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

by Vaill, Amanda

  Even his writing became a battleground. The first piece he sent to Ken on his return from Spain was entitled “Treachery in Aragon,” and it laid the blame for the government’s recent retreat not on insufficient matériel or the Nationalists’ superior strength, but on the betrayals of fifth columnists (supporting details, he claimed, were too sensitive to be included in the article). As corollary evidence of widespread perfidy Hemingway cited the case of the American writer, “a very good friend of mine,” who’d refused to believe that a Spanish associate of his could possibly have been a traitor. “I happened to know,” asserted Hemingway, “this man had been shot as a spy after a long and careful trial in which all the charges against him had been proven.” The references to Dos Passos, and to Robles, were obvious.

  They were less obvious but also present in a short story he’d begun in Paris and completed soon after his return to Key West: “The Denunciation,” set in Chicote’s Bar in Madrid, in which the narrator tells a waiter how to denounce a man he knows to the secret police. “I would never denounce him myself,” he says, although to protect the waiter he later claims to have been involved in doing so. “I am a foreigner and it is your war and your problem.” Betrayal and responsibility—other people’s if not his own—were almost all he could think about now.

  When he wasn’t writing he was traveling to New York for the Joe Louis–Max Schmeling fight at Madison Square Garden, which he reported on, jokingly, for Ken; or refereeing semipro boxing matches at Key West’s Blue Goose arena; or sparring with a young, unsuccessful boxer named Mario Perez; or telling a gullible journalist from the Key West Citizen that in his youth he’d been an amateur boxing champion. Or he was fishing in the Gulf Stream, on the Pilar.

  He returned from one such trip, at the beginning of July, to discover Pauline, dressed as a hula dancer, grass skirt and all, preparing for a costume party at the Havana Madrid nightclub to celebrate the opening of the Overseas Highway to the mainland. Refusing, angrily, to go with her, he stomped off to his locked writing room—but he couldn’t find the key. Before Pauline knew what he was doing, he’d pulled out a pistol and was waving it around: God damn it, I’ll shoot it open. Pauline tried to reason with him—let’s just look for the key—but he couldn’t be talked to. Instead he fired the gun, first at the ceiling, then at the door, breaking the lock; finally he barricaded himself inside the room.

  Pauline sent the children to stay with the neighbors, but went on to the nightclub as planned. A few hours later Hemingway showed up there—the black mood seemingly dissipated—but soon started a fight with one of the guests. Punches were thrown, furniture was broken. Pauline was furious.

  Shortly afterward, they celebrated, if that was the right word for it, their joint birthdays—his thirty-ninth, on July 21, her forty-third, on the twenty-second—and started packing for another family trip to the L Bar T Ranch. They’d missed going last year; perhaps Pauline thought that some time in the mountains would restore their equilibrium. For his part, Hemingway wrote to his mother-in-law from the ranch, if he’d hired someone to run his life badly, he could hardly have made a more thorough mess of it.

  June–July 1938: Paris

  Ilsa had had a windfall: 180 francs for a bit of business translation; and with these unimaginable riches she and Barea bought a little spirit stove and a frying pan, and some forks and spoons and knives and plates, so they could cook and eat in their room at the Hotel Delambre. The purchase did more than provide them with food: for Barea, it became a way to recapture the world he was trying to portray in the book he had started, haltingly, to write.

  Every day he’d go to the marché du quartier, the market at the top of their street, looking for fresh sardines and potatoes to sauté in oil the way his mother had done in their attic in Lavapiés, or squid—the cheapest thing at the fishmonger—to serve in a sauce of squid ink, fragrant with garlic and bay leaves and brightened with vinegar; and hovering over the spirit stove, in front of the cold black hearth, he would keep up a running commentary for Ilsa as he cooked. The alleys and parks of Madrid, the fields around his grandparents’ house at Brunete, all were summoned with the hiss of the sardines in the hot oil and the scent of garlic, returning to him the Spain he had lost. And when he and Ilsa had finished eating and had washed their dishes in the tiny sink, the images and tastes and sounds and smells of his old life formed themselves into words almost as soon as he sat down at Tom Delmer’s old typewriter.

