Review: Hotel Florida – Truth, Love and Death in the Spanish Civil War, by Amanda Vaill

Hotel Florida - Truth, Love and Death in the Spanish Civil War

Author: Amanda Vaill

ISBN-13: 9781408833896

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Guideline Price: £9.99

Truth, it is said, is war’s first casualty. And perhaps the second, third and fourth, as well. In Spain during the Spanish civil war truth went topsy-turvy and did somersaults. More ink has probably been spilled (and lies written) over that war than over any comparable conflict. So it was with some trepidation that I began to read this book. Also because it covers a good deal of ground already ploughed by that master Paul Preston in We Saw Spain Die, published in 2008. It is a brave writer who follows Preston on matters Spanish!

I needn’t have worried. Amanda Vaill has written a fascinating and absorbing narrative – she calls it a “reconstruction” based on all sources available – on many levels: historical, human and political. And she introduces to a new generation of English-speaking readers Arturo Barea, who would have never been noticed outside of his own circle, nor become a great writer, nor died in exile in England, had Franco not, in the 1930s, plunged Spain back into the Middle Ages.

The Spanish civil war is viewed through the prism of three couples: Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gelhorn; Robert Capa and Gerda Taro; and Arturo Barea and Ilsa Kulcsar. I liked the approach and I think that it works.

Hemingway, only in his mid-thirties and firmly established as a celebrity (and revelling in it), was aware that he hadn’t written anything of critical acclaim since A Farewell to Arms in 1929. His hunting and deep-sea fishing, though enjoyable, could not mask the fact that in 1936 John Dos Passos, his friend and rival, had just completed the last of his USA trilogy to worldwide plaudits. And to add insult to injury, in August Dos Passos’s face was peering out at Hemingway from the cover of Time magazine.

Martha Gelhorn, coming off a romance (or was it?) with elderly HG Wells and a previous one with Bertrand de Jouvenel, each of whom introduced her to high society in London and Paris, was setting out on a career that would make her the greatest female war correspondent, and perhaps the greatest ever, male or female. She didn’t let the fact that she wasn’t anywhere near the scene get in the way of her vivid eyewitness account of a lynching of a black teenager in Mississippi in 1936. In fact, there was no scene – she invented the story.

Born in Budapest, 22-year-old André Friedman took the more American-sounding name of Robert Capa from the director Frank Capra and the word for shark in Hungarian. His girlfriend, Gerta Pohorylle, born in Germany, and three years older than Capa, took the name, Gerda Taro, perhaps because it sounded like Greta Garbo. And like Garbo at that age, she juggled five or six boyfriends at a time as a matter of course – she wore high heels everywhere, even on field trips! In 1936 they were busy re-inventing themselves in Paris. Both were Jewish, anti-fascist, had been arrested in their own countries and had come to Paris to breathe more easily and because it was, well, Paris.

While in Madrid, they all stayed at the Hotel Florida along with many other famous writers and war correspondents too numerous to mention. It became a watering hole, as well, for politicians, hangers-on, Soviet advisers and, in Hemingway’s words, whores de combat, and it could find itself being bombed at any time, day or night, by Hitler’s airplanes.

The third couple are less well-known. Arturo Barea, also anti-fascist, grew up in Madrid and became a censor (later broadcaster) there for the Spanish Republic in September 1936. He was appointed as head of the press office through the “good offices” of Mikhail Kolsov, a Soviet journalist, who would, like many others, fall foul of Stalin and be executed for treason in 1940, after, of course, doing his loyal bidding for years. Barea was already married when, two months later, he met the university-educated, multi-linguist Austrian, Ilsa Kulcsar, also married. She had been a member with her now semi-estranged husband of a leftist cell in Vienna. Another member of the cell there was none other than Kim Philby, the double agent. She went to Spain to do something against fascism, not simply talk about doing something.

While Preston’s account is thematic, this book is linear. It has no chapters, only datelines – scores of them. The first dateline is Madrid: July 1936, telling us how Barea was helping to storm the Montana Barracks to get weapons to defend the Spanish Republic in the aftermath of Franco’s military rebellion. The final one is KeyWest/Havana: March 1939 where, having just arrived in Havana from Key West and aware that the end has come for the republic, Hemingway puts a sheet of paper into his typewriter and begins to type out his great novel based on the conflict, For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Any book written about this war has to address the problem of truth. But whose truth?

The Spanish Republic’s? Which, denied aid from democratic countries while Nazi Germany and fascist Italy poured men and materiel in to help Franco, absolutely needed the Soviet Union’s military aid in order to survive – and this aid came at a price, as Barea and many other would realise.

The Soviets’? Who were embarking on their show trials in Moscow and whose emissaries were already by November 1936 calling the shots in Madrid and eventually relieving Spain of its gold reserves. Of course, Spain had relieved the Aztecs and the Incas of their gold reserves some time before.

The United States, France and England’s? Whose washing of hands led ultimately to the defeat of the republic and the death or execution of 150,000 people, the exile of 500,000 in appalling circumstances and the enslavement for many years of hundreds of thousands of republican prisoners.

Hemingway’s? Who doctored many a dispatch to protect the republic and glibly parroted many lies, the most outrageous of which was that the Catalan leftist leader Andreu Nin was in Berlin working for the Nazis – when, in fact, he had been kidnapped, then tortured and killed by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, in Madrid.

Capa’s? Whose most famous picture of the war (among others) of the militiaman getting shot in battle, rifle flung in the air, was, in the opinion of the author and many others, staged – his dissimulation seems almost refreshing, in comparison.

