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

by Vaill, Amanda

  Unlike Hemingway’s journalism pieces, but like his fiction, this story (as he would later write to Arnold Gingrich) “took charge of itself very quickly”; by 11:10 that evening he was cabling the finished version to Ken. And the next day Gingrich wired him that it was “marvelous,” adding: “THESE SHORT PUNCHES HAVE DONE MORE GOOD FOR LOYALIST CAUSE THAN VOLUMES ORDINARY REPORTING.”

  * * *

  Although she made copious notes as she and Hemingway and their companions chased the front along the Ebro, Martha wasn’t writing much for publication during this trip to Spain. She’d wanted to do a piece for Collier’s about the plight of the refugees she’d seen on the road and described in her journal; it would be like an account of “the last days of Pompeii,” she told her editors. But Collier’s wasn’t interested. “Stale by the time we publish,” they cabled back. The attention of the world had moved on to an increasingly probable European conflict, and the magazine wanted her to go to France, and England, and—now that Hitler was eyeing it so greedily—Czechoslovakia, and find out what was going on there. Rumors had begun to circulate that a German invasion—like the incursion into Austria in March—was imminent. If that happened a European war wouldn’t be far behind.

  Martha was torn. On the one hand, as she wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt, “What goes on here seems to be the affair of all of us who do not want a world whose bible is Mein Kampf.” Spain, she believed, was “fighting our battle”; and it should be “saved for decent people”—not fascists—because “it’s far too beautiful to waste.” But she sensed, even as Hemingway struggled not to, that the fight was over, that writing any more about Spain wouldn’t save it, that her work was elsewhere now. She begged off an excursion to the American brigade’s headquarters at Darmos for May Day celebrations because she couldn’t bear to listen to the hopeful and hortatory speeches that would be a part of it; and although Hemingway and Herbert Matthews were planning to travel to Madrid to report on conditions there she declined to accompany them, exasperated by the amount of red tape she’d have to cut through to get clearance.

  “Maybe,” she wrote in her diary, making herself feel better about her choices, “history is just a big stinking mess and a big injustice anyhow, and the victory is always wrong. But one thing is sure: good men are as absolute as the mountains and as fine, and as long as there are any good men then it is worth while to live and be with them And one cannot feel utterly hopeless about the future knowing that such people exist, whether they win or not.”

  At the beginning of May she went with Matthews and Hemingway to Marseille, from which they planned to fly into the Loyalists’ southern zone; then, by leisurely stages, she drove north to Paris. And on May 1, Prime Minister Negrín, one of her “good men,” released a thirteen-point peace manifesto, outlining the sort of government—a much-watered-down version of the Popular Front, with accommodation for private capital and an amnesty for the rebels—he envisioned for a postwar Spain, if the back-channel negotiations he’d been making to Franco through the Vatican and other parties resulted in an armistice. All he had to do was keep fighting until Franco said yes. He didn’t seem to understand that the only thing Franco was interested in was unconditional surrender.

  May 1938: Madrid

  Hemingway and Matthews arrived at the Hotel Florida on May 9. They’d flown down the coast the day before, the only two passengers in a twenty-two-seat plane, gazing out the windows at the brown hills—“like a dinosaur come to drink,” Hemingway said—that were all that stood between the Nationalist lines and Castellón and Valencia; and their visit to the front at Castellón had reassured them that the Nationalists’ steamroller advance seemed to have stalled, at least momentarily. Madrid cheered them up even more. Dropping in on their old haunts in the trenches in University City and talking to the soldiers, they’d concluded that Fortress Madrid was, as Hemingway described it, “unchanged and more solid than ever.” If Hemingway had had a crisis of confidence in Barcelona, two days of high-level military briefings were enough to cure it: they had plenty of guns and ammunition, the commanders told him, all they needed was more artillery, more planes, more automatic weapons, and they could win this thing. He wanted to believe them; “certainly there will be bitter fighting,” he cabled to NANA, “but there is a year of war clearly ahead where European diplomats are trying to say it will be over in a month.”

