In war, truth ‘dangerous to come by’
Hemingway, history meet in hotel lobby in Amanda Vaill’s biography
HOTEL FLORIDA: TRUTH, LOVE, AND DEATH IN THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR Amanda Vaill (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
When a Nazi officer intruding in Picasso's studio in occupied Paris saw Guernica he asked, “Did you do that?” Picasso famously replied, “No, you did.”
While no one book can definitively capture the complexities, atrocities and resounding relevance of the Spanish Civil War, few single books on that uniquely intra- and international war can be as moving and illuminating as Amanda Vaill's vibrant Hotel Florida.
Ernest Hemingway is one of the six main characters in this stirring assemblage of history, archival scholarship and imaginative redramatization. Vaill's numerous quotations from this writer significantly defined by Spain include: “It is very dangerous to write the truth in war, and the truth is very dangerous to come by.”
Vaill comes by numerous truths — historical, political and emo- tional — largely due to her focus on three fascinating, international couples who often stayed at Madrid's shell-battered Hotel Florida.
Hemingway left his heiress second wife Pauline at home in the United States while travelling throughout Spain with the younger writer (and next Mrs. Hemingway) Martha Gellhorn.
Also compelled to seek then bear witness to this conflict against fascism were the photographers André Friedmann (a.k.a. Robert Capa, from Hungary) and the Polish- German Gerta Pohorylle (a.k.a. Gerda Taro). Spanish native (Arturo) Barea Ogazón won the complex heart of visiting Austrian social activist and translator Ilse Kulcsar while they worked with, for, and against the tide of foreign journalists as censors, then propagandists.
Vaill ably situates the Spanish Civil War as a uniquely modern moment bridging the two world wars amid a final evaporation of international political hope. The portable typewriters, fast cameras, terse telegrams and impatient stateside editors of these embedded foreign correspondents are significantly evolved over the static coverage of the First World War.
The modestly brave Robert Capa took iconic battlefield photographs that would eventually grace the covers of Life magazine (and others that were their first colour prints). The compelling mix of the personal and political here also sees the Soviet Union, Germany and Italy all using Spain as live-action training for the impending Second World War.
Vaill has that telescopic gift necessary to make, as the cliché goes, “history come alive.” She can see the forest and the trees and compares them well to other forests, other trees. She succinctly diagnoses “the old paradox of reform: When enough pressure for change builds up, lifting the lid off the kettle just a little doesn't reduce the pressure — it makes the contents explode.”
Like Shakespeare, Vaill knows history isn't written without tragedy. She ably charts the wartime death of marriages, political goodwill and one of her star characters.
Capa memorably claimed, “If your pictures (of battle) aren't good enough, you're not close enough.” For their courage in bearing witness, one of these six would die in the line of duty but be honoured with a public funeral in Paris with tens of thousands of mourners before interment in the prestigious Père-Lachaise cemetery (complete with a headstone made by sculptor Alberto Giacometti).
Of these six souls scarred by Spain, Hemingway's wasn't the only later-life suicide. If you've never cried over a biography or history, Hotel Florida might be your first weeper with an index.
A career biographer on biography number three, Vaill writes with vivid prose, judicious research and the requisite nose for good dirt.
Vaill isn't a blind Hemingwayo-phile, but she's right to open this troubled accounting with one of his terse and memorable lines: “You could learn as much at the Hotel Florida in those years as you could learn anywhere in the world.” Vaill's Hotel Florida has plenty to teach you.