by Preston Paul
Once in Madrid, she was given a safe-conduct by the military authorities, dated 3 April 1937.36 Given that Dos Passos did not reach Valencia until 8 April, this would mean that she had enquired about Robles about a week before he arrived. It could be, as Elinor Langer suggests, that she was innocently asking for Robles simply because Dos Passos had given her his name as someone that she ought to meet. In her published account, her informant chose to unburden himself or herself to Josie about the authorities’ concerns regarding Dos Passos and the Robles case only because, she was told, it was known that Dos Passos was an old friend of hers. If the informant was Constancia de la Mora, she could certainly have been told about this friendship by Liston Oak, a fellow American leftist and a mutual acquaintance of both Josie and Dos Passos. Yet for all that they were friends, in neither her published version nor in her unpublished diary did Josie record telling Dos Passos anything about the case, although it is extremely unlikely that he had not confided in her his worries about Robles.
All subsequent accounts of the Robles case and its damaging impact on the Hemingway-Dos Passos friendship have taken their cue from Josephine Herbst’s account published in 1960. That version goes as follows. For all that she was sworn to secrecy, Josie did choose to tell Hemingway. She says that he broached the subject first, after the particularly frightening artillery bombardment that shook the Hotel Florida at dawn on 22 April. Just after she had snapped at him, tired and tetchy, saying that she didn’t feel like being a Girl Scout, he invited her to his room for a brandy, not so much to console her as to urge her to tell Dos Passos to stop stirring things up over the Robles case: ‘It was going to throw suspicion on all of us and get us into trouble. This was a war.’ He informed her that Pepe Quintanilla, the ‘head of the Department of Justice’, had already told Dos Passos that Robles was still alive and would get a fair trial. He went on to say that Quintanilla was ‘a swell guy’ and that she should get to know him. She was initially inhibited by her promise of secrecy, and less than impressed by his fears that Dos Passos’ insistent enquiries were fomenting unease among the denizens of the Hotel Florida. However, in the face of Hemingway’s brash confidence that all was well with Robles, she finally blurted out what she knew.
She portrays herself as outraged by what seemed to be Pepe Quintanilla’s duplicity, although her memories of him were probably coloured by a later encounter with him: ‘I could not believe Quintanilla so good a guy if he could let Dos Passos remain in anguished ignorance or if the evidence was so clear as not to admit contradiction. I felt that Dos should be told, not because he might bring danger down on us but because the man was dead.’ Thus, she revealed that Robles had been shot as a spy – ‘Quintanilla should have told Dos’. On hearing this, Hemingway apparently had no difficulty in accepting that Robles was a fascist spy. Josie insisted that Dos Passos be told but in a way that the information would not seem to be coming from her. She concocted a rather ramshackle and devious solution to safeguard her own promise of silence, although hardly the cruelly sinister one imagined by Stephen Koch in his book on the subject. She suggested that Ernest pass on the bad news but say only that he had been told by ‘someone from Valencia who was passing through but whose name he must withhold’. Hemingway, who was happy to accept without question that Robles had been guilty of espionage, apparently agreed with ‘too cheerful a readiness – I don’t think he doubted for a minute that Robles was guilty if Quintanilla said so’. And there was an imminent opportunity to tell Dos Passos whatever it was they had planned, for all the correspondents were about to go to a lunch at the headquarters of the XV International Brigade that very afternoon.37
Now, it is certainly the case that, on the morning of 22 April, when he shaved so calmly and appeared so at ease, Dos Passos still entertained hope that Robles might not be dead. He had made enquiries at the United States Embassy and been told by a third party that Robles had been seen alive in a prison camp by the United States Military Attaché, Colonel Stephen Fuqua, on 26 March.38 However, by midmorning of 22 April, little hope remained. The encounter between Josie and Hemingway over a snifter of brandy did not take place quite as described in ‘The Starched Blue Sky of Spain’. What Josie wrote in her diary at the time makes much more sense: ‘Dos comes in. Has found out Robles executed. Wants to investigate. Discuss with Hem danger of D. investigating. R. bad egg given fair trial – give away military secrets.’ Accordingly, there was no need for a devious plot to work out how to tell Dos Passos that Robles was dead. On the other hand, there was a need to explain to him why it had happened and perhaps thereby stop him stirring things up about it. It is reasonable to assume that Dos Passos had left the room when Josie and Hemingway started to discuss ‘the danger of Dos investigating’. If Hemingway was right and Robles was ‘a bad egg’, had been given a fair trial and been found guilty of giving away military secrets, then that was what Dos Passos should be told. In her June 1939 letter to Bruce Bliven of the New Republic, Josephine Herbst wrote: ‘It has always seemed to me and did then that it was a tragic mistake not to give Dos whatever evidence there was about the case and of the death.’39 This suggests not that she had wanted him to be told that Robles was dead – after all, he already knew – but to be informed of the process that had led to his arrest and execution.
