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Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War, by Amanda Vaill
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A spellbinding story of love amid the devastation of the Spanish Civil War
Madrid, 1936. In a city blasted by a civil war that many fear will cross borders and engulf Europe―a conflict one writer will call "the decisive thing of the century"―six people meet and find their lives changed forever. Ernest Hemingway, his career stalled, his marriage sour, hopes that this war will give him fresh material and new romance; Martha Gellhorn, an ambitious novice journalist hungry for love and experience, thinks she will find both with Hemingway in Spain. Robert Capa and Gerda Taro, idealistic young photographers based in Paris, want to capture history in the making and are inventing modern photojournalism in the process. And Arturo Barea, chief of the Spanish government's foreign press office, and Ilsa Kulcsar, his Austrian deputy, are struggling to balance truth-telling with loyalty to their sometimes compromised cause―a struggle that places both of them in peril.
Beginning with the cloak-and-dagger plot that precipitated the first gunshots of the war and moving forward month by month to the end of the conflict. Hotel Florida traces the tangled and disparate wartime destinies of these three couples against the backdrop of a critical moment in history: a moment that called forth both the best and the worst of those caught up in it. In this noir landscape of spies, soldiers, revolutionaries, and artists, the shadow line between truth and falsehood sometimes became faint indeed―your friend could be your enemy and honesty could get you (or someone else) killed.
Years later, Hemingway would say, "It is very dangerous to write the truth in war, and the truth is very dangerous to come by." In Hotel Florida, from the raw material of unpublished letters and diaries, official documents, and recovered reels of film, the celebrated biographer Amanda Vaill has created a narrative of love and reinvention that is, finally, a story about truth: finding it, telling it, and living it―whatever the cost.
*INCLUDES 16 PAGES OF BLACK-AND-WHITE PHOTOGRAPHS
- Sales Rank: #169624 in Books
- Published on: 2014-04-22
- Released on: 2014-04-22
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.30" h x 1.50" w x 6.22" l, 1.00 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 464 pages
Amazon.com Review
Amanda Vaill Five Things I Learned About Hemingway While Writing Hotel Florida by Amanda Vaill
1) He was a classical music maven.
Although I knew his mother had been an aspiring opera singer and had taught piano and voice in the Hemingways' Oak Park, Illinois home, I didn't realize that classical music was Hemingway's go-to soundtrack for relaxation and distraction. But when shells were whistling over the Hotel Florida in Madrid, where he and Martha Gellhorn were staying during the Spanish Civil War, what did Hemingway put on the Victrola to drown out the bombardment? Chopin's Opus 33 mazurka, number 4, and the ballade in A-flat minor, opus 47.
2) He was an agent of the KGB.
In public Hemingway had always strenuously resisted the idea of writing anything from "a Marxian viewpoint" – something he derided as "so much horseshit." But in 1937, when he was in Spain covering the Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance and writing the script for Joris Ivens's documentary film, The Spanish Earth, Ivens had tried to enlist him as a propagandist, and possibly more, for the Communist Party, which had been supporting the Spanish government against Franco's rebels. And according to internal KGB files studied by a former Soviet agent, Alexander Vassiliev, Hemingway was recruited by the KGB in 1941 and given the code-name "Argo." It was hoped he could report on Nazi activity in Cuba and the Caribbean during World War II, but he never generated any useful intelligence and his cover was terminated in 1950.
3) He couldn't cook paella.
In April of 1937, at a Rioja-fueled lunch party at the Madrid restaurant Botin, a spot Hemingway loved (and had celebrated in The Sun Also Rises), the writer insisted on leaving the table – where the company included the photographer Robert Capa and Capa's beautiful girlfriend and professional partner Gerda Taro –- and going into the kitchen to help prepare paella. "Less skillful in the kitchen than at the typewriter," was the tactful verdict of the restaurant's owner, Emilio Gonzales.
4) His affair with Martha Gellhorn was less than a great romance.
He might have run off with Gellhorn to Spain, beginning an affair that culminated in marriage three years later, after he divorced his second wife, Pauline; but apparently the Gellhorn-Hemingway romance could have used some couples therapy. Gellhorn later claimed her "whole memory of sex with Ernest [was] the invention of excuses and failing that, the hope that it would soon be over." Which it was, by 1944, when Gellhorn scooped her husband by getting a ride on a hospital ship to the D-Day beaches while he gazed at the coast through binoculars from the deck of an attack transport.
