We Saw Spain Die

by Preston Paul

  Hardly surprisingly, it took a decade before Dos and Hemingway had a brief token reconciliation in Havana in September 1948. Meanwhile, they met in 1938 at the New York home of a mutual friend, the wealthy patron of the arts, Gerald Murphy. After a conversation with Hemingway on the balcony, Dos Passos came into the apartment and said to Murphy: ‘You think for a long time you have a friend, and then you haven’t.’70 Dos Passos continued to blame Álvarez del Vayo for not helping him to discover Robles’ fate. Nevertheless, he did not go explicitly public about the case until, in July 1939, he wrote a relatively measured account in the form of a letter to the New Republic in reply to a damning review of his novel The Adventures of a Young Man by the critic Malcolm Cowley. In it, Cowley had stated that Robles had been arrested as a fascist spy on the basis of damning evidence. Dos Passos’ response showed that he still clung on to what Pepe Quintanilla had told him; he also wrote:

  It is only too likely that Robles, like many others who were conscious of their own sincerity of purpose, laid himself open to a frame-up. For one thing, he had several interviews with his brother who was held prisoner in Madrid, to try to induce him to join the loyalist army. My impression is that the frame-up in his case was pushed to the point of execution because Russian secret agents felt that Robles knew too much about the relations between the Spanish war ministry and the Kremlin and was not, from their very special point of view, politically reliable. As always in such cases, personal enmities and social feuds probably contributed.

  Dos Passos sent a copy to the editor of the anti-Stalinist Partisan Review, the radical critic Dwight Macdonald, accompanied by a letter in which he said: ‘I rather underplayed the stupid way in which Del Vayo lied to me about the manner of Robles’ death.’71

  Over the years, Dos Passos’ views hardened even more. By the mid-1950s, he had moved far to the right. In 1956, he published a selection of his articles with a commentary. When writing about the Robles affair, he presented the Russians as the brutal conquerors of the Spanish Republic. He described his enquiries into his friend’s disappearance provoking ‘the run around, the look of fear, fear for their own lives’, which was surely an exaggeration. He wrote that he had kept silent on his return from Spain to the United States because: ‘You didn’t want to help the enemy, to add to the immense propaganda against the Spanish Republic fomented by so many different interests.’72 In the atmosphere of the Cold War, he seems to have forgotten telling Maurice Coindreau to say nothing of his part in the Robles affair lest it damage his relationship with the Communist Party. By claiming that he had remained silent in order not to damage the Spanish Republic, he was not being honest. In his anxiety to protect his own reputation for integrity and discretion, he also seems to have forgotten his articles in the magazine Common Sense and in Journeys Between Wars. By the 1970s, the gloves were completely off. In his novel Century’s Ebb, he vents his spleen against Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Sidney Franklin and Julio Álvarez del Vayo, who is portrayed as ‘Juan Hernández del Río’.73 In the meanwhile, however, when taking part in the 1964 presidential campaign of Senator Barry Goldwater, Dos Passos told one of his fellow campaign workers, who was a Spaniard with a particular interest in the Civil War, what he had been told at the time – perhaps at the fiesta at the XV Brigade. He said that Robles had actually been arrested with an envelope containing sensitive information about Russian aid to the Republic that he was about to give to the fifth column. This was, of course, never reflected in any of Dos Passos’ public utterances. Significantly, in the early 1960s, Gustav Regler, long after he had turned against the Communist Party, told Josephine Herbst that Robles had been ‘a bad egg’.74

  4

  Love and Politics: The Correspondents

  in Valencia and Barcelona

  The first assault on Madrid in November 1936 had been beaten off. Subsequent rebel attempts to encircle the city, culminating in the battle of Jarama, had also been thwarted. After the Republican victory at Guadalajara in March 1937, rebel objectives changed. The capital was no longer the main target and Franco adopted a strategy of mopping up Republican territory by instalments, beginning in the north. Accordingly, by the early spring of 1937, the emphasis for correspondents tended to pass from Madrid to Valencia. Of course, there would always be correspondents and writers eager to visit the heroic city but, to get the requisite permits and passes, they had to apply at the press office of the new capital. The shift of the centre of gravity to Valencia was especially marked after the constitution of the government of Dr Juan Negrín on 16 May 1937. Barea was yesterday’s man. Rubio Hidalgo resumed his old importance although he would soon be eclipsed by a figure of lasting significance, the tall and imposing Constancia de la Mora who, ironically, had once been married to the brother of Franco’s press chief Luis Bolín.

