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

by Vaill, Amanda

  Ivens knew how important it was: Joris Ivens, interview with William Braasch Watson, in Watson, “Joris Ivens and the Communists,” Hemingway Review, vol. 10, no. 1, September 1990.

  Hemingway had brought two bottles of whiskey: The gathering in Koltsov’s rooms and its sequelae are discussed variously in Ehrenburg, Memoirs, pp. 383–84; Beevor, The Battle for Spain, p. 205; Vernon, Hemingway’s Second War, p. 169; Gazur, Orlov, p. 130, Stanley G. Payne, The Franco Regime, p. 137, Paulina and Adelina Abramson, Mosaico Roto, pp. 179–81, and LaPrade, Hemingway and Franco, p. 61.

  Martha Gellhorn got out of her second-class railroad compartment: Gellhorn always insisted, and legend has accepted, that she took only a duffel and backpack to Spain. But Franklin, in his own memoir, Bullfighter from Brooklyn, claimed (pp. 220–21) she’d given him ten pieces of her luggage. This may be an exaggeration; but it’s difficult to see how the wardrobe Martha was photographed wearing in Spain could have fit in a backpack and duffel (especially if the latter was full of canned goods, as she said it was). In addition, Ted Allan mentions many pieces of luggage. See the note at the end of this section. Gellhorn also said that she walked into Spain—an assertion her biographers and others have taken literally, assuming that she hiked over the Pyrenees. Her journal, entitled “Spanish War Notes” and lodged in her papers at Boston University, tells a different story.

  the press department had made arrangements: Details in this section come from two versions of Martha Gellhorn’s Spanish journals at BU: one is holograph, and represents her unconsidered impressions, the other, typed, with dates (March 22–27, 1937), edits some telling details out. Other sources are Cecil Eby, Comrades and Commissars, p. 119, Ted Allan, Ted, chapter 1; Gellhorn, Face, pp. 14–15 (the account that misleadingly suggests that she hiked from France to Spain instead of just walking across a set of railroad tracks); and Kert, The Hemingway Women, pp. 295–97. Interestingly, Gellhorn’s contemporaneous account of her trip differs substantially from those she provided later, as well as from that in her authorized biography by Caroline Moorehead. Kert, e.g., says the locked door incident occurred on Gellhorn’s second night in Madrid, but Gellhorn’s journal rules this out; it must have been the first night, a conclusion with which Moorehead concurs. But Moorehead makes no mention of Ted Allan (who is mentioned in Gellhorn’s diary).

  The day before, Good Friday: Matthews, “Good Friday Quiet on Madrid Fronts,” New York Times, March 27, 1937. This story may have spawned one of the minor canards of the war: Jay Allen, in a letter to EH dated August 25, 1937, says that at Teruel Matthews “found [POUM militiamen] playing football with the rebels,” a charge Hemingway then repeated, as Allen had urged him to, in a dispatch written the next month. In fact, by the time Matthews first went to Teruel in September 1937, the POUM militia had been replaced by the Popular Army.

  The next morning: MG, “Spanish War Notes,” March 29, 1937, BU, and “High Explosive for Everyone,” The Face of War, p. 19.

  Ivens and Ferno went out to film: The Spanish Earth, Reel 4.

  There, at the hospital: EH, NANA dispatch 8, undated but scheduled for publication on April 24 and 25, 1937, HR7.

  “had no qualifications”: Cowles, Looking for Trouble, p. 4.

  blew in to the Telefónica: Barea, FR, p. 655.

  from watering hole to watering hole: Eby, Comrades and Commissars, p. 119, Smith and Hall, Five Down, No Glory, p. 193.

  “We were a jokey bunch”: MG, interview with Michael Eaude, in Eaude, Triumph at Midnight, p. 18.

  He pointed out where his mother: Barea, FR, pp. 655–56.