  The Hotel Florida, Hemingway and Matthews found, was outwardly the same as they remembered it, if slightly more shell-battered, with Don Cristóbal still tending his stamp collection at the reception desk; but the pilots and correspondents and whores de combat had for the most part moved on, and the raucous sense of life that had pervaded the place in the first year and a half of the war seemed to have ebbed away. In the lobby Hemingway ran into The Daily Worker’s Joe North, who had also come to check the situation in Madrid. As editor at The New Masses, North had been responsible for commissioning Hemingway’s “Who Killed the Vets” piece in 1935; and he’d watched the formerly apolitical Hemingway’s evolution into an engagé writer and antifascist spokesman with interest and some skepticism. Did he now try to probe the depth and nature of Hemingway’s commitment to antifascism? Whatever it was, Hemingway—beginning to chafe at the propagandist’s harness, and probably several drinks beyond rationality—turned swiftly pugnacious. “I like the Communists when they’re soldiers,” he said to North, doubtless thinking of Líster, Modesto, even the irascible Walter; “but when they’re priests I hate them.” North must have looked puzzled, because Hemingway went on to explain: “Yes, priests, the commissars who hand down the papal bulls.”

  Nonsense, North replied; the generals were good soldiers because of their political conviction, not in spite of it. He didn’t add, although he could have, What about your friend Gustav Regler, the political commissar? Or the Lincoln Brigade’s Marty Hourihan? Because by now Hemingway was dancing around the room on the balls of his feet, shadowboxing. “I keep fit that way,” he said, swiping at North. Then, sneering: “I suppose you keep fit reading Das Kapital.”

  Suddenly, as quickly as it had appeared, the black cloud of hostility blew away. Hemingway dropped his fists and started laughing. “Hell,” he told North, “I believe you’re one of the goddamn bishops.” Sketching a sacerdotal little bow, he held out the whiskey bottle. “Here, mi padre, a libation.”

  May 1938: Paris

  Martha had been zigzagging north, from Marseille up through the French Alps to the Napoleonic fortress town of Briançon, then across the vineyards and wheatfields of la France profonde, gathering material for a Collier’s article on the state of the country; and she reached Paris in the last week of May, just before Hemingway sailed for New York on the Normandie on May 25. “Am going home to see Pauline and the kids and take them wherever they want to go,” he’d written to a friend. “Have neglected my family very badly this year and would like to make it up.” Whether he’d be able to make it up was an open question: Pauline had already warned him not to come home and sulk, like last time. “If you are happy over there don’t come back here to be unhappy,” she’d told him. But he seemed reluctant to take responsibility for his happiness, or anyone else’s.

  As for Martha, once again watching her lover leave her behind: she was, as she wrote to her mother, “not exactly happy, but … being what the French call ‘reasonable.’ There isn’t anything left to be, I have tried everything else. I believe he loves me, and he believes he loves me, but I do not believe very much in the way one’s personal destiny works out, and I do not believe I can do anything about this.”

  What she could do was throw herself into her work. On the trip north she’d talked to postmen and metalworkers and border guards, noticed the new tanks rolling along the roads of Burgundy and the new fortifications in the high passes of Quercy. Now, in Paris she had meetings with the fascist Jacques Doriot and the Communist Maurice Thorez; and to fill out what she called “the bright or social end” of her article, she went to lunch with the Aga Khan, to the
races at Longchamp, to cocktails among the gratin—the upper crust. As her mother’s well-connected, socially conscious daughter, Martha had always moved easily between the picket line and the receiving line; her years with Bertrand de Jouvenel had given her entrée to the most exalted salons of Paris, and her time with Hemingway in Spain had put her on easy footing with the soldiers, politicians, and journalists in whose male-dominated club she enjoyed being the smart, sassy, good-looking “It” girl. She’d tested her own courage and perseverance in the back country and under fire, and—in her work on The Spanish Earth—her ability to pull strings. And her writing had taken on an authority and toughness that came from her increased self-assurance. Although she’d been sincere in her passion for la causa, now Spain had become just another thing to be angry about in a growing list of bigger things. She had moved on.

