In my last post, I introduced you to an unusual book: Amanda Vaill’s Hotel Florida: Truth, Love and Death in the Spanish Civil War. Not
a history book, it reads more as romantic fiction and yet the events that shape
these three love stories are based on historical evidence. Madrid in the late 30s became a magnet for idealistic
foreigners. Thus, we saw photographers Robert Capa and Gerda Taro together with
Ernest Hemingway and his new obsession, long-legged Martha Gellhorn, arrive to
Spain’s capital. So, did a Viennese journalist named Ilse Kulcsar who would
meet, worked for and fall in love with Arturo Barea, La Republica’s Press
Censor. In this entry, I’ll discuss how he word “truth,” that Vaill’s includes
in the title of her book, affected the lives of the six protagonists.
During the Spanish Civil War, the Florida was the obligatory
residence for war correspondents. It was within walking distance of the
Telefonica Building where the Press Censorship Office was installed and where
journalists made their broadcasts and mailed their news. The hotel was also on
la Gran Via, home of Madrid’s most fashionable cafés, bars and restaurants. Vaill
depicts a bustling nightlife that went on parallel to church-burning, people
shot at dawn, and bombs falling from the sky. Some would land on Hotel Florida.
Although Hotel Florida and Madrid are at the core of Vaill’s
book, she does take us all over. We travel with Gerda to the Cordoba front, and
to the Battle of Brunete where she finds her untimely death. We follow Capa to
Bilbao, just before the city fell to Nationalists. We take trips to Paris and
cross the Atlantic to New York where Hemingway, and his crew, give the
finishing touches to his “Spanish Earth.” That documentary, directed by Joris Ivens,
would see the end of the friendship between Hem and John Dos Passos. Finally, we
go down to the Mediterranean coast with Barea and Ilse as they try to escape
the shadow of a repressive state. We follow them to Barcelona and to an early
exile, after Spain grows too dangerous for those who embrace freedom of
thought.
As the book progresses chronologically, the tone changes.
It’s not about war and death anymore, but about purging and fear. The Soviet influence
threatens their own. Like Saturn, the
Spanish Republica devours its own children. Lies and suspicion will haunt Barea
and Ilse’s love, but fear will bring them closer. On the other hand, lies will
provoke a rift between Hemingway and Dos Passos, forcing Martha to side with
her lover.
Because she deals with mediatic people (journalists,
photographers, censors) you could say Vaill is focusing on the conflict from
the press’ point of view. Although several other journalists walk through Hotel
Florida’s lobby, or promenade throughout the book, we can’t rely solely on
their perspectives. Vaill is obsessed with the word “truth,” as if journalism
was the only means to provide the world with an honest vision of the war. It was
not. There was heavy censorship on both sides of the conflict, and certain icons
of journalistic realism were manufactured. Just think about that most famous
Capa photograph. If you didn’t know it was staged, Vaill does describe every
detail of its fabrication. At the end she adds (Capa’s version) that in a twist
of irony, a rogue bullet killed the model just as he was posing.
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| Capa's most famous snapshot |
As Vaill tells us, Martha Gellhorn was also good at juggling
fiction with reality. Prior to her Hemingway involvement, she wrote a story
about a lynching in the Deep South. published by Reader Digest, it was a good compelling story. The only problem was
it didn’t read like fiction, more like a reportage. Gellhorn did nothing to
dispel the idea that her story was based on true events. When she was asked to
bear witness of what she had seen, in front of a congressional committee, she panicked.
How could she face the fact that she had deceived her public? In typical
Gellhorn fashion she let her good friend Eleanor Roosevelt clean her act for
her.
As Republican Spain went through a Sovietizing campaign,
truth became a precious commodity. Barea struggled against the tergiversation,
manipulation and suppression of the news. But then even journalists began to
fear truth. Some, like Claude Blackburn, were prey to generalizations about
Spain and its people. Others just felt (like Hemingway) that truth could be a
double-edged sword. It was better to let it rest like you would with a sleeping
dog, or sweep it under the rug, and accept the official version even if it reeked
of libel.
