Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War

by Vaill, Amanda

  As the conflict in Spain had persisted and deepened, Hemingway had indeed been talking of his interest in it, but in a theoretical way, as one might say to an acquaintance, “We really must have lunch.” Now Winchell and Wheeler were all but calling his bluff—or were they presenting him with an opportunity? Despite the pleasure he took in the life he and Pauline had constructed in Key West, he was restless. “I’ve got this nice boat and house,” he told a friend, “but they’re both really Pauline’s. I could stay on here forever, but it’s a soft life. Nothing’s really happening to me here and I’ve got to get out … In Spain maybe it’s the big parade starting again.” His work had always fed on his own experience, and now he found himself desperately needing new material: the fishing trips and safaris were pretty much used up, and for the new novel he’d had to ask a Havana-based journalist friend, Dick Armstrong, to dig up stuff about Cuban revolutionaries because he had no firsthand knowledge to draw on. If he went to Spain with an assignment to report on the war, he’d get the makings of any number of novels.

  But still he hesitated, putting Wheeler’s letter under a pile of paper on his writing table, leaving it unanswered. For there remained the question of Pauline, whose anxiety for Hemingway’s safety set her against the whole idea of his going to a war zone, and whose fervent Catholicism made her leery of the Loyalists, with whom Hemingway’s own natural sympathies lay. He would have to find a way to deal with her. Meanwhile there was the Harry Morgan novel, which he had to finish before he could even think about what would come next.

  He’d been using its pages as a shooting gallery, taking aim at one person after another from his real life, as if to destroy whatever hold they had over him: his former lover, Jane Mason, and her husband, Grant, thinly disguised as rich Tommy and nymphomaniac Helene Bradley; Dos Passos, as Richard Gordon; even Pauline, one of several sources for Helen Gordon, who tells her husband, “You were a genius and I was your whole life. I was your partner and your little black flower. Slop. Love is just another dirty lie … Love is all the dirty little tricks you taught me that you probably got out of some book … You writer.”

  Of course, for Hemingway, the dirty little trick—one he’d employed in more than one book—was to make a real person’s fictional avatar do something, or say something, that he could legitimately despise that person for, thus leaving himself free to treat that person badly. Like a papal indulgence purchased in advance of the sin, it was an insurance against blame, or self-recrimination. And now he was using it on Pauline. You writer.

  November 1936: Naples

  Gerda arrived in Naples toward the end of November to find Georg Kuritzkes sharing a large room with two other students in a house in the old town. The last time she had seen Georg she was still Gerta Pohorylle, an unknown ingénue activist in Leipzig; in the three years since, she’d become Gerda Taro, a published combat photographer who had been under fire in Spain. Then, she’d been Georg’s lover and political follower; now she had a highly visible liaison with Robert Capa, a man even more well-known than she—and certainly more so than Georg, who was still after all this time a medical student. For any other woman their reunion might have been difficult, full of questions about the past, the present, the future; but Gerda was different. She slipped into and out of encounters as she would a pretty negligée; they meant something while they were on, nothing when they were off. Guilt and regret were not in her repertoire. When she had gone to Paris, and Georg to Italy, their sexual relationship had ceased, but she still wrote him warm, newsy letters. Just because she wasn’t sleeping with him didn’t mean they weren’t still friends; on the other hand, just because they were friends didn’t mean they couldn’t sleep together.

  The shared room in the old town wasn’t the best place for that, though; and anyway Gerda wanted to spend some time sightseeing, and visiting with Georg’s sister Jenny, who had followed her brother to Italy and was now working as a governess for the children of an American diplomat, Douglas MacArthur (nephew and namesake of the more famous general). But then they all went to stay with the third Kuritzkes in Italy, Georg’s younger brother, Soma, who was studying at the university in Naples but living an hour’s boat ride away on Capri, in rooms rented from a winegrower. Who would pay attention there if, just for a while, Gerda and Georg resumed their old intimacy?

