Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War (34 page)

And Gerda, who might have found Barcelona hostile territory herself these days, went south, first to the wide, wildflower-spattered fields around Los Blazquez, northeast of Córdoba, where Alfred Kantorowicz, whom she’d met in February in Valencia, had been sent as information officer of the Chapaiev Battalion. Finding no action there, however, she retraced her steps to Valencia—and there the war caught up with her.

At dusk on May 14, a wave of Nationalist planes rolled in from the sea and dipped low over the city, spraying it with bombs; the attack continued through the night and into the next day. A number of buildings were destroyed or damaged, including the British Embassy, and men, women, and children were killed and injured. By morning the toll stood at thirty dead and at least fifty wounded; and Gerda Taro, not content to photograph the wreckage-strewn streets and eviscerated apartment houses she’d taken too many pictures of in her short career, took her camera to the city morgue.

Somehow she argued her way past the guards at the gates; once through she stopped, turned back, and photographed the crowd pressed against the iron railings, sweeping her camera back and forth to capture the panorama of anxiety and grief she saw there. Then she went inside. There, on marble slabs, on the tiled floor, or laid out on makeshift beds of wooden stools placed next to one another, were the bloodied, broken bodies of the dead. A man in his business suit, blood pooling under his bald head; a black-clad woman, one arm flung up as if in sleep; a little girl with her bare legs akimbo. She and Capa had both come to Spain searching for—what? Romance? Excitement? Pathos? Danger? This is what she had found. Walking up and down between the rows of corpses, stepping carefully to avoid the puddled blood and stained sheets and tangled limbs, Gerda looked into the face of death; quietly, unsensationally, almost lovingly, she documented it. “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough,” Capa used to say; that day Gerda was very close indeed.

Afterward she went to the hospital where the survivors of the attack were being cared for. There she took pictures of the injured—despite his wounds, one young man, flanked pietà-like by his mother and his wife or sweetheart, glanced up at the pretty blond photographer and managed a faint smile for her—but after what she’d seen at the morgue she seemed barely able to click her shutter.

Later she encountered a Danish reporter she knew from Madrid, Ole Vinding, the son of
Politiken
’s Andreas Vinding. The younger Vinding, whom the other journalists rather meanly referred to as the “Trembling Dane,” had been traumatized in Madrid, first by seeing a child killed in a bombardment and then, when Kajsa Rothman took him to Chicote’s to restore his morale with whiskey, by watching one soldier shoot another at point-blank range in a bar fight. Barea, as a fellow sufferer from combat nerves, had tried giving Vinding a pep talk; but finally he’d given up, and Vinding had left Madrid, hitching a ride to Valencia with Virginia Cowles and Sidney Franklin. Now he was flying back to Paris, couldn’t wait to get on the plane, actually; so Gerda gave her exposed film to him, and asked him to take it to Capa at the rue Froidevaux studio. She sent Capa a telegram: She wanted the Valencia and Córdoba photos she’d given to Vinding printed on ExtraDur Kodak photo paper, and would Capa please bring floodlights and reflectors for the movie camera when he came to Valencia? Also coffee and chocolate. Apparently the horrors she’d witnessed had only made her ready for more.

June 1937: New York

On the night of June 4, Carnegie Hall’s pillared galleries were packed with 3,500 people—another 1,000 had been turned away at the door—for the opening of the second congress of the League of American Writers, an earnest politico-cultural powwow about “the writer and fascism” that had been transformed into a must-see event by its headline attraction, the screening of footage from Joris Ivens and Ernest Hemingway’s new film,
The Spanish Earth
, and by a promised address from Hemingway himself.

Hemingway had returned from Spain on May 18; and when Pauline had received the wire announcing his arrival date she’d thrown an impromptu dinner party on the patio in Key West from which the last guest left at 4 a.m. “Now I am cold sober,” she’d written to her husband the next day, “and missing you as much as ever.” He’d gone directly from the French Line dock to Key West, and thence, in the
Pilar
, to Bimini (Pauline and the boys flew from Miami); and Pauline hoped he’d settle back into his old routines—writing, fishing in the Gulf Stream in the summer, hunting in Wyoming in the early fall, then home to Key West. “I am sick and tired of all this,” she’d told him when he was in Spain; “I wish you were here sleeping in my bed and using my bathroom and drinking my whiskey.” But Hemingway had other plans.