  “The war in Spain was one kind of war,” she wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt, already using the past tense; “the next world war will be the stupidest, lyingest, cruelest sell-out in our time.”

  * * *

  Behind on the rent again. Ilsa just couldn’t bear meeting Madame’s boot-button stare when she went past the desk in the hotel lobby; so it was Barea who sneaked down the stairs, waiting until the landlady’s back was turned before he darted out into the street. Hoping to find a friend from Spain who could lend him a little money, or at least give him a cigarette, he headed for the Dôme, on the corner where the rue Delambre intersected with the Boulevard Montparnasse. He scanned the crowd enjoying the spring evening on the terrasse under the black iron marquee: nobody he knew. So then, inside, where the din of conversation bounced off the tile floor and the smell of food made him light-headed. Still no one. But, at his customary seat at one end of the horseshoe-shaped bar, there was a little man Barea had noticed before, whose shiny suit and pencil mustache gave him a forlorn kind of respectability. The little man never spoke, just nursed a glass of Pernod and water from which he occasionally looked up, pointed at some unsuspecting person, and began gesticulating wildly and wordlessly at him before falling motionless again over his drink. This evening Barea caught a glimpse of his face, the eyes empty and dead, like the windows of one of the bombed apartment buildings in Madrid, and realized the man was mad.

  With that realization came another, a revelation, really: despite the fears that had haunted him for months, he himself was not going mad. Yes, he’d been weakened and traumatized; but the thing that had tormented him, that had both goaded him into action and destroyed his ability to act effectively, wasn’t terror, and wasn’t lunacy: it was the conflict within himself. He’d wanted to win his own war with society, but he’d refused to make any compromises to do it. He’d wanted to change, but he didn’t want to turn his back on who he was. Trying to avoid these contradictions had led him into a fog of denial and deprived him of the will to go forward. Suddenly he could see this, as the little man with his Pernod couldn’t see what was preying on him. And, he thought, he could fight his way out of it if he faced it and explored it.

  Even more important, exploring his own conflicts might help him explain, to himself, and maybe to others, the crisis of his generation in Spain. That was what he should be writing about, not propaganda, not human-interest reportage. He should tell his own story, the story of his childhood and coming of age in a world that was changing beyond recognition. He might not be a Hemingway, or a Dos Passos, but he could, he must, write the truth about what had happened to him and to his country. A writer who will not lie cannot live under fascism. He hadn’t been at Carnegie Hall to hear Hemingway say that, but he knew, perhaps better than Hemingway did, that it was true.

  For the first time in months, though he was still starving and penniless, he felt as if a weight had rolled off his shoulders.

  * * *

  On May 29, as a watery sun at last broke through the rain clouds that had hung like bunting over Paris for two days, two very different commemorative events were taking place.

  In the Avenue George V, at the American Cathedral, the U.S. ambassador, William Bullitt, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and France’s Marshal Pétain, hero of Verdun, among a multitude of others, attended a memorial service for the fallen soldiers of the Great War. Hymns were sung, “Taps” was played, and at the ceremony’s end the flags of Britain, the United States, and France, which had been carried into the sanctuary, were dipped in tribute. Afterward, a detachment of the Garde Républicaine and the 24th Colonial Regiment accompanied Ambassador Bullitt to the Arc de Triomphe, where he solemnly laid a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

  At the other end of Paris, a crowd numbering in the thousands—factory workers, officials of the French Communist Party, young women, old men, Spanish war orphans—converged on Père-Lachaise cemetery, at whose wall 147 holdouts of the Paris Commune had been gunned down and shoveled into a mass grave fifty-eight years before. The crowd’s banners and placards fluttered in the spring breeze: Unity! they cried; Jobs for the Young, Retirement for the Old! And also, Down with Fascism! Help the Spanish Republic! End the Embargo! As the marchers approached the sacred wall, whose stones were still riddled with bullet holes from the volleys that had killed the Communard martyrs, some noticed a new installation: the grave of Gerda Taro, which lay nearby, had finally been marked by a stone.

