We Saw Spain Die (15 page)

Thereafter, Dos Passos went to Madrid to work on the film
Spanish Earth
and, if possible, pursue his investigations into the fate of Robles. To do that, he had two advantages: his celebrity as an internationally
acclaimed novelist; and a prior acquaintance with the head of Republican counter-espionage (Comisario General de Investigación y Vigilancia), Pepe Quintanilla. He knew Pepe through his brother Luis, a famous Republican artist and one of his oldest and closest friends in Spain. Pepe and Luis were also good friends of Hemingway, who was going to be intensely displeased by Dos Passos’ efforts to find out what had happened to Robles. There may have been some tension between them over the direction to be taken in
Spanish Earth.
Hemingway was more comfortable concentrating on the military achievements of the Republic, whereas Dos Passos was happier showing the suffering of ordinary people and the hopes raised by social revolution. Nevertheless, this was not a bone of contention. It is more likely that Dos Passos was becoming uncomfortable and suspicious about the growing influence of the Communists within the Republic as they endeavoured to impose order. In contrast, Hemingway regarded their activities as a crucial contribution to mounting an effective war effort.

When Dos Passos reached the Hotel Florida in Madrid, everything he did and said seemed to provoke Hemingway’s scorn. He had failed to bring any food with him. There was also a certain friction deriving from the fact that Dos Passos and his wife Katy were close friends of Hemingway’s wife Pauline. Dos Passos could not conceal his discomfort at the fact that Ernest was conducting a highly visible affair with Martha Gellhorn.
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In his thinly fictionalized account, Dos Passos wrote of Martha: ‘It becomes immediately clear that she doesn’t like Jay [Dos Passos] any better than he likes her.’
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Their mutual friend, Josephine Herbst, would be a privileged observer of the breakdown of the relationship between Hemingway and Dos Passos. She noted in her diary that Hemingway often made derogatory remarks about Dos Passos’ wife Katy, irritated because she was such a good friend of Pauline. His annoyance was also reflected in complaints that Dos Passos had ‘no guts’ and ‘no balls’.
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Trying to explain the friction between the two, Josie Herbst wrote later that Hemingway was determined to be
‘the war
writer of his age’ and that he ‘seemed to be naively embracing on the simpler levels the current ideologies at the very moment when Dos Passos was urgently questioning them’. Perhaps too, as he posed ever more as the wise
combat veteran, he resented the fact that Dos Passos knew how little combat he had actually seen. Or maybe he was just annoyed that Dos Passos did not share his visceral enjoyment of the war. Josie noted that there was ‘a kind of splurging magnificence about Hemingway at the Florida, a crackling generosity whose underside was a kind of miserliness. He was stingy with his feelings to anyone who broke his code, even brutal, but it is only fair to say that Hemingway was never anything but faithful to the code he set up for himself.’ However, it was not just that Dos Passos was anything but ostentatiously macho. Rather, the key issue was Hemingway’s annoyance about his friend’s insistent enquiries about Robles. Josie could feel the irritation growing between them: ‘Hemingway was worried because Dos was conspicuously making inquiries and might get everybody into trouble if he persisted. “After all”, he warned, “this is a war”’, whereas Dos Passos refused to believe that his friend could be a traitor.
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In Dos Passos’ fictional version, he gives a flavour of their disagreements over Robles. George Elbert Warner (the character based on Hemingway) asked the hero (Jay Pignatelli) why he was looking worried, saying: ‘If it’s your professor bloke’s disappearance, think nothing of it…People disappear every day.’ As soon as Sidney Franklin (‘Cookie’ in the novel) left the room, Warner screamed in Jay’s ear: ‘Don’t put your mouth to this Echevarría [Robles] business…not even before Cookie. Cookie’s the rightest guy in the world, but he might get potted one night. The Fifth Column is everywhere. Just suppose your professor took a powder and joined the other side.’ When Jay protested that Echevarria/Robles was of unimpeachable loyalty, Warner’s girlfriend, Hilda Glendower (Martha Gellhorn), allegedly chipped in, ‘like a blast of cold air’, saying: ‘Your enquiries have already caused us embarrassment.’
