Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War (43 page)

The lack of anything to report had left Hemingway and Martha enervated, sniping at each other for no good reason. Martha tried to turn an expedition to the Morata front into an outing, with lunch at an inn at Aranjuez for themselves, Matthews, and Delmer; Hemingway derided her plans, and then the action they’d all hoped to cover turned out to be a failure, which meant more recriminations, more quarreling. They went to the Censura, but the girl Rosario had no news for them, and Barea and Ilsa weren’t supposed to talk to them—all very tedious, thought Martha. Nor was she pleased to encounter Lillian Hellman, who’d been talked into coming to Madrid by the ubiquitous propagandist Otto Katz. She’d just arrived and was planning to visit the usual war-tourist sites; tonight she would be giving a radio talk that would be broadcast in the United States by Columbia Broadcasting Service, and she’d come to the Censura to have her remarks cleared by the censor. Although Martha eyed her with distaste, Hemingway asked her to dinner that very evening at Delmer and Matthews’s penthouse; he had got some beef from the bullring, he said, and she’d better come because she wouldn’t see any more beef during her stay in Spain.

“Dinner,” said Martha later, “was a meal like scratching your fingernail over the blackboard.” Hellman arrived at the apartment bearing two cans of sardines and two cans of pâté as gifts, and proceeded to stare critically at Martha’s “well-tailored pants and good boots.” She wasn’t impressed by the “overknowing” Delmer, either, nor by the athletic beef, although she seemed to find the wine tolerable; over dinner she quizzed Martha about the series of lectures she was planning to give on her return from Spain, and when Hemingway turned mocking about the project she egged him on until he was telling Martha he thought she was “moneygrubbing” at the Republic’s expense. It was, Martha reflected, “the kind of show usually reserved for enemies.”

Suddenly a bombardment started, and everyone rushed out onto the terrace to watch the shells bursting over the Telefónica—all except Hellman, who sat on the sofa with her head down and her eyes shut in terror. Then the phone rang: it was one of Barea’s people at the radio station, calling to say that their building on the Gran Via had taken a hit and Hellman should tell the station chauffeur, who was on his way to pick her up, that the broadcast was canceled because the street wasn’t safe. But when the chauffeur arrived Hellman started going downstairs to get in the car anyway. Hemingway tried to stop her, but she insisted: it might be her only chance. “So,” Hellman would remember him saying, as he watched her go, “you have
cojones
after all.”

Martha and Hemingway left, too; walking angrily back to the Hotel Florida “with plenty of street between us.” The quarrel that had begun at dinner continued in their room, and it got physical: at its climax Hemingway swung at her, but his hand caught the lamp on the bedside table and it crashed to the floor and shattered. There was a pause in which they looked at the lamp and each other, and then they started laughing. Afterward, on his way to bed to make love with Martha, Hemingway cut his bare feet on the broken glass. But once again he was “Mr. Scrooby, as friendly as a puppy and as warm as fur.”

*   *   *

To Have and Have Not
was published on October 15; and if Hemingway still truly believed it was the triumphant achievement he had counted on, he had to be disappointed. “It would be pleasant,” wrote J. Donald Adams on the second page of
The New York Times Book Review
the following Sunday, to say that Hemingway “is a writer who has grown steadily in stature as well as in reputation. But that, unfortunately, would not be the truth. His skill has strengthened but his stature has shrunk … [His] record as a creative writer would be stronger if [this book] had never been published.” Other critics took up the theme: Hemingway was perhaps unrivaled as a prose stylist, but the novel suffered from structural problems, awkward transitions—the result of hasty cutting—unrealistic dialogue, two-dimensional characterization, moral ambiguity, and (said one of America’s leading novelists, Sinclair Lewis) a combination of “puerile slaughter” with “senile weariness.” Still others, however, praised what they saw as Hemingway’s awakened social consciousness, even while they were unsure of his political savvy. And
Time
, extoling his new “maturity of outlook,” gave him the big cover story he’d been longing for ever since he saw the one on Dos Passos—even though it hinted that his writing method was becoming dated.

Predictably, Hemingway was infuriated and hurt by the negative press, refused to be comforted by the positive, and cabled Max Perkins frequently for sales reports. Here, fortunately, there was good news: the critical controversy—along with Hemingway’s heightened public profile and the fact that this was his first full-length work of fiction in eight years—meant that sales were brisk. At least he didn’t have to worry about that. As for the critics, he would remember the names of the ones who had ganged up on him, he promised. Meanwhile he wanted to get to work on something else.

