Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War (69 page)

to see for themselves what was happening: Sources for the next pages are EH, dispatch 22,
HR7
, pp. 76–77, MG, “Spanish War Notes,” April 15, 1937, BU, and Sheean,
Not Peace
, pp. 72–79.

“The victorious sword of Franco”: ABC (Sevilla), April 16, 1938.

the theater was crowded: “Air Raid Siren Halts Showing of War Film,”
New York Times
, April 25, 1938; Sheean,
Not Peace
, pp. 248–49; EH, dispatch 26,
HR7
, pp. 84–85; Hemingway, “The Writer as a Writer,”
Direction
, May–June 1939, p. 3.

“pig-headed”: EH to John Wheeler, June 2, 1938. JFK.

Hemingway wrote down enough: EH, field notes for “Old Man at the Bridge,” JFK, also described in William Braasch Watson, “‘Old Man at the Bridge’: The Making of a Short Story,” in
HR7
, p. 154.

“
THESE SHORT PUNCHES
”: EH to Gingrich, October 22, 1938, in Baker,
Selected
, p. 472; Gingrich cable to EH, July 18, 1938, JFK.

She’d wanted to do a piece: Cables between
Collier’s
and MG in Moorehead,
Gellhorn
, p. 145.

“What goes on here seems to be the affair”: MG to ER, April 24 or 25, 1938, in Moorehead,
Selected
, pp. 59–61.

She begged off an excursion: MG, “Spanish War Notes,” April 28 and May 1, 1938, BU.

“history is just a big stinking mess”: MG, “Spanish War Notes,” April 13, 1938, quoted in Moorehead,
Gellhorn
, p. 145.

All he had to do was keep fighting: Thomas,
SCW
, pp. 798–99; Preston,
SCW
, pp. 284–85.

They’d flown down the coast: Matthews, “Madrid’s Morale Found Unflagging,”
New York Times,
May 10, 1938; EH, dispatch 30, May 10, 1938, EHR, pp. 91–92.

North had been responsible: Donaldson,
Fitzgerald and Hemingway: Works and Days
, p. 375.

“I like the Communists”: Joseph North,
No Men Are Strangers
, pp. 143–44.

“Am going home”: EH and PPH quoted in Hawkins,
Unbelievable Happiness
, p. 207.

“not exactly happy”: MG to Edna Gellhorn, May 26, 1938, in Moorehead,
Selected
, pp. 62–63, Gellhorn, “Guns Against France,”
Collier’s
, October 8, 1938.

“The war in Spain was one kind of war”: MG to ER, undated [March 1938?] in Moorehead,
Selected
, p. 58, and Moorehead,
Gellhorn
, p. 146.

Ilsa just couldn’t bear: My source for details in this section is Barea,
FR
, pp. 734–36.

In the Avenue George V: “Le Memorial Day,”
Le Temps
, May 30, 1938, p. 6.

At the other end of Paris:
L’Humanité
, May 30, 1938, p. 7.

the grave of Gerda Taro:
Ce Soir
, May 30, 1938, p. 8.

whether dove or falcon: Irme Schaber (in
Taro
, p. 268) identifies the bird as Horus, the Egyptian god of the sky, war, hunting, and resurrection, according to an essay by the contemporary Italian scholar Casimiro de Crescenzo, “La Tomba di Gerda Taro: un lavoro inedito di Alberto Giacometti,” in
Riga
, 1991, cahier 1.

The person who paid that: An undated 1938 letter (probably written in July), from RC in China to Julia Friedmann, instructs her that “the gravestone (Gerda’s) … should be paid from my money.”

He accused Jack Wheeler: EH to John A. Wheeler, June 2, 1938, JFK.

He attacked Archie MacLeish: EH to AMacL, [July 1938], JFK.

He fought with the people: EH to Ralph Ingersoll, July 17, 1938, JFK.

he wrangled with Max Perkins: Perkins to EH, July 1, 1938; EH to MP, July 12, 1938.

The first piece he sent to
Ken
: Hemingway, “Treachery in Aragon,”
Ken
, June 30, 1938.

a short story he’d begun in Paris: Hemingway, “The Denunciation,”
The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War
, p. 97.

telling a gullible journalist: Key West
Citizen
, June 18 and July 13, 1938.

if he’d hired someone: EH to Mary Pfeiffer, date not given, quoted in Kert,
Women
, p. 118.

the images and tastes and sounds and smells: Barea,
FR
, pp. 738–39.

“march to the rescue”: Gilbert,
A History of the Twentieth Century
, p. 189.

On the moonless night of July 25: Beevor,
Battle for Spain
, pp. 349–53; Thomas,
SCW
, pp. 815–21.

