Hemingway and Gellhorn Read online

  When France, Britain, and the U.S. remained neutral and refused to supply arms to Spain’s left-wing government, the republicans turned to Russia for support. Franco and his nationalists were backed by Germany and Italy. Figuring out which side to come down on was a devil’s choice for most open-minded individuals, with Stalin in one camp and Hitler and Mussolini in the other. For Martha the choice was easy; she had tilted to the left from the time she was old enough to think for herself. The war against fascism was all that mattered to her. If it involved an alliance with Stalin to get the job done, so be it.

  But for Ernest, the issue was not so black and white. He was basically apolitical, non-ideological, anarchistic, a gut-level isolationist who thought that all wars were evil despite his mania to write about every one that erupted around the world. “Hemingway said he was neutral because he had friends on both sides,” said Welsh author Denis Brian. A major point of contention between Ernest and Pauline—and her entire family as well—was her staunch support of Franco simply because she was Catholic. All the Pfeiffers were devout Catholics, so when the Catholic Church stamped its Imprimatur on Franco and the nationalists, the Pfeiffers fell in line behind the Church. Ernest had converted to Catholicism when he married Pauline, but in his soul he was essentially a hedonistic pagan.

  Ernest had a way of weaseling around the issue when pressed too hard. He loved the pomp and ceremony of the Church and once remarked that Catholicism was the only religion worth taking seriously—assuming that you wanted to take any of them seriously in the first place. Indeed, he had been attracted to the Catholic Church ever since a young priest tended to him on the battlefield in Italy during World War I. Harry Sylvester, a Catholic writer who also claimed to be neutral at the time, remarked that Ernest and Pauline “had a real problem, which I never went into very much with him, about birth control. They seemed happy, but then he was on the verge of breaking up with her. They had separated and he was horsing around with Martha Gellhorn.”

  In the end, Ernest came down on the side of the republicans. “He called the war a bad war in which nobody was right,” said Sylvester, “but said that all that mattered to him was to relieve the suffering of human beings. He said it was neither Christian nor Catholic to kill the wounded in a Toledo hospital with hand grenades, or to bomb the working-class area of Madrid simply to kill poor people.”

  Ernest acknowledged that both sides were guilty of atrocities and the republicans had slaughtered their fair share of priests and bishops. At the same time he wondered why the Church sided with the oppressors, in this war at least, and not with the oppressed. Ernest wrote that his sympathies were always with exploited workers against absentee landlords, and he believed that Russia had a particularly lousy government, but he added that he didn’t like any government that much at all.

  Ernest had good company in Winston Churchill, who claimed he would welcome the devil himself as an ally in a righteous cause to defeat his enemy. It should be noted that the full extent of Stalin’s crimes against his own people was not yet fully apparent.

  Joris Ivens also recalled Ernest’s shift on the war. Once in Spain, Ivens said, Ernest weighed one side against the other and decided he was more anti-fascist than anything else. “He saw that most of his friends there, bullfighters and barmen and others he knew before the war, were fighting on the democratic, the republican side, against Franco and the nationalists.”

  Milton Wolff observed Ernest with a wary eye at first. Wolff was a dedicated leftist who commanded the Lincoln Battalion of the Fifteenth International Brigade and risked his life in the thick of battle. He knew of Ernest’s reputation, naturally enough, but worried about whether the renowned author was there on a photo shoot to puff up his own image and ego.

  “You had to be there to know what had happened,” he said. “Basically, it was a war waged by the army and monarchists led by General Franco to reverse the 1936 election in which a leftist government of several parties was elected. It was called the Popular Front. Franco brought over Moorish mercenaries, a paid army, to destroy the elected government…In the very first weeks of the war, long before Moscow decided to help the Spanish government, the republican side as they were called, Hitler and Mussolini were pouring in stuff to help Franco and the nationalists. The final factor was England putting the arm on France to close the border between France and Spain to cut off military aid to the republicans. And FDR went along.”