Not dispatches for NANA: there wasn’t enough news for that. And not, after the hard birth and uncertain welcome of
To Have and Have Not
, a new novel, or even the long short story about Spain he’d fleetingly considered over the summer. Instead he’d begun to write a play—a play about war correspondents and soldiers in Madrid that could draw on the material that
hadn’t
gone into NANA stories, the rich cache of characters, incident, and emotion that he had built up in his time in Spain. Its main character, Philip Rawlings, is a kind of idealized self-projection: a man as cynical as Jake Barnes, as sensitive as Frederic Henry, as tough as Harry Morgan; a man who, like Hemingway, enjoys raw onions and corned beef and Chopin records. A dedicated Communist who says, “My time is the Party’s time,” Rawlings uses his profession as a journalist as a cover for his real work as a counterspy for the Loyalists. Directed by his political commissar, Max, a man with teeth as bad as Koltsov’s, and by the secret police chief, Antonio, whose dove-gray wardrobe might have been filched from Pepe Quintanilla’s closet, Rawlings spends much of the play finding and questioning, and executing, suspected fifth columnists, committing what W. H. Auden, in a poem he’d written after his trip to Spain the previous spring, called “the necessary murder.” Rawlings believes that what he does is always justified. “Were there ever any mistakes?” he asks Antonio; but Hemingway knew the answer, which had already been spoken, at lunch with Virginia Cowles and Josie Herbst half a year before, by Pepe Quintanilla:

ANTONIO:
Oh, yes. Certainly. Mistakes. Oh, yes. Mistakes. Yes. Yes. Very regrettable mistakes. A very few.

PHILIP:
And how did the mistakes die?

ANTONIO:
All very well.

In the play Rawlings and Max make a “mistake” of their own: the execution of a man who resists being brought to headquarters for questioning. “He would never have talked,” says Max, by way of excuse; at which the man’s comrade, whom they are about to interrogate, and who Rawlings believes is a weakling who
will
talk, cries accusingly, “You
murdered
him!” Perhaps John Dos Passos said the same thing when he learned what had happened to José Robles.

When he’s not doing undercover work for the Republic, Rawlings is carrying on a love affair with a blond Vassar graduate named Dorothy Bridges, who writes—“quite well, too, when she’s not too lazy,” he says—for
Cosmopolitan
and other magazines; Rawlings tells Antonio that he would like to marry her “because she’s got the longest, smoothest, straightest legs in the world.” Although she has hung a sign on the door of her room at the Hotel Florida that says, “Working. Do Not Disturb,” Dorothy actually doesn’t seem to do much other than sleep, or buy silver fox furs that, Rawlings witheringly points out, cost the equivalent of four months’ pay for a member of the International Brigades. (“I don’t believe I know anyone who’s been out four months without getting hit—or killed,” he says.)

Lone wolf though Rawlings is, Dorothy is attracted to him: in her dreams they will “work hard and have a fine life,” as well as two children who will roll hoops in the Jardin du Luxembourg. And he asks her “to marry me or stay with me all the time or go wherever I go, and be my girl.” But their relationship founders: by the play’s end Rawlings feels it truly is the “colossal mistake” he says it
will
be at the beginning. At one point Hemingway had wanted to blame its failure on Dorothy’s desire for marriage: if she’d just been content with being a mistress, Rawlings could have gone happily home to his wife once the affair was out of his system. Perhaps this scenario seemed altogether too close to Hemingway’s own triangulated situation for comfort, so he discarded it; instead, Rawlings concludes that Dorothy is a social parasite, a money-grubber, “uneducated,” “useless,” and “lazy”; she isn’t pure enough for a dedicated warrior like himself, and sex, the only thing she has to offer him, is only “a commodity.” In fact, the only things separating her from the
whores de combat
—one of whom says, pointing at the notice outside Dorothy’s door, “I’ll get me a sign like that too”—are her Vassar diploma and American passport. He breaks with her; and in parting she lands the one punch Hemingway allowed her: “Don’t be kind,” she admonishes him. “Only kind people should try being kind.”

