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

by Vaill, Amanda

  In response, Barea fired off his own letter: he and Ilsa refused to be put on leave, and instead were resigning from their censorship posts. They were returning to Madrid, to report to General Miaja. And they were taking the car—which Miaja, not the Foreign Ministry, had given them—with them. It was a challenge, Barea knew it; but he knew also that it was time, finally, to make some kind of stand against the reflexive, truth-smothering conformity that more and more seemed official policy. What he couldn’t know was where that challenge would lead.

  August 1937: New York

  On the afternoon of August 11 Ernest Hemingway paid a visit to Maxwell Perkins’s office in the Scribner building on Fifth Avenue. After dithering about the form his Harry Morgan book should take, he’d finally decided not to make it part of an omnibus, but to publish it—with the cuts he’d proposed in June—as a stand-alone novel; and Perkins, not waiting for him to change his mind again, had rushed the manuscript of what was now officially called To Have and Have Not to the printer in July. The galleys had been corrected and the book was scheduled for publication in October, but there were still a few details that needed tending to; surely Max wouldn’t mind his dropping in unannounced to take care of them.

  It was a hot day, and the fans were stirring the heavy air without making it seem any cooler. As Hemingway walked through Perkins’s door, Perkins rose from his desk chair, a slight frown of anxiety on his face. “Here’s a friend of yours, Max,” Hemingway heard him say. He realized that there was already someone else in Perkins’s office, and that that person was Max Eastman.

  Eastman had indeed been a friend of his, once: a Greenwich Village radical, comrade of John Reed, and editor of New Masses, he had tried to help the ten-years-younger Hemingway get published when he was still unknown. But then he’d written that review in The New Republic of Hemingway’s bullfighting book, headlined “Bull in the Afternoon”—the one in which he referred to the Hemingway prose style as “wearing false hair on the chest”—and recently he’d been associating with none other than that renegade Communist Leon Trotsky, translating him and acting as his unofficial agent. So Hemingway was not pleased to see him.

  But he smiled—just a little too broadly—and shook hands; and Perkins settled down in his chair again, relieved. At which point, still wearing that dangerous ear-to-ear grin, Hemingway started to unbutton his shirt. There was his suntanned barrel chest, covered with a thick mat of black hair. Look at this, Max—does this look like false hair to you? Eastman laughed nervously. Still showing his teeth, Hemingway asked Eastman to open his shirt; which Eastman did, revealing a chest as hairless and smooth as a baby’s bottom. Now it was Perkins’s turn to laugh. Would he be next? Suddenly the hot blood rushed into Hemingway’s face and he started shouting. “What do you mean,” he bellowed at Eastman, “accusing me of impotence?”

  With Perkins looking on helplessly, Eastman gestured toward a book lying open on Perkins’s desk, which happened to be a collection of his essays in which “Bull in the Afternoon” was reprinted. Why didn’t Hemingway read what he’d actually said—he’d see there was nothing about impotence in it. Hemingway snatched the volume up and flipped angrily through its pages until he found the passage he wanted, then read it, grunting like a bull. Finally he whirled around and slapped Eastman across the face with the open book. That did it. Eastman launched himself out of his chair and grappled with the younger man, and the two of them fell heavily to the floor; Perkins, terrified that Hemingway would hurt his opponent, raced around his desk to pull them apart. But it was Eastman on top, not Hemingway, and when Perkins dragged Eastman off him the younger man burst out laughing. Just kidding!

  Three days later, surrounded by reporters and photographers, Hemingway stood on the French Line pier at Forty-eighth Street, waiting to board the S.S. Champlain, bound for Le Havre and Paris. He was on his way to Spain with a new contract from NANA, which wanted “straight, unbiased, colorful reporting”—and, John Wheeler had reminded him at a bon voyage lunch at the Stork Club, exclusives—and he was also going to write for the glossy new current-events magazine, Ken, that Esquire’s publisher David Smart had started. Even without those assignments, however, he couldn’t stay away from the war, much as Pauline entreated him to. “I promised them I would be back,” he told his mother-in-law, and through her, the wife he had once sworn to love and cherish till death did them part: “and while we cannot keep all our promises I do not see how not to keep that one.”

