He was only gone for half a day, but by the time he returned there was better news: the French government had unsealed the border and promised to ship forty-five planes and some heavy artillery to Spain; and Prime Minister Negrín, pledging that his government would “resist, resist, resist,” had made a radio broadcast asking for 100,000 new volunteers for the army. By the time Hemingway boarded the night train to Perpignan on the thirty-first—Martha was traveling separately with the car that had come on the Aquitania—he was feeling a good deal more cheerful. He had company on the train, the Herald-Tribune’s Vincent Sheean, whom everyone called Jimmy, and Sheean’s younger Trib colleague, Ring Lardner’s son James, a gangly bespectacled twenty-three-year-old who’d become a reporter immediately after graduating from Harvard and, despite his age and inexperience, knew far more about the war and its leading characters than the veteran Sheean did. The three of them sat up much of the night in Sheean’s wagon-lit, talking and lubricating themselves with swigs from Hemingway’s capacious silver flask. “I don’t know why you’re going to Spain, anyhow,” grumbled Hemingway to Sheean, at one point. “The only story you could get would be to get killed, and that’ll do you no good. I’ll write that.”
“Not half as good a story as if you get killed,” responded Sheean, “and I’ll write that.” Lardner, a kid allowed to sit with the grown-ups, laughed and laughed.
April 1938: Barcelona
The Hotel Majestic was, Jimmy Sheean thought, maybe the worst hotel in Europe. The food was bad, and there wasn’t much of it. The rooms were frequently dark because of power outages, and Barcelona had run out of soap, so the chambermaids stripped the dirty sheets off the beds, ironed them, and put them back on, grimy but freshly pressed. But in the lounge or the big dining room, where the mirrored walls were x-ed with paper strips to protect against air raids, you could nearly always find a group of journalists or furloughed International Brigaders talking or drinking: Sheean, Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Tom Delmer, Herbert Matthews, young Jim Lardner, Evan Shipman, Marty Hourihan. (An exception was André Malraux, who stayed with the profiteers and their floozies at the Ritz: “I prefer whores to bores,” he said.) They needed to talk and drink together in the evening, because the daytime was always full of bad news.
By the beginning of April, the rebel army, augmented by Italian troops and German and Italian aircraft, had pushed eastward from Saragossa; and the Loyalists had fallen back, down the valley of the Ebro toward the Mediterranean. On April 3, Lérida, the stronghold of the POUM militia in the days when Capa and Gerda visited it at the beginning of the war, was lost to the Nationalists; the nearby mountain reservoirs and their hydroelectric plants, which supplied much of the power for Barcelona, went with it. Next was Gandesa, where the American and British battalions had both been surrounded, with many killed and more missing. But still the rebels came on, and the beleaguered Loyalist army and International Brigades retreated, trying to preserve men and matériel, regroup, and fight on.
Before dawn most mornings Hemingway and Martha would leave Barcelona, generally with Delmer and Matthews accompanying them, and drive long hours along bomb-pitted roads choked with refugees, soldiers, tanks and artillery, to where the story was today. Sometimes there was fighting along their route and they had to detour; sometimes the Italian Savoias or German Heinkels bombed the road, or the Fiat fighters swooped dangerously low over it, and they had to get out of the car and huddle behind stone walls for shelter. They made an odd sight speeding along in their fancy open car: Hemingway in his ratty wool stocking cap and battered tweeds, Martha with a bandanna tied around her blond bob to keep away the dust from the road, Delmer in a too-small leather aviator’s cap, and Matthews puffing away on his ever-present cigar. People wondered if they were Russians. The weather was unsettlingly balmy and springlike, and the palisaded bluffs along the Ebro, the slopes of the coastal sierra, frothy with almond blossom, and the glassy, foam-edged sea looked like plaster scenery. Even the spring sun, Martha thought, seemed made of “translucent paper.” Except that the thunder of the big guns, the rumble of the tanks, and the bung-bung-bung of the bombs dropping from the silver Heinkels and Savoias were real, and territory was being lost and people were dying. The destruction everywhere was the worst she could remember, and her spirits were very low. Although she could still muster fury when writing to Eleanor Roosevelt, privately she felt despair. “It was hard to believe the war is almost over and almost lost,” she wrote in her diary.