Perhaps Stalin, who had spent two years in a seminary in Georgia, had read there Rule No 13 of St Ignatius Loyola’s s Spiritual Exercises, which states, “White is black, if the herarchical Church so decides.” Perhaps he was thinking of it when he applied it by means of the Comintern and ultimately when he did his deal with Hitler in 1939, making communists all over the word do yet another somersault.

Hemingway is there, in all his reflected macho glory, risking his life to get close to the front to earn €1,000 per story, an unheard-of sum during the Depression. Dos Passos is there as well, asking, in Hemingway’s view, dangerous questions about the disappearance, in early 1937, of his long-time friend and translator, José Robles. Robles, who left his position as professor of Spanish literature at Johns Hopkins University to help the republic, was also aide to and translator for General Vladimir Gorev, Soviet military attaché.

Declassification of Soviet archives has revealed a report by Gorev himself about the necessity for a struggle against anarchists in Spain. As Gorev’s translator, Robles, in the author’s view, “knew too much about the Soviet Union’s plans for its Spanish protégés”. Preston is, in my view, very unsatisfactory on this point, all but felon-setting Robles for treason on inferences and the fact that his brother was a fascist. (Gorev, of course, was purged and executed for treason by Stalin in 1938, but not before being so interested in Ilsa as to summon her after midnight to ask her about propaganda and politics, which worried Barea no end.)

Barea and Ilsa lost their government jobs. They came more and more under suspicion. Why had she given up her party membership? Why wasn’t he a member? Were they Trotskyists? They finally decided to leave Spain and crossed the border in February 1938, he only achieving his recent dream of becoming a writer in exile.

Ilsa was very fortunate that the Russians never learned that Philby and she were members of the same cell, because, if they had, she would have been liquidated to protect Philby’s cover as a pro-fascist journalist embedded with Franco’s forces. She only realised many years later, in 1963, when Philby was unmasked as a Soviet double agent, just how fortunate she had been.

Dos Passos would soon be asking the same question about Andreu Nin, whose body would never be found. Dos Passos’s experiences in Spain soured him so much that he was later unable or unwilling to distinguish between Stalinism and any form of socialism, democratic or otherwise, and would end up supporting Richard Nixon.

Hemingway and Gelhorn would marry in 1940 but their happiness was short-lived and they divorced in 1945. He resented her competitiveness. He ensured that she would not get press credentials to cover the D-Day landings. However, she trumped him by stowing away in a hospital ship and then impersonating an orderly to get ashore in Normandy while Hemingway’s boat, in sight of Omaha Beach, turned around and headed back to England. Later in life, she granted interviews on condition that no question be asked about “Papa”, saying that she “had no intention being the footnote to any other person’s life”. They both took their own lives, he in 1961 and she in 1998.

Capa and Gerda, practically overnight, became the most celebrated photographers in the world. Capa’s dictum about photos was: “If they’re not good enough, you’re not close enough.” He and Gerda both took incredible risks at the front, wherever it was. Gerda took one too many and was killed by one of the republic’s own tanks in February 1937. Capa was disconsolate and blamed himself, as did her family. He went to China to film the war there and did not return to Barcelona until October 1938 when the cause was lost. He arrived just in time to record the farewell parade of the International Brigade in Barcelona. The parade was only announced on the radio 20 minutes before its start for security reasons, but 300,000 people came streaming out to line both sides of the Diagonal Avenue to cheer the foreign soldiers and kiss them as they marched past for the last time. The offices and apartments above gave them an impromptu ticker-tape parade. There was a huge picture of Stalin and the dying republic’s leaders thanked them.

Capa would take many more pictures – the harrowing scenes of refugees fleeing in terror in advance of the fascist army following the Battle of the Ebro, the inhuman conditions of the concentration camps on the beaches near Perpignan, the D-Day landing at Omaha Beach and the Allied victory – until his luck ran out when he stepped on a land mine in 1954 in Vietnam while covering yet another war.

On the minus side, the author writes of Claud Cockburn, the Comintern’s puppet who was the Madrid correspondent of the Daily Worker, “even (sic) Cockburn admitted that he fabricated news stories to serve his cause”. This indicates that she holds this committed Stalinist in high regard. She fails to mention that among these fabricated stories were the lies about Andreu Nin’s party, the POUM, being agents of Franco and the Nazis. (In the same dispatch of May 11th, 1937 Cockburn comments approvingly of the show trials going on in Moscow!) This failure is a serious defect in the context of a book about truth. She also could have referred to Cockburn’s nauseating autobiography where he makes light of Koltsov’s execution by Stalin and makes no mention of Koltsov’s 14-month torture and “confession”. Cockburn does, however, say that he was a friend of Koltsov, but apparently not friend enough to express anger or regret at his friend’s torture and death, even 30 years later. Unless, of course, Cockburn thought that Koltsov had it coming.

On a geographical note, the author puts Malaga 20 miles from Gibraltar when it is about 80 miles away. On a historical note King James I of Aragon and Catalonia did not wrest Catalonia from the French in the 13th century. He conquered Mallorca and Valencia in the 13th century. Count Borrell II of Barcelona had wrested Catalonia from the Franks (not the French) in the 10th century.

Vaill had written the well-received Everybody Was So Young, the story of the Jazz Age couple, Gerard and Sarah Murphy, who were friends of Hemingway and F Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald in Paris and Nice. This very different effort is well worth the read.

Frank MacGabhann is a lawyer and commentator