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

by Vaill, Amanda

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  On August 23, 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union stunned the world by doing what Maxim Litvinov had told the journalist Georges Luciani they would do: they signed a mutual nonaggression pact, accompanied by a secret map that divided Poland between the two powers in the event of a German invasion. Even though the promised partition of Poland was not public knowledge at the time the pact was signed, the news of an alliance between Stalin and Hitler filled antifascists with dismay, and drove many, including Gustav Regler, to break with the Communist Party.

  On August 25, the British government signed a treaty with Poland, promising to come to her aid in the event of an attack by Germany, which by then—with Hitler blustering over the airwaves about the “harassment” of ethnic Germans in the area around Danzig—appeared almost inevitable. France already had such an agreement. A week later, with no fear of reprisal by the Soviet Union, Hitler invaded Poland, pulverizing the country’s defenses with massive bombing of the sort inflicted on Madrid, Barcelona, and Guernica; two days after that, on September 3, Britain and France declared war on Germany. The general European conflict that everyone had been both expecting and hoping to avert for two decades had at last begun.

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  The book Ernest Hemingway began writing on March 1, 1938, became For Whom the Bell Tolls, the big critical and commercial hit he had been seeking for years and his most successful novel ever. The story of an idealistic young American saboteur on an abortive mission to bomb a bridge with a band of Loyalist aktivi that includes a beautiful young woman, a former rape victim named Maria with blond “sunburnt” hair, it was published to admiring reviews—“the best book [he] has written, the fullest, the deepest, the truest,” said The New York Times, while Edmund Wilson proclaimed, “Hemingway the artist is with us again, and it is like having an old friend back.” By six months after publication in October 1940 it had sold 491,000 copies, and Paramount Pictures had paid $110,000 for the film rights. The few critical reactions to the book came mainly from members of the Lincoln Brigade, among them Alvah Bessie, Freddy Keller, and Milton Wolff, who objected to what they felt were negative portrayals of Communists in the book, especially of the International Brigades chief André Marty, and said that Hemingway had misrepresented Russia’s role in the war. (These critics would have been surprised to learn that Hemingway’s relations with the Soviet Union were still cordial enough for the KGB to recruit him as a special agent, code-named “ARGO,” in 1941—an assignment that apparently never resulted in any practical intelligence.)

  A more substantial, and oddly sympathetic, negative appraisal of For Whom the Bell Tolls came from Arturo Barea, writing in the English magazine Horizon in 1941. “Hemingway could describe with truthfulness and art what he had seen from without,” Barea said, “but he wanted to describe more. He wished for a share in the Spanish struggle. Not sharing the beliefs, the life, and the suffering of the Spaniards he could only shape them in his imagination after the Spain he knew.” To Barea, the death of the hero at the novel’s end occurs, “not so much because the inner necessity of the tale demands it, but because Ernest Hemingway could not really believe in his future.” Hemingway, he concluded, “was always a spectator who wanted to be an actor, and who wanted to write as if he had been an actor. Yet it is not enough to look on: to write truthfully you must live, and you must feel what you are living.” Barea called the article “Not Spain, but Hemingway.”

  Hemingway dedicated For Whom the Bell Tolls to Martha Gellhorn. Shortly after its publication she became his wife: he had left Pauline definitively in September 1939, and when their divorce was final he and Martha were married, in Cheyenne, Wyoming, on November 21, 1940. Robert Capa—sent by Life to do a story on Hemingway and the film of For Whom the Bell Tolls, partly illustrated with Capa’s and Gerda Taro’s pictures of the Guadarrama campaign—photographed the happy pair shooting game birds, reading in front of a crackling fire, and dancing together after their wedding.

