Despite Barea’s vague discomfort about Gorev, not everything was bleak. The Nationalist attempt to cut the Corunna road between Madrid and El Escorial had been halted after much fighting and heavy losses; the resulting standoff outside the city limits felt almost like a victory. Madrid’s continued defiance of the fascist juggernaut seemed to promise an even greater triumph: the Defense Junta had recently plastered the city with a poster that showed Madrid’s symbol, the bear, devouring a swastika over the legend “El Oso de Madrid Destrozara al Fascismo.” (“The Madrid Bear Will Destroy Fascism.”) Some journalists who had left Madrid returned: Robert Capa was at the Hotel Florida and prowling the streets with his camera, and Claud Cockburn, a lanky Englishman with long, slightly receding dark hair—who was a cousin of the Catholic and conservative novelist Evelyn Waugh but wrote (as Frank Pitcairn) for London’s Daily Worker and for his own scrappy and incisive review, The Week—had returned from several months’ service as a private soldier with Commandante Carlos’s Fifth Regiment. The New York Post had sent the muckraker George Seldes, who had been thrown out of Italy for speaking out against Mussolini. A new correspondent had come from The New York Times: Herbert L. Matthews, a patient, careful reporter with a sure grasp of the stakes in the conflict, which he was already referring to as “the little world war.” And there was a new medium for coverage of the war, an organization Cockburn was working for in addition to his other jobs: a Paris-based press service called Agence Espagne.
Agence Espagne was the brainchild of a multilingual Sudeten German named Otto Katz. A smooth, dark, ingratiating man with multiple aliases, at least as many passports, and an eye for the ladies, Katz was a kind of Paganini of propaganda: someone for whom the truth was simply the departure point for magnificent invention. He claimed to have been Marlene Dietrich’s first husband (though probably he was only one of her numerous lovers in Berlin in the 1920s); he’d been a director of the Soviet film company Mezhrabpom and the principal author of The Brown Book of Hitler Terror, a creative exposé of the plots that helped bring Hitler to power; and even Cockburn admitted he fabricated news stories to serve his cause. That cause, currently, was the Loyalist resistance; and with the approval of his boss, the Comintern’s Willi Münzenberg, and the blessing of Álvarez del Vayo, he’d founded the Agence Espagne to disseminate—and report, or if necessary invent—stories that would tell the government’s side of what was going on in Spain. After all, the rebels were issuing exaggerated, often fictitious accounts of “Red” atrocities, illustrated with faked photographs of mutilated bodies, to inflame feelings against the government; why should they have a monopoly on such propaganda?
Katz had worked with Gustav Regler in the Saar and in writing The Brown Book, and in the early ’30s, in Paris, he had met with Ilsa’s Vienna associate Kim Philby; if he didn’t know Ilsa already, they certainly had friends in common. Now he’d turned up in Madrid, using the name of André Simone. He was, he said, looking for stories about war-battered Madrid from a Spanish perspective, and he had the idea of asking Ilsa’s Spanish lover, a man who had once had dreams of being a writer, if he could provide them.
The request was enough to stir the nearly dormant embers of Barea’s ambition. Long ago, when the teenaged Barea had dared to speak to his hero Valle-Inclán at the Café Granja in the Calle de Alcalá, the great man had told him not to waste his time trying to gate-crash the tertulias; instead, he’d said, the young man should study the best authors and stick to his work, whatever it was; “then you may begin to write, perhaps…” In his prickly boyish diffidence Barea had taken Valle-Inclán’s words for a brush-off; was it possible that they had really been sage advice, advice that was at last bearing fruit? Could his literary aspirations become reality?
Before Barea could feel pleasure in this unexpected turn of events, however, something else unexpected happened: a telephone call came for Ilsa from Paris. It was Leopold Kulcsar, announcing that he was transferring his operations to the Spanish Legation in Prague, where he’d be doing vague “propaganda work” for Spain in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland, and demanding to know what Ilsa’s plans were. Was she returning to Paris? Would she be coming with him to Prague?