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Apart from
Century’s Ebb,
the most commonly used source for the disagreements between Dos and Hemingway over Robles is the fragment of memoir by Josephine Herbst, ‘The Starched Blue Sky of Spain’, although her unpublished diary contains important additional information. Josie Herbst had arrived in Valencia about a week before Dos Passos. She had come to Spain not as a fully accredited correspondent of any newspaper. Rather, her biographer, Elinor Langer, considered
that, as a lifelong leftist, Josie just wanted to be able to experience the revolutionary events there. According to Stephen Koch, she was a trusted Comintern operative and ‘was sent to Spain to help monitor and control the American literary celebrities in Madrid’. To this end, he claimed, she had been invited by ‘the Republic’s propaganda office’ to make radio broadcasts. It is highly unlikely that she had the sinister function attributed to her by Koch. Indeed, her personal notes reveal not the slightest interest in the political stances of anyone that she wrote about. However, she certainly made at least one broadcast ‘from a cellar deep underground in Madrid’. It is true that she had set off for Spain rather precipitately, failing to get a newspaper assignment, and had secured only the vaguest expressions of interest from magazine editors who would be glad to consider articles from a ‘human interest’ or ‘women’s angle’. However, she seems to have written to Otto Katz, whom she had met briefly in Paris years before, to let him know about her trip and to ask his advice about getting into Spain. His wife, Ilsa, replied briefly, offering to help Josie should she encounter any difficulties.
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Thus, despite her lack of newspaper credentials, but because of her still current, albeit now forgotten, celebrity as a writer, she was supplied with a letter of introduction to Álvarez del Vayo from the Republican press agency in Paris, Otto Katz’s Agence Espagne. If indeed he received her in Valencia, Álvarez del Vayo must quickly have passed her on to the press bureau. There, she was given anything but the privileged treatment that might have been expected if she was really an important Comintern agent on a mission personally backed by the Minister of Foreign Affairs. In fact, she was kept hanging around as befitted someone with no proper journalistic credentials. She complained: ‘I had been assured at the press bureau that I would get to go places, but for days I was suspended, wondering. Where?’
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In the published memoir of her Spanish experience, she claims that it was told in strict confidence by someone in Valencia that Robles had been shot as a spy. She does not say who told her. Koch has claimed that the ‘authority’ in question was Julio Álvarez del Vayo, who had allegedly received Herbst for a lengthy conversation when she delivered her letter of introduction from the Agence Espagne, although there is
no evidence for this. In fact, Josephine Herbst does not say that she was told by anyone in authority. However, in a letter to Bruce Bliven of the
New Republic,
she wrote: ‘My informant was not an “American Communist sympathizer” but a Spaniard
and a responsible person
[added by hand] and I was told that he had worked in the Ministry of War and documents had been found in his possession proving or appearing to prove that he had direct connection with Franco’s side.’ This would rule out Liston Oak, whom she would have met when she visited the press office to arrange transport to Madrid. On the other hand, it would rule in Constancia de la Mora, whom she almost certainly saw as well. Her informant, whoever it was, told her that she must swear to keep the secret just as he had been sworn to secrecy by someone ‘higher up’. This in itself eliminates Álvarez del Vayo, since the only person ‘higher up’ than the Foreign Minister was the prime minister, Francisco Largo Caballero, and it is inconceivable that that highly moral anti-Communist would be involved in covering up an apparent assassination by the Russians. The reason for all this secrecy was, she was told, that the authorities ‘were beginning to be worried about Dos Passos’s zeal, and fearing that he might turn against their cause if he discovered the truth, hoped to keep him from finding out anything about it while he was in Spain’. This makes it much more likely that her information originated in the press office. On the other hand, it does not explain why telling Josie increased the possibility of keeping the news from Dos Passos.
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Once in Madrid, she was given a safe-conduct by the military authorities, dated 3 April 1937.
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Given that Dos Passos did not reach Valencia until 8 April, this would mean that she had enquired about Robles about a week before he arrived. It could be, as Elinor Langer suggests, that she was innocently asking for Robles simply because Dos Passos had given her his name as someone that she ought to meet. In her published account, her informant chose to unburden himself or herself to Josie about the authorities’ concerns regarding Dos Passos and the Robles case only because, she was told, it was known that Dos Passos was an old friend of hers. If the informant was Constancia de la Mora, she could certainly have been told about this friendship by Liston Oak, a fellow American leftist and a mutual acquaintance of both Josie
and Dos Passos. Yet for all that they were friends, in neither her published version nor in her unpublished diary did Josie record telling Dos Passos anything about the case, although it is extremely unlikely that he had not confided in her his worries about Robles.