  Wolff wrote an article in which he called Ernest a tourist in Spain, incurring Papa’s eternal wrath. “I commanded troops and was wounded before you were dry behind the ears,” Ernest shot back.

  Wolff then backed off—but not completely, lumping Ernest in with the other correspondents covering the war. “I thought in a sense all war correspondents were tourists in Spain,” he explained, “because they could call their shots, visit cathedrals when they wanted. And when I say cathedrals I mean whatever action or inaction they wanted. When they were hungry, they could go to Paris to eat and stock up. And they were warm and dry and didn’t have to be in the rain. I thought their attitude should reflect that.”

  Ernest’s attitude was that he was there to participate as well as to write. In almost every conflict he covered for one publication or another, he had a habit of bearing arms and risking his life to get closer to the real story and get it down just right. And he had suffered enough injuries to prove it. In this conflict, he was more than just a journalist and armed combatant. He was also a spy working on behalf of the U.S. government.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Martha moved in with Ernest in one of the rooms he rented in the Florida Hotel on the Plaza de Callao. Rooms 108 and 109 were situated on the rear corner of the third floor and had balconies overlooking the street. Martha and Ernest occupied one of the rooms, which he thought would be safe from Franco’s mortar shells whirring in from encampments just outside of Madrid. The city was constantly under bombardment. Ernest installed Sidney Franklin in the other room to keep an eye on his provisions. As a form of compensation, Ernest moved a Swedish girl who spoke several languages in with Sidney to keep him company.

  Madrid was “cold, enormous, and pitch black,” said Martha. The city was a “battlefield” with everyone waiting around in the dark. “There was certainly fear in that feeling, and courage. It made you walk carefully and listen hard and it lifted the heart.”

  Ernest was far and away the best-equipped reporter in Spain. Alvah Bessie, a novelist, journalist, and screenwriter who would later be blacklisted in Hollywood for his communist sympathies, envied Ernest’s treasure trove of provisions, which were on display from the day he first arrived in Madrid. Miraculously, it seemed, Ernest had managed to secure a map case, military maps, a compass, and binoculars, none of which were available to loyalist military officers. “I don’t know where he got them,” Bessie said. Ernest also carried around two letters in his shirt pockets wherever he went. In one breast pocket sat a letter from Franklin Roosevelt, just in case he got captured by the nationalists. The other pocket contained a letter written by the prime minister of Spain, to be unfurled if Ernest got captured by the republicans.

  “He had two enormous canteens made to order for him,”

  Bessie remembered, “each of which held about a quart of whiskey.”

  All of which led to speculation that Ernest was more than a journalist covering the conflict; he was on a spy mission for the U.S. government as well. His fellow journalists believed that Ernest could never have accumulated the things he did, or have had access to some of the places he visited during the war, without help from some well-placed people in Washington.

  “I’ve got a case of Scotch I want you to take up to Milt Wolff,” Ernest said to Bessie one day, perhaps in an attempt to get Wolff to soften his opinion of him.

  “I’ll do it, but it’s kind of heavy to carry.”

  “You’re going back in the truck, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, just be sure nobody swipes it
from you.”

  Despite their envy, the journalists and combatants in the antifascist cause were happy enough to have Ernest among them. He was highly regarded as a resourceful man to have around in difficult times. He was a good military strategist as well, who could look over the landscape and instantly glimpse the big picture of what was going on out there—a talent lacking in many top-ranking generals.

  Ernest’s colleagues marveled at his courage and his grace under fire, even under awkward circumstances. At breakfast one morning in his room at the Florida Hotel, Ernest held court before an audience of generals, politicians, and correspondents. He sought to put everyone at ease as the battle lines got closer to the heart of Madrid. He laid a huge map out on the table, and he explained that it was impossible for Franco’s incoming shells to hit their hotel because of the peculiarities of their location. Ernest could speak militaryese as well as any general or grunt in a foxhole. He managed to convince everyone present that they were a distance removed from harm’s way.