  To begin with there was the noise: MG, “Spanish War Notes,” April 3, 8, and 18, 1937, BU.

  the charismatic colonel Juan Modesto: In her later years, Gellhorn told a story, detailed in her essay “Memory” (London Review of Books, vol. 18, no. 24, December 12, 1997), about Hemingway’s interrupting a conversation between her and Modesto by challenging the officer to a game of Russian roulette.

  “to understand the anti-fascist cause”: Ivens, interview with William Braasch Watson, in “Ivens and the Communists,” Hemingway Review, vol. 10, no. 1, Fall 1990.

  “was able to sit with a bunch of men”: Gellhorn, Travels with Myself and Another, p. 14.

  “that it would soon be over”: MG to Peter Gourevich, in Moorehead, MG, p. 134.

  “skyzophrenia”: EH to Sara Murphy, December 8, 1935, in Miller, p. 149.

  “I think it was the only time”: Kert, p. 299.

  Stopping by the Telefónica: MG, “Spanish War Notes,” March 28–31, 1937, BU.

  “small, dark, square-faced”: MG, “Spanish War Notes,” BU.

  a tall Swedish Valkyrie: Preston, WSSD, pp. 115–18; Cowles, p. 32.

  “conceit of a beautiful woman”: MG, “Spanish War Notes,” April 9, 1937, BU.

  “dirty as only places that deal with hair can be”: MG, “Spanish War Notes,” April 3, 1937, BU.

  In the south, in Seville: Preston, SCW, p. 193.

  in Madrid, station EAQ: Norman Bethune, J. B. S. Haldane, and Hazen Sise, Listen In: This Is Station EAQ, Madrid, Spain, pamphlet published by the Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy, 1937; other radio background, O. W. Riegel, “Press, Radio, and the Spanish Civil War,” Public Opinion Quarterly, January 1937, pp. 131–36, and T. E. Goote, “Radio’s Role in the Spanish Civil War,” Radio News, January 1937.

  suggested that Martha try her hand: MG, “Spanish War Notes,” April 7 and 10, 1937, and undated fragment, “Living here is like nothing…” BU. It’s generally assumed that Hemingway suggested MG broadcast; but it was Ilsa who was in charge of setting up such connections, and she is as likely to have made the suggestion as Hemingway.

  Hemingway’s only combat experience: Over the years the circumstances of Hemingway’s wounding took on ever more colorful trappings: in some accounts he was said to have carried a wounded officer on his back for anywhere from 50 to 150 yards. This is not mentioned in his citation for bravery; and he himself used to say that the experience of Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms—“I didn’t carry anybody; I couldn’t move”—comes closest to his own. See, for example, Mellow, Ernest Hemingway, pp. 60–61.

  he’d given expensive small leather goods: MG, “Spanish War Notes,” April 8, 1937.

  “like college kids”: MG, “Spanish War Notes,” April 9, BU.

  So in chronicling: EH’s descriptions of Morata and Casa de Campo from dispatch 6, HR7, as well as two stories, “Night Before Battle,” Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War, pp. 110–12, and “Heat and Cold,” Spanish Front: Writers on the Spanish Civil War. Footage of Casa de Campo and Morata—including one shot of EH at the ambulance point—is in Reel 6 of The Spanish Earth.

  He wrote the dispatch out: MG’s Spanish diary establishes beyond doubt that the Raven dispatch (#8) was written by April 5, when (MG notes) she proofread it and left it to be mailed, along with the note to Sidney Franklin that Baker (EH, p. 311) misdates as having been written on April 21. In the absence of contradictory documentation, Watson’s edition of the dispatches perpetuates Baker’s misdating.

  The following morning: MG, “Spanish War Notes,” April 10, 1937, BU.

  When they returned: MG, “Spanish War Notes,” April 10, 1937, BU, and Dos Passos, Century’s Ebb, pp. 81–82. MG’s journal disproves that Dos Passos was accompanied to Madrid by André Malraux, as has sometimes been claimed.

