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

by Vaill, Amanda

  In the days after the Telegram interview, Capa took care of business. Unhappy with the efforts his previous agency had made to place his work in American periodicals, he negotiated a deal for U.S. representation with Léon Daniel of Pix, who wanted to sign Capa badly enough that he also agreed to hire Kornel (now going by the all-American name of Cornell) as a darkroom assistant. It was Daniel who did the translating when, later in the week, Capa met with the editors at Life, who offered him a contract that would pay him a regular advance against a guaranteed monthly minimum of pages in the magazine. It was a life-changing deal, the sort of thing he and Gerda could only dream of when they were making the rounds of Paris photo editors two short years ago. Now, whatever happened, Capa had an income to count on, and the backing of what was becoming one of the most powerful news media franchises in the world.

  But he had something closer to his heart to accomplish in New York: to arrange for the publication of a book of his and Gerda’s Spanish photographs—something that would give permanence to Gerda’s work as well as his own, and be a kind of memorial to her. He persuaded the publisher Pascal (Pat) Covici, who had already made a name for himself by championing the writers Nathanael West and John Steinbeck, to take the book on at his imprint, Covici-Friede, and then enlisted his Bilbao acquaintance Jay Allen to write a brief introduction and translate the captions, and his onetime mentor André Kertesz, who had moved to New York, to do the layouts. Although both Gerda and Capa would be credited with the photographs, there was no distinction made between his pictures and Gerda’s in the images he handed over to Kertesz, any more than there had been in those the pair of them had made in the early days in Spain and sent to Maria Eisner under the byline “Robert Capa.” (In fact, it would later turn out that some of the photographs in the book were by neither of them, but had been taken by Chim.) When he’d signed the contract, selected the images, and written the captions, Capa went back, alone, to Paris.

  The book would be published after the new year, under the title Death in the Making. On the dedication page was one of the pictures Capa had taken of Gerda—smiling, chic, and insouciant—hovering over her bouquet of muguet on their last May Day together; and underneath it was the legend: “For Gerda Taro, who spent one year at the Spanish front—and who stayed on.”

  October–November 1937: Madrid

  They had patched up the shell holes at the Hotel Florida, refurbished the lobby, and Don Cristóbal had moved his reception desk from the front, where flying glass from broken windows might hit him when the hotel was shelled, to the back. But otherwise things were much the same. True, Herbert Matthews and Tom Delmer had moved out, to a penthouse apartment overlooking the Parque del Retiro, a more prudent distance from the guns on Garabitas—Delmer’s quarters at the Florida had been destroyed during one of the attacks last spring, but fortunately he’d been on leave in London at the time. Incoming fire didn’t deter Hemingway; the rooms he and Martha now checked in to, numbers 113 and 114, were at the corner of the hotel, in what he was convinced was a “dead angle” impervious to Nationalist shells. Besides, he joked, “you never hear the one that hits you.”

  The new, professional order—the “strict disciplinary basis” Hemingway had noticed, and praised, in the troops he’d just been visiting—was also evident at the Censura, where he and Martha discovered that Barea and Ilsa were no longer at their old posts. Stopping to talk to them despite their pariah status, Hemingway professed to be bewildered by the change. “I don’t understand the whole thing,” he told Barea, frowning, “but I’m very sorry. It seems a lousy mess.”

  The air had turned cool and crisp, with sun shining on the shattered buildings and barricaded streets; the shops, astonishingly, were full of clothes and pictures and antiques and cameras; and although food was scarce, beer hard to find, and imported hard liquor virtually unobtainable, the bars and restaurants were crowded. Hemingway and Martha made the circuit of their old haunts, eating at the Gran Via and drinking at Chicote’s; afterward, in the evenings, the salon Hemingway had held in his room at the Florida the previous spring resumed. There were some new faces, among them Evan Shipman, who after delivering Hemingway’s ambulances in April had enlisted in the International Brigades and was now recovering from war wounds; Alvah Bessie, another fighter from the Lincoln Battalion, who called Hemingway “the Great Adolescent” and Martha “his long-legged moll”; and Bessie’s fellow Lincolns, Marty Hourihan, Freddy Keller, Phil Detro, and Milton Wolff. They and the old rotating cast of regulars—correspondents, army officers, Russian advisors—all drank Hemingway’s whiskey and ate whatever was left of Sara Murphy’s delicacies. When the shelling started they’d open the windows so the glass wouldn’t shatter in the blast, and play Hemingway’s Chopin records—the opus 33 mazurka, number 4, and the opus 47 A-flat minor ballade were favorites—at top volume on the Victrola to drown out the sound of the bombardment.