To her horror, Ilsa realized he must never have received the letter she’d written him, from Valencia, telling him that their marriage was definitively over and that she had fallen in love with someone else; now she had to explain all this to him through the static of a bad connection and in the hearing of her colleagues. Like something in a novel, thought the young censor on duty, who didn’t even pretend not to stare. At length she hung up the telephone, pale and shaking. When she could speak at last, she told Barea she would have to fly to Paris to sort things out.
Barea was stricken. Had she only been playacting when she said she loved him? Would Kulcsar win her back in Paris? Would she decide to stay no matter what, somewhere far from the cold and hunger and daily bombardments that were life in Madrid? Would she even make the journey safely? He had no right to beg her to stay, he thought, miserably. No right, even, to worry about her.
She left the next day in a small car, bound for the airfield at Alicante on the coast, where she would get the plane to France. Barea had never felt so alone.
January 1937: Valencia
By the first winter of the Civil War, Valencia—formerly a sleepy if elegant, historic, and cosmopolitan city, the third largest in Spain—had become a kind of caravanserai, its population tripled by refugees, transplanted government officials, hangers-on, and journalists, its palm-shaded streets full of people in uniform, its once-sacrosanct siesta hours superseded by wartime bustle. It was a place where you might meet anybody, at any time of day; where the war, and the business of the war, was on everybody’s lips; and at that moment it must have seemed like a good place for Gerda Taro to be.
She’d returned from Italy for a brief stopover in Paris; now she and Capa were both in Spain again. He’d gone to Madrid, although nothing seemed to be happening there just now, and she’d stayed on in Valencia. One day she sat in the corner of the Hotel Victoria’s lobby—“a nest of newspaper correspondents, governmental agents, spies, munitions salesmen and mystery women,” as an American writer put it—chatting over a glass of wine with the exiled German composer Hanns Eisler, a collaborator of Bertholt Brecht, who’d come to Valencia for a benefit concert in which his songs would be sung both for and by the soldiers of the International Brigades. On a couple of other occasions she met up with Alfred Kantorowicz, another German émigré, who’d been an associate of Gustav Regler and Willi Münzenberg in Paris and now edited the French and German editions of the battlefront newspaper Volunteer for Liberty from an office in Valencia. Both Kantorowicz and Eisler were well-traveled, German-speaking, like-minded antifascist intellectuals, and they could give Gerda a sense that she was participating in an enterprise greater than photojournalism, and had an identity beyond that of the unknown half of “Robert Capa.”
For her ingenious creation of this professional persona had succeeded almost too well. “Capa” had indeed become a famous photographer, but that byline was being associated mainly with the man who was her lover and partner; “Gerda Taro” was an also-ran. She told Ruth Cerf that she felt “insulted” by such treatment. And Capa’s most recent reportages, from Madrid, had cemented his reputation as a photographer of risk and action: “He shared the perils and the heroism of the antifascist volunteers,” Regards had boasted in their accompanying text. Gerda had photographs on the cover of two magazines this month, Einheit and Unité, but in each case they were images of children—touching human-interest photos, not visceral combat pictures. If she wanted to take such photographs, though, she’d have to get another camera. The Rollei was too boxy and cumbersome, its presentation too formal. What she really needed, in addition to her own byline, was a Leica. Like Capa’s.
January 1937: New York
Hemingway got off the Florida Special in Pennsylvania Station and took a taxi to the Barclay Hotel, the W
aldorf-Astoria’s smaller, more intimate, but no less elegant neighbor. He had a lot to do. His first stop was his publisher’s office, three blocks away on Fifth Avenue, where he had to tell Maxwell Perkins that the Key West novel wasn’t done yet. Yes, he knew he’d wired Perkins that the manuscript was finished; but Arnold Gingrich, who would be serializing part of it in Esquire, had asked a lot of pesky questions—some of them about the resemblance of characters in the novel to actual people (Dos Passos among them) who might get litigious if it were published in its present form. Hemingway could take care of Gingrich’s queries, he told Perkins, but not before June, because he had to honor his commitment to go to Spain, no matter what Perkins thought about it. (Perkins had confessed he believed “this Rightist general must be good” and had repeatedly urged his famous author to “give up” the idea of covering the war.) In the meantime, Hemingway said, Perkins should read a story called “Exile” by a remarkable young writer named Martha Gellhorn—it might be something for Scribner’s Magazine.