At the end of October, Hemingway wrote Pauline that he had finished the play, which he variously called
Working: Do Not Disturb
and
But Not for Love
(he would eventually settle on a more topical, less personal title:
The Fifth Column
), and he seemed confident enough in his achievement to talk it up among his circle in Madrid: Mikhail Koltsov mentioned it in his diary, although he was under the impression that it was a comedy. And Martha? She maintained to friends later that she thought Dorothy an affectionately parodic portrait of herself; but the play can’t have made easy reading for her.

She was finding this autumn in Madrid difficult in many respects. She was working on a long story for
Collier’s
about the American
brigadistas
, a story that began with her observations of Belchite and the Brunete battlefield, but that devolved into an elegiac meditation on “the handsome land” that was being punished by the war, and the young men, some from very far away, “who came all this distance, neither for glory nor money and perhaps to die.” They “knew why they came,” Martha concluded, “and what they thought about living and dying, both. But it is nothing you can ask about or talk about. It belongs to them.”

She was proud of the article, which she sent to her mother in St. Louis to read, and
Collier’s
liked it and wanted to publish it, the second piece of hers they’d taken; but she was suffering from “bad weather, bad tummy, cold feet and weltschmerz.” During the bitter nights she lay awake, thinking about the boys she’d interviewed for the
Collier’s
piece; after tossing and turning for an hour or so she’d take a sleeping pill at 4:30 and then couldn’t rouse herself before lunchtime. Hemingway wasn’t sympathetic: years afterward he would tell a friend that he hated to watch Martha when she was sleeping, because “no ambitious woman looks lovely when asleep.” Looking out the window of her room at the Florida, Martha saw a girl in the gutted house across the street chopping up her furniture to use for firewood. It made her think of herself and Hemingway. “So now the long winter starts,” Martha wrote in her journal: “So no doubt he and I will wear each other out, as millions have done so well before us, chipping a little each day, with just a little dig or a minor scratch, until it ends in fatigue and disgust, and years later we will be able to think of all this as a brief infatuation. Oh, God, either make it work or make it end now.”

*   *   *

Although Herbert Matthews was reporting to
The New York Times
that the reorganized Loyalist army was becoming “stronger and stronger with the passing of time”—indeed, had to be considered “a powerful fighting force by any standard, especially if it came to a question of mere defensive warfare”—his confidence, and Hemingway’s, wasn’t completely shared by the Spanish government. Its former prime ministers, Azaña and Giral, and the current war minister, Prieto, were weary and pessimistic, afraid of what would happen if the Nationalists won the war, as it now appeared they might. (Prieto, in fact, had tried to resign, and had contemplated suicide, after the fall of Bilbao.) On October 21 the rebel army entered Gijón, completing the Nationalist conquest of the north, and initiating a bloody purge of thousands of government soldiers and sympathizers; days earlier, the Loyalist commanders and most of the Russian advisors had fled by plane, except for General Gorev, who had insisted on staying behind and who was now reported to be in hiding somewhere in the Asturian hills. What was next—Catalonia? Before that happened, wouldn’t it be better to negotiate peace with the rebels now and protect those who had stuck by the Republic? The wavering Loyalist ministers couldn’t know that Hitler had recently alarmed his inner circle by declaring, “We are most interested in the continuance of the war”—and that Spain’s nominal supporter, Stalin, had just said much the same thing. Or that Franco, in a memorandum to the Italian ambassador, had committed himself to the painful ritual purification of what he considered a contaminated country:

I will occupy Spain town by town, village by village … [T]his civil war could still last another year or two, perhaps three. Dear ambassador, I can assure you that I am not interested in territory, but in inhabitants. The reconquest of the territory is the means, the redemption of the inhabitants the end. I cannot shorten the war by even one day …

Prime Minister Negrín—whom Martha Gellhorn described to Eleanor Roosevelt as “a brilliant gay lazy man with strong beliefs and perhaps too much sense of humor … who surely never wanted to be prime minister”—was as much in the dark as Prieto and Giral, but more optimistic. He felt if he could just turn the tide of public opinion abroad in the government’s favor, he could negotiate for peace from a position of strength. In the meantime he was pursuing his vision of a democratic dictatorship “which would prepare the people for the future,” ruling more by decree than by consensus. And when he unilaterally decided to move the seat of government from Valencia to Barcelona—ostensibly to shore up Catalonia and ensure its supplies of manufactured goods for the Republic, but also to strengthen his control over it—it must have seemed more like dictatorship and less like democracy, at least to the dismayed Catalan authorities and the dissenters in his own government.