  Louis Fischer had met her in April 1936 at the home of Julio Álvarez del Vayo, the Socialist journalist whom he had known in Russia and had been for a time the Republican Ambassador in Mexico. Fischer was much taken by Constancia’s Modigliani-style looks. By that time, she had divorced Bolín and married Ignacio Hidalgo de Cisneros, who had been Republican Military Attaché in Rome and, during the war, would be head of the air force. Fischer wrote later: ‘She was a handsome dark Spanish woman, in revolt against her aristocratic, Catholic upbringing, who ran an antique and folk-art shop opposite the Cortes.’ The shop, known as Arte Popular, actually belonged to Zenobia Camprubí, the wife of the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez. When the war broke out, Constancia had worked looking after refugee children. At the beginning of 1937, she had been persuaded by both Jay Allen and the poet Rafael Alberti to apply for a job in the Republic’s foreign press office in Valencia, which was under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She asked Louis Fischer to speak on her behalf to Álvarez del Vayo, still Foreign Minister in the cabinet of Largo Caballero. A member of the Communist Party, married to Hidalgo de Cisneros, and with perfect English, French and German, Constancia was an ideal candidate.1

  Once hired, like Barea before her, Constancia was unimpressed by the premises selected by Rubio Hidalgo: ‘the offices themselves were up three flights of old wooden stairs, a suite of barn-like rooms with floors littered with papers, walls grim with peeling paint, old tables and chairs covered with torn posters, carbon paper, copies of Polish, Swiss, German, British and French newspapers’. She was even less impressed by Rubio himself, who

  lived like a mole in the middle of the Foreign Press Bureau. His office was practically pitch-dark. All the shades were drawn. The only daylight leaked in from cracks in the door. A shaded dim desk light made an eerie pool of green in the gloom. In the midst of this darkness sat Señor Rubio, partly bald, with a tiny moustache, pasty-coloured face, and dark glasses.2

  At first, Rubio treated Constancia patronizingly and she was put to work in the censorship office. There she learned that newspapermen could say whatever they wanted as long as it was true and did not give away confidential military information. Accordingly, her job would be to filter out wild rumours, lies and coded military messages. It was in the press office that she met the glamorous would-be actress Gladys Green, who later married Burnett Bolloten, at the time a pro-Communist United Press correspondent and a daily visitor to the bureau. No one who worked with Rubio seemed to like him very much. Kate Mangan, who coincided with him in the press office, recalled:

  He never came to the office until the afternoon and stayed there until the small hours and had his supper and trays of black coffee taken into his private room. Rubio was pallid and bald and looked rather sinister as he had weak eyes and always wore dark glasses. The only light in his pitch-black office came from cracks in the door, his desk-light and that which was reflected off his shiny bald pate.

  John Dos Passos described him as sitting ‘owl-like in his big glasses’.3

  As a result of Rubio Hidalgo’s machinations, Barea was reduced to being a censor for the radio. By the summer of 1937, he noted that Constancia de la Mora ‘h
ad virtually assumed the control of the Censorship Department in Valencia and that she did not like Rubio; that she was an efficient organizer, very much a woman of the world who had joined the Left of her free choice, and that she had greatly improved the relationship between the Valencia office and the press’.4 Although correspondents found the censorship infinitely less irksome than in the rebel zone, there were occasional disagreements. Vincent ‘Jimmy’ Sheean, of the New York Herald Tribune, thought it a mistake that the censorship never allowed journalists to mention the munitions factory at Sagunto. The censors’ logic was incontrovertible but the frequent bombing of Sagunto made it obvious that the rebels already knew all about the factory. Despite the daily bombing raids, the town’s munitions workers had chosen to remain at their jobs. The bombs had miraculously failed to hit the factory, while destroying the homes around it, but the workers knew that one direct hit on the explosives factory would blow the entire area to smithereens, yet they rejected chances to leave. Sheean thought that the censors had missed a great opportunity to publicize the workers’ heroism.5