  The reporters clustered around him on the pier, however, weren’t interested in what he had promised to whom, or why he was going to Spain. All they wanted to talk about was his tussle with Eastman in Perkins’s office, which had already made all the gossip columns. Hemingway obligingly gave them a recap: Eastman, he said, “jumped at me like a woman, clawing … with his open hands. I just held him off. I didn’t want to hurt him. He’s ten years older than I am.” At which point he bounded up the gangplank to the ship.

  “He is living in a world so entirely his own,” wrote Scott Fitzgerald to Max Perkins when he heard of the Eastman episode, “that it is impossible to help him, even if I felt close to him at the moment, which I don’t.”

  September 1937: Paris

  The other promise Hemingway had to keep, one he certainly did not mention to his mother-in-law or to Pauline, was to Martha—with whom his feelings about Spain were inextricably tangled. It was with her, maybe even because of her, that he had gone there; it was, to a considerable degree, to be with her that he wanted to return. Throughout the past month, since they had parted after the White House screening, they had been trying “steadily and in vain to be discreet,” communicating by carefully phrased letters and stolen, secret telephone calls; and the day after Hemingway’s departure she, too, sailed for Le Havre, on the Normandie.

  If she’d been hoping for a solitary and low-profile crossing, Martha was disappointed: for also on board the luxurious liner were Lillian Hellman and Dorothy Parker and Parker’s husband, the actor and screenwriter Alan Campbell, all of whom were connected both to Hemingway and to The Spanish Earth. Hellman wasn’t in good spirits. Recently reunited with her on-again, off-again lover, the alcoholic novelist Dashiell Hammett, she’d been overjoyed to find herself pregnant until she’d come home one evening from the Hollywood studio she was working in to discover Hammett in bed with a starlet. Now she was on her way to Europe, ostensibly to attend a theater festival in Moscow, but possibly also to get an abortion where they were easier to come by than in the United States. Dottie Parker and Alan Campbell had a more cheerful mission: they were headed for the International Exposition in Paris, and were delighted to think they’d be able to meet up with Hemingway and other old friends while they were there.

  From the start, Martha didn’t like Hellman—didn’t like her flat, lidless-seeming eyes, her thin upper lip, or her bad teeth, didn’t like her “expression of polite spite.” Really, thought Martha, Hellman shouldn’t “hate all women simply because one man left her.” Hellman didn’t seem much taken with Martha, either. She commented acidly on the amount of time the younger woman spent in the Normandie’s lavishly appointed gymnasium—perhaps she was beginning her “basic training” for life with Hemingway? But Dottie Parker admired Martha’s “looks and her spirit and her courage and her decency” and despite Hellman’s digs asked the younger woman to drinks in First Class. Martha reported to her mother that Parker was “nice.”

  The Normandie docked at Le Havre on August 23 and Martha left for a few days of sea and sun in Le Lavandou, on the Côte d’Azur, where she and Bertrand used to spend their holidays; on her return to Paris she lay low. Too many of Hemingway’s—and Pauline’s—friends were there, including Gerald and Sara Murphy, who had been spending the summer in Europe trying to recover from the loss of their son Patrick earlier that year. Hemingway had drinks or dinner with them, and the Campbells, and Hellman at the Meurice, at the Deux Magots, at the Closerie des Lilas, and Sara Murphy fussed over him as she might have do
ne over her dead sons, offering to store luggage he didn’t want to take to Spain with him, and arranging for mammoth food packages to be sent to him in care of the press office in Valencia.

