Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War (66 page)

his last dispatch from Madrid: EH, NANA dispatch 10,
HR7,
pp. 37–37.

after a riotous farewell party: Baker,
EH
, p. 312, Herbst, journal, May 1, 1937, YU.

“His jokes told me”: Barea,
FR
, p. 676.

he broadcast the following warning: Preston,
SCW
, p. 167.

“anything that might hurt”: Geoffrey Dawson, quoted in Preston,
SCW
, p. 268.

a report by their pro-rebel correspondent: William P. Carney, “Rebels Lay Fires to Guernica ‘Reds,’”
New York Times
, April 30, 1937.

the order to bomb Guernica: Pertinax, “Air Attack on Guernica Attributed to Goering,”
New York Times
, April 30, 1937. “Pertinax” was the pseudonym of André Géraud, foreign editor of
L’echo de Paris
, ironically a conservative, Catholic-oriented newspaper. Géraud was described by the
Manchester Guardian
as a journalist who “reports today what the Quai d’Orsay denies tomorrow and confirms the day after tomorrow.” (David Wingate Pike,
France Divided: The French and the Civil War in Spain
, p. 284.) The fight over what really happened at Guernica continues to the present day, with revisionist historians maintaining that the town housed several government battalions and three arms factories (Nigel Townson, e-mail to the author).

they’d both gone on leave: MG, “Spanish War Notes,” April 14, 1937, BU.

“a lonely chaos of timber and brick”: Cowles
Looking for Trouble
, p. 69.

It was May Day: “Paris Marks May Day with Demonstration,”
New York Times
, May 2, 1937; “Bulletin Météorologique,”
Le Temps
, May 1, 1937;
L’Humanité
, April 30 and May 2, 1937.

they stopped in front of a display of
muguet:
RC’s photographs of GT, ICP; Schaber,
Taro
, p. 207.

his assertion that the anarchists and the POUM: Liston Oak, “Behind Barcelona Barricades,”
New Statesman and Nation
, May 15, 1937. Martinez de Pison believes that this article was written and submitted
after
Oak left Barcelona; but given its publication so soon after his departure it seems it must have been completed beforehand.

a political assassin: Preston,
WSSD
, pp. 84–85; Koch,
Breaking Point
, pp. 175–77, 191–98.

Dos Passos had gone to interview Nin: Dos Passos, “The Defeated,” in
Travel Books
, pp. 486–87.

he’d begged his wife’s boss: “Reminiscences by Charles Orr,” in Horn,
Letters from Barcelona
, p. 180.

he agreed with Dos Passos:
Century’s Ebb
, pp. 94–95. Dos Passos also wrote about his encounter with Orwell in the nonfiction
The Theme Is Freedom
, pp. 145–46. In both places he indicates he spoke to Blair in a hotel, but a memoir in the papers of Charles Orr, an American Socialist who was in charge of arranging Dos Passos’s stay in Barcelona, persuasively argues that the only time Dos Passos saw Blair was at Nin’s office. (See Orr memoir in
Letters from Barcelona
, pp. 177–80.)

“like a tropical rainstorm”: George Orwell,
Homage to Catalonia
, pp. 130–31.

Juan Negrín, the multilingual socialist: Thomas,
SCW
, p. 645, n. 2, cites the memoirs of Jésus Hernández, the Communist minister of education, who says he approached Negrín on his party’s behalf in May 1938. Thomas also cites Walter Krivitsky’s
I Was Stalin’s Agent
, where the former
rezident
maintains that as early as November 1936 the Russian official Arthur Stashevsky had “picked” Negrín as a future premier.

“Where is Nin?”: For the events of the May Days and after, including the fate of Andrés Nin, see Thomas,
SCW
, pp. 635–47; Beevor,
Battle for Spain
, pp. 263–73; Preston;
SCW
, pp. 256–62; and elsewhere.

Hemingway got to Paris: Details of Hemingway’s trip to Paris from Baker,
EH
, p. 312; Percy Philip to Edwin James, cable May 8, 1937, HRC, cited in Vernon,
Hemingway’s Second War
, p. 31; Ivens to EH, arranging plane, April 26, 1937, JFK.

a not-so-subtle allegory: The analysis of “The Chauffeurs of Madrid” was made by Alex Vernon,
Hemingway’s Second War
, p. 63.

an armchair analysis: EH, dispatch 11,
HR7
, pp. 40–42.

“
ASK YOU UNSEND
”: HJJS to EH, May 10, 1937, quoted in Watson, editorial note to dispatch 11,
HR7
, p. 39.

“There are practically no words”: MG to Gunther, May 10, 1937, in Moorehead,
Gellhorn
, p. 128.