  At that moment, a mortar shell whooshed through the room above Ernest’s—the first actually to hit the Florida—and the ceiling fell down onto the breakfast table. To anyone else but Ernest, the event and its timing would have been humiliating. While the assorted dignitaries jumped around the room, pulling plaster out of their hair, Ernest looked slowly around, first at one and then at another. Without missing a beat he said, “How do you like it now, gentlemen?”

  For the moment at least, his spontaneous remark conveyed the impression that the bombardment somehow confirmed his theory rather than disproved it.

  Martha went to school on Ernest during the early days of their arrival. To a great extent, she was still in the process of being created by Ernest at this stage of their courtship. Peter Davis, who was making his own documentary film about the war, said that “Spain was the real start of her journalistic career. At the same time, she was overshadowed by Hemingway.”

  “There was never a secret about Hemingway living with Martha Gellhorn at the Florida Hotel,” said author and reporter George Seldes. “When the hotel was shelled, our great fun was to stand at the foot of the stairway to see who was running out of what room with what woman. I don’t need to tell you who came out of Hemingway’s room. Although I think Hemingway needed one great love affair for each of his four great or near-great books.” In that regard Seldes agreed with F. Scott Fitzgerald, who said a decade earlier that Ernest needed a new wife for each book he wrote.

  New York Times correspondent P.J. Phillip maintained that Martha told him “she was going to get Hemingway come hell or high water.”

  * * *

  At this early stage of the war, the republicans had repelled every attempt by the nationalists to capture Madrid. The battle lines seesawed back and forth, with each side winning victories in one area or another. The conflict trapped civilians with varying political persuasions on the wrong side of the lines, resulting in them being pushed up against a wall and summarily shot by whichever side won a particular skirmish. The numbers of the dead mounted steadily through the first year of the war—hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands before Ernest and Martha arrived on the scene.

  Ernest liked to leave early in the morning with Joris to one of the many warzones surrounding Madrid. He carried Joris’s heavy equipment on his broad shoulders and helped the filmmaker set up shots for his documentary. Ernest walked the battlefield near Guadalajara with commanders, studied their tactics, offered them advice about strategy, and made notes of the dead strewn over the landscape like fallen trees.

  “Over the battlefield on the heights above Brihuega,” Ernest wrote in one of his dispatches for NANA, “were scattered letters, papers, haversacks, mess kits, entrenching tools and everywhere the dead…They did not look like men but, where a shell burst caught three, like curiously broken toys. One doll had lost its feet and lay with no expression on its waxy stubbled face. Another doll had lost half of its head. The third doll was simply broken as a bar of chocolate breaks in your pocket.”

  Back in Madrid, the shells rained down on the Florida Hotel with increasing frequency and accuracy. Franco’s artillery units had selected it for a target in their sights. Ernest and Martha both pecked away at typewriters in their room with the plaster coming down around them. Through it all, the smell of bacon, ham, and eggs wafted through the corridors, emanating from Sidney Franklin’s adjoining room as Ernest shared his food and whiskey with his fellow journalists. While Ernest rode out with Joris to film the action on one front, Martha traveled with other journalists to a different area to cover the violence there. Herb Matthews of the New York Times was especially taken with her. Some say he became more than smitten as he accompanied her into a warzone; he had actually fallen in love. Virginia Cowles went with her, covering the war for the Hearst chain. Then there was Sefton Delmer with the London Daily Express, Henry Buckley with the Daily Telegraph, George Seldes with the New York Post, and a host of ink-stained wretches reporting for one venue or another. But Ernest spent most of his days traveling with Joris.

  “Hemingway liked to accompany me,” said Joris, “because my direct connections with the General Staff of the Republican Army and the International Brigades enabled me to get much closer to the frontlines than other correspondents could. We became good friends. Because he was strong he carried the movie camera. He also contributed to the story line of The Spanish Earth, and later in the U.S. he wrote and spoke the commentary for the film.”