One journalist that would not accept defamation in lieu of
truth was John Dos Passos. Dos, as he was known among the Hemingway circle, had
come to Spain to discover the whereabouts of his friend and translator, Jose
Robles. A former John Hopkins Professor and an avowed Socialist, Robles had
returned to Spain in 1936. Fluent in Russian, Robles got a job for NKDV, and
yet one day he vanished mysteriously after being arrested. He was one of many
innocent people purged by an overzealous and paranoid political machinery
brought to Spain, together with weapons money and personnel, from Moscow.
As those familiar with Hemingway’s life know, Dos Passos
involvement in Robles affair led to a final quarrel between both writers.
Hemingway resented Dos Passos’s involvement, as much as he resented his friend’s
solid prestige as a novelist. The injustice committed against Robles, made Dos distrustful
of the Republic, the Soviet Union and the Left in general. Hemingway took
advantage of his friend’s disillusion with politics, to defame him, in Spain and
abroad. A libelous campaign that would go on for the rest of Papa’s life.
On a couple of occasions, Vaill uses a Hemingway quote: “it
is very dangerous to write the truth and the truth is very dangerous to come by.”
Those words came as result of the Robles affair and reflect Hem’s cynical view
of politics. He was not a devout leftist; his anti-fascism was more of a trend
than a true belief. He was foremost a writer that liked to adapt the world outside,
so it would fit into the outline of whatever novel he was writing at the time.
Like Gellhorn, he did not expect his fiction to reflect reality. On the contrary,
he expected reality to mirror his fiction.
I’ve read the book twice. From a political point of view, Hotel Florida does the Dos Passos step.
Never doubting the righteousness of the Republican cause, it grows disappointed
and fearful specially as a climate of terror and suspicion clouds relationships
and claims lives. Soon, the Soviet presence becomes oppressive, even to Russians
already settled in Madrid. Stalin’s purges reach Spain, and many are recalled to
Moscow just to vanish forever. Red Spain
decides to rid herself of the bothersome anarchists. Early on, Vaill told us,
Dos Passos had perceived they were a threatened group. While shooting ”Spanish Earth”
he catches a glimpse of anarchist soldiers calmly fishing in the Manzanares.
His companion, a staunch communist, foresees that someday they shall be
reckoned with.
Stalin’s split with Leon Trotsky and the latter’s escape
from the Soviet Union, also turned Trotskyites into suspicious material. Finally,
in the summer of 1937, the fuse exploded and Barcelona was caught in a mini
civil war where the communists managed to suppress all dangerous elements. The
lucky ones like Willy Brandt— future chancellor of Germany—fled.
He went to Norway, after rejecting the offer made by another disillusioned
novelist, George Orwell, to go to England. Orwell also managed to get back to London
and from then on became highly suspicious of Stalinist politics.
It is my opinion (and that of several prominent historians)
that La Republica died from internal injuries. It was not Franco’s Army that defeated
it, but inner squabbles, wrong political choices and that psychotic dependence on
the Soviet Union. Politics were everywhere. Despite our need to look upon
members of the International Brigades as idealist antifascists, the truth is
that they were hardcore communists totally in line with Moscow. Political commissars
suffocated soldiers with their preaching and the habit of snooping into their
private thoughts and lives. Vaill shows us a depressed Stephen Spender who,
like Orwell and Dos Passos, grew disappointed with Stalinist Communism. This
came after Tony Hydeman, the poet’s former lover, was thrown out of the
International Brigades, because of his homosexuality.
In a world where Marxist dogma affected everything it’s so
surprising to ascertain that the book’s six protagonists were rather innocent
when it came to politics. For starters, none of them carried Party cards. Vaill tells us how after Gerda Taro’s death,
the Communist Party turned her into a Leftist Joan of Arc, gave her a martyr’s
funeral, and commissioned Giacometti to build a statue on her grave. Nonetheless,
she was never a communist. Capa-Friedman was idealist and an anti-fascist, but
one of the reasons Gerda drifted away from him, was his lack of political
commitment.
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| Gerda's funeral as noted by a French paper. |
Hemingway was too egotistic to be a Marxist, but he loved
how Russians fawned over him and hyped their cause shamelessly. It has recently
been discovered, that for a short while before Pearl Harbor, Hemingway was a KGB
agent. Under the codename “Argos,” he informed on naval movements in the Caribbean,
but “Papa” was as ineffectual as a spy as he would have been as a “Red.”