There was
The Spanish Earth
, for which Ivens had sent him a mission statement to edit; Hemingway cut it by half, although he kept its polemical tone: “We fight for the right to irrigate and cultivate this Spanish Earth which the nobles kept idle for their own amusement.” As soon as they had a rough cut of the film Ivens would want him to come to New York and work on the voice-over script; certainly neither of them had any intention of letting Dos Passos reinvolve himself in it, despite MacLeish’s rather timid request that they do so.

There was Martha, who had sailed from France on the
Lafayette
and announced bracingly to the reporters who met her at dockside on May 23, “The Loyalists will win in Spain simply because they have an apparently unlimited supply of guts.” She’d seemingly waltzed from the pier straight to the publishing offices of William Morrow and Company, because on the basis of her month in Madrid she’d already negotiated a contract for a book on Spain, to be published in the fall, in which—said
The New York
Times
—she’d use “the same technique” she’d employed in
The Trouble I’ve Seen
to “show what the millions of common men and women are thinking and doing in Spain.” When not writing she’d been working with Ivens on the film in New York, and peppering Hemingway with anodyne notes, addressed to “Hemingstein” and signed “Gellhauser,” that were designed to pass inspection if they fell into Pauline’s hands.

And finally there was the congress of the League of American Writers, which he’d rashly agreed to address. An organization of left-leaning intellectuals whose members ranged from socially conscious liberals such as Archibald MacLeish, William Carlos Williams, and John Steinbeck to more committed leftists such as Josephine Herbst, Lillian Hellman, and even Earl Browder, the general secretary of the American Communist Party, the League was one of a number of Popular Front initiatives that sought to promote the cause of democracy against fascism. Its actual membership—you were supposed to actually be a writer to join—wasn’t large, but its appeal was broad. And a speech about the situation in Spain at its opening session would bring the issue of Spanish self-determination the kind of visibility no money could buy. Hemingway hated public speaking—he’d choked up just reading to the gang at Shakespeare and Company—but he said he’d go.

New York was experiencing a day of premature summer heat when he landed at Newark Airport. For some reason he’d chosen to wear a tweed suit—perhaps to coordinate with Martha, whom he picked up on his way to the theater, and who was wrapped in her silver foxes—and as he stood in the wings the combination of the heavy fabric and whatever alcohol he’d consumed beforehand made him sweat heavily. Out in the audience and on the stage a throng of New York intellectuals waited, like seals at feeding time: Archie MacLeish, Gerald and Sara Murphy, the journalists John Gunther, Walter Duranty, Joseph North, and Vincent Sheean, the critics Van Wyck Brooks and Carl Van Doren, the playwrights and screenwriters Marc Connelly, Thornton Wilder, and Donald Ogden Stewart, the novelist Dawn Powell. John Dos Passos wasn’t among them; nor was the former secretary of the League of American Writers, Liston Oak, who had resigned from the organization on his return from Spain.

The evening had opened with speeches by Earl Browder (brief, serious) and Donald Ogden Stewart (longer, funnier) about the role of writers in the struggle against fascism. Then Ivens stepped forward to introduce the clips from
The Spanish Earth
. “Maybe it is a little strange,” he said, in his slightly awkward English, “to have at a writers’ congress a moving picture, but … this picture is made on the same front where I think every honest author ought to be.” The clips were run without sound, so as footage of the Morata air raid and shelling in University City flickered on the screen, Ivens kept up a running commentary—“At this point you would hear machine guns”—to fill in what was missing.

Shortly after 10 p.m. came the main event, when, as Dawn Powell somewhat acidly described it to Dos Passos later, “all the foreign correspondents marched on, each one with his private blonde, led by Ernest and Miss Gellhorn, who had been through hell in Spain and came shivering on in a silver fox cape chin-up.” Hemingway’s face was shining with sweat, his glasses were fogged, and he kept tugging at his tie as if it were choking him; but when Archie MacLeish, the master of ceremonies, introduced him, he bounded to the podium like a prizefighter. The hall thundered with applause. Without waiting for it to die down, Hemingway launched into his speech.

He began by framing what he said was “the writer’s problem”: “how to write truly and having found what is true, to project it in such a way that it becomes part of the experience of the person who reads it.” This kind of writing, this kind of truth, was impossible under fascism, he said, because “fascism is a lie told by bullies. A writer who will not lie cannot live under fascism.”