  All Dos knew: Dos Passos, “The Death of José Robles,” The New Republic, July 19, 1939; Martinez de Pison, To Bury the Dead, pp. 19–20 and 39–42.

  “Don’t put your mouth”: Dos Passos, Century’s Ebb, pp. 82–84.

  a power play by the NKVD: Martinez de Pison, Bury, p. 83.

  In the weeks since he had been in Madrid: Kert, Women, p. 300.

  Whatever drove him: MG, letter to Hortense Flexner paraphrased in Moorehead, Gellhorn, p. 156; quotes from “Spanish War Notes,” April 10, 1937, BU.

  she’d never found anyone: MG, “Spanish War
Notes,” April 7, 1937, in Moorehead, Gellhorn, pp. 120–121.

  the process of composing it: MG, “Spanish War Notes,” April 15, quoted in Moorehead, Gellhorn, p. 123, and April 22, BU.

  “We are launching a major attack”: Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: Court of the Red Tsar, p. 118.

  he was summoned to the Kremlin: This anecdote, related by Koltsov’s brother Boris Efimov in Mikhail’ Kol’tsov, kakim on byl. Vospominaniya (Moscow, Sovetskii Pisatel’, 1965), p. 66, is detailed in Preston, WSSD, p. 192.

  “Arturo! Come away from here!”: Barea, FR, pp. 659.

  Quintanilla lived in an opulently furnished flat: MG, “Spanish War Notes,” April 17, 1937, BU. Limoges may be best known for porcelain, but MG’s journal specifies that the cup Quintanilla gave her was glass. Description of Quintanilla from Cowles, p. 30. JQ and EH’s conversation about Robles, Baker, EH, pp. 305–6, and EH, “Treachery in Aragon,” Ken, June 1938.

  It was balmy, almost hot: Cowles, Looking for Trouble, pp. 26–27, Dos Passos, “Madrid Under Seige,” “Journeys Between Wars,” in Travel Books, pp. 470–71, and MG, “Spanish War Notes,” April 17, 1937, BU.

  “What’s the matter with you?”: Barea, FR, p. 662.

  “But that’s me you’ve killed here”: Ibid., p. 665.

  Fuentidueña de Tajo: Although both Dos Passos and the titles for The Spanish Earth render the spelling as Fuentedueña, I have followed most contemporary maps in spelling it with an “i.”

  to Martha Gellhorn: MG, “Spanish War Notes,” April 18, 1937, BU.

  when Archibald MacLeish screened the combat footage: AMacL to EH and JI, April 7, 1937, JFK.

  Ivens and Ferno had discovered: Joris Ivens, in John T. McManus, “Down to Earth in Spain,” New York Times, July 25, 1937.

  And Dos Passos, by interviewing: Ivens, The Camera and I, p. 110.

  Walking down a little dirt track: Dos Passos, “Villages Are the Heart of Spain,” Esquire, February 1938.

  If he thought about them at all: Herbst, Starched Blue Sky, pp. 150–51.

  he and Martha somehow managed: Ibid., p. 162.

  He and Gerda and Korvin: Schaber, Taro, p. 203. Schaber says (presumably on Korvin’s authority) that the restaurant was Las Cuevas de Luis Candelas—impossible, since that establishment only opened in 1949. But Botín, which was opened in the seventeenth century, is only a few doors away on the Calle de Los Cuchilleros. The story of Hemingway and the paella is recounted by the establishment’s present owner, Emilio Gonzales’s grandson, in “Casa Botín: Mi abuelo intent enseñar a Hemingway a cocinar una paella,” La Vanguardia, April 27, 2012. Quotes are my translations.

  he immediately recognized in the older man: Capa, Focus, pp. 128–29; Herbst, Starched Blue, p. 151.

  Maybe it was her fondness: Re. Dos Passos: MG, “Spanish War Notes,” April 14, 1937, BU; EH on GT: Ted Allan, Ted.