Later that day, a long lunch party took place at a castle that had once belonged to the Duque de Tovar, near El Escorial. The fiesta was being held to celebrate the incorporation of the XV International Brigade into the Republican Army. It was there that Dos Passos was to be told. But told what? He already knew that Robles was dead but not the circumstances. It is extremely likely that his informant that morning had been Pepe Quintanilla. As Comisario General de Investigación y Vigilancia, he was one of the very few people in a position to know what had happened and even to know about the existence of Grigulevich and the Brigada Especial. Moreover, as the brother of Dos Passos’ intimate friend Luis Quintanilla, Pepe was the only person in the know prepared to talk to him. In 1939, Dos Passos referred to having been told regretfully by ‘the then chief of the Republican counterespionage service’ [Pepe Quintanilla] of Robles’ death at the hands of ‘a special section’. In his later novel, he invents a party where ‘Juanito Posada’ (Pepe Quintanilla) told him: ‘The man has been shot.’ When ‘Jay Pignatelli’ (Dos) asked why, ‘Juanito Posada’ replied: ‘Who knows? We are living in terrible times. To overcome them we have to be terrible ourselves.’40 Although the time and place are different in the novel, there is no doubt that it was Pepe who revealed that Robles had been shot and that he did so on the morning of 22 April. The tone of what little is known of Pepe’s explanation suggests a desire to let Dos Passos down as gently as possible. Years later, Luis Quintanilla told a friend in New York that Robles had been arrested because he was known to have handed sensitive information to the fifth column. To soften the blow, Pepe refrained from telling Dos Passos that his friend was a fascist spy. That is surely what Josie Herbst and Hemingway decided to tell him. If anything would make Dos Passos stop making awkward enquiries and embarrassing himself as well as them, surely that would.41
Whatever Hemingway told Dos Passos, he allegedly did so in the most abrupt and insensitive way. According to his biographer, Townsend Ludington, Dos Passos was distressed by ‘Ernest’s abrasive manner and secretiveness, which seemed to him a kind of treason’.42 What happened that day at the fiesta for the XV Brigade has been widely seen as the culmination of the breakdown of the Hemingway–Dos Passos relationship. Certainly, Dos Passos wrote in his novel that: ‘The fiesta out at the Fifteenth Brigade broke my heart.’ Yet, in his contemporary factual account, ‘The Fiesta at the Fifteenth Brigade’, he made no mention of any unpleasantness with Hemingway. Nor, in her diary, does Josephine Herbst, who says only that he and Dos sat together at lunch. In her published version, she comments only on Dos’ agitation at the fact that Hemingway would not reveal the identity of the ‘someone from Valencia who was passing through’. Obviously he could
not do so since the ‘someone’ was an invention of Josie. However, in her 1939 letter to Bruce Bliven, she wrote: ‘It should be remembered that Dos hated war of all kinds and suffered in Madrid not only from the fate of his friend but from the attitude of certain people on the fringe of war who appeared to be taking it as a sport. A deep revulsion followed.’