  Gerda loved the steep green terraced hills and the views of the sea, and the companionship of other young people who lodged nearby. But she couldn’t give herself over to the holiday spirit wholeheartedly. Because across the water, in Spain, people were dying for the principles she believed in, that Georg had taught her to believe in. She had brought with her some of the photos she and Capa had taken there, and now she took them out and spoke of her experiences, and Capa’s; told Georg and Soma and the rest of them about the International Brigades, and how they were the first line of defense against the tide of fascism.

  When she left Naples a few weeks later her commitment to la causa, or his feelings for her, or both, had persuaded Georg to leave his studies and join the Brigades, where his medical training would be of real use. By the time he arrived in Paris to sign up Gerda was on the point of going back to Spain; so she didn’t know that when he got to the border his Marxist bona fides were questioned by the special agent of the NKVD who was supervising the intake of foreign volunteers. Nor did she hear how he was denounced, and sentenced to be shot as an Italian spy; nor that he was saved at the last minute by the intervention of a Polish doctor, and made his way to the front. For by then she was in Madrid with Capa, and she never saw Georg Kuritzkes again.

  December 1936: Madrid

  As winter closed in on Madrid the city settled into a state of siege. Many Madrileños had left, heeding the posters showing a stylized woman and her daughter dancing in front of a shell-battered building: “So your family doesn’t have to be a part of the drama of war,” the legend ran, “EVACUATE MADRID and help us to final victory.” For those who stayed, food and fuel were harder and harder to obtain: shivering women lined up every morning with pails or baskets hoping to buy just enough coal or wood to cook the handful of rice they were able to purchase, and even the shells and bombs didn’t scare them away from their places. The rebel armies were massed to the west, trying to bomb or starve or freeze the Madrileños into submission, but could make no headway; both sides seemed locked into a face-off, looking for some means to break out.

  Aiming to cut Madrid off from the government’s forces in the Guadarrama, the rebels began planning an offensive to the north of the city, on the Corunna Road leading to Philip II’s palace at El Escorial; the Loyalists, on the other hand, directed their energies at their own organization, hoping that changes, even divisive, painful ones, might alter the direction of the war. With the influx of aid and personnel from the Soviet Union came pressure from Stalin to centralize political and military decision-making and dampen the revolutionary fervor that might frighten the Western democracies. The old militias had already been ordered dissolved, to be absorbed into or replaced by regular army units; and the anarchists of the CNT and FAI had been almost forcibly included in the government, with any contrary ideas they might have had about the direction of government policy smothered in the name of the “three virtues” of the Communists: “Discipline, Hierarchy, and Organization.” Meanwhile, wrote Louis Delaprée, the self-described “accountant of horror,” scores of people were being killed by enemy bombardments every day on the streets of Madrid.

  It was raining, a cold December drizzle, when Barea said goodbye to his family. After weeks of arguing, Aurelia had finally agreed it would be best if she and the children relocated to Valencia; and this morning a convoy of cars from the Foreign Ministry was waiting to take them and other staff dependents to safety. Aurelia had put on her best coat and hat and her most fashionable shoes—she looked as if she were going to a dinner party, not an evacuation center—and as Barea embraced Carmen, Adolfina (whom he called Fina), Arturo, and Enrique, she started haranguing him
: Why wasn’t he coming with them to Valencia? Did he want to stay in Madrid so he could romance other women? Explanations of duty and responsibility were no use to her: You have brains but no heart, she flung at him. Or you have a heart, but only for other people. Not for me.

  Things were no better in the censors’ office: Rubio had begun telephoning him daily, telling him he should transfer the office to Valencia (in the name of Discipline, Hierarchy, and Organization); also daily, General Miaja, the chief of the Junta de Defensa, Madrid’s Defense Council, told him to stay. Koltsov would call with a set of instructions that contradicted what Rubio had ordered the day before. Whiplashed by conflicting orders, Barea was at his wit’s end, snappish, inconsistent. When Maria called to importune him (had she heard that Aurelia had left?), he dressed her down on the phone; then—ashamed of his bad temper—took her out for a drink he didn’t really want to have, especially with her. As he left the office Ilsa looked up (with reproach? disdain?) but said nothing.