  It was doubly painful, after an afternoon immersing himself in his past, to pass the news kiosk on the corner and read today’s headlines about Spain, where—after retreating and regrouping and resting from the fascist onslaught of April—the government’s army was now making a desperate new offensive. Since his tentative peace overtures to the Nationalists in the spring had failed, Prime Minister Negrín, who was also minister of war, had decided to throw the army, now rested and enhanced by the addition of new conscripts, as young as sixteen and as old as thirty-five, into a three-pronged surprise attack back across the Ebro. If it was successful, he hoped, it would give him leverage to make a deal with Franco. And even if it wasn’t, if he could just keep the fighting going on long enough, the crisis in Czechoslovakia, where Hitler was now warning he might have to “march to the rescue” of the country’s German minority, would bring about the long-feared European war—and Britain and France, desperate to keep Spain from being taken over by Hitler’s allies, would at last intervene in the Republic’s behalf. Or so Negrín believed.

  On the moonless night of July 25, Republican troops began crossing the river on hastily constructed pontoon bridges, followed by rafts and assault boats. At first a salient was pushed into Nationalist territory; but almost as soon as the offensive began Franco threw all his resources into crushing it. Divisions were brought back from the area around Castellón to join the counterattack; dams in the high Pyrenees were destroyed, sending floodwaters rushing down the Ebro to sweep away bridges; and three hundred aircraft from the Condor Legion, the Italian Legionary Air Force, and the Nationalists’ own air squadrons pounded the infantry positions, and the vastly outnumbered Republican air force, with impunity. As July turned into August the two armies were locked into a bloody, seemingly hopeless struggle near Gandesa, and optimism was hard to come by.

  At the corner bistrot, Barea listened to the workers arguing: Why should they fight for their country when Spain showed you what happened if you risked your life for freedom? When they turned to him, a Spaniard, and asked what he thought, he couldn’t answer.

  July 1938: Hankow

  If Capa had not had a bad case of dysentery he might have gone to the races on July 14: the Race Club was still one of the centers of social life in Hankow, the treaty port on the mile-wide Yangtse River that, after the fall of Nanking in March, had become the wartime capital of China. The club grounds, which looked as if they belonged on the Berkshire Downs instead of in the middle of the steaming green Hupei plain, were located at the outskirts of the tile-roofed Chinese city that had grown up around the European-style buildings of the waterfront Bund; and on a good afternoon the grandstand boxes were crowded with everyone who was anyone in Hankow society: Madame Chiang Kai-shek, the American leftist journalist and aid worker Agnes Smedley, the British ambassador, Sir Archibald Kerr, General Chou En-lai, or any one of the number of émigré Russian princes or princesses who had drifted eastward to Hankow in the years since the October Revolution.

  Today, Capa was not among them. In addition to the dysentery he was suffering from Hankow’s 100-degree summer heat and humidity: “if it’s not the runs, it’s the sweats,” he wrote to his friend Peter Koester, his contact in Léon Daniel’s photo agency in New York, “and I can hardly stand up.” A year earlier he had been in Paris, dancing with Gerda in the streets of Montmartre; he wished desperately that he were back there now. His heart still ached for her: he’d brought a small valise full of prints of the photo he’d taken of her with her May Day bunch of muguet, and in China he gave
them to nearly everyone he met, telling them she’d been his wife. Beyond that, however, he never spoke of her; it was important for his own self-preservation to seal off the part of himself that could be hurt, and to enjoy—or to seem to enjoy—friends, women, money, life itself. His new acquaintances, such as the English poets W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, with whom he and John Ferno had become friendly on the long sea voyage from Marseille, were enchanted by his merriment, his cries of “Eh, quoi, salop!” when he met them on deck, his “drooping black comedian’s eyes”; but they didn’t realize what lay behind the ribald tough-guy disguise.