  The gossip during these gatherings was that, as Hemingway repeated in his NANA dispatches, “sooner or later [Franco] must risk everything in a major offensive on the Castilian Plateau.” To get a feel for the territory, Martha and Hemingway went to Brunete one day with Delmer and Matthews, driving in Delmer’s Ford with American and British flags flying on its hood in a mistaken attempt to demonstrate neutrality—mistaken, because the Nationalists watching with binoculars mistook it for a high-ranking staff car and lobbed a few shells at the road. Hemingway was philosophical: “If they don’t hit you, there’s no story,” he said afterward; “if they do, you won’t have to write it.” But the correspondents switched to a camouflaged military vehicle for their trip to the battlefield. All four of them gazed solemnly at the treeless fawn-colored plain; Hemingway analyzing the terrain, Martha noticing—in addition to the open field of fire with “no cover anywhere”—the ruined houses, one with an empty birdcage hanging from what was left of a window, and a pink petticoat left to dry, forever, on the stone rim of a well. Like the ruined apartments on the Paseo Rosales, it was a place out of time; and Hemingway found himself thinking, “If Franco’s going to take the offensive, let’s have it soon and get it over with.”

  Certainly precious little was going on in Madrid. It was calm enough that Dorothy Parker, persuaded by journalist friends in Paris that as a good leftist she was obligated to make a pilgrimage to Spain, had showed up in Madrid with Alan Campbell and a lot of canned goods, as well as a shocking-pink hat that she wore even while eating lunch at the Hotel Reina Victoria, to the puzzlement of the dining-room staff. She and Martha renewed their acquaintance at dinner at Herbert Matthews’s—Martha still thought she was nice—before she and her husband left for Valencia.

  The lack of anything to report had left Hemingway and Martha enervated, sniping at each other for no good reason. Martha tried to turn an expedition to the Morata front into an outing, with lunch at an inn at Aranjuez for themselves, Matthews, and Delmer; Hemingway derided her plans, and then the action they’d all hoped to cover turned out to be a failure, which meant more recriminations, more quarreling. They went to the Censura, but the girl Rosario had no news for them, and Barea and Ilsa weren’t supposed to talk to them—all very tedious, thought Martha. Nor was she pleased to encounter Lillian Hellman, who’d been talked into coming to Madrid by the ubiquitous propagandist Otto Katz. She’d just arrived and was planning to visit the usual war-tourist sites; tonight she would be giving a radio talk that would be broadcast in the United States by Columbia Broadcasting Service, and she’d come to the Censura to have her remarks cleared by the censor. Although Martha eyed her with distaste, Hemingway asked her to dinner that very evening at Delmer and Matthews’s penthouse; he had got some beef from the bullring, he said, and she’d better come because she wouldn’t see any more beef during her stay in Spain.

  “Dinner,” said Martha later, “was a meal like scratching your fingernail over the blackboard.” Hellman arrived at the apartment bearing two cans of sardines and two cans of pâté as gifts, and proceeded to stare critically at
Martha’s “well-tailored pants and good boots.” She wasn’t impressed by the “overknowing” Delmer, either, nor by the athletic beef, although she seemed to find the wine tolerable; over dinner she quizzed Martha about the series of lectures she was planning to give on her return from Spain, and when Hemingway turned mocking about the project she egged him on until he was telling Martha he thought she was “moneygrubbing” at the Republic’s expense. It was, Martha reflected, “the kind of show usually reserved for enemies.”

  Suddenly a bombardment started, and everyone rushed out onto the terrace to watch the shells bursting over the Telefónica—all except Hellman, who sat on the sofa with her head down and her eyes shut in terror. Then the phone rang: it was one of Barea’s people at the radio station, calling to say that their building on the Gran Via had taken a hit and Hellman should tell the station chauffeur, who was on his way to pick her up, that the broadcast was canceled because the street wasn’t safe. But when the chauffeur arrived Hellman started going downstairs to get in the car anyway. Hemingway tried to stop her, but she insisted: it might be her only chance. “So,” Hellman would remember him saying, as he watched her go, “you have cojones after all.”