Martha had been a pacifist, but in general she was
politically naïve. In Spain, she let her lover dictate her thinking in that realm.
When Dos Passos was harping about Robles’s whereabouts, Martha petulantly interrupted
him complaining that his insistent investigation was “reflecting badly on us.” This is the only time in the book that I feel
like strangling Gellhorn. I felt like asking: Who is ‘us,’ Martha? The
Club of Adulterous Couples? The Shopaholics League?”
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| Martha, "Papa"y Dos en "Hemingway&Gellhorn" |
According to Vaill, in Spain, Martha Gellhorn spent more
time shopping than in front of her typewriter. I have nothing but empathy for
women that buy pretty things to look and feel better. And, certainly, I’m not
one to cast stones on women who fall for married men, but her flippant response
to injustice and those that demand truthful answers, were an odd reaction to
her idea of honest reporting.
However, her “us” meant Hemingway and her. It’s heart
rendering to see how Gellhorn needed to salvage a relationship in which she was
investing her whole self. Moreover, Dos was a close friend of Pauline, Hem’s
wife. To Martha, he was a foe.
As a couple, Hemingway and Gellhorn remained on the fringes
of ideological commitment. Politics played a part in creating a rift between Capa
and Gerda, as they would play a part in drawing Barea and Ilse close. They were
the most political of the three couples, but neither was a communist. Arturo Barea
was a moderate socialist, who took offense at church- burning and whose love
for truth insulted those who were dragging La Republica to her downfall.
Ilse was three times more suspected than her lover was. Stalinist
agents saw her as a traitor who had renounced the Party. She was branded a “Trotskyite,”
a dangerous tag to wear in 1938. Arturo and Ilse were interviewed by the
dreaded SIM, the new police apparatus. Friends warned the couple to flee.
Instead, they moved to a beach house in the Valencian coast. After a paradisiacal
sojourn, they returned to Madrid to find themselves jobless. They fled back to
Valencia. Those were days of terror, uncertainty, and anguish. They knew too
much. They knew what lied ahead.
Then, SIM knocked at their door and took them into Catalonia
to meet the “new chief.” He turned up to be Poldi, Ilse’s estranged husband who
had come to Spain to investigate a “dangerous element.” Finding out that this
was about his wife, he sided with the lovers and offered his help. He left for
Paris, leaving Ilse and Arturo marooned in Barcelona. The stress took a toll on
their physical and mental health, but ironically strengthen their love for each
other. Friends begged Barea to drop Ilse and save himself. On the contrary, he
grew more devoted to the little Austrian. Seeing her in danger propelled him to
do the unexpected. He started writing seriously and sold his short stories to
make ends meets.
Then another blow came. Unexpectedly, Poldi died in Paris
from kidney failure. Recently, some authors have elevated a conspiracy theory
that Amanda Vaill barely touches upon on the last pages of her book. Barea was
of no interest to the Stalinist repression machinery. The Soviets were after
the Kulcsar. They killed Poldi and wanted to make Ilse disappear because they
feared the couple would expose the man they had infiltrated on the Nationalist
side, the notorious Kim Philby. Back in Vienna, the most famous double agent in
history, had befriended Ilse and Poldi. Philby had been part of the Kulcsar
communist cell. They were the ones that could blow the whistle on the
respectable British journalist (who had just received a medal from Franco’s hands)
and tell the world he was a Moscow mole.
Whatever the reason behind the secret services hounding
them, Ilse and Barea had to leave. I don’t want to go into the many dantesque steps
of their flight. They make the most harrowing pages in the book. Particularly,
since we know (did Ilse know?) that Arturo had been advised by friends and authorities
to drop his woman. And yet he was willing to leave everything behind, country,
ideals, work, children even the wife that he finally divorced. Ilse and Barea
made their way to Paris, where they immediately got married. They would never
return to Spain. Above any other event, the story of Ilse and Arturo is why I
consider Hotel Florida an example of
romantic literature.
In my next and last entry on this fascinating and thought-provoking
book, we shall see how Vaill deals with her female protagonists, how she brings
out the domestic, the vain, even the petty, in them while showing the reader
how they took advantage of their feminine condition to cope with war.