  In Morata outside of Madrid, Ernest, Joris, and his film crew were forced to retreat with their equipment when incoming shells bombarded their position. Ernest had not been that close to actual combat since he had been wounded by a mortar shell as a youth in Italy. A few days later he and Martha toured the republican lines in the Guadarrama Mountains together. Just a few miles away along the Basque coast, German Junker bombers launched a devastating attack on a republican encampment in Guernica, killing or wounding a third of the entire population and leveling almost every building in the village. Guernica would go down as the most infamous battle of the war, immortalized on canvas by Picasso. When Ernest and Martha returned to Madrid, they found “the air still full of granite dust and high explosive smoke,” in Ernest’s words, “the sidewalks scattered by new round jagged holes with blood trails leading into half the doorways you passed.”

  Martha contributed her own words on the subject: “Women are standing in line, as they do all over Madrid, quiet women, dressed usually in black, with market baskets on their arms, waiting to buy food. A shell falls across the square. They turn their heads to look, and move a little closer to the house, but no one leaves her place in line…A small piece of twisted steel, hot and very sharp, sprays off from the shell; it takes a little boy by the throat. The old woman stands there, holding the hand of the dead child, looking at him stupidly, not saying anything.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  And then John Dos Passos arrived in Madrid. Ernest and Dos had practically been like brothers during their early days in Paris. Dos was three-and-a-half years older and already a highly regarded novelist when Ernest moved to Paris with Hadley in the early 1920s. Right after World War I, Dos electrified the reading public with his novel, Three Soldiers, and reveled at the sight of it peering out at him from the windows of almost every bookstore in America and Europe. Dos and Ernest hit it off immediately when they first met and formed their own mutual admiration society. They recognized each other’s talent and vowed to teach themselves all they could learn about writing, starting by reading aloud from the Old Testament.

  “We read to each other,” Dos said. “Choice passages. The Song of Deborah and Chronicles and Kings were our favorites.”

  Ernest was just getting started with his short stories as Dos enjoyed his early celebrity. Dos was convinced that Ernest might surpass him one day. He just knew that “Hem would become the first great American stylist.” Dos was political right from the start, way over on the left while Ernest said he was bored with
politics and would rather write about the things he loved, like fishing, hunting, and bullfighting, as well as all the wars he would cover. But the two young men were critical of each other too. Dos, who had developed a crush on Hadley, didn’t care for the way Ernest treated his wife.

  “Right from the beginning Hem was hard on his women,” Dos said. Ernest seemed to have a need to love two women at once. Dos went skiing with them at Schruns in Austria around the same time that Pauline befriended Hadley so she could move in on Ernest. Dos remembered the good times. “Mealtimes we could hardly eat for laughing,” he said. “We ate vast quantities of trout and drank the wines and beers and slept like dormice under the great featherbeds. We were all brothers and sisters when we parted company.”

  But Dos, as observant as he was, failed to see what was happening beneath the surface—or beneath the blankets, if you will. “It was a real shock to learn a few months later that Ernest was walking out on Hadley.”

  It was Dos who discovered Key West first. To him it was almost like Spain in America. He wrote to Ernest in 1929, telling him that the place would “suit him to a T.” It was like Spain with the palm trees waving in the sea breezes. It was like Provincetown at the tip of Cape Cod, but with much better weather in the winter.

  By the time Ernest moved there with Pauline near the turn of the decade, he rivaled his friend, his spiritual brother, in fame and achievement following the publication of his first two major novels, The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms. Dos, meanwhile, had come out with his first widely regarded masterpiece, Manhattan Transfer, which invigorated the left but infuriated right-wing critics who called it “an explosion in a cesspool.” But Ernest loved it. It was “a spiritual Baedeker to New York,” he said. Sinclair Lewis thought it was “a novel of the very first importance…the dawn of a whole new school of writing.” F. Scott Fitzgerald pronounced it “astonishingly good.” Dos followed that book up with The 42nd Parallel, the first novel in his U.S.A. trilogy. Ernest, who often resented the success of other writers whom he regarded as serious competitors, remained steadfastly loyal to Dos.