  Martha and Hemingway left, too; walking angrily back to the Hotel Florida “with plenty of street between us.” The quarrel that had begun at dinner continued in their room, and it got physical: at its climax Hemingway swung at her, but his hand caught the lamp on the bedside table and it crashed to the floor and shattered. There was a pause in which they looked at the lamp and each other, and then they started laughing. Afterward, on his way to bed to make love with Martha, Hemingway cut his bare feet on the broken glass. But once again he was “Mr. Scrooby, as friendly as a puppy and as warm as fur.”

  * * *

  To Have and Have Not was published on October 15; and if Hemingway still truly believed it was the triumphant achievement he had counted on, he had to be disappointed. “It would be pleasant,” wrote J. Donald Adams on the second page of The New York Times Book Review the following Sunday, to say that Hemingway “is a writer who has grown steadily in stature as well as in reputation. But that, unfortunately, would not be the truth. His skill has strengthened but his stature has shrunk … [His] record as a creative writer would be stronger if [this book] had never been published.” Other critics took up the theme: Hemingway was perhaps unrivaled as a prose stylist, but the novel suffered from structural problems, awkward transitions—the result of hasty cutting—unrealistic dialogue, two-dimensional characterization, moral ambiguity, and (said one of America’s leading novelists, Sinclair Lewis) a combination of “puerile slaughter” with “senile weariness.” Still others, however, praised what they saw as Hemingway’s awakened social consciousness, even while they were unsure of his political savvy. And Time, extoling his new “maturity of outlook,” gave him the big cover story he’d been longing for ever since he saw the one on Dos Passos—even though it hinted that his writing method was becoming dated.

  Predictably, Hemingway was infuriated and hurt by the negative press, refused to be comforted by the positive, and cabled Max Perkins frequently for sales reports. Here, fortunately, there was good news: the critical controversy—along with Hemingway’s heightened public profile and the fact that this was his first full-length work of fiction in eight years—meant that sales were brisk. At least he didn’t have to worry about that. As for the critics, he would remember the names of the ones who had ganged up on him, he promised. Meanwhile he wanted to get to work on something else.

  Not dispatches for NANA: there wasn’t enough news for that. And not, after the hard birth and uncertain welcome of To Have and Have Not, a new novel, or even the long short story about Spain he’d fleetingly considered over the summer. Instead he’d begun to write a play—a play about war correspondents and soldiers in Madrid that could draw on the material that hadn’t gone into NANA stories, the rich cache of characters, incident, and emotion that he had built up in his time in Spain. Its main character, Philip Rawlings, is a kind of idealized self-projection: a man as cynical as Jake Barnes, as sensitive as Frederic Henry, as tough as Harry Morgan; a man who, like Hemingway, enjoys raw onions and corned beef and Chopin records. A dedicated Communist who says, “My time is the Party’s time,” Rawlings uses his profession as a journalist as a cover for his real work as a counterspy for the Loyalists. Directed by his political commissar, Max, a man with teeth as bad as Koltsov’s, and by the secret police chief, Antonio, whose dove-gray wardrobe might have been filched from Pepe Quintanilla’s closet, Rawlings spends much of the play finding and questioning, and executing, suspected fifth columnists, committing what W. H. Auden, in a poem he’d written after his trip to Spain the previous spring, called “the necessary murder.” Rawlings believes that what he does is always justified. “Were there ever any mistakes?” he asks Antonio; but Hemingway knew the answer, which had already been spoken, at lunch with Virginia Cowles and Josie Herbst half a year before, by Pepe Quintanilla:

  ANTONIO: Oh, yes. Certainly. Mistakes. Oh, yes. Mistakes. Yes. Yes. Very regrettable mistakes. A very few.

  PHILIP: And how did the mistakes die?

  ANTONIO: All very well.