All subsequent accounts of the Robles case and its damaging impact on the Hemingway-Dos Passos friendship have taken their cue from Josephine Herbst’s account published in 1960. That version goes as follows. For all that she was sworn to secrecy, Josie did choose to tell Hemingway. She says that he broached the subject first, after the particularly frightening artillery bombardment that shook the Hotel Florida at dawn on 22 April. Just after she had snapped at him, tired and tetchy, saying that she didn’t feel like being a Girl Scout, he invited her to his room for a brandy, not so much to console her as to urge her to tell Dos Passos to stop stirring things up over the Robles case: ‘It was going to throw suspicion on all of us and get us into trouble. This was a war.’ He informed her that Pepe Quintanilla, the ‘head of the Department of Justice’, had already told Dos Passos that Robles was still alive and would get a fair trial. He went on to say that Quintanilla was ‘a swell guy’ and that she should get to know him. She was initially inhibited by her promise of secrecy, and less than impressed by his fears that Dos Passos’ insistent enquiries were fomenting unease among the denizens of the Hotel Florida. However, in the face of Hemingway’s brash confidence that all was well with Robles, she finally blurted out what she knew.

She portrays herself as outraged by what seemed to be Pepe Quintanilla’s duplicity, although her memories of him were probably coloured by a later encounter with him: ‘I could not believe Quintanilla so good a guy if he could let Dos Passos remain in anguished ignorance or if the evidence was so clear as not to admit contradiction. I felt that Dos should be told, not because he might bring danger down on us but because the man was dead.’ Thus, she revealed that Robles had been shot as a spy – ‘Quintanilla should have told Dos’. On hearing this, Hemingway apparently had no difficulty in accepting that Robles was a fascist spy. Josie insisted that Dos Passos be told but in a way that the information would not seem to be coming from her. She concocted a rather ramshackle and devious solution to safeguard her own promise of silence, although hardly the cruelly sinister one imagined by Stephen
Koch in his book on the subject. She suggested that Ernest pass on the bad news but say only that he had been told by ‘someone from Valencia who was passing through but whose name he must withhold’. Hemingway, who was happy to accept without question that Robles had been guilty of espionage, apparently agreed with ‘too cheerful a readiness – I don’t think he doubted for a minute that Robles was guilty if Quintanilla said so’. And there was an imminent opportunity to tell Dos Passos whatever it was they had planned, for all the correspondents were about to go to a lunch at the headquarters of the XV International Brigade that very afternoon.
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Now, it is certainly the case that, on the morning of 22 April, when he shaved so calmly and appeared so at ease, Dos Passos still entertained hope that Robles might not be dead. He had made enquiries at the United States Embassy and been told by a third party that Robles had been seen alive in a prison camp by the United States Military Attaché, Colonel Stephen Fuqua, on 26 March.
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However, by midmorning of 22 April, little hope remained. The encounter between Josie and Hemingway over a snifter of brandy did not take place quite as described in ‘The Starched Blue Sky of Spain’. What Josie wrote in her diary at the time makes much more sense: ‘Dos comes in. Has found out Robles executed. Wants to investigate. Discuss with Hem danger of D. investigating. R. bad egg given fair trial – give away military secrets.’ Accordingly, there was no need for a devious plot to work out how to tell Dos Passos that Robles was dead. On the other hand, there was a need to explain to him why it had happened and perhaps thereby stop him stirring things up about it. It is reasonable to assume that Dos Passos had left the room when Josie and Hemingway started to discuss ‘the danger of Dos investigating’. If Hemingway was right and Robles was ‘a bad egg’, had been given a fair trial and been found guilty of giving away military secrets, then that was what Dos Passos should be told. In her June 1939 letter to Bruce Bliven of the
New Republic,
Josephine Herbst wrote: ‘It has always seemed to me and did then that it was a tragic mistake not to give Dos whatever evidence there was about the case and of the death.’
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This suggests not that she had wanted him to be told that Robles was dead – after all, he already knew – but to be informed of the process that had led to his arrest and execution.