From Scribner’s Hemingway went to the offices of the North American Newspaper Alliance, where he signed a contract that would give him $1,000 per story—or $500 if it was cabled and had to be deciphered from shorthand “cablese” into prose—for dispatches sent from Spain, an extraordinary sum, but then, he was a very famous writer. He stopped at the Medical Bureau of the American Friends of Spanish Democracy, where he agreed to serve as chairman of their ambulance fund-raising drive. He visited his sister-in-law, Virginia Pfeiffer, at her new apartment, where the two of them got into an argument about Hemingway’s wandering eye, his disregard of Pauline’s feelings, and his decision to go to Spain.
But much of his trip to New York was spent on an unexpected writing assignment: the voice-over for the second half of Spain in Flames, the documentary pastiche that John Dos Passos, Archibald MacLeish, and Joris Ivens were putting together. Dos Passos was at work on the script for the historical first half, but wouldn’t be able to complete the second, which dealt with the first months of fighting, in time for the film’s release at the end of the month. Since Hemingway was actually here, in New York—and with his NANA and ambulance-drive credentials, so publicly committed to the cause—couldn’t he undertake the job? He’d have an assistant, a twenty-four-year-old Cuban-American writer, Prudencio de Pereda, whom they’d engaged to do a first draft; in fact, Hemingway already knew him. The boy had been sending him reverential fan letters for two years and finally, this past December, Hemingway had offered to loan him the money to go fight against Franco. “If you didn’t get killed you would get wonderful material,” Hemingway had told him, “and if you did get killed it would be in a good cause.”
De Pereda hadn’t taken him up on the offer; among other things, it would mean he might not get a chance to actually meet the writer he idolized. And now, for a brief two days in January, he came to the Barclay and fed Hemingway the raw material he could hammer into the commentary for Spain in Flames. Encouraged by proximity, de Pereda gave a manuscript of his short stories to his hero to read, and shyly suggested he might accompany Hemingway to Spain; but to his dismay Hemingway didn’t like the stories and was even more negative about de Pereda’s potential as a companion in arms. You aren’t a fighter, Hemingway said dismissively; “not even a good behind-the-lines man.”
Fortunately, however, de Pereda bore these snubs with good grace, claiming his time with Hemingway was “the highlight of my writing career”; and Dos Passos and MacLeish were so happy with the Spain in Flames script that they asked Hemingway the question they’d had on their minds since December. Would he like to be involved—really involved—in the original documentary they planned, the one Joris Ivens was going to direct? Ivens had already left for Spain to start preliminary work on it, but Hemingway was headed there himself shortly and could link up with Ivens then. What about it?
Hemingway said yes.
Before he could return to Florida to prepare for his Spanish assignments, however, he had another, sadder errand to perform. On January 16 he drove with Jinny Pfeiffer and Sidney Franklin, a Brooklyn-born matador who was one of his cronies, to Saranac Lake, a sanitarium resort in the Adirondacks, where Gerald and Sara Murphy were keeping a deathwatch over their youngest child, Patrick. He and the Murphys had had a complicated relationship over the years: they had been among the first people to take him up, in the days when they were the center of artistic expatriate society in postwar Paris and he was a struggling writer; and he had always been attracted to Sara’s beauty and charm, always been a little in love with her, and always mistrustful and uneasy around Gerald, scorning him for his bisexuality and his dandyism and perhaps envying him for the mysterious paintings he produced, as terse and clean as any of Hemingway’s own writing. But however he thought of the Murphys, he ached for their agony as they saw their son, whose name his own son bore, losing his seven-and-a-half-year struggle with tuberculosis, just two years after the sudden death of the boy’s brother, Baoth, from meningitis. And he knew if he went to Spain he might not have another chance to say goodbye—not just to Patrick, but to the life all of them had shared in the days when, as Sara put it, life was like “a great fair, and everybody was so young.”