  Just before dawn on April 22: The story of the Hotel Florida bombardment comes from Herbst, Starched Blue Sky, pp. 152–53; Dos Passos, Century’s Ebb, pp. 85–86; Dos Passos, “Room and Bath at the Hotel Florida,” Esquire, January 1938; and MG, “Spanish War Notes,” April 22, 1937, BU.

  photographed the clean-up effort: Four prints in Capa archives labeled “Hotel Florida, Madrid, April 1937,” ICP.

  Maybe the official had been Constancia de la Mora: Fox, Constancia de la Mora, pp. 72–73. The conversation between Hemingway and Herbst is recounted in Herbst, Starched Blue Sky, p. 154.

  at some point during those few April days: Dos Passos, Century’s Ebb, p. 91.

  an inadvertent chink of light: El Heraldo de Madrid, November 4, 1936.

  the probable truth about Robles: Much has been written about the Robles case and what Robles did or didn’t do. Many accounts, such as Paul Preston’s chapter on the affair in WSSD and Stephen Koch’s The Breaking Point, take somewhat politicized positions on the matter; others, such as José Martinez de Pisón’s To Bury the Dead, seem less agenda-driven; each has something to tell us and I have drawn on all of them.

  “They shove a cigarette”: Dos Passos, “Coast Road South,” originally published in Esquire, December 1937; in “Journeys Between Wars,” Travel Books, p. 459.

  “felt a heartbroken admiration”: Dos Passos, Century’s Ebb, p. 92.

  Robert Merriman’s wife found: Marion Merriman and Warren Lerude, American Commander in Spain, pp. 133–34.

  after stopping in at the Telefónica: JDP to Dwight MacDonald, July 1939, in Fourteenth Chronicle, p. 526.

  “late in the summer evenings”: Dos Passos, “Villages Are the Heart Of Spain,” originally published in Esquire, February 1938; in “Journeys Between Wars,” Travel Books, p. 478. Biographies of Dos Passos and other books about the Robles matter, taking their cue from Dos Passos’s “Villages Are the Heart of Spain,” say that Dos Passos left Madrid, then spent some time in Fuentidueña and other villages before going to Valencia and thence to Barcelona. This is impossible: he left Madrid after the broadcast he participated in on the night of the 24th, was seen by Ivens in Valencia on the 25th or 26th, and interviewed Andrés Nin in Barcelona on April 28 (according to a letter from Lois Orr in Letters from Barcelona, edited by Gerd Rainer-Horn, p. 158). The confusion is caused by the fact that he included material about Fuentidueña, which he had visited earlier, in the piece.

  he sent Hemingway a carefully worded letter: JI to EH, April 26, 1937, JFK.

  she spent the morning and afternoon: MG, “Spanish War Notes,” April 24, 1937, BU; “A Sense of Direction,” The Heart of Another, pp. 138–76; MG to David Gurewitsch, undated (1950?) in Moorehead, Selected, p. 222. MG’s diary simply says Pacciardi (she spells it Patchardi) made a pass at her.

  a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian: MG, “Spanish War Notes,” April 25, 1937, BU; Hemingway, “Fresh Air on an Inside Story,” originally published in Ken, September 22, 1938, in By-Line, pp. 294–97.

  Hemingway was just finishing his coffee: This story is recounted, in slightly different versions, in Herbst, Starched Blue Sky, pp. 167–71, and Cowles, Looking for Trouble, pp. 30–31.

  his last dispatch from Madrid: EH, NANA dispatch 10, HR7, pp. 37–37.

  after a riotous farewell party: Baker, EH, p. 312, Herbst, journal, May 1, 1937, YU.

  “His jokes told me”: Barea, FR, p. 676.

  he broadcast the following warning: Preston, SCW, p. 167.