On April 4, in the hills behind Rasquera, on the east bank of the Ebro, they found Milton Wolff, Freddy Keller, Alvah Bessie, and several other members of the Washington-Lincoln Battalion, who had had to cut their way through enemy lines and swim naked across the Ebro to safety after being surrounded in the night by Nationalist infantry. Keller had been wounded in the hip, but at least he was alive and accounted for. Many of those who’d tried to swim across had drowned or been shot by the insurgents, and the battalion commissar, Dave Doran, and chief of staff Robert Merriman, whose exploits at Belchite had made Martha “proud as a goat,” were still missing. But these bleak reverses didn’t seem to unsettle Hemingway. From his earliest days hunting and fishing in Michigan, he had always found strength in the company of men, in being a man among men; to be back among the Loyalist commanders he admired seemed to stiffen his spine. And he had Martha beside him, with her long legs and her smart mouth, and that helped. On the tenth, they lunched on mutton chops with tomatoes and onions and drank red wine out of a tin can with Lieutenant Colonel Juan Modesto, the tough, handsome, sarcastic thirty-two-year-old Andalusian Communist, at his headquarters in the middle of a vineyard. Although Modesto seemed weary and grubby in his worn uniform and alpargatas, he stated confidently that the Nationalists would never get to the sea. Just then a shell landed a hundred yards away. “They’re shooting at the map,” he said, dismissively. “That sort of shooting isn’t serious.” It was the kind of talk Hemingway loved, and he took on some of Modesto’s cockiness. “Franco’s forces are absolutely held up in their attempt to come down the Ebro,” he told the American readers of his NANA dispatches.
A little more than a week later, though, a midnight bulletin issued by Constancia de la Mora’s office indicated that there was trouble on the coast road south of the river, and the next day, Good Friday, April 15, Hemingway and Martha joined Matthews and Delmer to see for themselves what was happening. It was four in the morning when they left Barcelona, the silver moon dimming the blue glow of the blackout. Delmer drove. Near Tarragona the sun came up, illuminating clusters of refugees traveling north; they weren’t carrying very much, which meant they’d left their homes in a hurry. At Tortosa, at the head of the Ebro delta, a once-picturesque town now laid waste by daily aerial bombardments, the journalists crossed the swollen yellow flood of the river on the great, three-spanned steel bridge and turned left onto the Valencia highway, wondering where the fighting had got to and what they would find around the next bend.
They soon found out. First bombers, then fighter planes roared over the road, and they all dove out of the car to take shelter. Bombs were falling on Tortosa, behind them, and on the Loyalist lines in front of them, and the fighters were strafing Ulldecona, where they were headed. Meanwhile, motorcycle couriers were racing up and down the highway, but not even they seemed to know what was going on. On the outskirts of Ulldecona a group of Loyalist staff officers, huddled over a map, filled the journalists in: the Nationalists had broken through the government lines and were now fighting their way toward Vinaroz, on the coast; two more rebel columns were headed north. Afraid of being trapped by the advancing Nationalists, Hemingway told Delmer to turn around and began retracing their route.
They had been driving for almost eight hours by now and they were dusty and hungry, so they stopped for lunch in an olive grove, where they found Jimmy Sheean, the Daily Worker’s Joe North, and two other colleagues, on their way to Ulldecona. As they all ate their sandwiches more bombers flew over, headed for Tortos
a, and soon a cloud of smoke and dirt mushroomed on the horizon, accompanied by the continuous thunder of explosive. Finally the bombing stopped, and Hemingway tried to talk Sheean out of continuing toward the front, but Sheean (who suspected Hemingway of trying to keep a scoop to himself) insisted on pressing on.
It was dangerous no matter where you went. As Delmer navigated the fresh bomb craters on the road just outside Tortosa, a guard came running over to the car, waving his arms: the bridge they’d driven over in the morning, the great steel structure that Hemingway had declared as impervious to bombs as “a bottle on a string at a French fair,” had been demolished little more than an hour ago, and the only way across the swollen Ebro was on a rickety footbridge, itself severely battered by the bombardment. Soldiers were hastily laying boards along its length to reinforce it and cover the holes; trucks probably couldn’t cross it, but their car might be able to. The journalists decided to take the risk: the Nationalists’ Savoias could return at any minute, and the car was an easy target. Hemingway and Matthews got out and walked to lighten the load, and Delmer let in the clutch and rolled onto the bridge just behind a mule cart whose iron wheels made the boards rattle alarmingly. There was a gaping hole halfway across and they all averted their eyes so as not to see where they’d end up if the bridge gave way.
