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

by Vaill, Amanda

  Into the anxious fog that surrounded her, the bulletins from Spain—the army’s attempted coup, the government’s resistance, and even more the revolutionary changes that were taking place in the wake of the rebellion—came like a ray of clear light. In Spain fascism was being openly confronted, not accepted, or appeased, or explained, or ignored; people were acting on their convictions, instead of endlessly talking about them, as her and Poldi’s friends seemed to do. Perhaps, she thought, she could find a way to get to Madrid, where she could volunteer as a writer, an editor, a translator—there must be some use for the six languages she spoke—and start fresh, doing work that mattered. A new life! It seemed just barely possible.

  July 1936: Key West

  On July 17, the cruiser Pilar, thirty-eight feet long with a black hull, green roof, and mahogany cockpit, tied up in Key West harbor after a six-week fishing trip to Bimini; and its captain, Ernest Hemingway—burly, dark, unshaven, in his usual Key West getup of dirty shorts and torn T-shirt—made his way home to the big house on Whitehead Street that he shared with his second wife, Pauline, and their two sons, Patrick and Gregory. The Bimini trip had been a fine one. To begin with, Hemingway had hooked a 514-pound, eleven-foot-long tuna off Gun Cay, and after a seven-hour battle—Hemingway had sweated away more than a pound an hour hauling on the lines—he’d managed to land it, still full of fight, thirty miles away from where he’d started; by the time he got back to port he’d drunk so much beer and whiskey he could hardly stand, but somehow he pulled the fish up on stays on the dock and proceeded to use it for a punching bag. Almost as good as the fishing were the couple of meetings he’d had with an editor from Esquire magazine, Arnold Gingrich, who suggested he make a novel out of a couple of short stories he’d written about a renegade Caribbean rumrunner called Harry Morgan—a book that, both men felt, would put Hemingway back on top of the literary world where he belonged.

  In the early 1920s, in Paris, when he had lived in the cramped flat above the sawmill in the rue Notre Dame des Champs with his first wife, Hadley, and their baby son, John, nicknamed Bumby, and his first collection of short prose sketches (with its bravely uncapitalized title), in our time, had been published by one of the little presses, no one had been more innovative, more exciting, or more admired among the Lost Generation literati than Hemingway. And when The Sun Also Rises, his novel about angst-ridden expatriates in Paris and Pamplona, appeared in 1926, followed three years later by the tersely elegiac Great War love story A Farewell to Arms, no writer had seemed so successful. His spare, clean prose and his clear-eyed presentation of unvarnished subject matter that he knew from personal experience—“All you have to do is write one true sentence,” he would say; “write the truest sentence that you know”—seemed to set him apart from all who had come before him; in consequence he’d been rewarded with critical praise, robust book sales, and record-setting magazine fees. For the past three years Esquire, for which he’d been writing articles about such far-flung places as the Caribbean and Kenya, had been giving him an audience of half a million readers a month. And when A Farewell to Arms was made into a movie starring Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes, Hemingway became even more of a celebrity than before.

  With fame had come fortune: and not just, or even principally, from his earnings as a writer. Pauline Hemingway, née Pfeiffer—dark, gamine, quick-witted, tart-tongued—was the wealthy daughter of one of the richest landowners in the state of Arkansas, and the niece of a childless pharmaceutical czar whose greatest pleasure was to give her (and her husband) presents. The green-shuttered stone house on Whitehead Street ($12,500)? Out came Uncle Gus’s checkbook. A big-game safari in Africa, complete with guides and private planes ($25,000)? Uncle Gus was happy to foot the bill. The days were long gone when Hemingway had had to write in cafés to escape the noise of the downstairs sawmill, or take the train to the races at Auteuil because it was cheap, and bring along a packed lunch so as not to spend money in the racecourse restaurant. Now he worked in a spacious second-story study in the Whitehead Street carriage house; cruised to Cuba and the Bahamas on his own boat to fish; and spent the late summer and fall on a Wyoming ranch where he and Pauline could hunt and he could write in a cabin among the trees.