  Their happiness didn’t last. Although Martha had been proud to list herself as “Martha Gellhorn (Mrs. Ernest Hemingway)” in the biography on the jacket flap of her Czech war-correspondent novel, A Stricken Field, and although she’d signed a jocular prenuptial “agreement” with Hemingway affirming that “he and his business are what matter to me in this life,” she found the role of helpmeet to genius impossible to sustain. Even before their marriage she’d got an assignment from Collier’s to cover the outbreak of war in Finland, where the Soviet Union, having previously invaded Poland in concert with its new ally, Germany, had launched an offensive; and on the way there she had seemingly, if briefly, reignited her dormant affair with the still-married Allen Grover. Although Hemingway was unaware of the dalliance (and would have been apoplectic if he had known of it), he had been bitter about her Finnish assignment: “she thinks now that she stood by like one of those dumb wives and abandoned her career while I wrote a book,” he complained to Edna Gellhorn, “while really she went to France and Norway and Sweden and Finland to a war and made much fame and lots of money.” And while he was at first grateful for her financial contributions, even telling the columnist Earl Wilson that he had been “busted” in 1940 from the economic demands of his divorce and needed her help, he grew to resent her independence and what he saw as her competitiveness. By the time she scooped him by stowing away on a hospital ship that put her on the beach at D-Day—Hemingway, who’d been ferried over on an attack transport, could only gaze at the coast through binoculars from the stern of a landing craft and didn’t get on shore—the marriage had dissolved into a puddle of spite. They divorced in 1945, and he married another journalist, Mary Welsh, with whom he had been carrying on a wartime affair, who was more content than Martha to put his work ahead of her own.

  In 1952 he published the story, now grown to novella length, that he had first outlined to Max Perkins before he went to Havana in 1939, about “the old commercial fisherman who fought the swordfish all alone in his skiff for 4 days and four nights and the sharks finally eating it after he had it alongside and could not get it into the boat…” It had taken him a dozen years to get the story right—maybe because the theme, of the fisherman fighting with and landing his treasure, only to have it chewed up by predators, felt unsettlingly like his own vision of himself, his talent, and the critics he detested. It must have seemed like justification when, in 1954, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his mastery of the art of the narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea.”

  But Hemingway’s postwar career never brought him another success—commercial or artistic—to match the work he had done before; although it did bring him to Spain again on several occasions to follow the bullfights and revisit some of his old haunts, including the Hotel Florida. Curiously, his animosity to Franco and Francoism seemed not to act as a deterrent, either to him or to the Spanish government.

  In the years after the Civil War, as he became the very icon of the Famous Writer, Hemingway lost touch with many of those who had been the friends of his youth. His relationship with John Dos Passos, in particular, never really recovered from their break over the fate of José Robles—perhaps unsurprisingly given that Dos Passos, embittered over his experience in Spain, drifted further and further to the right politically. But Dos did attempt to repair the breach, particularly in the terrible few years when it became apparent that Hemingway was suffering a prolonged mental and physical breakdown, for which he was hospitalized at the Mayo Clinic in 1960 and 1961. Hemingway never responded to Dos Passos’s overtures; probably, given the suffocating silence his illness imposed on him, he couldn’t respond. In July 1961, unable to write and in the grip of black depression, he shot himself with a double-barreled shotgun.

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  Martha Gellhorn was put on the masthead at Collier’s at the end of 1939 (not in 1937 as she would later claim) at the time of her first reporting from Finland. She spent the World War II years as a front-line journalist in Finland, Asia,
Italy, France, and Germany, where she was among the first to report on the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp. Afterward she covered the Vietnam war, the Six-Day War in the Middle East, and guerrilla fighting in Central America, and her name became a byword for courage and tenacity in reporting what she called “the view from the ground.” She published ten works of fiction, a play (with Virginia Cowles) about women war correspondents, and several collections of reportage and travel writing, all praised for their incisiveness and eloquence, although few had commercial success.

