Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War (59 page)

While Martha was talking to notaries and gardeners and housekeepers, Hemingway was preparing himself, like a matador or a soldier, for the work he was about to embark on. He had sketched in the background already in all the dispatches he’d written for NANA—perfunctory or grandiose, some of them, but full of useful detail. Writing them, and working with Joris Ivens on
The Spanish Earth
, he’d known firsthand the sound of bombing and artillery, the smell of granite dust and cordite, the way men made jokes before battle and then spat to show the joke was real—because, he said, “you cannot spit if you are really frightened.” He’d met the commanders, and the fighting men, and the hangers-on at Chicote’s and Gaylord’s. And although most of the stories he might want for the foreground of his novel weren’t those he knew from personal experience, he’d heard them from those who had lived through them: the tales of Orlov’s
partizans
—which might allow him to use the dynamite plot he’d discarded from
To Have and Have Not
; the beautiful nurse Maria’s account of being raped by Nationalists, which he’d heard when visiting Freddy Keller in the International Brigade hospital at Mataro in the spring of 1938; the fighting in the Guadarrama that Capa had photographed and filmed with Gerda; the bloody slaughter at Badajoz that Jay Allen had described. Now all these pieces were ready to come together, not as propaganda, or reportage, but as a novel about the war that, he hoped, would “show
all
the different sides of it.”

On March 1, rising early while it was still cool, he left Martha cocooned in sleep in their bed at the Sevilla-Biltmore and walked the few blocks to the Ambos Mundos. He checked at the desk for mail and then went up to Room 511. On the desk was his Royal typewriter, a supply of number 2 pencils, and two stacks of paper, one already covered with typed words and markings in his own round, almost schoolgirlish hand, the other blank, unblemished. He sat down at the desk. Taking a fresh sheet of paper from the second pile, he scrolled it into the typewriter, and began: “We lay on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest…”

EPILOGUE

On March 27, 1939, Madrid—the city that Ernest Hemingway had proclaimed Francisco Franco “must” take if he were to win the civil war—surrendered without a fight to the Nationalist army. Five days later, on April 1, the Caudillo issued a final bulletin from his headquarters: “Today, with the Red Army captive and disarmed, our victorious troops have achieved their objectives.” On the same day the United States recognized the Nationalist rebels as the legitimate government of Spain. Over the next few months the new government imprisoned thousands of Loyalists, or suspected Loyalists—many in forced-labor camps; of these an estimated 50,000 were executed, and the killings went on into the 1940s. Although most important Loyalist officials, including Negrín, Azaña, Indalecio Prieto, and Constancia de la Mora, managed to escape to exile, some found danger there instead of safety: Largo Caballero died after four years in a Nazi concentration camp, Azaña was being pursued by German and Vichy French agents when he, too, died in a small Provençal town, and the Catalan president Luís Companys was captured by the Gestapo in occupied France, returned to Spain, and shot.

Francisco Franco ruled Spain as a dictator until his death in 1975; but his designated heir, Prince Juan Carlos de Borbón, grandson of the old king Alfonso XIII, had different ideas than the Caudillo about the way the country should be run, and by 1978 established a parliamentary democracy with himself as constitutional monarch. Although a cornerstone of the new regime was a “pact of forgetting” that granted amnesty for all Franco-era crimes, historians and survivors of the war, or their descendants, began investigating the deaths and disappearances of the Franco years; and in 2007, with the Socialists enjoying a majority of seats in the Cortes, the government enacted a Historical Memory law to facilitate exhumation of victims. But bitter controversy erupted when the examining magistrate Baltasar Garzón Real attempted to overturn the amnesties and prosecute wartime deaths as crimes against humanity; the result was that Garzón himself was suspended for exceeding his judicial authority. Despite the pact of forgetting, the ghosts of the Civil War have apparently still not been laid to rest.

*   *   *

On August 23, 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union stunned the world by doing what Maxim Litvinov had told the journalist Georges Luciani they would do: they signed a mutual nonaggression pact, accompanied by a secret map that divided Poland between the two powers in the event of a German invasion. Even though the promised partition of Poland was not public knowledge at the time the pact was signed, the news of an alliance between Stalin and Hitler filled antifascists with dismay, and drove many, including Gustav Regler, to break with the Communist Party.