  Joseph North, of the American Daily Worker, who arrived in Valencia in the second week of September 1937, found Rubio Hidalgo less than helpful. According to North, Rubio was ‘a short, heavy man wearing smoked glasses, who had a sombre air and his welcome was tepid’. Apparently unaware of, or indifferent to, the fact that the Daily Worker was campaigning for Roosevelt to lift the arms embargo, Rubio put considerable difficulties in the way of North being able to send cables, which were certainly extremely expensive. Finally, he agreed to let him have the miserly amount of five hundred words per week. North was in despair until things changed after Rubio was eventually replaced by Constancia de la Mora, who gave him ample facilities for sending cables.6

  Constancia’s rise to domination of the press office was not without its difficulties. In October 1937, she had to overcome a serious crisis. One day, Louis Fischer bumped into her in the street in Valencia. Surprised to see the notorious workaholic away from her desk and looking upset, he asked her what had happened, to which she explained bitterly: ‘I’ve been discharged...Prieto did it.’ The reason was that Indalecio Prieto, as Minister of Defence, had issued a decree limiting the capacity of the Communists to proselytize within the armed forces. Although the decree was reported within Spain, Constancia had censored comments on it by foreign correspondents lest it damage the Communist Party. Kate Mangan refers obliquely to Constancia being ‘under a temporary political cloud herself’. Prieto’s reaction was understandable, since Constancia was effectively censoring her own government. He had telephoned José Giral, who had replaced Álvarez del Vayo as Foreign Minister in May. The press office came under Giral’s jurisdiction and he had dismissed her.

  Shortly after meeting her, Fischer returned to the Presidencia, where he was staying along with Otto Katz. He said to Negrín over lunch: ‘Prieto did a very foolish thing today.’ When he explained, Negrín exclaimed: ‘I would have put her in prison.’ Fischer agreed that she had behaved unpardonably, but that she was irreplaceable in the press department: ‘All the foreign visitors and journalists are pleased with her and there is nobody who would do nearly as well in her job.’ Negrín shrugged his shoulders, said it was up to Prieto and recommended that Fischer go and see him. Fischer already had an appointment with him and at the end of their conversation raised the issue. Prieto replied that Constancia was essentially too high-handed: ‘she is a Maura and like her famous grandfather Don Antonio Maura, Prime Minister of Spain, she is brusque and sometimes hysterical. She does things this way.’ And he proceeded to imitate her dismissive manner, with wild gestures from side to side, saying ‘bah, bah, bah’. In the end, Prieto said he was happy for Negrín to take the decision and Negrín said he would talk to Giral.

  Fischer asked if it would help if there were a petition from all the foreign correspondents. Earlier in the day, ‘a fair young United Press correspondent’ (almost certainly Burnett Bolloten) had been collecting signatures, but Fischer had advised him to stop because in his Russian experience an official could be damaged by the support of foreign newspapermen. Once Negrín said that he thought a petition might help, Fischer himself signed and urged Bolloten to get other correspondents, including Ernest Hemingway and Herbert Matthews, to sign as well. A few days later Constancia was back at her office. However, since Bolloten had told her about Fischer’s initial reluctance to sign the petition but not about his subsequent efforts on her behalf, she was furious and held him partly responsible for her dismissal. Although she said that she accepted his explanation that he had lobbied to have her reinstated, she never forgave him and refused ever to speak to him again.7