  After her marriage to Hemingway dissolved, Martha Gellhorn had relationships with a number of other powerful and attractive men, including General James Gavin, Laurance Rockefeller, and David Gurewitsch, a physician who was also romantically linked to Eleanor Roosevelt. A marriage to the Time editor Thomas Matthews ended in divorce, but brought an enduring connection to his son, Alexander (Sandy), who became her executor. She adopted a son of her own, Alessandro, also nicknamed Sandy, from an orphanage in Italy in 1949; but she seemed uncomfortable in a maternal role and their relationship was often troubled. Always restless and rootless, she traveled widely and lived briefly in Africa, Italy, Mexico, and, for the last forty years of her life, England, where after her divorce from Matthews she became a kind of mentor and model to a younger generation of English journalists and novelists. Although she frequently published essays and letters to the editor in which she attempted (not always accurately) to set the record straight about the Spanish Civil War, she refused virtually all requests to discuss Hemingway in interviews, claiming that she had “no intention of being a footnote in someone else’s life.” In 1998, diagnosed with cancer, her hearing and her eyesight failing, she—like her first and rarely mentioned husband—committed suicide. After her death a prize was established in her honor for journalism that tells “an unpalatable truth, validated by powerful facts.” The 2011 winner was the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange.

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  Robert Capa was in Paris in 1939 when World War II was declared. Both Ce Soir and L’Humanité, as Communist-affiliated media, had been closed by the French government when the Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed; although Capa applied for accreditation as a war photographer to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, his request was turned down because of his former association with Ce Soir, and it seemed possible he would be rounded up for internment as a Communist sympathizer and a former German resident. With the help of Life he managed to emigrate to the United States; when it appeared he would lose his visa a young woman he’d met through John Ferno suggested he marry her so he would become a citizen. He did, although the marriage was never consummated, and ended in divorce some years later. In 1941 he went to England, where he collaborated with Dinah Sheean on a photographic book about a London family surviving the Blitz; and after America entered the war he went first to North Africa, then to Sicily and Italy to cover the Allied invasions there. In 1944, landing with the first wave of troops at Omaha Beach on D-Day, he took some of the most brutal and terrifying war photographs ever shot (even though the prints were distorted by a careless darkroom assistant), then went on to chronicle the liberation of Paris (which he claimed to have witnessed from a tank driven by émigré Spanish soldiers), the Allied drive into Belgium, and the Battle of the Rhine, where he parachuted into combat with the 17th Airborne Division. In 1947, with his old friends Chim, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Maria Eisner, and two other photographers, he established Magnum, a cooperative that became perhaps the premier photographic agency in the world.

  When he wasn’t risking his life taking pictures Capa spent his time seeing friends, playing poker, and chasing women. But after Gerda, he never again wanted to settle down with any of them. A two-year romance with Ingrid Bergman—whom he met in 1945, after she had starred in Gaslight and, following strenuous lobbying by Ernest Hemingway, as Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls—foundered on his unwillingness to abandon the peripatetic and sometimes dangerous life of a photojournalist for marriage; the same thing happened with a longer-lived (though less monogamous) relationship with Jemison McBride Hammond, the ex-wife of the record producer John Hammond. Capa was always leaving to cover a war in the Middle East, the antics of jet-set skiers in Klosters or Val d’Isère, the daily lives of Picasso and Henri Matisse on the Riviera. In 1954 he accepted an assignment from Life to go to Indochina, where the Communist Vietminh had just taken the city of Dienbienphu from the French. “This is the last good war,” Capa commented. “Nobody knows anything and nobody tells you anything, and that means a good reporter is free to go out and get a beat every day.” He was out getting a beat on May 25, taking pictures of the evacuation of a fort at Dongquithan, when he stepped on a land mine and was killed.

  Just over fifty years later, three cardboard boxes containing more than 165 rolls of film, shot by Capa, Gerda Taro, and Chim during the Spanish Civil War and missing ever since, were discovered in Mexico City. They had been spirited out of Paris by Capa’s darkroom assistant Csiki Weiss when the Germans invaded France in 1940, and had found their way into the hands of the Mexican ambassador to France’s Vichy government, who took them back to Mexico at the war’s end. Somehow every one of the rolls had miraculously survived in good condition, although it took a further dozen years for arrangements to be completed for their return to Capa’s and Taro’s archives at the International Center of Photography, the institution founded by Cornell Capa as a memorial to his brother and his fellow photojournalists. But in September 2011, after four years of conservation work and cataloguing, ICP’s exhibition The Mexican Suitcase made these images of the Spanish Civil War public at last.