He arrived at the huge half-timbered Adirondack lodge the Murphys had rented in Saranac to discover things were even worse than he expected: emaciated, bedridden, and on oxygen, Patrick was barely clinging to life. Going in to see him for a few moments that evening, Hemingway found himself promising the boy a splendid Christmas gift, one he knew would never be received: a skin from a bear he had shot himself. It’s not ready yet, but it will be, he said. Patrick was tremulously excited; and Hemingway, coming out of the room, broke down in tears, weeping perhaps as much for the lie he had told as for the boy’s fate.
He and Sidney Franklin left Saranac the next day; Jinny, with whom he’d been sparring more or less continuously since their argument at her apartment, stayed behind with the Murphys. When he got back to New York Hemingway had a fitting at the bespoke tailors Gray and Lampel, on East Fifty-third Street, which Gerald Murphy had recommended to him as a “very good reliable old N.Y. house, no chi-chi”; for despite his oft-expressed feeling that he “couldn’t stand” his old friend and sometime benefactor, no one could say that Murphy wasn’t always impeccably and elegantly dressed. And because he wasn’t the kind of man who would spend his wife’s money on another woman, he stopped at his bank to set up a special account, to be funded by his writing income, which he intended to use for any expenses associated with his relationship to Martha Gellhorn.
February 1937: Málaga Front
Although the Nationalist armies, professionally trained, augmented by Italian troops and outfitted with German and Italian munitions, had rolled over a huge swath of Spain during the autumn of 1936, the months of November and December had seen them halted by the government’s motley assemblage of trade-union militias, loyal soldiers, and International Brigaders. In the first months of the new year the front around Madrid, drenched by cold rain and swept by the bitter wind from the sierra, froze into deadlock; but fighting continued in the south. Republican forces attempted an offensive around Córdoba in the weeks after Christmas, but were beaten back (a number of British Brigaders, among them the poet John Cornford, were killed in that attack). And farther south, the Nationalists began eyeing the twenty-mile-wide strip of coastline to the east of Gibraltar—including the important port of Málaga—which had remained in Loyalist hands since the beginning of the war.
Sometime between February 3 and February 8, Robert Capa and Gerda Taro arrived in Cartagena, home port of the Spanish Navy, 391 kilometers to the east of Málaga, to take pictures of the Republican battle cruiser Jaime I. Christened after the great Aragonese king who had wrested Catalonia back from the French in the thirteenth century, Jaime I these days had a new nickname: the Spanish Potemkin—in homage to the vessel made legendary by Sergei Eisenstein’s film The Battleship Potemkin—because at the beginning of the war her Republican
crew had mutinied against their rebel officers and commandeered her for la causa. The ship was a potent emblem, and indeed Capa’s friend and colleague Chim had published one reportage about her back in October; but perhaps because February 2 was the historic King Jaime’s birthday, or because February 5 was the ship’s twenty-fifth anniversary, she could be thought of as back in the news again.
So on a bright, balmy day Gerda and Capa clambered all over, from the bridge to the decks to the stygian engine room, shooting frame after frame; and Gerda’s photographs in particular had the heroic grandeur of Eisenstein’s cinematic epic. Here were the smiling sailors with their arms flung around each other—click; cannon mouths making a perfect line of O’s—click; brawny stokers shoveling coal in their undershirts—click. There was an atmosphere of fiesta on board and the crew had got up an impromptu band, with an accordion and a guitar and a Galician bagpipe; behind the players, the crew stood on bollards and risers, grinning and clapping for the music and for the pretty blond girl and her companion.
El cañón ruje, tiembla la tierra
Pero a Madrid … ¡NO PASARÁN!
[The cannon roars, the earth trembles—
But at Madrid … THEY SHALL NOT PASS!]
You could almost have forgotten there was a war going on, until Málaga was attacked.
Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War Page 15