  He’d been in China since the end of February, following and assisting Joris Ivens and Ferno as they shot the film that would become The Four Hundred Million. Although Peter Koester told him that the pictures he’d been able to send back to New York—including shots of a Chinese victory at the walled town of Taierhchwang, unprecedented coverage of one of Chiang Kai-shek’s cabinet meetings, and a series showing peasants fleeing the defensive flooding of the Yellow River—were “first class … technically, reportagewise, better than your Spanish work,” Capa was having a difficult time of it. Part of the problem was financial: Ce Soir, which had originally promised to underwrite his China trip, had reneged (although they did give him a token advance against payment for photos they bought); Ivens likewise balked at paying for his passage out, although he did agree to cover his expenses in China; and his Life retainer wasn’t enough to make much of a difference, particularly since he was sending back money to pay for Gerda’s gravestone and to support her brother and her father, Heinrich. In addition, in the time since he’d originally proposed the project to Richard de Rochemont, other photographers had arrived to cover the war, among them a former Dephot man named Walter Bosshard, working for the Black Star agency but competing with Capa for space in Life.

  But the truly painful thing for Capa was that Ivens, and the Chinese, were treating him like the director’s hireling. He wasn’t allowed to pursue independent reportages but had to stay with Ivens and Ferno; and Ivens forbade him to take still photos of material that was to be featured in the film. “I am the ‘poor relation’ of the expedition,” he wrote to Peter Koester. “They are fine fellows, but the movie is their private affair (and they let me feel that), and the still pictures are completely secondary.” There was also trouble with Chiang’s Chinese censors, who wanted to prevent any coverage of “backward” peasant life or of the Communist leadership of their Eighth Route Army; waiting for clearance to cover what he and the filmmakers were allowed to photograph, Capa spent too much time kicking his heels in the flyblown White Russian bars along Dump Street—the Navy Bar, or Mary’s, or the Last Chance—wishing he could go back to Europe, or looking forward to the day when Ivens and Ferno finished shooting and left him alone in China to take the pictures he wanted.

  And then the Japanese, advancing ever farther into the Chinese interior, began bombing Hankow. First they attacked strategic targets: the airfield, and the railroad tracks, and the godowns on the waterfront; but then—as had happened in Spain, as would happen in Poland, and France, and Britain, and Germany—it was the civilians’ turn. On July 19, Imperial Japanese Air Force bombers pummeled theaters, temples, churches, and houses with incendiary bombs, killing hundreds in one strike. The next day, Capa went to photograph the smoking aftermath, capturing images of firefighters and rescue workers searching through the wreckage for bodies; but the filmmakers had a prior engagement elsewhere and he had to stop work and go with them. “Unfortunately,” Capa wrote Koester, “the story is incomplete. I wanted to finish it the next day (they now come over daily), but on the 20th there was only an alarm, no bombing.”

  He had no sooner typed these words than he seemed to hear them—hear the sound of the journalist so hungry for a story he forgets that real people are dying to make it happen. And he was horrified, wanted to take them back. “Slowly I am feeling more and more like a hyena,” he admitted to Koester, and he hated to “make money at the expense of other people’s skins.” If you were a combat photographer, he told Koester, the thing you should want more than anything in the world was to be out of a job. Even his work seemed to hold no joy for him just now.

  But in addition to the “first-class” pictures he was taking—one of which, a portrait of a child soldier in the People’s Army, became one of only two Life covers in his career—he was getting something else out of his China sojourn. He was learning English, the lingua franca of Ivens and Ferno’s film crew, and of most of the expatriate community of Hankow. Although he would later say, mockingly, that he’d “won his English in a crap game in Shanghai,” he actually worked hard trying to master the alien grammar and idioms. Usually he wrote in French in the work notebooks he kept, but in China he began trying to do so in English, for practice. And on one piece of foolscap, along with notes on some of his pictures, he typed a misspelled but revealing sentence: “He was best [beset?] b[y] per[s]onal troubles with his co-workers and missed his Europe grievously.”

  September 1938: Prague

  On September 12, after months of threats and demands about the “self-determination” of ethnic Germans living in Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland, Adolf Hitler delivered an ultimatum: unless the Czech president, Eduard Benes, put an end to what Hitler called the “oppression” of the Sudeten Germans, steps would be taken.