The club grounds: Auden and Isherwood,
Journey to a War
, p. 152.

“if it’s not the runs”: RC to PK, in Whelan,
Capa
, p. 141.

His new acquaintances: Auden and Isherwood,
Journey
, pp. 43–44.

he was sending back money: RC to PK, April 29, 1938; and July 27, 1938 bank draft from Capa’s account at National City Bank to Heinrich Pohorylle, both ICP.

“I am the ‘poor relation’”: RC to PK, April 29, 1938.

“Unfortunately,” Capa wrote Koester: RC to PK, July 27, 1938, ICP.

“won his English in a crap game”: Whelan,
Capa
, p. 136.

“He was best”: RC, “China phrases,” fragment in 1938 miscellaneous documents, ICP.

At his residence in Prague: Gilbert,
History
, pp. 194–202.

there was no point: MG to Edna Gellhorn, May 26, 1938, in Moorehead
Selected
, p. 62.

“golden key”: PPH to EH, September 1, 5, 10, and 28, 1938, in Reynolds, pp. 294–95.

they sat in the sun on the
terrasse
: Gellhorn,
A Stricken Field
, p. 288.

“In going where you have to go”: Hemingway, preface to
The Fifth Column and the First Forty-nine Stories
(Scribner’s, 1938), p. vii.

went pheasant shooting: Baker,
EH
, p. 334.

“the barbarism of Fascist interventionists in Spain”: Hemingway, “‘Humanity Will Not Forgive This!’: The
Pravda
Article,” ed. William Braasch Watson, in
HR7
, pp. 114–18. In his cable to M. M. Olgin accepting the commission, Hemingway sent regards to Koltsov, suggesting that Koltsov had something to do with
Pravda
’s request.

Koltsov, his teeth as bad as ever: Cockburn,
Discord
, pp. 310–14.

clutching her silver fox fur: George Kennan,
Memoirs
, vol. 1, pp. 90–92.

She, too, wanted to talk: Gellhorn, “Memory,”
London Review of Books
, December 12, 1996. Gellhorn says here that Koltsov told her all about Russia’s guarantees to Benes, and goes on to blame the Czech president for not accepting the challenge to fight for his people. Interestingly, she made no mention of these guarantees in her
Collier’s
article, “Epitaph for a Democracy,” nor in her otherwise information-packed letters to her editor, Charles Colebaugh. One wonders if the candor of Koltsov’s conversation, and her indictment of Benes, were both a kind of
arrière-pensée.
Accordingly, I haven’t included this point in my account.

after making several more vain attempts: MG to Charles Colebaugh, October 22, 1938, in Moorehead,
Selected
, pp. 67–70.

Stalin had agreed: G. Dimitrov and D. Manuilsky to Voroshilov, copy to Stalin, August 29, 1938, in Radosh et al.,
Spain Betrayed
, p. 469. Although there had been discussions over the summer of both sides renouncing the help of outside forces, Negrín’s unilateral move wasn’t made until Voroshilov and Stalin had been asked for their “advice and instructions.”

there were only about seven thousand: Beevor,
Battle for Spain
, p. 363.

“The only thing to say”: Cockburn,
Discord
, p. 314.

“I’ve spoken about you”: Barea,
FR
, p. 742.

they saw an old couple: Ibid., p. 745.

Sheean’s English wife, Diana Forbes-Robertson: Richard Whelan notes, ICP. Forbes-Robertson says she met Capa when she first arrived in Spain, and that he helped her to establish herself there as a journalist. She also says, elsewhere in the same interview, that she accompanied her husband to Spain in April 1938, after he and Hemingway had tried to forbid her and Martha Gellhorn to come because it was too dangerous. Capa, however, was in China in April; and no one, including her husband in his memoir
Not Peace but a
Sword, mentions seeing Forbes-Robertson in Spain at that time. It seems more likely that she first met Capa in the fall of 1938.

On the sixteenth he went to Falset: Details of Capa’s trips to Falset and Montblanch are reconstructed from films in the Mexican Suitcase archive, ICP, supplemented by contemporary news accounts.

Capa, who had dressed carefully: Agustí Centelles I Osso, photograph in the Archivos Estatales, MECyD, Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca; Capa, photographs of “La Despedida” in ICP; Cynthia Young, e-mail to the author.

On either side of the Diagonal: Capa’s photographs and notebook (#5), ICP; Matthews, “Loyalists Honor Foreign Fighters,”
New York Times
, October 17, 1938; Eby,
Comrades and Commissars
, pp. 410–12, Beevor,
Battle for Spain
, p. 366; De la Mora,
Splendor
, pp. 371–73.

