, if not in the printed ‘copy’, I was a torero, a ‘bullfighter’. However, it is a churlish complaint when describing the arcane and esoteric to expect the sub-editor doing the headline on the edited copy – which has lost these nuances – to know the differences.

What is more, at least I did not lie. 

The article attached to my article from the League Against Cruel Sports – for balance, which I respect – has no such compunctions nor attachments to research and truth. 

I’ve been on every major ranch and in every major bullring and fought myself. When was a bull’s eyes ever smeared with Vaseline? Where is their evidence for this claim? A half blind bull would charge a blur of man and cape, rather than the specific part of the cape the matador dictates, and many, many more would be dead. The same goes for starving – nonsense, I have photos of them eating in the corrals of the bullring itself… guys, the blood is in the ring, you don’t need to make it up. 

If anyone really wants to read about the morality of bullfighting, read my speech at the Edinburgh International Book Festival as a blog post here. 

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

My new project…

… has a new blog. http://www.thelandofwolves.com I intend to find out, and write about, everything you ever wanted to know about wolves and dogs and humans. Let’s see how far I get.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

Method Authors: A New Literary Movement – from The Independent

Note: For details on the classes, go to our website http://www.theactofwriting.co.uk

I’ve been meaning to write a post on author Thomas W. Hodgkinson’s mooting of the “new literary movement” (ahem) of ‘method writing’ since he first spoke about it on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme a week or so ago. (You can listen to it excerpted on the BBC here.)

However, ironically, I was too busy practising what he was preaching, as I was living in the Montparnasse apartment of one of the real-life protagonists of a short historical fiction I was writing to enter in the Prix d’Hemingway in France.

So it wasn’t until I returned to London late last night that I discovered he had launched the intended project in this morning’s The Independent (online here.)

My Research

Thomas tells an abridged version of the story of why I am one of his three “method authors” in the piece.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison… trained as a matador in Spain as research for his book about bullfighting, Into the Arena. He is also an actor who, like Dustin Hoffman, has honed his technique at the Actors Studio. So for him, nothing was more natural, when he sat down to write, than to don the same black “country suit” and short jacket he’d worn in the arena. Between bursts of typing, he would move about the room, performing what is known as toreo de salon.

THE LAST ARENA: Noel Chandler, Prince of Pamplona: A Tribute

From my bullfighting blog ‘The Last Arena’.
AFH

Noel Chandler and Alexander Fiske-Harrison, Pamplona, July 2013 (Photo: David Penton)

It seems it is my season for tributes to dead friends: I lost a near-sister on September 14th, and a true friend one month later on October 14th. Noel Chandler, though, was a few weeks shy of his 80th birthday, where Antonia Francis died just before her 40th. There is quite a difference.

The Spanish newspapers have been suitably effusive – for example his Pamplona local Diario de Navarra headlined with ‘Welshman Noel Chandler dies, illustrious visitor to the feria of San Fermín’. However, they all seem to have propagated certain errors, starting with his age. Noel died at 79 not 76.

For that reason among others I am pleased not only to include my own memories of Noel, interspersed with a little journalistic research (about, for example, his service in the army), but also an interview he did with the secretary of the Club Taurino of London, David Penton, for their magazine La Divisa in 2013 which I suggested someone should do before it was all forgotten. However, nothing will ever capture the man in full. As even David noted when he forwarded the piece:

I promised to send you… the Lunch with Noel article which you prompted me to do. I hope you think it does him justice. Sadly he asked me to take a number of things out – mostly related to his generosity.

I’ll raise a glass to that.

AFH

Noel John Chandler

On his way to the great encierro (Photo: Jim Hollander, 1981)

15 November 1935, Newport, Wales – 14 October 2015, Madrid Spain

B.A. (Hons.) Law, University of Bristol, 1958.

Lieutenant, Middlesex Regiment (Duke of Cambridge’s Own), 1961.

Managing Director, ICL Singapore Pte Ltd. 1994.

 

After the corrida on the final day of my first feria de San Fermín – July 14th, 2009 – a few hours before pobre de mí– when I was… (ahem)… tired and emotional having run with bulls that morning and drunk whatever was handed to me during the day until I had seen them killed very badly that evening, I bumped into a pretty young woman called Ivy Mix – a good name for such a famous bartender – who led me to a bar called Al Capone where in the doorway was standing Noel Chandler.

I had heard of Noel, of course, but in my research for my book Into The Arena: The World Of The Spanish Bullfight I had courteously avoided British and American aficionados as I did not want to inherit non-native prejudices or to see Spain second-hand. (The only reason I had gone to Pamplona was because my first teacher of toreo, Juan José Padilla said he would run with me and his bulls.)

Miss Mix introduced me to Noel saying I was writing a book on the world of the bulls. Noel looked into my eyes – which were a little blurry on the third day of my first Pamplona fiesta – through his own – which were… well, he was ten days into his forty-eighth fiesta – and said:

“What the fuck do you know about bulls?”