Finally they reached the other side, and found themselves in an inferno. Tortosa was still ablaze from the morning’s attacks and Delmer had to speed through streets full of burning debris to the Barcelona highway. There they had to slow down, because the road was clogged with military vehicles and fleeing civilians. Nobody found very much to say. Suddenly exhausted, Martha leaned against the car window and stared at the people they passed: an old woman cradling a chicken, a young woman clutching a canary, a mother incongruously making up her face in a small mirror. “A retreat,” Martha told herself, fighting despair, “can be braver than an attack.”
It was dark when Hemingway and his companions drew up in front of the Majestic. Although they’d been working for fourteen hours with barely a letup, they still had dispatches to file; and Hemingway’s—which was accompanied by a request that NANA wire Pauline to tell her he was all right—marked the first glimmer of doubt in the hopeful story he had been trying to frame for so long. Good Friday, he said, marked “a bad night for the west bank of the Ebro.”
Exactly how bad he had yet to find out. For that afternoon, as he and his companions had been inching their way across the bridge at Tortosa, soldiers of the insurgent general Alonso Vega’s 4th Navarrese Division had waded, delirious with joy, into the Mediterranean at Vinaroz, while their commander dipped his fingers in the salt water as if into a baptismal font and crossed himself. “The victorious sword of Franco,” as one newspaper in insurgent Seville would put it, “had cut in two the Spain occupied by the reds.”
* * *
On April 24, after playing all over Europe, an edited version of The Spanish Earth opened in Barcelona with Spanish dubbed narration, new music, and different, less realistic sound effects. For weeks Barcelona had been papered with advertising posters for the film that carried a comment from Franklin Roosevelt (one of the remarks he’d made informally to Hemingway and Ivens at the White House screening), and the theater was crowded. But five minutes after the titles ran, just at the point where the narrator was asserting that, to win the war, the rebels had to cut the Madrid-Valencia road, the screen suddenly went dark. An announcement came from the back of the theater: “Gentlemen, there is an air raid alarm.” Instead of the clumsy sound effects, the audience could hear the real-life thudding of the ack-ack guns as bombs fell on the outskirts of the city. No one moved. After a while the manager played “The Hymn of Riego” and the Catalan anthem “Els Segadors” (“Drive out these people, so conceited, so arrogant!”) on the theater’s loudspeakers and everybody sang along and applauded; after about an hour the all-clear sounded, and the projectionist started up again.
At the picture’s end the lights went on and someone pointed out Hemingway in the audience, seated with Martha and his journalist buddies; he got a five-minute ovation. Then Jim Lardner, who had also been in the audience, came up to say goodbye: he was going from the theater to the International Brigades headquarters to enlist as a gun layer, the man who calculates the angle and trajectory of a gun, in the artillery corps. He’d talked about doing this before, and both Hemingway and Jimmy Sheean had tried to dissuade him. It was too late to enlist, they told him; there were rumors the brigades were going to be disbanded. Anyway his eyesight was bad, and he was a journalist, not a soldier. Why didn’t he go to Madrid, Hemingway wanted to know, and stay there until it fell to the Nationalists, and write about that? That was a story no one else would have. But Lardner was adamant. As the junior Trib correspondent in Spain he felt redundant, he said; he wanted to make a real contribution to the Loyalist cause, in which he’d come to believe “absolutely” and confidently, and action, not writing, was the way to accomplish that. Going to Madrid and waiting for it to be taken over so he could write about it seemed “defeatist” to him.