According to Stephen Koch, what Josie and Hemingway planned to do at the International Brigade lunch was publicly to humiliate Dos Passos, expose him in public as the friend of a fascist spy: ‘she had quietly and discreetly handed Hemingway the exact weapon she knew he was looking for. And then, just as quietly and discreetly, she had shown him how to use it.’43 There is no evidence whatsoever to justify this assertion. Whatever Hemingway said to Dos Passos, he said quietly as they talked together. There is no mention of any of this malice in either of Josie’s versions. And there is good reason to think that, if there was malice aforethought, she would have said so in her diary. For Josie Herbst was not without a nasty side, but it was focused not on the enemies of the Comintern but on women prettier than herself who got more attention than she did. While waiting for the car to go to lunch, she watched the glamorous Martha Gellhorn with loathing: ‘Pushing whore like M gets pretty much around on what she’s got. Don’t mean in the head. The pants. Plays all. Take all. Never speaks of anyone not a name. Glib stupid tongue.’ When they arrived at the fiesta, she switched her venom to María Teresa de León, the sensual blonde wife of the poet Rafael Alberti, who was the centre of all male attention: ‘Marie T in coral earrings & brooch, scarf, stouter & lush.’ Josie was irritated to see María Teresa, chirping trivialities like birdsong, surrounded by admiring men. The fact that less attention was paid to her than to the beautiful and the famous is by far the greatest preoccupation of Josie’s account of the fiesta.44
Pepe Quintanilla’s role in the Robles case was almost certainly confined to telling Dos Passos about the execution and giving him a sanitized version of how it had come about. However, he seems by association to have acquired an aura of guilt in the affair. This picture of Pepe Quintanilla as a monster who typified the Republican security services derives from the accounts by Josie Herbst and Virginia Cowles of a lunch with him and Hemingway on 28 April. Because of Josie’s published account, and the fact that he is loosely portrayed as Antonio, the ‘thin-lipped’ security chief in Act II of Hemingway’s The Fifth Column, Quintanilla has been enshrined in Carlos Baker’s phrase as the ‘thin-lipped executioner of Madrid’. A week after the fiesta for the XV Brigade, Hemingway, Virginia Cowles and Josephine Herbst were having lunch at the restaurant of the Hotel Gran Vía. Virginia noticed ‘a fastidious-looking man dressed from head to toe in dove grey. He had the high forehead and long fingers of the intellectual and wore horn-rimmed spectacles which added to his thoughtful appearance.’ Noticing her interest, Hemingway could not resist showing off his inside knowledge and his contacts, saying dramatically, ‘That is the chief executioner of Madrid’, and inviting Pepe to join them. He did so on the condition that they let him buy them another carafe of wine.
First Pepe regaled them with stories of the first days of the war when foolhardy Madrileños had stormed the Montaña barracks where the rebels had made their stronghold. As Quintanilla spoke, shells began to rain down and he coolly counted the explosions, pouring wine, one, talking, then two, three, four. By the time he got to ten, the air was thick with fear. As the wine flowed ever more freely, Pepe kept counting, flushed now and increasingly drunk. When Hemingway pressed Pepe to talk about the struggle against the fifth column, the atmosphere grew even thicker. Hemingway beamed and the women squirmed as he told them about an officer who soiled himself ‘huddled in a corner’ then ‘had to be carried out and shot like a dog’. Nevertheless, when two soldiers and a girl walked, arm in arm, down the middle of the street in the direction from which the shells were coming, a frantic Quintanilla tried solicitously to stop them.