To read on, click the logo below…

In Memoriam: Antonia Raissi, née Francis, 4 February 1976 – 14 September 2015

I have come to hold the belief that one of the most powerful and definitively human compulsions is that of being remembered: that when the physical reality of self has perished, that echo of appearance, the memory of self in other minds, should be confirmed in defiance of death. Hence the funeral, the oration, the headstone, the monument, the memorial service, the obituary and this, the personal memoire. That, and an expiation.

So I am not writing claiming I knew Antonia better than others – her mother and stepfather, her husband and her sons, her other family and many of her other friends had that privilege – but we had our moments over twenty or so years. I want to write down those I remember, and those I can repeat, before my recollections of them change and mutate any more than they already have. To ‘re-member’ to, as the word suggests, is to piece back together the members, the parts, of a dismembered whole. At best this is a jerry-rigged fiction that just about passes muster and at worst an outright lie, fuelled by want, and perspective, and sorrow.

AFH

*                    *                    *

It was in her room in the top floor of Matthews Building I first met her, second on the right. A single bed, a desk, armchair and a basin in cupboard, divided by no more space than you could lie down in, loo and shower down the corridor. St. Peter’s College, Oxford, wasn’t exactly as glamorous as Brideshead Revisited, but Antonia was. Tall, lithe, exquisite faced which she fought against – admiring the strong more than the pretty – speaking with clipped St. Mary’s (Calne) tones and Eton-cropped black hair, which I would later cut to make her look more like Irène Jacob in Kieslowski’s Trois Couleurs : Rouge the film we all fell in love with that year. Just as we all fell in love with her.

In that tiny room we were all packed, a group, almost exclusively male at its core, and regarded as deeply, almost hilariously pretentious even by the standards of Oxford undergraduates. However, looking back one can see it was just curiosity and fascination and youthful gaucheness.

There was Hugh Dancy, George Pendle and Paul Curran, all studying English under Dr Francis Warner, Dominic Elliot studying Archaeology and Anthropology, and Steven France studying Philosophy under Dr John Kenyon. Antonia would within her first year abandon Geography for English, and I would only make it to the end of my second before switching from Biology to Philosophy under Kenyon.

Me, matriculation day, October 1994

One of her first stories to me, a story which would have perhaps annoyed the more sophisticated and subtle person she became, was of her summer holiday, just prior to coming up to Oxford, in Kenya. I remember still the image she conjured so well of her sitting, dressed in white, smoking Cartier cigarettes, the only non-male, and indeed only non-Masai sitting around a camp fire in The Mara. She would have been eighteen years old.

I wonder if she viewed us like Masai too. She certainly preferred the company of us men, and although she was not a tomboy in the sense of climbing trees, her way of speaking was… well, like anti-aircraft fire – not always deadly accurate, but incessant and intimidating to fly amongst, the dark crumping bursts of her conversational shells peppering the night sky. And it was usually night sky – we sat up late into the night talking and talking, me smoking Marlboro, her Lights, me Coke, her Diet. She wasn’t much of a drinker, disliking the silliness, the loss of control, or so she claimed. When I did see her tipsy for the first time I was surprised at how girly she became. I think that was what she feared most.

Antonia’s 19th Birthday Party, Gloucester Green pizza restaurant, clockwise from bottom left: George Pendle, Dave – & ?, Steven France, Hugh Dancy, Genevieve Connors, ?, John Mühlemann, ?, David Collard, David Budds, Biranda Ford, Lucy -, Antonia Francis, Caroline Early, Catherine Bagshaw, Joshua Steckel (Photo by Alexander Fiske-Harrison)

Detail from above (Photo: Alexander Fiske-Harrison)

It was inevitable that I would fall head over heels for her – I mean I was only a few months out of an all boys boarding school, grew up without sisters and had never had a girlfriend. And here was this stunning and exotic creature, fitting no standard feminine norm that I knew of – never a skirt or dress, but black boots and jeans on those very long legs, and almost invariably a black polo neck, channelling Juliette Greco with a hint of Audrey Hepburn. Of course, now in retrospect I can see that Antonia wasn’t oblivious to the effect she had on us boys – and we were just boys – wrangling us to some extent with those quirks honed to charms, equalising the gender imbalance using that weapon among all the others at her disposal.

By The Sword: My Latest Column for Taki’s Magazine

My latest contribution to my column, ‘By The Sword’, for Taki’s Magazine is out now. It concerns the current refugee crisis in Europe, but goes as far back as the Viking invasions of Britain, with reference to the epic Old English poem the Battle of Maldon, and beyond that to the Christianisation, decline and fall of the Roman Empire. It is also a paean to realpolitik and how to actually save lives, rather than make public displays of one own virtuous emotions while decrying the viciousness of others. To promote feeling above thought and then parade it in public is infantile narcissism, pure and simple.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

THE PAMPLONA POST: The Dangerous Summer: Editor’s (my) article In The Telegraph

Alexander Fiske-Harrison running the bulls in Cuéllar on the morning described in the article (Photo © Antonio Tanarro / El Norte de Castilla)

My article on the extraordinary fatality rate in the encierros, ‘bull-runs’, and other ‘popular’ taurine events this year, and why we continue to participate in them, is in The Telegraph today (to read on click here.)

Alexander Fiske-Harrison