5) He originally began the manuscript of his most successful novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, which draws on his experience in the Spanish Civil War, in the first person.
He changed his mind, choosing the detachment of a narrative in which the protagonist is "he," not "I." It was the best and most truthful decision he could have made. To understand why, of course, you have to read the book. Or books. His, and mine.
From Booklist
As if civil war wasn’t torturous enough, the Spanish Civil War had the misfortune to become entangled in larger global issues of ideology on the eve of WWII. That subtext added to the complexity of deciphering who was friend or foe as Francisco Franco overthrew the government and leftist rebels fought back. Thousands of miles away, Ernest Hemingway saw the war as a way to revive a flagging career and get back his zest. Martha Gelhorn, an ambitious young journalist, also saw a career opportunity and a chance to make a lover of Hemingway. In Paris, Robert Capa and Gerda Taro, lovers and idealistic photographers, saw a chance to capture history in the infancy of photojournalism. Arturo Barea and Ilsa Kulcsar were press officers torn between telling the truth and struggling to support their crumbling cause. Vaill taps unpublished letters and diaries as well as official documents to bring intimacy and immediacy to a new look at the war from the perspective of three couples whose paths crossed. This is high drama and an assemblage of characters uniquely suited to appreciate and record it. --Vanessa Bush
Review
"Vaill here does for 1930s Spain what she did for 1920s Paris in Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy--A Lost Generation Love Story. She illuminates a cataclysmic time and place through the lives of intriguing individuals.... History lovers will melt. " (Barbara Hoffert, "Barbara's Picks," Library Journal)
“Fascinating chracters breeze through Vaill's pages as they once drifted through that lobby, and as they did in her stellar biography of Sara and Gerald Murphy and their sparkling set, Everybody Was So Young, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In war-torn Spain, she's again in her element, galloping through intrigues that made the world turn . . . Vaill calls Hotel Florida a "reconstruction," based on letters, diaries, biographies and filmed evidence that paint an electric collective portrait. Instead of offering criticial analysis, she relies on exquisitely researched anecdotes to tell the story, and she revels in the poignancy of strobe-lit details . . . Vaill's account of the war and its voluntary witnesses validates our need for narrative in the face of atrocity--something beyond propaganda, and, at times, as essential as food or shelter.” ―Jessica Kerwin Jenkins, The New York Times Book Review
“Vaill isn't after anything as quixotic as trying to ‘set the record straight' on the Spanish Civil War; instead, she delves deeply into the lives of three couples whose chronicling of the war shaped public perception . . . What Vaill seems to be mulling over in this book is the age-old question of what war does to people . . . Hotel Florida adds to the cold hard facts--as well as to the enduring mystique--of the Spanish Civil War.” ―Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air
“Hotel Florida . . . is well researched, strongly paced and vividly placed, adroitly interlaces its dispiriting stories, and . . . tell you more of value than do many more earnest works.” ―Jeremy Treglown, Times Literary Supplement
“Vaill's considerable accomplishment in Hotel Florida stems from her structural strategy to view the Spanish Civil War through the interwoven stories of a sextet of individuals . . . The threads of all these tales ripple with excitement, doom, courage, betrayal, defeat and, of course, love . . . Vaill's book races forward like a novel, even as it provides a lucid account of a hugely complex and sometimes baffling war.” ―Steve Paul, The Kansas City Star
“Moving and illuminating. . .Like Shakespeare, Vaill knows that history isn't written without tragedy . . . If you've never cried over a biography or history, Hotel Florida might be your first weeper with an index.” ―Darryl Whetter, National Post
“[Vaill] is eminently capable of juggling multiple stories, of making readers care about all her characters . . . [She] has written a powerful account of a country harrowed by war, of a motley collection of talented human beings striding into the gunfire looking for the truth.” ―Daniel Dyer, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)
“A vivid, well-paced story of the awfulness of war and of the complex motives of those who report on it.” ―James Campbell, The Wall Street Journal