Part of what they were all fighting for in Spain was the truth, he said, and to do that, to “quell” the bullies, they had to “thrash … the bully of fascism.” And by God, they were doing it. “In this war, since the middle of November,” Hemingway said, in the cadences of a politician or a revival preacher, the fascists “have been beaten at the Parque del Oeste, they have been beaten at the Pardo, they have been beaten at Carabanchel, they have been beaten at Jarama, they have been beaten at Brihuega, and at Córdoba, and they are being fought to a standstill at Bilbao.” That most of these victories were in fact failures seemed not to occur to him, or at least not to trouble him. Because what he was here for, regardless of all the fine talk about truth, was to dare the writers sitting in Carnegie Hall to rally to his cause.

“It is very dangerous to write the truth in war,” he warned, “and whether the truth is worth some risk to come by, the writers must decide for themselves. Certainly it is more comfortable to spend their time disputing learnedly on points of doctrine.” Such ivory-tower esthetes, he sneered, could sit on the sidelines if they liked; “but there is now and there will be from now on for a long time, war for any writer who wants to study it … When men fight for the freedom of their country against a foreign invasion, and when those men are your friends … you learn, watching them live and fight and die, that there are worse things than war.”

By the time Hemingway finished, the audience was on its feet in the stifling hall, whistling and stamping. One of those beating his hands together was Prudencio de Pereda, standing in a balcony to watch his hero “lap up the warm acceptance.” It was, de Pereda thought, “the speech of the meeting. The audience had come for Ernest; he was there for them.” Instead of basking in the acclaim, however, Hemingway turned and dashed into the wings and then (noted Dawn Powell) “went over to the Stork Club followed by a pack of foxes.”

The following afternoon Martha had her turn on the podium, at a closed session of the congress at the New School for Social Research, where she, too, played the truth card. “A writer must be a man of action now,” she declared. “If you should survive such action, what you have to say about it afterwards is the truth, is necessary and real, it will last.” She added, apparently without irony: “the writers who are now in Spain … were just brave, intelligent people doing an essential job in war … completely unaware of
themselves.
”

After Martha’s speech Hemingway flew back to Bimini; but he managed to find time beforehand to see Scott Fitzgerald, newly sober, who had just taken a job as a screenwriter for MGM and was making a stopover in New York on his way to Los Angeles. “I wish we could meet more often,” said the man who had introduced Hemingway to his publisher and suggested the ending for his most successful novel: “I don’t feel I know you at all.”

In truth, Fitzgerald’s old friend was changing. Down at Cat Cay, where he planned to finish the promised draft of his new book, Hemingway had come to the conclusion that perhaps this new novel shouldn’t appear on its own. Plaiting its disparate strands together had already been proving almost impossible, and now his other commitments would leave him little time to accomplish its ambitious design. What if he scaled it way back, to novella size almost, cutting out the Cuban revolution, most of the literary gossip, and some of the innuendos about real people that Arnold Gingrich had so many problems with? And what if he made this streamlined version the centerpiece of a collection? He’d include the two long stories “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” his
New Masses
piece about the drowned veterans, excerpts from his NANA dispatches, the story “Horns of the Bull,” about a poor Madrid waiter who dreams of being a matador, and the speech he had just given in Carnegie Hall. That’s what the crowds that had cheered him were waiting for: a book that would speak to his position as a public intellectual, a man of action who knew there were worse things than war. In keeping with his new
engagé
persona, he could call it
The Various Arms,
or
Return to the Wars.
Or maybe
To Have and Have Not
.

*   *   *

Back in New York, Martha Gellhorn and Joris Ivens were busy. “I am now Joris’s finger-woman and secretary,” Martha wrote Hemingway in mid-June, appropriating gangster lingo (finger man) for someone who targets unreliables for mob hits. New footage had come from John Ferno, and Ivens was editing it; she, meanwhile, was trying to set up benefit showings of
The Spanish Earth
in New York and Hollywood and talking to RKO about distribution. She’d pulled the biggest string she had by going to lunch at the White House and asking Mrs. Roosevelt to invite her, Hemingway, and Ivens to screen
The Spanish Earth
for the president. And, the finger-woman added gleefully, “Joris has had a dandy meeting with our pals Archie and Dos and it must have been something. These Communists are sinister folk and very very canny. The upshot is that he [Ivens] is President of the affair, and Dos has poison ivy.” Or, as she put it in a cable confirming the news, “Rotfront [red front] working like mad.”