  And not just any stone. On the gray slab that had been placed over the grave the Italian sculptor Alberto Giacometti had erected a kind of bier made from granite blocks, in the center of which rose a rectangular stele bearing Gerda’s name, her birth and death dates (the former a year later than her actual date of birth), and the inscription: KILLED IN JULY, 1937, ON THE FRONT AT BRUNETE SPAIN IN THE EXERCISE OF HER PROFESSION. In front of the stele, at one corner of the stone bier, was an empty stone bowl, like a ritual vessel; to the side of the plinth was the carved, elementally simple figure of a bird—whether dove or falcon, or something else, it was difficult to say.

  Giacometti was already famous as a sculptor, and getting him to make a monument for Gerda was no small undertaking, although as a leftist he was sympathetic to the cause for which she died. The editors at Ce Soir, among them Louis Aragon, Giacometti’s friend, took responsibility for persuading him to accept the commission; but then there was the matter of his fee. The person who paid that was Capa.

  June–July 1938: Key West

  Hemingway’s homecoming had not, so far, been a success. Stopping briefly in New York after he landed, he’d gone to dinner with Jay Allen and his wife in Washington Square, pumping them with questions about Pauline’s probable state of mind, and blaming his sister-in-law, Jinny Pfeiffer, for telling Pauline lies about him. Martha was never mentioned. He flew to Miami the next day, then on to Key West, where Pauline met his plane, having protected herself with company—their sons, Patrick and Gigi, and a family friend, Toby Bruce—for the drive back to Whitehead Street. Martha was still not mentioned. But the atmosphere in the car was strained; and five minutes after they started out, at the intersection of Simonton and United streets, Hemingway drove his Ford convertible into the ancient car of a WPA worker named Samuel Smart. Smart’s car rolled over and landed on the sidewalk, but fortunately Smart wasn’t hurt. He was angry, though, and he and Hemingway leaped from their cars and started shouting at each other in the middle of the street; even the arrival of a police officer didn’t stop them, so the policeman arrested them both and took them to Police Court.

  Although the judge ended up dismissing the case as trivial, things were off to a bad start. Back at Whitehead Street there were raised voices and wounded feelings, and again Martha’s name wasn’t uttered. But Hemingway, defensive about his own behavior, now went on the offensive against friends and business associates he claimed were trying to stiff him or slight him. In the process he used his activities in Spain as a weapon, indulging in a kind of grandiose chest-thumping that made him sound almost like a caricature of himself.

  He accused Jack Wheeler, at NANA, of holding back payments for articles and expenses
and not appreciating the pains and risks he’d taken to report his stories: covering the fronts at Castellón and Madrid, he complained, had required him “to come out from Toulouse, go to Marseilles, wait there for a plane to fly, for visa, non-intervention and Spanish. The Italians shot down this sort of plane when running between Santander and France and if they had known I was aboard you can be sure they would have tried for it.”

  He attacked Archie MacLeish for not repaying him money he’d put into Contemporary Historians for The Spanish Earth, and for maintaining that those funds should be used to help Spain—which after all was the Historians’ stated objective. He listed, with rhetorical flourishes and some exaggeration, the engagements he’d been in (or just missed being in) in Spain, making it sound like he’d been a combatant and not a reporter, then sneered: “When you write that the only effect of paying a certain amount which was promised to be re-paid to me of a very large amount I had furnished ‘would be to make less money available for ambulances etc’ I laugh at you … What did you ever give, my boy?” After telling MacLeish to “keep your long Scotch mouth shut,” he fired one Parthian shot: “Much love to your wife and children—and you know what I think of you because I told you one time.”

  He fought with the people—he referred to them as “the jews”—trying to produce The Fifth Column on Broadway, who were having trouble raising capitalization for the show; he wrangled with Max Perkins about the edition of his collected stories, because Perkins wanted him to cut explicitly sexual language from “Up in Michigan,” and seemed dubious about including the script of The Fifth Column as the lead-in to the story collection, as Hemingway was proposing.