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  Arturo and Ilsa Barea landed in England in February 1939 and settled in a series of rural villages—Puckeridge, Fladbury, Mapledurham—whose very names must have seemed exotic to Barea (as resident aliens, he and Ilsa were not permitted, once war had been declared, to live in London). With her knowledge of languages Ilsa found work at the BBC Monitoring Service, which eavesdropped on radio broadcasts from around the world, including hostile powers; Barea frequented the local pubs, learning English and dart-playing, tended his garden, and cooked paellas for his wife and her parents, who had managed to emigrate from Vienna at the last available moment. And he wrote—short stories, articles, a critical volume on Lorca, a short book about the Civil War entitled Struggle for the Spanish Soul, and most of the second and third parts of the autobiography he had begun in Paris, which would be translated by Ilsa and published as The Track and The Clash, in 1943 and 1946, respectively. Meanwhile, the first volume, The Forge, had been brought out in 1941 by Faber and Faber, where its editor was T. S. Eliot, and had earned Barea praise from Stephen Spender and George Orwell, among others.

  In October 1940 he began broadcasting a series of fourteen-minute talks about his experiences in England over the BBC’s Latin American Service, using the name Juan de Castilla, a pseudonym that both protected his family in Spain from reprisals and affirmed his identity as a son, if an exiled one, of “hard Castile,” the country of his childhood. He would have preferred to broadcast over the network’s Spanish Service; but the BBC, anxious to keep fascist Spain neutral during the war, didn’t want to hire someone with an anti-Franco background. “We do not employ Reds,” they proclaimed. The sound studio was in London, to which Barea was driven by a BBC car—a journey that filled him with anxiety and sometimes terror, especially during the Blitz and the later buzz-bomb attacks, which brought on a recurrence of what he referred to as “mi shell-shock.”

  In 1947 the Bareas moved to a spacious (if unelectrified) house in rural Oxfordshire owned by Gavin Henderson, a Labour politician and second Baron Faringdon, where their coterie of mostly left-leaning and literary friends, including T. S. Eliot, Cyril Connolly, Gerald Brenan, J. R. Ackerley, and George Weidenfeld, were always informally welcome. Ilsa collaborated with Barea on a study of Miguel de Unamuno, and wrote a novel called Telefónica, closely based on her experiences in Madrid during the siege, which
was serialized in Vienna’s Arbeiter-Zeitung in 1949. Both Barea and Ilsa enjoyed fishing in Lord Faringdon’s private lake and Barea liked to go pheasant shooting in his landlord’s woods; but he felt both worried and guilty about the family he had left behind in Spain. Aurelia and his children were living in straitened circumstances that improved only in the postwar years, when Adolfina and Victor emigrated to South America, leaving the older Carmen and Arturo behind with their own new families; his beloved brother Miguel, whom he’d disguised as Rafael in his autobiography, was imprisoned after the fall of Madrid and died after his release in 1941 or 1942. In his novel The Broken Root, published in 1951, Barea created a portrait of an exile whose son curses him as “the man who had left them to starve on charity lentils and on slops of water and sawdust, and had never once spared them a thought”; and writing to a friend, Ilsa spoke of the “heartbreaking” situation of Arturo’s children, “double victims, of the Civil War, which interrupted their schooling, and Arturo’s desertion. Surely you understand that I have to go to great lengths to help Arturo make up for it?” Barea tried hard to reestablish a connection with his children, sending them letters and monthly checks wrung from his own meager income, and cherishing the many little notes to “Querido Papa” that he received in return; but he never saw them again.

  After the war he continued writing and broadcasting; the autobiography was published in one volume, entitled The Forging of a Rebel, in the United States and was translated into ten languages, and Barea was mentioned as a possible recipient of the Nobel Prize. In 1952 he was given a six-month visiting professorship at Pennsylvania State University, an ironic achievement for someone whose formal schooling had ended at the age of thirteen. But although his students admired him, the American Legion and other organizations labeled him a Communist and at the end of his stay his contract wasn’t renewed. He had better luck on a BBC-sponsored trip to South America in 1956, where enormous audiences attracted by his books and broadcasts made him—in the words of a British consular official—“the most successful visitor we have had for many years.”