  Benes had already offered the Sudetens regional self-government as well as a massive loan to stimulate Sudeten industry; but this wasn’t enough for the Führer. He wanted that mountainous slice of Czechoslovakia for himself. And once he got it, as should have been obvious to anyone not bent on self-deception, he would want more.

  France, tied by treaty to defend Czechoslovakia in case of invasion, began a limited mobilization. But the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, hoped to avoid a conflict by appeasing Hitler; and the French, realizing they couldn’t stand alone against Germany, agreed to negotiate instead of fight. By September 20, Chamberlain and the French premier, Édouard Daladier, had worked out a plan whereby Czechoslovakia would be urged to cede all German-speaking areas of the country to the Reich, in return for a vague guarantee of sovereignty for what was left over. And Hitler asked Daladier, Chamberlain, and Italy’s Mussolini to come to Munich to formalize the agreement. The Czechs were not invited to discuss the dismemberment of their country. At his residence in Prague, the medieval Hradçany Castle, Eduard Benes went into seclusion.

  Martha Gellhorn, who had just been reunited with Hemingway and was enjoying a brief holiday with him on the Côte d’Azur, heard this news with dismay. She’d declined to return to the United States with him in May—there was no point, she’d decided, being “within telephoning distance of something you can’t telephone to”; instead she’d remained in Europe all summer, continuing to work on her article about France and finishing two intensively reported, increasingly indignant pieces for Collier’s about the public mood in Britain and in Czechoslovakia. At the beginning of September, Hemingway had arrived in Paris with a contract from NANA to cover what his editors were sure was the impending European war. Before leaving the L Bar T, he’d somehow smoothed Pauline’s ruffled feathers, enough that she’d taken a short-term lease on a New York apartment whose “golden key” she promised to send him, believing that he’d return from Europe soon and rejoin her. But in Paris he’d promptly reset his compass; anyone watching him and Martha as they sat in the sun on the terrasse at Café Weber, on the rue Royale, or holding hands as he walked with her down the street, would have thought Martha the only woman in his life.

  With Europe hovering on the brink of war, however, Collier’s wanted Martha in Czechoslovakia, not Paris or the Riviera, and she had to cut short their reunion and fly to Prague. Hemingway, despite his brief from NANA to cover a wider European conflict, didn’t go with her. Was he reluctant to blow his alibi by filing dispatches from Czechoslovakia when Martha was also reporting from the same place? Or honoring his promise to Pauline to stay awa
y from potential combat? Or was he angry with Martha for paying more attention to an assignment than to him? In the preface to his soon-to-be-published collection of stories he’d set forth a kind of manifesto: “In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dulled … and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well oiled in the closet, but unused.” Now, however, he took his instrument and went pheasant shooting in the Sologne, then headed back to Paris to work on two Spanish war stories for Esquire.

  * * *

  Prague, thought Claud Cockburn, was just like Madrid in ’36—all the same people seemed to be turning up (himself included). Next thing you know, we’ll have shells falling on the hotel. In his dual capacity as correspondent for both The Week and The Daily Worker, he’d gone to see the Soviet ambassador, anxious to find out what Russia’s position in the Czech crisis would be: for Russia was also a party to the Franco-Czech mutual defense treaty and could step in to defend Czechoslovakia with its formidable air force if France agreed to do its part. Almost the first person he saw at the embassy was Mikhail Koltsov, from whom little had been heard since he’d been recalled to Moscow from Spain almost a year previously. It was a relief to know he was not only alive, seemingly unscathed by Stalin’s purges, but still writing for Pravda; and excerpts from his “Spanish Diary” had been running in the magazine Novyi Mir to considerable acclaim. Perhaps not coincidentally, Pravda had also just published an article by his friend Ernest Hemingway on “the barbarism of Fascist interventionists in Spain”; if Koltsov had helped to snare this big-name American author for Pravda’s pages, surely that would help keep him in Stalin’s good graces?