Hemingway—paradoxically for a man for whom action had always been a byword, and who had been so desperate to be a part of the Great War that he’d become a Red Cross ambulance driver when the army rejected him for his poor eyesight—seemed exasperated rather than sympathetic. Although he sent a short human-interest story about the new volunteer to NANA the next day, it was perfunctory and impersonal, and somehow managed to make its subject seem like a coddled Ivy Leaguer with an unrealistic idea of his own abilities. Privately, Hemingway was even more dismissive: Lardner, he said, was “pig-headed” and “a superior little snot.”
Something was eating at him. It wasn’t just anxiety over the course of the war: it was deeper than that, something that went to his essence, to the part of him that craved only to “write one true sentence.” For the past year, except for The Fifth Column and the stories he’d been unable to make progress on down in Key West, he had written nothing but propaganda. The Spanish Earth narration, the Carnegie Hall speech, the fund-raising talks, the articles for Ken, the preface to the book of Luis Quintanilla’s drawings, even the purportedly journalistic, highly compensated NANA dispatches, which he’d been churning out almost daily since he returned to Spain—they were all eloquent, vivid, often heartfelt. But they were in the service of something other than his own vision, and though he would loudly proclaim otherwise, he knew not all of them were truthful. You are the propagandist, Ivens had told him; but that wasn’t who he really was, who he wanted to be. Just write one true sentence. Sitting in the theater, he’d heard the real bombs and guns interrupt their filmed, manipulated avatars in The Spanish Earth; saying goodbye to Lardner, he’d been face to face with his younger, eager self. And the contrast must have unsettled him.
A week earlier, on Easter Sunday, he’d gone with Martha and Matthews to Amposta, in the Ebro delta below Tortosa, to see how far the rebel tide had reached: on the way they saw more cars, more carts, more refugees, a Breughel landscape of dispossession. A pontoon bridge had been put in place where the permanent one had been bombed by the Nationalists; and as Hemingway’s car went over the bridge, the journalists passed an old man in dust-covered clothes and steel-rimmed glasses like Hemingway’s, sitting on the ground. When they returned several hours later, having made certain that the rebel armies hadn’t yet made it to the banks of the Ebro, the retreat had passed on but the old man was still there. They stopped the car and Hemingway got out. He took one of the pieces of paper he used for note-taking out of his pocket—a letter-size sheet, folded in quarters marked 1, 2, 3, and 4, so he could write on it easily, unfolding and refolding it as he filled each numbered quarter. He’d already noted the gray sky and now-empty road, the detritus of flight, scattered corn kernels from a chicken coop tied to the back of a peasant’s cart; now he wanted to know something about the old man in glasses. The old man said he’d come from San Carlos, on the coast. He’d been taking care of a couple of g
oats, some cats, four pairs of pigeons, and hadn’t wanted to leave them; but the army captain told him the artillery was coming, so he’d walked, twelve kilometers since daylight. He was worried about the animals; and he was tired, too tired to go on. He could get a ride on a truck, Hemingway suggested; but the truck would take the old man to Barcelona, and he had no wish to go there, he said. He would stay by the bridge.
Hemingway wrote down enough to remember things: the sky, the road, the old man, the animals. And then, because he and Matthews had deadlines, and were still six hours from Barcelona, they left.
Back at the Majestic, Hemingway mulled over what to do with his notes from the trip to the delta. He could file a NANA dispatch about the Nationalist advance (imperceptible) and the Loyalist retreat (orderly), which would end up covering the same ground as Matthews, and run the risk of the Times spiking his story because of duplication. Or he could write something about the old man who had caught his fancy. It wouldn’t be something for NANA; but it would do for Ken, and he owed them a piece this week. He set to work.
What emerged wasn’t a polemic, like the other articles he had done for Ken, nor larded with military exegesis, like so many of his NANA dispatches. It was short, barely more than two pages long; and it was sharp and tight, the way his best fiction was—simply an account of his conversation with the old peasant at Amposta, a man claiming to be “without politics,” who has walked so far he doesn’t think he can go farther, who has had to abandon what was left in his care, and who in turn is abandoned by the narrator to the advancing fascists. The story’s last image is of the old man, sitting on the ground by the bridge, on an overcast day whose clouds has kept Nationalist bombers back at their bases: “That and the fact that cats know how to look after themselves,” the narrator explains, “was all the good luck that old man would ever have.” That was a true sentence; maybe the truest Hemingway had written in Spain.
Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War Page 39