When Hemingway said he wanted to get back because he was worried about ‘the blonde’ (la rubia), Martha, Quintanilla wouldn’t hear of it and insisted that they wait until the danger was over. He ordered brandy and began to flirt outrageously with Virginia, which did not endear him to Josie, who was sourly wondering how Miss Cowles managed to get down the rubble-strewn Gran Vía from the Florida to the restaurant on such high heels. Quintanilla said he would divorce his wife, marry Virginia and make his wife do the cooking. At the time, they all laughed but, in retrospect, Virginia Cowles remembered only what she took to be sadism in ‘his bright marble-brown eyes’. When they left the restaurant, Hemingway said to her: ‘Now remember, he’s mine.’ He thus gave the game away, revealing that he saw Pepe both as a prize with which to show off his own privileged status and also as a unique source and even as a character in a short story or a play. He later used the conversation about the deaths of rightists in his play The Fifth Column, rendering Pepe as ‘Antonio’.45
This hair-raising lunch took place after a distressed Dos Passos had left Madrid. He spent some time in Fuentidueña del Tajo, a village where he wanted to film an irrigation project for the documentary Spanish Earth. Then he went back one more time to Valencia to tell Márgara Villegas what he had learned and to try in vain to get some answers from Julio Álvarez del Vayo. The minister still knew nothing, but at least he promised to try to secure a death certificate so that Márgara could collect José’s life insurance.46 The fact that he did not do so would rankle with Dos Passos in later years. However, in a letter to Claude Bowers at the time, he commented: ‘As nothing has come from Del Vayo, I imagine he has forgotten about it, certainly he has enough on his shoulders not to remember small personal details.’47 In fact, Del Vayo was replaced as Foreign Minister in mid-May 1937 and was unable to fulfil his promise. If Dos Passos did indeed inform Márgara Villegas of what he had been told, neither she nor her children chose to believe him. Letters written by Coco show that they continued to hope for more than two and a half months after Dos Passos’ departure from Spain. At the end of April, Dos Passos left for France, stopping en route for a few days in Barcelona.
Someone else in the Catalan capital was Liston Oak, who had been trying to get away from his job in Valencia for some time, citing health problems. He had spent time in Madrid in April; he was investigating the possibility of opening a bureau there. He was photographed there with Hemingway and Virginia Cowles in mid-April. Given the camaraderie among the correspondents in the Hotel Florida, it is highly unlikely that he did not also see Dos Passos. Unnerved by the constant bombardments, he returned to Valencia. He stayed only long enough to collect his belongings and left for Barcelona, telling his boss, Constancia de la Mora, that it was merely for a short visit. It is not clear whether he planned to stay there, given a burgeoning sympathy with the POUM, or was already intending to return to the USA. At the Valencia press office, it took some weeks before they realized that he would not be coming back.48
In Barcelona, Dos Passos visited POUM headquarters and spoke with Juan Andrade and Andreu Nin.49 According to his fictionalized account, in his hotel lobby, he also bumped into George Orwell:
a gangling Englishman with his arm in a sling. He was wearing a threadbare uniform. A squashed overseas cap on the side of his head nestled in abundant wavy black hair. His long face with deep lines in the cheeks, was distinguished by a pair of exceptionally fine dark eyes. They had a farsighted look, like a seaman’s eyes. […] an extraordinary sense of relaxation came over him when he realized he was talking to an honest man. All these weeks since he’d landed in that horrid Casa de la Cultura in Valencia he hadn’t dared talk frankly to anyone. At first he was afraid of saying something that would endanger his chances of smuggling Ramón [José Robles] out of the country and afterwards he was afraid some misinterpreted word of his might lessen Amparo’s [Márgara] chances of getting out with the children.50
Although the notion of him smuggling José Robles and his family out of Spain was entirely invented, there is no reason to doubt tha
t Dos Passos met Orwell. It is confirmed elsewhere, although it should be noted that, in the novel, he places the meeting during the May Days, when in fact he had already left Barcelona. Eighteen years later, in his factual account, Dos Passos wrote in similar terms of Orwell:
His face had a sick drawn look. I suppose he was already suffering from the tuberculosis that later killed him. He seemed inexpressibly weary. We didn’t talk very long but I can remember the sense of assuagement, of relief from strain I felt at last to be talking to an honest man. The officials I’d talked to in the past weeks had been gulls most of them, or self-deceivers, or else had been trying to pull the wool over my eyes.51