On August 25, the British government signed a treaty with Poland, promising to come to her aid in the event of an attack by Germany, which by then—with Hitler blustering over the airwaves about the “harassment” of ethnic Germans in the area around Danzig—appeared almost inevitable. France already had such an agreement. A week later, with no fear of reprisal by the Soviet Union, Hitler invaded Poland, pulverizing the country’s defenses with massive bombing of the sort inflicted on Madrid, Barcelona, and Guernica; two days after that, on September 3, Britain and France declared war on Germany. The general European conflict that everyone had been both expecting and hoping to avert for two decades had at last begun.

*   *   *

The book Ernest Hemingway began writing on March 1, 1938, became
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, the big critical and commercial hit he had been seeking for years and his most successful novel ever. The story of an idealistic young American saboteur on an abortive mission to bomb a bridge with a band of Loyalist
aktivi
that includes a beautiful young woman, a former rape victim named Maria with blond “sunburnt” hair, it was published to admiring reviews—“the best book [he] has written, the fullest, the deepest, the truest,” said
The New York Times
, while Edmund Wilson proclaimed, “Hemingway the artist is with us again, and it is like having an old friend back.” By six months after publication in October 1940 it had sold 491,000 copies, and Paramount Pictures had paid $110,000 for the film rights. The few critical reactions to the book came mainly from members of the Lincoln Brigade, among them Alvah Bessie, Freddy Keller, and Milton Wolff, who objected to what they felt were negative portrayals of Communists in the book, especially of the International Brigades chief André Marty, and said that Hemingway had misrepresented Russia’s role in the war. (These critics would have been surprised to learn that Hemingway’s relations with the Soviet Union were still cordial enough for the KGB to recruit him as a special agent, code-named “ARGO,” in 1941—an assignment that apparently never resulted in any practical intelligence.)

A more substantial, and oddly sympathetic, negative appraisal of
For Whom the Bell Tolls
came from Arturo Barea, writing in the English magazine
Horizon
in 1941. “Hemingway could describe with truthfulness and art what he had seen from without,” Barea said, “but he wanted to describe more. He wished for a share in the Spanish struggle. Not sharing the beliefs, the life, and the suffering of the Spaniards he could only shape them in his imagination after the Spain he knew.” To Barea, the death of the hero at the novel’s end occurs, “not so much because the inner necessity of the tale demands it, but because Ernest Hemingway could not really believe in his future.” Hemingway, he concluded, “was always a spectator who wanted to be an actor, and who wanted to write as if he had been an actor. Yet it is not enough to look on: to write truthfully you must live, and you must feel what you are living.” Barea called the article “Not Spain, but Hemingway.”

Hemingway dedicated
For Whom the Bell Tolls
to Martha Gellhorn. Shortly after its publication she became his wife: he had left Pauline definitively in September 1939, and when their divorce was final he and Martha were married, in Cheyenne, Wyoming, on November 21, 1940. Robert Capa—sent by
Life
to do a story on Hemingway and the film of
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, partly illustrated with Capa’s and Gerda Taro’s pictures of the Guadarrama campaign—photographed the happy pair shooting game birds, reading in front of a crackling fire, and dancing together after their wedding.

Their happiness didn’t last. Although Martha had been proud to list herself as “Martha Gellhorn (Mrs. Ernest Hemingway)” in the biography on the jacket flap of her Czech war-correspondent novel,
A Stricken Field
, and although she’d signed a jocular prenuptial “agreement” with Hemingway affirming that “he and his business are what matter to me in this life,” she found the role of helpmeet to genius impossible to sustain. Even before their marriage she’d got an assignment from
Collier’s
to cover the outbreak of war in Finland, where the Soviet Union, having previously invaded Poland in concert with its new ally, Germany, had launched an offensive; and on the way there she had seemingly, if briefly, reignited her dormant affair with the still-married Allen Grover. Although Hemingway was unaware of the dalliance (and would have been apoplectic if he had known of it), he
had
been bitter about her Finnish assignment: “she thinks now that she stood by like one of those dumb wives and abandoned her career while I wrote a book,” he complained to Edna Gellhorn, “while really she went to France and Norway and Sweden and Finland to a war and made much fame and lots of money.” And while he was at first grateful for her financial contributions, even telling the columnist Earl Wilson that he had been “busted” in 1940 from the economic demands of his divorce and needed her help, he grew to resent her independence and what he saw as her competitiveness. By the time she scooped him by stowing away on a hospital ship that put her on the beach at D-Day—Hemingway, who’d been ferried over on an attack transport, could only gaze at the coast through binoculars from the stern of a landing craft and didn’t get on shore—the marriage had dissolved into a puddle of spite. They divorced in 1945, and he married another journalist, Mary Welsh, with whom he had been carrying on a wartime affair, who was more content than Martha to put his work ahead of her own.