  Determined to resolve at least his professional situation, he decided he must go to Valencia and settle things with Rubio once and for all. Miaja, however, refused to give him a safe-conduct for what the Junta considered desertion of his post. Providentially, an anarchist friend, recently appointed to a government post, offered him a lift as well as the necessary passes and papers. So on December 6, feeling like a traitor, or maybe just a fool, Barea left Madrid. He wondered if he would be coming back.

  December 1936: New York

  As 1936 drew to a close, John Dos Passos should have been in a celebratory mood—The Big Money had turned into a bestseller and was due to be translated into French, Italian, Hungarian, and German—but he was too anxious about the course of the war in Spain to enjoy himself. One of his best friends, his Spanish translator, José Robles Pazos, was actually in Spain at this moment, accompanied by his wife and children; Dos Passos hadn’t heard from Robles for some time and was worried for the family’s welfare. On a larger scale, he was dismayed by the biased, polemical, and inaccurate coverage of the war in the United States, where (as one reporter put it) the Catholic Church had all but instructed newspaper advertisers “not [to] imperil their immortal souls or their pocket-books by dealing with supporters of leftists, pinkos, and radicals.” Dos Passos had only to look at The New York Times’s front page on December 7, where the headline “MADRID SITUATION REVEALED” was followed by the subhead: “All Semblance of Democratic Forms of Government in Spain Disappears—25,000 Put to Death by Radicals—Priests, Nuns Slain.” No wonder the U.S. Congress was rushing through an extension of the 1935 Neutrality Act that would embargo any arms sales to either side in the Spanish conflict, and ban all travel to Spain by U.S. passport holders.

  Dos Passos wasn’t content to just wring his hands on the sidelines—a decade ago he’d been arrested along with his fellow writer Dorothy Parker for marching in protest against the execution of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti—and he wanted to do something to dispel this cloud of misinformation. So it must have seemed a fortunate coincidence when he met the very person who might help him accomplish this.

  Joris Ivens was a thirty-eight-year-old Dutchman, a director of artistically aspirational documentary films about railroad bridges, dyke-building on the Zuyder Zee, workers in a radio factory, miners in Belgium, and the like. He’d spent the previous two years in Moscow, drinking vodka and eating black bread with all the right people: the Hungarian revolutionary Béla Kun, the journalist Mikhail Koltsov, the directors Erwin Piscator, Sergei Eisenstein, and Vsevelod Meyerhold, the German writer Gustav Regler. He’d even worked with Regler on a short picture about the political struggle between Nazis and antifascists in Germany’s Saar Valley. “Simplicity is what works,” he’d told Regler, whose screenplay he thought was too nuanced. “Listen: ‘The Nazis lie, the Russians tell the truth.’ That’s what we have to say, nothing else!”

  Although Ivens was employed by the Soviet film company Mezhrabpom, founded by the ubiquitous propagandist Willi Münzenberg as part of the Comintern’s image-making apparat, and was also a member of the Dutch Communist Party, he hadn’t yet been deemed qualified for membership in the party’s Soviet Union division, and during the past two years he’d been frustrated when plum projects at Mezhrabpom went to more established party men. He’d also become unsettled by the increasingly dangerous atmosphere in Moscow, as Stalin carried out a murderous campaign against old Bolsheviks who might have mounted a threat to his absolute dominance; Meyerhold and Eisenstein, for example, were already in trouble with the regime, and Regler had left for Paris so he wouldn’t be.

  Luckily, Ivens managed to get leave (or was ordered) to go to America for a “creative vacation” in January 1936, and after traveling to Hollywood and back, lecturing and making contacts, he and his lover, a film editor named Helene Van Dongen, had quickly established themselves among the progressive intelligentsia in Greenwich Village, where Dos Passos met him at a screening of his Zuyder Zee film, New Earth. Tall, lean, with a shock of wavy dark hair, cleft chin, and deep-set blue eyes under strong black brows, Ivens had the kind of rugged but puckish sex appeal that speaks to both women and men—Dos Passos described him as looking “like a high-school boy playing hookey.” Soon after the two of them met they’d begun talking about collaborating on a documentary about the American film industry that would be, Ivens said gleefully, “scathing and one-hundred percent anti-Hollywood”; but somehow the Hollywood exposé never got off the ground.