  Despite all these signs of success, however, something had gone wrong for Hemingway in the years since the publication of A Farewell to Arms. The old friends, the writers and painters with whom he’d talked about art and life on the terrasse at the Closerie des Lilas or the Dôme, had been largely displaced by the sportsmen he hunted and fished with, or the rich men and their wives who frequented his new haunts: places like Bimini, which one of the old friends, who’d come for a visit, described as “a crazy mixture of luxury, indigence, good liquor, bad food, heat, flies, land apathy and sea magnificence, social snoot, money, sport, big fish, big fishermen, and competitive passion.” Hemingway was living large, and conscious that he was often paying for it with others’ money (whether Pauline’s or Uncle Gus’s or Esquire’s or his publisher’s). Sometimes he confessed to feeling like a peasant in this luxe milieu; and in his letters to his editor at Scribner’s, Maxwell Perkins, he fretted over advances the publisher had made him that had not earned out—though Perkins, soothingly, told him that any money in the debit column was Scribner’s problem, not his, so he shouldn’t worry about it.

  What did worry Hemingway, though, was the nagging feeling that all this success might have blunted the sharp implement of his craft, that he might have sold out his talent. The books that had followed A Farewell to Arms—a romantic paean to bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon; a collection of stories, Winner Take Nothing; a self-aggrandizing account of his 1934 Kenyan safari, The Green Hills of Africa—had been greeted with disappointing sales and mixed reviews. (“Bull in the Afternoon” was the headline for one, which compared his macho literary style to “wearing false hair on the chest.”) Hoping for his author to return to form, even Maxwell Perkins permitted himself to say, “You must finish a novel before long.”

  But what kind of novel? In 1936, after six years of world economic depression, with fascism on the rise in Europe (and in America, if you counted Father Coughlin’s anti-Semitic right-wing radio rants), Hemingway’s usual subject matter—expatriate life, bullfighting, game hunting, deep-sea fishing—seemed exotic, if not trivial; and the pose of his protagonists, which veered between stoicism and cynicism, didn’t satisfy an audience that increasingly wanted its artists to be engagé, like John Steinbeck or John Dos Passos. Why didn’t he write about a strike? one critic suggested. Although he had written an article for the left-wing magazine New Masses excoriating the U.S. government for neglecting victims of the 1935 Florida hurricane, Hemingway derided such ideas as “so much horseshit.” He wasn’t going to become a cheerleader for communism, or “a Marxian viewpoint,” he said, because “I believe in only one thing: liberty.”

  The other thing he’d believed in, the thing that had inspired his most completely realized fiction, was love—love lost, love denied, but still love. Lately, however, he’d seemed soured on the whole idea: the only love he wanted to write about was love gone bad. Waiting for him on his antique Spanish writing table at Whitehead Street were the edited manuscript of one story about an adulterous woman who hates her husband so much that she plugs him in the back of the head with a shotgun, and the advance copies of the August issue of Esquire magazine containing another story, this one about a has-been writer dying of gangrene in Africa, literally corrupted by his relationship with his rich wife. As good as these stories were—and they were among the best he had ever written—they dealt with themes that didn’t bear exploring too deeply without risk to the marriage he’d built with Pauline.

  Maybe that’s why he’d fastened—the way that Bimini tuna had on his hook—on to Gingrich’s suggestion that he make a novel by combining two published Harry Morgan stories with a third, which he’d started working on early in the year. Soon after his return from Bimini he sat down in his second-story writing room
; there, looking out at the tree-shaded garden where the tame peacocks and flamingoes roamed, he began outlining the book he and Gingrich had discussed: a book that Hemingway intended to be a condensed, twentieth-century War and Peace. Set in a shabby, corrupt Key West and an even more corrupt and revolution-torn Cuba, full of rich people and poor people—many of them versions of individuals Hemingway knew, or wanted to settle a score with—and featuring smuggling, storms at sea, and plenty of violence, it would document the decline and fall of the rugged individualist, Morgan, betrayed by the forces of wealth and privilege. It would also resurrect the fortunes of that other individualist, Hemingway. That this resurrection was essential became all too clear as he read a letter Gingrich had written him about the new project: “What I like to feel,” Gingrich told him, “is a resurgence … of confidence in your stuff. I want to be able to shut my eyes and count ten and be sure that A Farewell was no fluke.”