“irrelevant to the great drama”: MG, review of Ken Loach’s
Land and Freedom
, in the London
Evening Standard,
October 5, 1995.

Hemingway went to the Gare St. Lazare: Dos Passos,
Century’s Ebb,
pp. 98–99, Ludington,
JDP
, p. 374, and Carr,
Dos Passos
, p. 372.

“What did you kill him for?”: Hemingway,
THAHN
(Scribner Classics), p. 39.

“I had to go to Spain”: Baker,
EH
, pp. 312–13, and note, p. 622.

dropping down onto the field at Sondika: Jay Allen, introduction to
Death in the Making
, unpaged.

whose blueprints had been smuggled: Thomas,
SCW
, p. 595; Preston,
SCW
, p. 271.

British and French rescue organizations: “Evacuation Work,”
Manchester Guardian
, May 4, 1937; Antonio Cazorla and Adrian Shubert,
A Inmigración Española en Canada: Unha Visión de Conxunto,
Estudio Migratorios #10, 2000, pp. 32–34. The name “Carimare” is clearly visible on the hull of one of the ships Capa photographed.

The next day Capa headed out of Bilbao: The narrative of Capa’s experience at Mount Solluve is reconstructed from the following: “Shells and Bombs Blast Bilbao Area,”
New York Times
, May 8, 1937; Capa photographs and notebooks, ICP; and film fragment from Henri Cartier-Bresson,
With the Lincoln Brigade in Spain
. The attribution of the fragment is made by Juan Salas in “Capa and Taro: Lost Footage from the Córdoba Front,”
The Mexican Suitcase
, pp. 252–76.

There, a French plane: The story of Capa’s and Allen’s meeting comes from Allen, preface to
Death in the Making
, unpaged.

“a fear that tortured”: Dos Passos,
The Theme Is Freedom
, pp. 136–37.

Yes, he thought, the war had been started: Barea,
FR
, pp. 670–72.

Barea’s old friend Angel: Ibid., p. 672; AB, “Notes on Federico García Lorca,”
Horizon
, pp. 192–95.

having lost both their business and their home: In her essay “The Eye of Solidarity” (
Taro
, p. 24) Irme Schaber says they were dispossessed in 1937; but in
GT
, pp. 272–73 she presents documentation that they had in fact possibly emigrated as early as 1935, a date she has recently confirmed in an e-mail.

In hiding he ran across Eric Blair: Peter Wyden,
The Passionate War
, p. 371.

At dusk on May 14: “Loyalist Cabinet in Spain Resigns; Valencia Bombed,”
New York Times
, May 16, 1937.

The younger Vinding: Cowles,
Looking for Trouble
, pp. 49–50; Barea,
FR
, p. 677.

She sent Capa a telegram: GT telegram to RC, May 17, 1937; ICP. The telegram’s receipt stamp is dated the 18th.

“Now I am cold sober”: PPH to EH, April 25, 1937, in Kert,
Women
, p. 302.

“I am sick and tired”: PPH to EH, in ibid., p. 301.

Hemingway cut it by half: EH and JI statements quoted in Baker,
EH
, p. 313.

MacLeish’s rather timid request: AMacL to EH, May 27, 1937, JFK.

“The Loyalists will win”:
World Telegram
, May 20, 1937.

she’d already negotiated: “Book Notes,”
New York Times
, June 7, 1937.

anodyne notes: MG to EH, undated letters, BU.

Out in the audience: A partial report of the congress, with speeches by Hemingway, MacLeish, and others, in
New Masses
, June 22, 1937, available on
www.unz.org
and in Hart, ed.,
The Writer in a Changing World
, pp. 69–73. EH’s speech in Robert W. Trogdon,
Ernest Hemingway, a Literary Reference,
pp. 193–96.

“all the foreign correspondents”: DP to JDP, undated, UVA; quoted in Ludington,
Dos Passos
, pp. 376–77.

One of those beating his hands: P de P to Carlos Baker, June 2, 1967, PUL; also in Vernon,
Second War
, p. 91.

“went over to the Stork Club”: DP to JDP, quoted in Ludington,
Dos Passos
, pp. 376–77.

“A writer must be a man of action”:
New Masses
and Hart,
loc. cit.

“I wish we could meet”: FSF to EH, June 5, 1937, in Baker,
EH
, p. 313.

Hemingway had come to the conclusion: EH to MP, June 10, 1937, in Baker,
EH,
p. 314. The story “Horns of the Bull” was eventually published as “The Capital of the World.”

“I am now Joris’s finger-woman”: MG to EH, undated [June 1937]; BU; quoted in Kert,
Women
, p 302.

“Rotfront”: MG to EH, telegram, June 11, 1937; JFK.

“send back that sheet of paper”: JI to EH, June 17, 1937, JFK.

eager to have it repaid: EH to Ralph Ingersoll, July 17, 1937, JFK.

Ivens’s lack: EH to AMacL cable draft [June 16], 1937, JFK.

immediate and poignant resonance: The Dust Bowl connection is interestingly discussed in Alex Vernon,
Second War
, p. 123.

Martha (as she wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt): MG to ER, [June?] 1937, BU, in Moorehead,
Selected Letters
, p. 52.

the roar of bombs was achieved: Erik Barnouw,
Documentary: A History of the Nonfiction Film
, p. 136.

Ivens was finding it: Schoots,
Living Dangerously
, p. 129.

“You effeminate boys”: Orson Welles interview,
Cahiers du Cinéma,
November 1966.

On May 30 they had started: Beevor,
Battle for Spain
, p. 276; Alexander Szurek,
The Shattered Dream
, pp. 141–42.

“fakery in allegiance”: Barnouw,
Documentary
, pp. 121–22.

“better there than in my heart,”: Schaber,
Taro
, p. 218.

the agony of retreat: Szurek,
The Shattered Dream
, pp. 171–72; Capa footage from “Rehearsal for War,”
March of Time
newsreel footage; Capa and Taro photos, vintage prints, ICP; Mexican Suitcase rolls 88, 89, 90, 91, ICP. Szurek mistakenly says that Capa and Gerda’s visit was during the Battle of Brunete; but Capa wasn’t there for that, and Gerda never spent the night, or had dinner, at the Brunete front.

By the next day: Beevor,
Battle for Spain
, pp. 276–77.

Instead they took pictures and shot footage: Photographs described in this paragraph have been dated by referring to Capa, notebook #1, Archives Nationales de France.

“His fear and his courage”: Barea,
FR
, p. 678.

“When I was thirteen”: Ibid., p. 680.

“the forgotten brigade”: Schaber, “The Eye of Solidarity,” in Schaber, Whelan, and Lubben,
Gerda Taro
, p. 27.

When the two photographers arrived: Kantorowicz, in Schaber, “Eye,” pp. 215–17; photos of Chapaiev Battalion, RC, and GT, ICP. Chapaiev Battalion newspaper cover reproduced in Schaber,
Taro
, fig. 79.

In the abandoned village: GT, photographs of Valsequillo from rolls 97–99, reproduced in
The
Mexican Suitcase,
pp. 243–51; Schaber, “Preliminary Remarks on Gerda Taro’s Documentation of the Defense of the Andalusian Mining Region,”
The Mexican Suitcase
, pp. 239–42; Juan Sala, “Capa and Taro: Lost Footage from the Cordoba Front,”
MS
, pp. 252–55.

So perhaps it was in Valsequillo: Photos of GT by RC, in
MS,
p. 407. Although the Capa archive has labeled these photographs “Paris, 1935–36,” where and when they were taken (Spain? Paris?) cannot be determined: other than Taro’s figure, all that can be seen in them is a narrow brass bed, part of a mirrored armoire door, and a rolled-up newspaper on a nightstand. Several vintage prints of the images were among Capa’s possessions, and the negatives were included with the Mexican Suitcase rolls, which Capa hoped to save from the invading Germans during World War II, all of which indicates the photographs’ value to him.

he, Ivens, and Martha: EH to Mrs. Paul Pfeiffer, August 2, 1937, in Baker,
Selected
, p. 460. Grammatical solecisms (“Joris and I”) are Hemingway’s.

Both Roosevelts seemed to feel: MG to ER, July 8, 1937, in Moorehead,
Selected
, p. 55; Schoots,
Living Dangerously
, p. 130.

along with Pauline: PPH to Sara Murphy, July 8, 1937, in Miller,
Letters
, p. 194.

what emerged from her typewriter: MG to EH, July 2, 1937, in Kert,
Women
, p. 305; Moorehead,
Selected
, pp. 132–33.

it was too soon: MG to ER, July 8, 1937, in Moorehead,
Selected
, p. 56.

having a triumph in Hollywood: Vernon, pp. 94–97, Baker;
EH
, p. 316; Schoots,
Living Dangerously
, pp. 130–31; and EH to Ralph Ingersoll, July 27, 1939, JFK.

wearing a dark blue suit and an expression of extreme anxiety: Anthony Powell, “A Reporter in Los Angeles—Hemingway’s Spanish Film,” from
Night and Day
, August 19, 1937, in Valentine Cunningham, ed.,
Spanish Front: Writers on the Civil War
, pp. 208–11.