Martha Gellhorn wasn’t in Barcelona: Gellhorn, “The Third Winter,”
The Face of War
, p. 41. Herbert Matthews’s correspondence for this period reveals that neither Hemingway nor Gellhorn was in Barcelona for the disbanding of the International Brigades: a letter to his wife, Nancie (November 8, 1938), says that Hemingway has just left Spain after a three-day visit to rejoin Gellhorn in Paris, and that she will arrive later in the month for a week’s stay. As to “The Third Winter,” a search of
Collier’s
issues for 1938 and 1939, and of the
Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature
for 1937–1940, reveals no trace of this article. It was included under the title “The Third Winter,” with a dateline of November 1938, in
The Face of War
(pp. 37–49), where the copyright page only says that “the reports on the war in Spain … appeared first in
Collier’s.
” No first publication information is given. It seems inescapable that this is the “outdated” story
Collier’s
spiked (in a letter from Denver Lindley on February 8, 1939), and MG refers to in letters to Hortense Flexner (spring 1940) and Charles Colebaugh (July 17, 1941).

the reception for the collection: EH to Maxwell Perkins, October 28, 1938, in Baker,
Selected
, pp. 473–75.

“a carnival of treachery”: Ibid. “Rotten-ness” is Hemingway’s spelling.

Hemingway suddenly faltered: This incident is reconstructed from EH to Maxwell Perkins, October 28, 1938, in Baker,
Selected
, pp. 473–75; MG to David Gurewitsch, undated, in Moorehead,
Selected
, p. 222. In her letter, Gellhorn places the encounter in Valencia, which is impossible, since Pacciardi was not in Spain at the time, nor were Gellhorn and Hemingway, and neither of them was in Valencia after December 1937. On the other hand, they
were
in Paris in October 1938, and so was Pacciardi. Caroline Moorehead, in her biography of Gellhorn, mistakenly says that Gellhorn and Hemingway saw Pacciardi in the “Despedida” parade in Barcelona, which none of the parties attended.

“In a war”: EH, preface to Gustav Regler,
The Great Crusade
, p. vii.

very early the next morning they set out: The November 5 Ebro incident is reconstructed from Sheean,
Not Peace
, pp. 328–38; Matthews,
Education
, pp. 138–39; Capa photographs, ICP; Matthews, “Loyalists Retain Strong Ebro Hold,”
New York Times
, November 6, 1938; and Ramon Buckley (son of Henry) in Russ Pottle, “Hemingway and the Mexican Suitcase,” paper presented at the 15th Biennial Conference of the Hemingway Society, June 2012. Sheean says there were two boats, one with four oarsmen, one with two, and doesn’t mention the shells; Matthews mentions only one boat, and he and Buckley both cite the shellfire. Capa’s photos of the boat show three or four oars.

On a street in the village: Alvah Bessie to Carlos Baker, February 19 and 28, 1962, in Baker,
EH
, p. 335.

On the night of November 6: Sheean,
Not Peace
, pp. 339–40; Diana Forbes-Robertson, interviews with Josefa Stuart and Richard Whelan, Whelan notes, ICP.

Hemingway got Matthews to drive him: HLM to Nancie Matthews, November 8, 1938, Columbia University.

Within hours he was at the front: Capa’s experiences on the Segre reconstructed from photographs and newspaper clippings in the Capa archive, ICP.

The Segre offensive: Thomas,
SCW
, p. 833. There is considerable controversy over the final casualty counts: for instance, Beevor (
Battle for Spain
, p. 358) puts the number of dead at thirty thousand; Preston’s figure (
SCW
, p. 291) is much lower, 7,150.

intending to write the story: MG to Charles Colebaugh, December 6, 1938, in Moorehead,
Selected
, pp. 70–71.

“underneath she’s a lot softer”: HLM to Nancie Matthews, January 30, 1939, HLM papers, Columbia University.

“He was my brother”: Moorehead,
Gellhorn
, p. 143.

How could she write about suffering: Gellhorn, “Till Death Us Do Part,”
The Novellas
, pp. 296–97.

One night he held her hand: MG interview with Richard Whelan, December 31, 1981, and letter from Peter Wyden to Ruth Cerf Berg, both in Whelan notes, ICP.

After writing up her Barcelona story: See paragraph that begins “Martha Gellhorn wasn’t in Barcelona,” p. 330.

Although she’d confessed to Herbert Matthews: HLM to Nancie Matthews, November 26, 1938, HLM papers, Columbia University.

“so sick I had an absolute breakdown”: RC to Julia Friedmann, December 10, 1938, ICP.