  With the same mail that contained Gingrich’s letter came a pile of newspapers and magazines telling of trouble in Spain—and for a fleeting moment Hemingway wondered if there was enough juice in that story to make him want to go to Europe to cover it. He’d had romantic feelings for Spain ever since his first trip there, and the accounts of the storming of the Montaña Barracks sounded like just the sort of action he was hungry to write about. But he decided the fighting was an insignificant mutiny that would peter out before he could even get there: not worth the trouble. Besides, Pauline was already packing their Ford for the long trip to Wyoming, where they would fish for trout and shoot elk and antelope, and he would listen to the wind in the pines and the murmur of the Yellowstone River below their cabin and write the novel that would revive his reputation. That would give him the fresh start he was looking for. It had to.

  August 1936: Paris/Barcelona/Madrid

  Shortly before he and Gerda were supposed to leave for Barcelona, Capa had a surprise: his mother, Julia Friedmann, arrived in Paris, accompanied by his younger brother, Kornel, who had just graduated from high school with vague hopes of becoming a medical student. Convinced that another world war was on the way, Julia had left her husband, Deszö, behind in Budapest and was planning to emigrate to New York, where her sisters worked in the garment business, as soon as she could obtain the necessary visas for herself and Kornel. She also hoped to persuade her adored elder son to emigrate with them; and she was horrified by his plan to cover the fighting in Spain.

  She was even more horrified by Gerda; and the feeling was mutual. Julia had always had an intensely close relationship with Capa: he called her “Julia”—never anyuci, “mother”—and teased her by saying “Do you want me to treat you like I treat my girlfriends?” Over the winter Capa had written to her, “Don’t scold me on account of Gerda. When you meet her you’ll like her better than me”; and as long as Gerda was just a name in a letter Julia could bear the thought of her—just barely. Now here she was in the flesh. Once Julia had taken in the cropped hennaed hair, the plucked eyebrows, the assurance with which this girl handled her body and the way Capa looked at her, like wasn’t the word she would have used.

  Gerda wasn’t much happier. She hadn’t escaped her own family to run afoul of Capa’s; she didn’t want to share him with them, and she certainly didn’t want Julia sabotaging their Spanish trip. Anxious to keep peace between the two women in his life, Capa found an accommodation that would make everybody happy (or equally unhappy): he installed Julia and Kornel—temporarily, it was to be hoped—in their own quarters in the Hotel de Blois, where he and Gerda were living, and quickly taught his brother how to make photographic prints in a darkroom he’d improvised in a bathroom across the hall. He was taking a Leica with him to Spain, and Gerda had a somewhat larger Rolleiflex; now both of them could send Kornel their film from Spain, and Kornel would print it.

  On August 5, Gerda and Capa took the train to Toulouse, where Lucien Vogel had acquired an airplane to carry himself and his party of journalists from France to Spain. The plane took off, headed south, crossed the Pyrenees, still white-crested even at this season, and had started its descent for Barcelona when a siren in the cockpit started wailing: the pilot announced that something was wrong with one of the engines and he would have to make an emergency landing. The plane dropped out of the sky and crashed, wheels first, in an open field. Farmers and militiamen came running to the scene, but miraculously no one had been injured except for Vogel and one of the journalists, both of whom had suffered broken arms. Vogel and the journalist were taken to the hospital—where Vogel, learning that the aircraft would take weeks to repair, grandly decided to give it away to the Catalonian government for use as a warplane—and Capa and Gerda hurried on to Barcelona.

  On the road, they passed gun-toting countrymen, some of them sporting military helmets or cartridge belts over their farmers’ trousers, who were marching to the city to join the defense forces. But when Capa and Gerda arrived there themselves they discovered that in the three weeks since the generals’ revolt Barcelona had come to resemble a kind of anarchic carnival more than it did a battlefield. On July 20, after barely more than a day of street fighting, the rebel garrisons in the city’s two army barracks had surrendered, not to government forces, but to anarchist militiamen from the FAI (Iberian Anarchist Federation) and the CNT (National Workers’ Confederation); whereupon the president of the Catalan Generalitat, Luís Companys, had forged an antifascist coalition with the victors that also included members of the Socialist UGT and the Communist PSUC. Overnight, businesses and industries had been either turned into workers’ collectives or closed; banks had been taken over; lipstick factories had started making munitions; and churches had been closed or even—too many of those old black beetles—burned.

