Truth, War and Journalism: The Lovers of Hotel Florida (II)

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.

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.

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?”

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.