  Hemingway fled from the warm embrace of his and Pauline’s friends with the alacrity of “a horse that has escaped from a burning stable,” observed Martha, to rejoin her and Herbert Matthews, who was preparing to return to Spain himself after a four-week holiday. Sitting at a café table with them in the late-summer sun, Hemingway was dismayed by the news he found in the newspapers—not just The New York Times but even the dull, responsible Le Temps. A map in the Times told the story: the rebels had by now occupied an enormous mushroom-shaped swath of territory, from the south coast through the mining districts of Peñarroya to the coal-rich industrial north, and with the exception of a tiny Loyalist enclave around Gijón on the Bay of Biscay the government was being squeezed into an ever-smaller triangle whose points were Barcelona in the north, Madrid in the west, and Almería in the south. After Brunete, the Nationalists had turned their undiminished attention to the northern front, taking Santander and drawing ever closer to Gijón. The Loyalist forces there, advised by General Gorev, seemed to have little hope of holding out against the onslaught; but the government wanted to divert the rebels, and score a decisive victory, by moving against Saragossa, to the east in Aragon, which had been in Nationalist hands since the beginning of the war the previous summer. On August 24, with troops under the commanders Líster, Kléber, Modesto, and Walter, the offensive had begun; but now, like the action at Brunete, it appeared to have run out of steam. And the Loyalist armies, fighting in appalling heat in which the stench of rotting corpses forced anyone who had a gas mask to wear it, were reported to have been surrounded by the rebels and decimated.

  Hemingway, Martha, and Matthews were shaken. It wasn’t just that, as Martha said, “your friends got killed”; it was that with each Loyalist defeat the legend of Nationalist invincibility, even inevitability, grew. Even more dismaying, much of what newspaper readers saw was being written by pro-Nationalist journalists (like the Times’s William P. Carney) whose stories were essentially transcriptions of rebel communiqués, sent from the safe vantage point of Hendaye or Biarritz, over the border in France. This wasn’t news, they all agreed—and Hemingway went further. It was “criminal lying.” If stories like that made Franco and his generals seem on their way to certain victory, why would anyone in Washington or London or New York or Paris support the government? Yes, it looked as if the north was lost, but what about the rest of the country? Over the coffee and croissants Hemingway mapped out an itinerary for himself, Martha, and Matthews. They’d investigate fronts in Aragon and around the two places where the next offensives seemed likely—Teruel and the Castilian plateau. And with luck they’d be able to show their readers that as “precarious” as things were in the north, in Asturias, the government’s position elsewhere was, as Hemingway put it, “strong” and “solid.”

  * * *

  On the morning of September 6, Le Matin carried, on the front page, the story of a grisly murder: a man’s body had been found, his chest riddled with machine-gun bullets and his temple pierced with some kind of projectile, by the side of the road bordering Lac Léman, near Lausanne, in Switzerland. Papers on the body indicated that the dead man was a Czech, a salesman named Eberhardt; he carried a wallet full of French and Swiss francs that also held an unused railway ticket from Lausanne to Paris; and clutched in his now stiffened fingers was a lock of someone’s—presumably his assailant’s—hair. The police had no further clues, but they were presuming from the victim’s nationality that the crime might be an act of “political vengeance.”

  Reading Le Matin with his morning coffee, Walter Krivitsky, the GRU’s northern European rezident, or chief—normally stationed in the Hague, but currently sojourning in Paris—noticed a particularly alarming detail. He recognized the murdered man’s surname as one of the aliases of Ignaz Reiss, the GRU’s man in Belgium, one of his subordinates, with whom he’d discussed their shared disillusionment with Stalin’s search for “traitors” within the ranks of government. And he knew that Reiss had recently been recalled to Moscow, but instead of obeying the summons had fled to Switzerland, where he was planning to defect—something Krivitsky was also contemplating. The NKVD’s Mobile Group, which included Liston Oak’s nemesis, the ubiquitous George Mink, had been too quick for him. Now Krivitsky had to wonder how long it would be before they came after him. He didn’t have long to wait: within days he, too, received orders to return to Moscow.

  But Krivitsky was luckier, and perhaps more skillful than his late friend Reiss in avoiding the long reach of the Mobile Group. He made good his own escape, and soon was telling the French Sûreté, and later Britain’s MI5, most of what he knew. And one of the things he knew—and the NKVD knew that he knew—was that Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s inner circle had been breached by a Soviet agent: a British journalist, masquerading as a fascist sympathizer, who was a former associate of Ilse Kulcsar’s in her Viennese cell, the Spark. His name was Kim Philby.