  In the play Rawlings and Max make a “mistake” of their own: the execution of a man who resists being brought to headquarters for questioning. “He would never have talked,” says Max, by way of excuse; at which the man’s comrade, whom they are about to interrogate, and who Rawlings believes is a weakling who will talk, cries accusingly, “You murdered him!” Perhaps John Dos Passos said the same thing when he learned what had happened to José Robles.

  When he’s not doing undercover work for the Republic, Rawlings is carrying on a love affair with a blond Vassar graduate named Dorothy Bridges, who writes—“quite well, too, when she’s not too lazy,” he says—for Cosmopolitan and other magazines; Rawlings tells Antonio that he would like to marry her “because she’s got the longest, smoothest, straightest legs in the world.” Although she has hung a sign on the door of her room at the Hotel Florida that says, “Working. Do Not Disturb,” Dorothy actually doesn’t seem to do much other than sleep, or buy silver fox furs that, Rawlings witheringly points out, cost the equivalent of four months’ pay for a member of the International Brigades. (“I don’t believe I know anyone who’s been out four months without getting hit—or killed,” he says.)

  Lone wolf though Rawlings is, Dorothy is attracted to him: in her dreams they will “work hard and have a fine life,” as well as two children who will roll hoops in the Jardin du Luxembourg. And he asks her “to marry me or stay with me all the time or go wherever I go, and be my girl.” But their relationship founders: by the play’s end Rawlings feels it truly is the “colossal mistake” he says it will be at the beginning. At one point Hemingway had wanted to blame its failure on Dorothy’s desire for marriage: if she’d just been content with being a mistress, Rawlings could have gone happily home to his wife once the affair was out of his system. Perhaps this scenario seemed altogether too close to Hemingway’s own triangulated situation for comfort, so he discarded it; instead, Rawlings concludes that Dorothy is a social parasite, a money-grubber, “uneducated,” “useless,” and “lazy”; she isn’t pure enough for a dedicated warrior like himself, and sex, the only thing she has to offer him, is only “a commodity.” In fact, the only things separating her from the whores de combat—one of whom says, pointing at the notice outside Dorothy’s door, “I’ll get me a sign like that too”—are her Vassar diploma and American passport. He breaks with her; and in parting she lands the one punch Hemingway allowed her: “Don’t be kind,” she admonishes him. “Only kind people should try being kind.”

  At the end of October, Hemingway wrote Pauline that he had finished the play, which he variously called Working: Do Not Disturb and But Not for Love (he would eventually settle on a more topical, less personal title: The Fifth Column), and he seemed confident enough in his achievement to talk it up among his circle in Madrid: Mikh
ail Koltsov mentioned it in his diary, although he was under the impression that it was a comedy. And Martha? She maintained to friends later that she thought Dorothy an affectionately parodic portrait of herself; but the play can’t have made easy reading for her.

  She was finding this autumn in Madrid difficult in many respects. She was working on a long story for Collier’s about the American brigadistas, a story that began with her observations of Belchite and the Brunete battlefield, but that devolved into an elegiac meditation on “the handsome land” that was being punished by the war, and the young men, some from very far away, “who came all this distance, neither for glory nor money and perhaps to die.” They “knew why they came,” Martha concluded, “and what they thought about living and dying, both. But it is nothing you can ask about or talk about. It belongs to them.”

  She was proud of the article, which she sent to her mother in St. Louis to read, and Collier’s liked it and wanted to publish it, the second piece of hers they’d taken; but she was suffering from “bad weather, bad tummy, cold feet and weltschmerz.” During the bitter nights she lay awake, thinking about the boys she’d interviewed for the Collier’s piece; after tossing and turning for an hour or so she’d take a sleeping pill at 4:30 and then couldn’t rouse herself before lunchtime. Hemingway wasn’t sympathetic: years afterward he would tell a friend that he hated to watch Martha when she was sleeping, because “no ambitious woman looks lovely when asleep.” Looking out the window of her room at the Florida, Martha saw a girl in the gutted house across the street chopping up her furniture to use for firewood. It made her think of herself and Hemingway. “So now the long winter starts,” Martha wrote in her journal: “So no doubt he and I will wear each other out, as millions have done so well before us, chipping a little each day, with just a little dig or a minor scratch, until it ends in fatigue and disgust, and years later we will be able to think of all this as a brief infatuation. Oh, God, either make it work or make it end now.”