In 1952 he published the story, now grown to novella length, that he had first outlined to Max Perkins before he went to Havana in 1939, about “the old commercial fisherman who fought the swordfish all alone in his skiff for 4 days and four nights and the sharks finally eating it after he had it alongside and could not get it into the boat…” It had taken him a dozen years to get the story right—maybe because the theme, of the fisherman fighting with and landing his treasure, only to have it chewed up by predators, felt unsettlingly like his own vision of himself, his talent, and the critics he detested. It must have seemed like justification when, in 1954, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his mastery of the art of the narrative, most recently demonstrated in
The Old Man and the Sea
.”

But Hemingway’s postwar career never brought him another success—commercial or artistic—to match the work he had done before; although it did bring him to Spain again on several occasions to follow the bullfights and revisit some of his old haunts, including the Hotel Florida. Curiously, his animosity to Franco and Francoism seemed not to act as a deterrent, either to him or to the Spanish government.

In the years after the Civil War, as he became the very icon of the Famous Writer, Hemingway lost touch with many of those who had been the friends of his youth. His relationship with John Dos Passos, in particular, never really recovered from their break over the fate of José Robles—perhaps unsurprisingly given that Dos Passos, embittered over his experience in Spain, drifted further and further to the right politically. But Dos did attempt to repair the breach, particularly in the terrible few years when it became apparent that Hemingway was suffering a prolonged mental and physical breakdown, for which he was hospitalized at the Mayo Clinic in 1960 and 1961. Hemingway never responded to Dos Passos’s overtures; probably, given the suffocating silence his illness imposed on him, he
couldn’t
respond. In July 1961, unable to write and in the grip of black depression, he shot himself with a double-barreled shotgun.

*   *   *

Martha Gellhorn was put on the masthead at
Collier’s
at the end of 1939 (not in 1937 as she would later claim) at the time of her first reporting from Finland. She spent the World War II years as a front-line journalist in Finland, Asia, Italy, France, and Germany, where she was among the first to report on the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp. Afterward she covered the Vietnam war, the Six-Day War in the Middle East, and guerrilla fighting in Central America, and her name became a byword for courage and tenacity in reporting what she called “the view from the ground.” She published ten works of fiction, a play (with Virginia Cowles) about women war correspondents, and several collections of reportage and travel writing, all praised for their incisiveness and eloquence, although few had commercial success.

After her marriage to Hemingway dissolved, Martha Gellhorn had relationships with a number of other powerful and attractive men, including General James Gavin, Laurance Rockefeller, and David Gurewitsch, a physician who was also romantically linked to Eleanor Roosevelt. A marriage to the
Time
editor Thomas Matthews ended in divorce, but brought an enduring connection to his son, Alexander (Sandy), who became her executor. She adopted a son of her own, Alessandro, also nicknamed Sandy, from an orphanage in Italy in 1949; but she seemed uncomfortable in a maternal role and their relationship was often troubled. Always restless and rootless, she traveled widely and lived briefly in Africa, Italy, Mexico, and, for the last forty years of her life, England, where after her divorce from Matthews she became a kind of mentor and model to a younger generation of English journalists and novelists. Although she frequently published essays and letters to the editor in which she attempted (not always accurately) to set the record straight about the Spanish Civil War, she refused virtually all requests to discuss Hemingway in interviews, claiming that she had “no intention of being a footnote in someone else’s life.” In 1998, diagnosed with cancer, her hearing and her eyesight failing, she—like her first and rarely mentioned husband—committed suicide. After her death a prize was established in her honor for journalism that tells “an unpalatable truth, validated by powerful facts.” The 2011 winner was the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange.