Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War (68 page)

That evening the Russians gave a party: Events on the following pages described in MG, “Spanish War Notes,” November 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11, 1937, and Hemingway,
FWTBT
, pp. 237–38.

Koltsov, who had been so high-spirited: Preston,
WSSD
, pp. 196–97.

“And now the leaving”: MG, “Spanish War Notes,” December 6, 1937, BU.

“The frog lay on the edge”: Barea, “Bombas en la huerta,”
Valor y miedo
, p. 29. My translation.

In the darkness: Barea,
FR
, pp. 707–10.

which she promptly endorsed: MG to EH, December 1937, in Kert,
Women
, p. 311.

new, more expensive, and less satisfactory arrangements: MG to EH, undated [December 1937], BU.

And although Ivens had intended: JI to EH, January 28, 1938, JFK.

Writing to Hemingway from the boat: MG to EH, two undated letters, quoted in Kert,
Women
, pp. 311–12, and in BU; internal references to “the Yuletide season” and to her shipboard cabin place both as December 1937.

Ivens had sent his own letter to Hemingway: JI to EH, undated [but written on the boat train to the
Normandie
, so likely December 18, 1937], JFK.

the Hapag Lloyd Line’s ship
Europa
: “Events of Interest in the Shipping World,”
New York Times
, December 19, 1937, p. 61.

“Very cute and nervy”: KDP to SWM, November 12, 1937, and PPH to GCM and SWM, December 18, 1937, in Miller,
Lost Generation
, pp. 203–4; PPH passport photo, December 13, 1937, in Baker,
EH
, p. 323.

When the news of the offensive reached Hemingway: EH had traveled to Barcelona from Madrid with Sefton Delmer and Herbert Matthews, stopping to have breakfast with Luis Quintanilla in Sitges (Paul Quintanilla,
Waiting at the Shore
, p. 209). This seems to prove conclusively that contrary to her later assertions and accounts of Caroline Moorehead (p. 140), Bernice Kert (p. 311), and others, Martha Gellhorn didn’t have any kind of Christmas celebration, early or otherwise, with Hemingway in Barcelona. She was gone by then.

For three days: All details about EH and HLM’s participation in the battle for Teruel come from Matthews,
Education
, pp. 96–105, and EH, dispatch 18,
HR7,
pp. 64–68; other background from Thomas,
SCW
.

Capa hadn’t been planning: Details in the following pages from Whelan,
Capa
, pp. 129–30; Capa correspondence file, ICP; Mexican Suitcase photos, ICP.

At last he’d been not just a witness: EH to Hadley Mowrer, January 31, 1938, in Baker,
Selected
, p. 462.

“received the surrender”: EH dispatch 18, and EH cable to John Wheeler, n. 5, in
EHR
, pp. 63–68.

it was drawn-out and dangerous: Simone Téry, “Dans Teruel, prise et gardée,”
Regards
, January 13, 1938. My translation.

Hemingway glorying: EH to Hadley Mowrer, January 31, 1938, in Baker,
Selected
, p. 462.

“taking pictures of victory”: Capa,
Focus
, p. 102.

He sought out other images: Capa’s Mexican Suitcase film rolls and vintage prints, ICP.

The SIM agents had taken their time: Details from Barea,
FR
, pp. 710–13; identification of the Seminario, Beevor,
Battle for Spain
, p. 306, and personal observation.

he arrived from Teruel on Christmas Eve: P. Quintanilla,
Waiting at the Shore
, p. 210; Jay Allen in Luis Quintanilla,
All the Brave
, p. 14; Paul Quintanilla’s website,
www.lqart.org
.

Hemingway stayed around to celebrate: Kert,
Women
, p. 312; Baker,
EH
, pp. 323–24; Capa photographs, ICP; EH, dispatch 18, n. 5,
HR7
, p. 68; Ehrenburg,
Memoirs
, p. 418.

a ragged column of men: Narrative reconstructed from Capa’s film rolls in the Mexican Suitcase, ICP; Matthews,
Education
, p. 108. Other details, Beevor,
Battle
, pp. 317–18.

“heavy, flat-faced, brutish”: Matthews,
Education
, p. 108.

“You’re Ilse”: Barea,
FR
, p. 718.

“Perhaps subjectively you are a good revolutionary”: Katia Landau, “Stalinism in Spain,”
Revolutionary History
, vol. 1, no. 2, Summer, 1988.

If Barea had known either of these things: Before a shell struck the car he was riding in to Teruel with three other journalists, killing all three but sparing him, Philby had felt under considerable suspicion because, as he put it, “Franco officers … seemed to think that the British in general must be a lot of Communists because so many were fighting with the International Brigades.” (KP in Boris Volodarsky, “Kim Philby: Living a Lie,”
History Today
, August 5, 2010). So Ilsa’s (and Katya Landau’s) knowledge of his real identity and sympathies were a danger to him, and thus unwittingly to them.

Kulcsar came to bid Barea and Ilsa goodbye: Barea,
FR
, pp. 715–19.

On December 25, Georges Luciani: Thomas,
SCW
, p. 828, n. 5; Hugh Ragsdale,
The Soviets, the Munich Crisis, and the Coming of World War II
, pp. 30–31; Coulondre to Delbos, December 27, 1937,
Documents Diplomatiques Français
, 2nd series, vol. VII, note 30, “Note de M. Luciani.”

PART III: “LA DESPEDIDA”

On January 2: Sources for the following pages are Matthews,
Education
, pp. 109–11; Capa Mexican Suitcase photo rolls; Capa,
Slightly Out of
Focus, p. 137; Capa, “La lutte implacable dans les souterrains de la ville,”
Ce Soir
, January 8, 1938. My translation.

“The war correspondent has his stake”: Capa,
Focus
, p. 137.

she even became jealous: Paul Quintanilla, p. 211.

In their suite at the Elysée: EH and PHH in Paris and on shipboard: Reynolds, pp. 282–83; Kert,
Women
, p. 312.

he became enraged: EH to HRM, January 31, 1938, JFK; EH to MP, February 1, 1938, in Bruccoli, ed.,
The Only Thing That Counts
, pp. 253–54.

He was only slightly mollified: EH interview in
Ce Soir
, December 30, 1937, reprinted in Robert S. Thronberry, “Hemingway’s
Ce Soir
Interview (1937) and the Battle of Teruel,”
Hemingway Review
, vol. 5, no. 1, Fall 1985, pp. 2–8.

He continued to fret: EH to MP, February 1 and 8, 1938, MP to EH, February 3, 1938, JFK.

“I don’t think it necessarily follows”: AG to EH, February 6, 1938, JFK.

a long letter he got from Joris Ivens: JI to EH, January 28, 1938, JFK.

He wondered if he was too close: EH to Maxwell Perkins, February 1 and [9], 1938, in Bruccoli,
The Only Thing
, pp. 253–54 and 256–57.

a clipping from the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
: Clipping in EH/MG correspondence, BU.

“I am delighted to be back”: “Hemingway Tells of War, New Play in Interview,” Key West
Citizen
, February 1, 1938.

“I did not want to leave”: EH to MP, February 1, 1938, in Bruccoli,
loc. cit.

“to save the damned”: MG to HGW, February 8, 1938, in Rollyson,
Beautiful Exile
, p. 88.

“a single cell”: Rollyson,
Exile
, p. 87.

“called Franco a butcher”:
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
, January 28, 1938.

“the voice, the culture”: Moorehead,
MG
, p. 141.

the handy sum of $1,000: Herbert Matthews to his father, November 14, 1937, Columbia University.

“idiotic lazy cowardly”: MG to H. G. Wells, February 8, 1938, in Rollyson,
Exile
, pp. 87–88.

she told Mrs. Roosevelt: MG to ER, February 1, 1938, in Moorehead,
Selected
, p. 57.

“
POLDI DIED SUDDENLY
”: Barea,
FR
, p. 722.

Kulcsar had been entirely reconciled: Valentin Pollak, unpublished memoir, pp. 389–91, BP.

the result of intentional poisoning: Berdah, p. 20.

What if the NKVD was trying to eliminate: So far as I know, no one has ever directly connected Philby’s placement, Ilsa’s difficulties with the SIM, the persecution of the Landaus, and Kulcsar’s possible liquidation; but the connection seems persuasive, especially considering the timing of Krivitsky’s defection (see p. 240).

Things would resolve themselves: Source for the following pages is Barea,
FR
, pp. 719–27.

On March 18, bareheaded and without an overcoat: “Hemingway Off to Spain,”
New York Times
, March 19, 1938.

“the fate of Spain”: Matthews,
New York Times
, March 13, 1938.

he’d been affectionate: Kert,
Women
, p. 313.

“Where I go now”: EH,
The Fifth Column
, p. 83.

he’d written an introduction: “First Hand Picture of Conflict in Spain Given by a Volunteer Here,”
Washington Post
, March 18, 1938.

a prefatory note for the catalog:
www.moma.org/docs/press_archives/437/releases/MOMA_1938_0017_1938-03-14_38314-10.pdf?2010
.

a piece for
Ken
: Hemingway, “Dying Well—or Badly,”
Ken
, April 21, 1938, and “The Time Now, the Place Spain,”
Ken
, April 7, 1938.

“leftwing anti-fascist”: Seldes cable to EH, February 23, 1938, JFK.

they’d reduced his pay rate: JNW to EH, May 31, 1938, JFK.

“I’m sorry I sent you that cable”: EH to JDP, c. March 26, 1938, in Baker,
Selected
, pp. 463–65.

“I know the way your mind works”: AMacL to EH, December 14, 1928, JFK.

“The news has been terrible”: MG to ER, late March 1938, in Moorehead,
Selected
, p. 58.

“
IF ANYTHING EVER STOPS
”: Unsigned cable, MG to EH, March 22, 1938, JFK. Michael Reynolds dates this cable as from July 1938 and interprets it as referring to a
westbound
passage. But the sailing dates and ship names make no sense in that context, whereas they
do
in March 1938, when compared with the “Mails and Shipping” lists in
The New York Times
.

Hemingway had told Perkins: EH to MP, February 8, 1938, in Bruccoli,
The Only Thing That Counts
, pp. 256–57.

They wrote to Ilsa’s parents: Pollak, pp. 391–92.

a month of escalating threats and ultimatums: Schuschnigg,
Ein Requiem in Rot-Weisz-Rot
, quoted in Thomas,
SCW
, p. 783.

the streets of Vienna: “L’Armée hitlérienne a occupé Autriche,”
L’Humanité
, March 13, 1938; Martin Gilbert,
A History of the Twentieth Century
, vol. 2, pp. 170–78.

a story about lovers: Gellhorn, “In Sickness and in Health,”
The Novellas of Martha Gellhorn
, p. 251.

The situation in Spain: Matthews,
Education
, pp. 118–25; Thomas (
SCW
, p. 785) reports that in the raid of March 16–17, 1,300 people were killed and 2,000 injured.

Hemingway wasn’t enthusiastic: EH to Wheeler, June 2, 1938, JFK. Hemingway claimed in his letter to have researched accreditation and transport to the Nationalist zone, and that doing so cost him the opportunity to be present when the insurgents took Lérida. This seems somewhat unlikely, since he arrived in Paris on the 24th, worked on his short story manuscript and a
Ken
article, and had to wait for Martha to arrive on the 28th. His trip to St. Jean de Luz, where he spent a total of two hours and fifteen minutes, would probably not have allowed him sufficient time to go to Hendaye, on the border, and “ascertain it was impossible” to visit fascist Spain.

a
Ken
article to write: “The Cardinal Picks a Winner” was published on May 5, 1938.
Ken
’s lead time was approximately a month, so he would most likely have sent the piece to New York on or around the last day of March.

goaded by Martha: MG, in Moorehead,
Gellhorn
, p. 130.

he extracted from the ambassador: Claude G. Bowers to Cordell Hull (“Confidential to the Secretary of State”), April 3, 1938, report 1475; in Shulman, “Hemingway’s Observations on the Spanish Civil War: Unpublished State Department Reports,”
HR7
, pp. 147–49.

“resist, resist, resist”: Matthews,
Education
, p. 131.

Martha was traveling separately: In his account of the journey to the Spanish frontier in
Not Peace but a Sword
, Sheean doesn’t mention Martha’s presence on the train; he does, however, say that Hemingway went off in Perpignan and came back with a car, which he presumes was provided by the Spanish consulate. It seems much more likely that the car was the one Martha shipped over, and that she wasn’t on the train because she was getting it to Perpignan.

“I don’t know why you’re going”: Vincent Sheean,
Not Peace but a Sword
, p. 237.

you could nearly always find a group: Ibid., pp. 241–42. Sheean quotes Malraux as saying, “J’aime mieux les putains que les raseurs.”

Before dawn most mornings: MG, “Spanish War Notes,” April 10, 12, 15, 19, and 21, 1938.

they found Milton Wolff: EH, dispatch 20,
HR7
, pp. 71–72.

On the tenth, they lunched: EH, dispatch 22,
HR7
, pp. 76–77. In a piece entitled “Memory” in the
London Review of Books
(vol. 18, no. 24, December 12, 1986), Gellhorn, who mentions a previous encounter with Modesto in which he and Hemingway challenged each other to Russian roulette with herself being the stake, makes this meeting a similarly rivalous exchange between the two men. Unfortunately, none of the details about the earlier meeting check out, and her version of this one seems similarly creative.