  September 1937: Madrid

  Barea and Ilsa felt very small as they drove over the flat plain of La Mancha in their borrowed official car: on either side stretched endless rolling fields scored with grapevines, the ripened fruit powdered with white dust, and above them soared the infinite blue sky. They felt even smaller when they arrived in Madrid to discover that they had indeed been pushed to the margins of the world they had known. The chief of the foreign press censorship was now a young woman named Rosario, who’d been recommended for the post by Maria Teresa Léon; and General Miaja, though still a military commander, had been replaced as an administrator by a new civil governor. Barea was still radio censor and commissioner of the EAQ radio station—that is, unless and until the new civil governor decided he wanted someone else in the job—and Ilsa was his deputy, in charge of transmissions in languages Barea didn’t know; but they had to move their few possessions out of the Gran Via and into another hotel, the Reina Victoria, a turreted building on the Plaza Santa Ana south of the Puerta del Sol. They were allowed to keep the car, and Hilario the driver—they would need them for late-night journeys to the broadcasting station. And because no one could find an office for them to use for their radio censorship work, they had to camp out—to the girl Rosario’s irritated discomfort—in an empty room at the Foreign Ministry.

  This situation bore awkward fruit: because they were there, in the building, just down the hall from where they’d been before, the foreign journalists continued to ask them for advice, or dropped by to gossip with them. Trying to be helpful—or maybe trying to force the issue—Rosario invited Barea to a banquet given by the civil governor; surely he could talk to his new superior, play the good civil servant, make the case for separate quarters for the radio censors, which would get them out of the Foreign Ministry for good. But Barea was in no mood to play the courtier. All the benefits of his holiday had vanished with the sound of the first shells over Madrid, leaving him shaky and nauseated. The day before the banquet he’d gone to the front at Carabanchel, where soldiers were dug into the same stinking rat-infested trenches they’d been in for a year, ever since he and Ilsa and their comrades had insisted on staying at their posts to defend the city and what it stood for. And now, as he and Ilsa entered the room, full of well-groomed bureaucrats, newly arrived from Valencia to get things back on a professional footing, he felt the old rage rise within him. He tossed off two glasses of wine, then confronted the civil governor. There are people—kind, ignorant people, who think this war is being fought for them, for their happiness, their future. Do you care about them? Do you care about the soldiers in those trenches? Or do you just care about the well-fed, the well-behaved, the complacent—the people who won’t rock the boat? Even Ilsa’s agonized expression couldn’t make him stop.

  It was as if he were daring the government, Negrín’s new, regulated government—which the new premier had once desc
ribed as “a dictatorship under democratic rules”—to regulate him out of existence. At first it seemed as if he wasn’t important enough for them to worry about. He was allowed to go on broadcasting, and the Unknown Voice spoke about those stinking trenches, and the rough, irreverent Madrileños who somehow made a life amid the shattered stones of their city. He spoke about these things in the unbeautiful argot of Lavapiés, with the directness, the immediacy, of one of Robert Capa’s photographs; and hundreds of letters poured in from listeners all over the world who had been touched, and sometimes shocked, by what he said. He even wrote a story, about a miliciano who makes a pet of the fly who buzzes around in his trench, which Tom Delmer helped to get published in London’s Daily Express.

  But then came the hints: regrets from friends that Barea and Ilsa hadn’t joined the PCE, that they weren’t card-carrying civil servants; warnings that something dangerous might be brewing. Former associates crossed the street to avoid speaking to them. Soon there were more than hints: the German Communist George Gordon told Barea his days at the radio were probably numbered, and claimed to the other journalists that Ilsa was being investigated as a Trotskyist. Better steer clear of her. A friend in the Assault Guards sent Barea and Ilsa a message: the SIM, the new secret police force modeled on the NKVD, was interested in Ilsa, and might want to interrogate her. The friend offered her a bodyguard, one of his own officers—he’d watch her and make sure no one tried to pull her into one of the black SIM cars and take her away.