“In her meticulously researched and beautifully told new book, Hotel Florida, Amanda Vaill refracts the turbulent events that took place between July 1936 and March 1939 through a prism of six such determined believers . . . The intertwined stories Vaill tells with the grace of a talented novelist are rife with courage and passion . . . Hotel Florida offers a compelling narrative of the timelessly inseparable entities of love and war, reminding us that, while motives can be both noble and self-serving, in the end, the true stories of wars rest in people, not ideologies.” ―Robert Weibezahl, BookPage
“Magical and meticulous . . . [Hotel Florida] is a masterful reconstruction of one of the most tumultuous conflicts in 20th Century Europe.” ―Jane Ciabattari, BBC.com
“[An] energetic group biography . . . [Vaill] is a diligent researcher and a spirited writer who confidently inhabits and channels her historical characters. Her set pieces are numerous and well turned.” ―Charles Trueheart, The American Scholar
“Beautifully told, Vaill's story captures the timeless immediacy of warfront reporting with the universal struggle to stay in love.” ―Publishers Weekly
“[Vaill's] gift for character portrayal keeps [Hotel Florida] moving along . . . It is bound to be popular with general readers of 20th-century history.” ―Library Journal
“War, sex, friendship, betrayal, celebrity, rivalry, jealousy, idealism, foolishness and foppery--all this and more gather in the lobby of Madrid's Hotel Florida.” ―Kirkus Reviews
“Hotel Florida gathers literary giants among the international volunteers for Spain's civil war of everyday dreamers. In this masterful narrative, with unfailing judgment and artistry, Amanda Vaill captures heartache and obsession on a vast but intimate scale before the era of national-security states.” ―Taylor Branch, author of The King Years
“A highly original, beautifully written, and utterly compelling account, by turns gripping and heartbreaking, of the intrepid--and sometimes crazy--journalists who risked everything to report on the Spanish Civil War.” ―Amanda Foreman, author of The Duchess
“Combining a historian's meticulous research with her accomplished skills as a biographer, in Hotel Florida Amanda Vaill tells the fascinating interwoven stories of six people whose lives were forever changed as they fought for 'the last great cause.'” ―Scott Donaldson, author of Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald
“A stunner--cinematic in scope and detail, and speaking urgently to questions of truth and betrayal that are still compelling today.” ―Mary Dearborn, author of Mistress of Modernism
“The tragedy of the Spanish Civil War has never quite emerged from the fog of its own propaganda. In Hotel Florida, Amanda Vaill has dispelled that fog at last by telling the truth about three larger-than-life couples--men and women whose passion for one another mingled with the passions of war. It's a moving, powerful story--and nobody has ever told it better.” ―Stephen Koch, author of The Breaking Point
“Hotel Florida is a riveting tale of politics, propaganda, and indifference, told with conviction and real heart.” ―Brenda Wineapple, author of Ecstatic Nation
“Not since Orwell's Homage to Catalonia has there been so shattering a picture of the Spanish Civil War. A magisterial work of biography and history, Hotel Florida recounts a heartbreaking story with precision and passion. Page after page, Amanda Vaill writes scenes you will never forget.” ―Marion Meade, author of Dorothy Parker
“Timely, powerful, enchanting. Amanda Vaill's compelling heroes, their allies and enemies, remind us why the Spanish Civil War remains the defining struggle of hope and betrayal, for activism and justice--across so many generations.” ―Blanche Wiesen Cook, author of Eleanor Roosevelt
Most helpful customer reviews
56 of 58 people found the following review helpful.
Covering the war...
By Jill Meyer
The Spanish Civil War, a prelude to WW2, began in 1936 and ended almost three years later. In the war years, Spanish cities and towns were turned into battlegrounds and hundreds of thousands of Spaniards were killed. Also killed in the fighting were foreigners sympathetic to one or the other sides in the war and had traveled to Spain to take part in the war. The "International Brigades" were made up of men from the US, Britain, and European countries, wanting to help the Republicans, fighting off Franco and his Nationalist troops. The Germans sent men and materiel as well; looking forward to their own coming war, they tested out new weapons on the hapless Spanish. In addition to the fighters, the press came to Madrid and other Spanish towns. Writers and photographers hoping to both let the world in on what was happening in Spain. And if they also gained a bit of fame while covering the war, well, that was good, too. Certainly many war correspondents who became famous in the following big war, gained experience in covering the Spanish Civil War.
Amanda Vaill, author of two other superb works of non-fiction, looks at three "couples" who were part of the press coverage of the war in her new book, "Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War", Two of the six were writers, Ernest Hemingway and his soon-to-be third wife, Martha Gellhorn. Two were photographers, Hungarian Robert Capa (he changed his name from Endre Friedmann when he began his career) and his companion and photographic partner, Gerda Taro. The other two highlighted by Vaill, were Spaniard Arturo Barea, who ran the press office in Madrid. He was joined by an Austrian woman, Ilsa Kulcsar. The Hotel Florida was the main hotel in Madrid, used by the correspondents and photographers covering the war.
Vaill does an excellent job at looking at all six main characters, as well as secondary-to-the-story characters. She doesn't only write about what was happening in Spain; she puts her subjects in Madrid only after telling how they got there. In most cases, their lives were building to the point of covering the battles, and most enjoyed success after the war was over. And by writing in shortish chapters, giving month, year, and place, she is able to control the narrative.
She writes with a bit of a cutting edge, but that makes her book even more interesting. Amanda Vaill has written a superb look at people and places in a certain time.
By the way, if the Spanish Civil War is of special interest, you might like to look into the work of Rebecca Pawel, who has written four mysteries starring a Nationalist police officer in Madrid, at the end of the war. The first book is called, "Death of a Nationalist" and is a great book about a man who fought for a cause he believed in. Most of the readers would not be sympathetic to the character but Pawel writes with such nuance that her characters and plots are excellently drawn.
Also, Amanda Vaill refers to the International Center of Photography in New York City. Begun by Robert Capa and continued after his death in 1954 by his brother, the museum is filled with the photographic work of Robert Capa and other war photographers. A great place to spend a few hours.
48 of 52 people found the following review helpful.
No photos in a book about photographers
By Stan Jones
Amanda Vaill deserves better from Amazon. She has written an engrossing book about an important time and some of the individuals whose lives were changed by it. Two of those individuals were photographers yet Amazon has chosen not to include any of the photos from the print version in the e-book. Whoever made this decision needs to be told to find another job and Amazon needs to fix this and send revised copies to those who mistakenly opted for the e-book version. If the photos had been included this would be a 5 star book.
Update: I have had an exchange of e-mails with the author over the missing photos and she is as apalled as I am that they were not included. She did point out that a poor rating is more likely to affect her than the screw-ups at Amazon so I have changed my rating. I cannot give it five stars, though the writing deserves that. So - a five star book with the photos, not a five-star book without the photos. I doubt anyone at Amazon cares about this, since they don't seem to care anything anymore about books.
48 of 54 people found the following review helpful.
Vaill tells a complex story through personalities, and they're so riveting you turn the pages as if you were reading fiction.
By Jesse Kornbluth
The Hotel Florida, like the mythical Hotel California in the song by The Eagles, is one of those places where “you can check in but you can never leave.” Or so it seemed for the foreigners who used it as their home base in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War: Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, John Dos Passos, Robert Capa. War makes every day vivid, and the Spanish Civil War was especially vivid --- you didn’t have to be a seer to grasp that what was happening in Spain in the mid-1930s was a dress rehearsal for a much larger war between Fascism and Freedom.
“You could learn as much at the Hotel Florida in those years as you could anywhere in the world,” Hemingway said, and in “Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War,” Amanda Vaill learns all it has to teach. [Disclosure: Never reveal a woman’s age, but Amanda Vaill and I go way back. Here’s the thing: I don’t like a writer’s book because we’re friends, I’m friends with writers because I like their books.]
It’s a complicated story, largely because the Left is splintered into factions. The distinctions were important to the participants; they seem academic now. Fortunately, Vaill tells the story through personalities, and they are more than sufficiently riveting to keep you turning pages --- okay, skipping a few --- as if you were reading fiction.
These are the people you’ll meet:
Ernest Hemingway. Oh, you think you know him, but you meet him fresh here: a terrible husband, manipulative lover, jealous friend, headline-seeking egotist. In short: the great writer as world-class jerk.
Martha Gellhorn: Hemingway’s lover. Young and ambitious, a collector of mentors, an inveterate shopper, and, in Spain, a better journalist than Hemingway.
Robert Capa: He took the famous photo of a soldier as he’s fatally shot. In these pages, he’s heroically committed to his work and, equally, to his lover.
Gerda Taro: the photographer who was Capa’s lover and creative partner. She is admirable in every possible way.
Arturo Barea: chief of the Loyalist press office. Intensely moral, he’d rather report truth than propaganda. If this book has heroes, Barea and Ilse Kulcsar, his deputy and lover, surely qualify.
Add to the cast Orson Welles, George Orwell and a dozen others, and you might be overwhelmed. To focus on what’s crucial, I tossed questions across the park to Amanda Vaill.
JK: First the Murphys. Then Jerome Robbins. Now the Spanish civil war. How did you get from one subject to the next?
AV: Actually all three subjects have connections. We could make a game about it: Six Degrees of Gerald Murphy. Among the links: the Murphys' great friends, Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos, show up in major roles in “Hotel Florida.” Jerome Robbins lived next door to the Murphys in Snedens' Landing, worked with their friend Igor Stravinsky, choreographed a dance called “Death of a Loyalist” while in his 20's, met his one-time fiancéé Rose Tobias at a concert for Spanish Civil War relief….
Seriously, all three of these books are about what I think of as "hinge moments" in twentieth century history --- the 1920's in Paris, mid-century in New York, the late 1930's in Europe --- when things are changing in culture and society. This is what I look for when
searching for something to write about: dynamism, change, movement. I like it when my subjects have to grapple with what is happening in their world and how honestly and faithfully they can participate in that, how truthfully they can live their lives in that moment.
JK: Do you speak Spanish?
AV: I taught myself to read it, and I can understand what's said to me, more or less. My own spoken Spanish might charitably be described as a work in progress. My "other" language is French, which I learned as a child and studied right through school, and that helped me a little; so did my schoolgirl Latin and self-taught Italian. Fortunately the material I needed Spanish for was written: newspaper accounts, Arturo Barea's own writing, a few records and documents.
JK: The book reflects massive work in archives. Who was alive to interview?
AV: After doing almost 300 interviews for my Jerome Robbins biography, it was a relief to me to work on a project that would be based principally on written testimony. Virtually all the first-hand witnesses to events in this story are dead, and second- or third-hand accounts can be problematic. I was more interested in finding out what actually happened as it was recorded at the time in letters or diaries or film than in hearing what participants wanted to remember, or to have others remember, later. I did use memoirs, and in a very few cases fictionalized accounts written by participants, but I made every effort to check those accounts against documented facts --- things like passenger manifests or hotel registers or dated correspondence --- or corroborating evidence from others. I felt a little like a prosecutor building a case and trying to establish, or shake, alibis: I had a timeline for every month of the Spanish Civil War and every major character in my book, and entered events as they were documented until I built up a complete chronology. And the story emerged from there, from the comparison and contrast and interweaving of all these different timelines.
JK: How much time did you spend in Spain?
AV: All told, about a month, in separate trips. Paul Preston, one of our most eminent Spanish Civil War historians, told me it was highly unlikely, if not impossible, that I would find records of my subjects in Spanish government archives, as these would have been redacted or simply burnt by the defeated Loyalists to avoid reprisals after the war. So instead of hunting fruitlessly for nonexistent files I used my time in Spain to visit the sites where my subjects had been and to retrace their footsteps across the Spanish landscape. This was invaluable, as the biographer Richard Holmes insists in his classic book “Footsteps.” Even with the vast changes in the 75 years since the war, having a sense of relative geography and terrain and architecture allowed me to give context to my story. And in the case of my section on where and how Robert Capa's reputation-making and much-discussed “Falling Soldier” photograph was taken, I simply couldn't have written it without seeing the actual (as opposed to the supposed) site where it was made.
JK: Three years of war, 400,000 dead, land laid waste, a scarred national psyche --- are we invited to read the book as a metaphor for our own time?
AV: Certainly, as I researched it, I saw parallels between the political and international situation in the 1930's --- the factionalism, the polarization, the volatility of trouble spots around the globe --- and what's going on today. I wondered, for instance, what would have happened if, in the wake of the 2012 US presidential election, the losers had decided they didn't like the result and had called on the army to mutiny and take over the country. I asked myself whether the numbers of dead and the devastation caused by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will seem worth it to the people who have to live there when the other interested parties go home. And in the last year, as the Arab Spring has turned bitter, journalists continue being killed in the Middle East, and Russia advances in the Crimea, it has sometimes felt as if events in “Hotel Florida” were re-playing themselves in new iterations.
JK: The level of detail is stunning. How do you know, for example, that a secret police interrogator whistled Beethoven’s Fifth while administering beatings?
AC: When you have journalists recording history, even (or especially) in personal documents not intended for publication, they do tend to look for, or at least report, telling details. And when more than one of them is doing the recording you can sometimes feel you have hit the jackpot. In my description of the Madrid secret police chief's conversation during a lunchtime bombardment in the journalists' canteen, for example, which was described by Virginia Cowles and Josephine Herbst and used by Ernest Hemingway in his play “The Fifth Column,” I had multiple colorful sources to choose from. To answer your question specifically, the Fifth Symphony detail came from an account by Robert Capa, the interrogator's victim, in autobiographical writing from the 1940s that's in his archives at ICP and quoted by his biographer Richard Whelan. Possibly Capa embroidered the facts just a bit: he did love to tell a story. You must admit the Fifth would make excellent beating-up music: "Dah-dah-dah-POW, dah-dah-dah-POW…
JK: I was surprised that a young writer like Martha Gellhorn was Eleanor Roosevelt’s pen pal. How did that happen?
AV: Eleanor Roosevelt was a friend, or at least an acquaintance, of Martha's mother Edna Gellhorn, a crusader for women's rights and progressive causes in Missouri. And Martha was very good at finding mentors or friends in influential places, from Colette to Eleanor Roosevelt to H. G. Wells to Harry Hopkins. It's a great talent for a journalist to have.
JK: And I was surprised that Hemingway was, in essence, a Communist in Spain. That seems to have been lost in the romantic portrait of him as a two-fisted individualist.
AV: I would say he was more of a fellow traveler, if I can use an anachronistic 1950s, McCarthy-era term. Before going to Spain, he'd proclaimed he wasn't going to become a cheerleader for Marxism because "I believe in only one thing: liberty." But he was seduced by his own hunger for playing at the high-stakes table, being in on the secret stuff; and in Spain, increasingly, the high-stakes table and the secret stuff were controlled by people who were, or had close ties to, Communists. Joris Ivens, the Dutch Communist film director who worked with Hemingway on the documentary “The Spanish Earth,” saw himself as Hemingway's case-officer; and certainly at first Hemingway responded with wholehearted enthusiasm. His dispatches for North American newspapers are full of comments about how the Communists in the government and the army --- as opposed to what he depicted as the wishy-washy socialists and self-interested, cowardly anarchists --- are the well-organized ones who are dedicated to getting things done. It was only after the war was clearly lost that he changed his mind.
JK: To finance the besieged Spanish government, the Russians provided guns and planes and “stored” $500 million in Spanish gold reserves. What happened to that gold?
AV: The gold reserves were sent to Moscow, not only for safekeeping but to act as a kind of credit account on which the Spanish government could draw for continued expenditures during the war. You need a new plane? No problem, we will deduct the cost from the gold reserves! Of course, the ones doing the cost tabulation, and the deductions, were the Soviets. Unsurprisingly, when the war was finished, there was nothing left in the account.
JK: Gellhorn was beautiful – “legs that begin at her shoulders,” Hemingway said. But although she liked conquering men, she had no great affection for sex. As for Hemingway, he seemed to prefer playing cards and drinking with men, then sleeping alone. Please explain the Hemingway-Gellhorn “romance.”
AV: Martha Gellhorn hero-worshipped Hemingway: she'd given her first novel, “What Mad Pursuit,” an epigraph from a phrase in “A Farewell to Arms” --- "Nothing ever happens to the brave." (Originally she had planned to call the novel “Nothing Ever Happens,” too; probably her editor warned her about the kind of opening that would give reviewers.) Some have contended that, ambitious as she was, she engineered a meet-cute with Hemingway at Sloppy Joe's Bar in Key West; but whether she set out to seduce him or was somehow swept into his orbit, she was soon entranced by his talent and reputation, his romantic attraction to her, and his commitment to the anti-fascist cause in Spain. This was the great bond between them: "I don't believe I'd have gotten hooked otherwise," Gellhorn said later. For his part, Hemingway was excited by Gellhorn's youth, glamour, connections (to the Roosevelt White House, to European intellectuals), and by her admiration of him. When they met he was bored and restless, ready for the new adventure Gellhorn seemed to promise, in which he could be the leader; when the adventure was over, and she evolved into someone he felt was more competitor than acolyte, the relationship lost much of its luster for him. It ended badly, and Gellhorn famously didn't wish his name coupled with hers ever again.
JK: Scott Fitzgerald is usually cast as dominated by Hemingway. But several times, the way you quote him, he seems the wiser man --- at least he saw Hemingway clearly.
AV: The key, I suspect, is that at this period Fitzgerald was at least trying to be sober; he had touched bottom (and wrote movingly about this in “The Crack-Up,” a book Hemingway mocked for its confessional honesty). This kind of self-evaluation can make it easier to see others, as well, and I think that's what gave Fitzgerald his clarity about Hemingway in these years. In addition, as he himself pointed out, he he'd been out of the force field of Hemingway's personality for some time, which also made it easier for him to see his old friend more clearly.
JK: I found myself more taken with minor characters than with some of the stars. Gellhorn, for example, derided “all that objectivity [...]” --- Virginia Cowles didn’t. Dos Passos seemed more admirable than Hemingway. I like Gerda Taro as much as I did Capa. And I had huge admiration for Barea. Is this just me?
AV: I'm glad you were taken with Barea, because without him there would have been no book. I didn't want to write another account of the glamorous outsiders who came to Spain to fight for the Republic, or I didn't want to write only about that; I needed to tell about some of the people they were supposedly fighting for, or with. As the book evolved these comparisons emerged ever more sharply, and I began to see the different ways my subjects responded to the transformative promise of the war. And this became a major theme for me. So the truthfulness with which Dos Passos, or Cowles, reported the war, the honesty with which Barea, or Gerda Taro or Robert Capa, behaved --- these things became important plot points. And of course the better-known characters like Hemingway and Gellhorn don't have the freshness of a Barea or a Cowles or even a Dos Passos, who haven't been done and done. So you can respond to them more freshly.
JK: Gerda Taro. I knew nothing. She’s the big surprise of the book for me. Or should I have known of her?
AV: Despite Capa's best efforts to memorialize her after her death, Gerda Taro has suffered for years from being in Robert Capa's shadow --- not surprisingly, because their early work was so closely linked. When her career was cut short in 1937, his continued, in an upward trajectory, until his own death in 1954. She suffered also from the fact that after her death photo editors often credited her pictures to Capa (although the reverse was also true!). So you can be forgiven for not knowing much about her. But at the time she died, and for a few years thereafter, she was a huge star, an anti-fascist icon: a crowd numbering in the tens of thousands followed her coffin to the cemetery at Pére-Lachaise in Paris. And recently, over the past decade, following her first-ever career retrospective exhibit at the International Center of Photography in 2008, her work and her alluring personality have again begun to capture the public imagination. But there hasn't been a full-length biography in English (Irme Schaber's authoritative 1994 study of her exists only in German and in a French translation). She is extraordinary.
JK: “The writers were there for the story, the people for their lives” --- at a level, I see your book as a study in the way media defines and distorts conflict. Hemingway and Gellhorn most notably moved on. But others --- Barea and Capa --- seemed to carry Spain with them all these lives. Am I warm? And what do you carry with you from this story?
AV: "They are here for their lives" --- that's what Ilsa Kulcsar said about the Spanish, as opposed to the journalists and other, often well-intentioned folk who came to observe, or participate in, or influence the conflict of the Spanish Civil War. Of the main subjects in my book, Hemingway and Gellhorn and Capa and Taro reaped major career rewards from their coverage of the war, although Taro paid for these rewards with her life, and Capa, arguably, with his heart. But in the end, those who covered the war, if they lived, could go home; it was the Spanish, like Barea, and those who threw their lot in with them, like Ilsa, who were left to live with the war's consequences.
That was the departure point for “Hotel Florida.” But it's not what the book ended up really being about. As I researched and wrote, I found that each of my six main subjects, and many of my minor ones, grappled during the years of the war with questions of truth-telling: When you're writing about, or photographing, a major developing news story, do you report what is happening, or what you think is happening? Do you indulge in what media titan Henry Luce, publisher of Life and Time magazines and producer of the March of Time newsreels, called "fakery in allegiance to the truth"? Do you let your allegiance to, or reliance on, your connections influence how you cover your story?
My subjects also had to confront an even more essential truth issue: the role of honesty in their personal lives. How honest were they to themselves, and to each other? As it turned out, it was the ones who told the truth about themselves, as well as about the story, who ended up being the happiest, if not the most successful. Which isn't a bad take-away for the book's writer, now I come to think of it.
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