  Now, however, Ivens had a better, more important idea, something that was sure to stir Dos Passos’s blood: Helene Van Dongen had been asked to put together some existing newsreel footage in a documentary about the background to the Spanish Civil War that would be given a commercial release early in 1937. The film’s producers needed money, of course; and someone would have to write voice-over commentary for it. Dos Passos had done a successful adaptation of Pierre Louys’s novel La femme et le pantin, called The Devil Is a Woman, for Paramount; would he like to be involved? Of course he would; and he would also bring in his old friend the poet Archibald MacLeish. MacLeish might be working as an editor at Henry Luce’s elegant and intellectually stimulating business magazine, Fortune (for which Dos also wrote), but his antifascist politics were considerably to the left of his boss’s, and he was just then composing a radio play about fascism, The Fall of a City, for Orson Welles. So he’d be helpful with script advice, planning, and contacts.

  The tweedy, sandy-haired MacLeish was captivated by Ivens: he was “a communist who [would] never let communism get in the way of his work,” he declared, and unlike some radical writers, he wouldn’t “set out … to discover his preconceptions.” The poet was less enthusiastic about the Van Dongen documentary—an opinion with which Ivens rather surprisingly agreed. Even with the addition of excerpts from a Russian-made film about the war, and a lurid new title, Spain in Flames, the whole thing just seemed like a mash-up. “It would be cheaper and more satisfactory to make such a documentary film on the spot,” he said, instead of cobbling it together from preexisting material.

  So MacLeish came up with a new plan: put Spain in Flames together as quickly, painlessly, and cheaply as possible, and then send Ivens to Spain with a dedicated camera unit to produce an entirely new film there. They’d have to form a production company for it, of course—they gave it a worthy and neutral-sounding name, Contemporary Historians, Inc.—and they’d want to recruit other members for its board, people with the right amount of political passion whose celebrity would help them raise the funds they needed. They’d ask the playwrights Lillian Hellman and Clifford Odets, the theater producer Herman Shumlin, the philanthropist and civil liberties activist Margaret De Silver, and perhaps Dos Passos’s picket-line pal Dorothy Parker. Anyone else, someone who could help write it? Oh, yes—what about Dos and MacLeish’s great friend Ernest Hemingway?

  December 1936: Valencia

  Barea’s trip to Valencia was a disaster. In the car on the way from Madrid, exhausted by stre
ss and the conflicting pressures of work, he’d run off his mouth to his Anarchist companions about his difficulties with Rubio, and was alarmed when one of them, a tough named García, offered to take care of things for him: “People sometimes disappear overnight here in Valencia,” he said. “They’re taken to Malvarrosa, or Grau, or the Albuféra, get a bullet in the neck, and the sea carries them away.” Barea hastily assured García that such dark doings wouldn’t be necessary: things weren’t as bad as all that, he said, Rubio was really a patriot. “All right,” said García. “But one day you’ll be sorry … I know that type. We’re going to lose the war because of them. Or do you believe we don’t know about the many things the censors let through?” Not for the first time, Barea felt he was walking on a tightrope.

  He went to see Rubio in the shabby but still grand palace the Press and Propaganda Department had taken over on the Calle del Mar; but when he got there his chief waved him off. He was far too busy to talk to Barea today. Maybe tomorrow. Barea emerged into the sunlit streets in a daze. He passed food stalls overflowing with fruits and vegetables, poultry, flowers, all the kinds of things no one in Madrid had seen for months; well-dressed people were hurrying along the pavement or laughing on the terraces of cafés. A band was playing in the middle of the Plaza de Emilio Castelar, in front of the Ayuntamiento; on the other side was a gigantic billboard showing photographs of the murdered children of Getafe superimposed with the silhouetted images of bombs. It all seemed unreal.