  When the government moved from Valencia to Barcelona in November 1937, the foreign press bureau was forced to share premises with the Propaganda Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Luis Rubio Hidalgo was said to be piqued at what he perceived as a loss of independence and importance. However, he was chosen to go to Paris as titular head of the Spanish Republican News Agency, Agence Espagne. Constancia de la Mora, forgiven for her clash with Prieto, was made the director of the foreign press office.8 These changes seem to have been made as a result of a report on the Republic’s propaganda deficit prepared for Negrín by Louis Fischer.9 The real brains behind the Agence Espagne was the Comintern’s brilliant propagandist, Otto Katz. Kate Mangan met him on his occasional visits to Valencia, where he used his pseudonym of André Simon. She recalled later: ‘No longer young, he was a very charming man, an artful propagandist amazingly good at ingratiating himself with the most diverse types and making use of them for propaganda purposes without their realising it.’10 On her way back to England in the autumn of 1937, she met him in Paris with Louis Fischer and thought them both ‘sweet’.11

  Fischer’s report, probably compiled after consultation with Katz, was crucial. As his own intensely felt yet perceptively analytical articles reveal, Fischer believed that the best thing a journalist could do for the Republic was to write as accurately as wartime conditions permitted. He had been introduced to Negrín by Jay Allen before the war. Now, he was drawn ever closer to the prime minister as he tried to implement his vision that the survival of the Republic required a change of policy from the democracies and that, in turn, depended on getting British, French and American public opinion to put pressure on their politicians to abandon non-intervention. Interestingly, Katz had been with Fischer in October 1937 when he accompanied Negrín on a visit to the International Brigade hospital at Benicasim. Fischer took Negrín around the hospital where, among the wounded, he introduced him to the English veteran Tom Wintringham, whom he already knew both from his time as quartermaster in the Brigades and through the young American correspondent Kitty Bowler.12

  Not long after, on 9 November 1937, Fischer wrote to Negrín from Paris in terms that revealed just how close their collaboration had become:

  There is a general impression in Paris and London that our military situation is very bad and that Franco will soon win. […] An effective method of counteracting this tendency is to give correct and optimistic statements regarding our military situation. Apart from the dry cold, official staff communiqués there is little that goes abroad about the republican military status. I propose the following: 1) A weekly survey of the military situation written by, say, Cruz Salido or some other good journalist. This is to be published in the Agence Espagne and simultaneously given to all foreign correspondents in Spain. […] 2) From time to time, and preferably often, you or Prieto or Rojo should receive one or more foreign journalists and talk to them about our military situation and prospects. The world gets too little news out of Republican Spain. 3) The newspapers still complain that their correspondents cannot go to the front. They cannot send their representatives to a country at war without a guarantee that these representatives can go to the scene of the fighting. For these and many other matters it is essential that you should have a department in your office for the foreign press. […] It is
also very necessary to take full advantage of Spanish radio facilities. These are not well exploited. You ought to have a radio director in your chancellery. Occasionally it is important to encourage correspondents and persons of prominence in political life to visit Spain. We thought, for instance, that in connection with the depression of favourable sentiment towards us a group of French and British journalists should go down for a special interview with you.13

  Fischer was actually saying what the more perceptive staff on the ground in the main press offices in Madrid and Valencia, Ilsa Kulcsar and Constancia de la Mora, already knew. They had quickly reached the conclusion that the best way to counteract right-wing propaganda about the Republic was ‘to give foreign correspondents every opportunity we could to see the truth, and then every facility possible for writing it and getting it sent abroad’. Like Ilsa before her, Constancia found that a policy of providing contacts with senior government officials and visits to the battle-fronts paid off, although there were occasional mishaps. One such was the case of William Carney, of the New York Times, who in 1936 revealed the details of Republican gun emplacements in Madrid to the benefit of his Francoist friends. Another case, infinitely less clear, related to the highly distinguished correspondent of the Daily Express, Sefton ‘Tom’ Delmer. Expelled by the Nationalists in September 1936 because his reporting was considered insufficiently favourable to their cause, Delmer then represented the Daily Express in the Republican zone. Although highly rated by his fellow newspapermen, who jokingly paid tribute to his ability to get a story by calling him ‘Seldom Defter’, the staff of the Valencia press office considered him to be hostile to the Republic.