  “anything that might hurt”: Geoffrey Dawson, quoted in Preston, SCW, p. 268.

  a report by their pro-rebel correspondent: William P. Carney, “Rebels Lay Fires to Guernica ‘Reds,’” New York Times, April 30, 1937.

  the order to bomb Guernica: Pertinax, “Air Attack on Guernica Attributed to Goering,” New York Times, April 30, 1937. “Pertinax” was the pseudonym of André Géraud, foreign editor of L’echo de Paris, ironically a conservative, Catholic-oriented newspaper. Géraud was described by the Manchester Guardian as a journalist who “reports today what the Quai d’Orsay denies tomorrow and confirms the day after tomorrow.” (David Wingate Pike, France Divided: The French and the Civil War in Spain, p. 284.) The fight over what really happened at Guernica continues to the present day, with revisionist historians maintaining that the town housed several government battalions and three arms factories (Nigel Townson, e-mail to the author).

  they’d both gone on leave: MG, “Spanish War Notes,” April 14, 1937, BU.

  “a lonely chaos of timber and brick”: Cowles Looking for Trouble, p. 69.

  It was May Day: “Paris Marks May Day with Demonstration,” New York Times, May 2, 1937; “Bulletin Météorologique,” Le Temps, May 1, 1937; L’Humanité, April 30 and May 2, 1937.

  they stopped in front of a display of muguet: RC’s photographs of GT, ICP; Schaber, Taro, p. 207.

  his assertion that the anarchists and the POUM: Liston Oak, “Behind Barcelona Barricades,” New Statesman and Nation, May 15, 1937. Martinez de Pison believes that this article was written and submitted after Oak left Barcelona; but given its publication so s
oon after his departure it seems it must have been completed beforehand.

  a political assassin: Preston, WSSD, pp. 84–85; Koch, Breaking Point, pp. 175–77, 191–98.

  Dos Passos had gone to interview Nin: Dos Passos, “The Defeated,” in Travel Books, pp. 486–87.

  he’d begged his wife’s boss: “Reminiscences by Charles Orr,” in Horn, Letters from Barcelona, p. 180.

  he agreed with Dos Passos: Century’s Ebb, pp. 94–95. Dos Passos also wrote about his encounter with Orwell in the nonfiction The Theme Is Freedom, pp. 145–46. In both places he indicates he spoke to Blair in a hotel, but a memoir in the papers of Charles Orr, an American Socialist who was in charge of arranging Dos Passos’s stay in Barcelona, persuasively argues that the only time Dos Passos saw Blair was at Nin’s office. (See Orr memoir in Letters from Barcelona, pp. 177–80.)

  “like a tropical rainstorm”: George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, pp. 130–31.

  Juan Negrín, the multilingual socialist: Thomas, SCW, p. 645, n. 2, cites the memoirs of Jésus Hernández, the Communist minister of education, who says he approached Negrín on his party’s behalf in May 1938. Thomas also cites Walter Krivitsky’s I Was Stalin’s Agent, where the former rezident maintains that as early as November 1936 the Russian official Arthur Stashevsky had “picked” Negrín as a future premier.

  “Where is Nin?”: For the events of the May Days and after, including the fate of Andrés Nin, see Thomas, SCW, pp. 635–47; Beevor, Battle for Spain, pp. 263–73; Preston; SCW, pp. 256–62; and elsewhere.

  Hemingway got to Paris: Details of Hemingway’s trip to Paris from Baker, EH, p. 312; Percy Philip to Edwin James, cable May 8, 1937, HRC, cited in Vernon, Hemingway’s Second War, p. 31; Ivens to EH, arranging plane, April 26, 1937, JFK.

  a not-so-subtle allegory: The analysis of “The Chauffeurs of Madrid” was made by Alex Vernon, Hemingway’s Second War, p. 63.

  an armchair analysis: EH, dispatch 11, HR7, pp. 40–42.

  “ASK YOU UNSEND”: HJJS to EH, May 10, 1937, quoted in Watson, editorial note to dispatch 11, HR7, p. 39.