  Now armed workers in civilian clothes carried rifles as they walked along the Ramblas, and newly requisitioned cars marked with militia and party signs—UGT (Unión General de Trabadores), CNT-FAI (Confederación Nacional de Trabajo–Federación Anarquista Ibérica), PSUC (Partido Socialista Unificado de Cataluña), and the like—sped up and down the wide tree-lined boulevards that ran between blocks of elegant modernismo apartment buildings. Male pedestrians were wearing open-collared shirts, women were in coveralls or trousers; hats (except for proletarian berets), jackets, ties (unless they were militia insignia), or dresses marked you as dangerously bourgeois. At Gerda and Capa’s hotel, humble men and women who would previously never have dreamed of crossing the threshold ate in the dining room as if in a workingman’s canteen, their elbows on the crumb-strewn table.

  Gerda was exhilarated by what she saw. Wearing workers’ overalls and rope-soled shoes—alpargatas—instead of the tight skirts and high heels she sported in Paris, armed with the Rolleiflex, a camera you held at your waist, with the shot you wanted in a viewfinder you looked down at, she went about the streets capturing the spirit of this revolutionary moment in photographs as artfully composed as the ones she’d admired as a girl in Weimar Germany, in the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung or Die Dame. The Rollei’s square film format tightened her already rigorous focus, and its low shooting angle intensified the drama of her images: knobby-kneed little boys wearing FAI militia caps, playing on the sandbags and stone barricades that had been hastily thrown up across the streets; militiamen and children with their arms around each other; three handsome young men grinning flirtatiously at her from the windows of the Socialist Party headquarters at the Hotel Colón; and women, women everywhere—in blue uniform jumpsuits, carrying guns (or reading fashion magazines with their rifles propped beside them), training for battle—an army of ardent young Amazons who symbolized the extent to which the world in Spain had turned upside down.

  She and Capa went to the bullfights—Gerda took no pictures of the bull being worked and killed, though Capa did—and were startled to see (and photograph) a woman matador, Juanita Cruz, who faced the bull not in a suit of lights but in a sober tailored jacket and skirt. Capa was just as diverted by the collective fiesta atmosphere that so enchant
ed Gerda: the troop trains bedizened with painted slogans, that left for the front with grinning militiamen at each window waving their fists in the antifascist salute, and girlfriends, wives, and musicians serenading the departing heroes. But traveling around the city, he saw an uglier side of things as well. Here a row of religious statues, some missing their heads, others falling over as if in a swoon; there a group of men swinging their pickaxes at figures of the Madonna and child; there a pile of shattered timbers from a ruined church, with the broken statue of a dimpled baby Jesus placed atop it as on a funeral pyre. The pictures he took of such things probably wouldn’t make the pages of Vu; but some impulse—for a powerful image? for the truth?—made him go on clicking his shutter.

  During those heady first days in Barcelona, if he picked up a copy of La Vanguardia or La Humanitat, or the new Treball or La Veu de Catalunya—newspapers filled with pictures taken by the Spanish photographers of the events following the generals’ insurrection—he couldn’t have missed seeing Agustí Centelles’s images of the conflict he and Gerda had missed. Shot with a fast, portable Leica like his own, they showed a woman in black keening over the body of a man lying on the pavement; a group of Assault Guards, asaltos, firing from behind the contorted bodies of their dead horses; a trio of the same asaltos, guns drawn, surrounding a man in a tweed cap, as if all of them were partners in a grim dance—powerful, emblematic photographs that were simultaneously composed and immediate. And he’d have recognized in Centelles a kindred impulse for rushing into the thick of what was happening and photographing it; only in this case the subject wasn’t speeches or demonstrations, it was life and death. By now, the opportunity to get such pictures was over in Barcelona; the drama was elsewhere. In the weeks since the rising, the rebels, or the Nationalists as they called themselves, had gained control of the northwestern third of Spain, and a tiny wedge of the southernmost part; the government forces, the Loyalists, were pushing back along a line that extended from Huesca in the north through Aragon before looping back to the Guadarrama, northwest of Madrid. That was where the closest fighting was. And so Capa and Gerda packed up their gear, exchanged their French press credentials for Spanish ones, and moved on.