Authors: Preston Paul
Later that day, a long lunch party took place at a castle that had once belonged to the Duque de Tovar, near El Escorial. The fiesta was being held to celebrate the incorporation of the XV International Brigade into the Republican Army. It was there that Dos Passos was to be told. But told what? He already knew that Robles was dead but not the circumstances. It is extremely likely that his informant that morning had been Pepe Quintanilla. As Comisario General de Investigación y Vigilancia, he was one of the very few people in a position to know what had happened and even to know about the existence of Grigulevich and the Brigada Especial. Moreover, as the brother of Dos Passos’ intimate friend Luis Quintanilla, Pepe was the only person in the know prepared to talk to him. In 1939, Dos Passos referred to having been told regretfully by ‘the then chief of the Republican counterespionage service’ [Pepe Quintanilla] of Robles’ death at the hands of ‘a special section’. In his later novel, he invents a party where ‘Juanito Posada’ (Pepe Quintanilla) told him: ‘The man has been shot.’ When ‘Jay Pignatelli’ (Dos) asked why, ‘Juanito Posada’ replied: ‘Who knows? We are living in terrible times. To overcome them we have to be terrible ourselves.’
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Although the time and place are different in the novel, there is no doubt that it was Pepe who revealed that Robles had been shot and that he did so on the morning of 22 April. The tone of what little is known of Pepe’s explanation suggests a desire to let Dos Passos down as gently as possible. Years later, Luis Quintanilla told a friend in New York that Robles had been arrested because he was known to have handed sensitive information to the fifth column. To soften the blow, Pepe refrained from telling Dos Passos that his friend was a fascist spy. That is surely what Josie Herbst and Hemingway decided to tell him. If anything would make Dos Passos stop making awkward enquiries and embarrassing himself as well as them, surely that would.
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Whatever Hemingway told Dos Passos, he allegedly did so in the most abrupt and insensitive way. According to his biographer, Townsend Ludington, Dos Passos was distressed by ‘Ernest’s abrasive manner and secretiveness, which seemed to him a kind of treason’.
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What happened that day at the fiesta for the XV Brigade has been widely seen as the culmination of the breakdown of the Hemingway–Dos Passos relationship. Certainly, Dos Passos wrote in his novel that: ‘The fiesta out at the
Fifteenth Brigade broke my heart.’ Yet, in his contemporary factual account, ‘The Fiesta at the Fifteenth Brigade’, he made no mention of any unpleasantness with Hemingway. Nor, in her diary, does Josephine Herbst, who says only that he and Dos sat together at lunch. In her published version, she comments only on Dos’ agitation at the fact that Hemingway would not reveal the identity of the ‘someone from Valencia who was passing through’. Obviously he could not do so since the ‘someone’ was an invention of Josie. However, in her 1939 letter to Bruce Bliven, she wrote: ‘It should be remembered that Dos hated war of all kinds and suffered in Madrid not only from the fate of his friend but from the attitude of certain people on the fringe of war who appeared to be taking it as a sport. A deep revulsion followed.’
According to Stephen Koch, what Josie and Hemingway planned to do at the International Brigade lunch was publicly to humiliate Dos Passos, expose him in public as the friend of a fascist spy: ‘she had quietly and discreetly handed Hemingway the exact weapon she knew he was looking for. And then, just as quietly and discreetly, she had shown him how to use it.’
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There is no evidence whatsoever to justify this assertion. Whatever Hemingway said to Dos Passos, he said quietly as they talked together. There is no mention of any of this malice in either of Josie’s versions. And there is good reason to think that, if there was malice aforethought, she would have said so in her diary. For Josie Herbst was not without a nasty side, but it was focused not on the enemies of the Comintern but on women prettier than herself who got more attention than she did. While waiting for the car to go to lunch, she watched the glamorous Martha Gellhorn with loathing: ‘Pushing whore like M gets pretty much around on what she’s got. Don’t mean in the head. The pants. Plays all. Take all. Never speaks of anyone not a name. Glib stupid tongue.’ When they arrived at the fiesta, she switched her venom to María Teresa de León, the sensual blonde wife of the poet Rafael Alberti, who was the centre of all male attention: ‘Marie T in coral earrings & brooch, scarf, stouter & lush.’ Josie was irritated to see María Teresa, chirping trivialities like birdsong, surrounded by admiring men. The fact that less attention was paid to her than to the beautiful and the famous is by far the greatest preoccupation of Josie’s account of the fiesta.
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Pepe Quintanilla’s role in the Robles case was almost certainly confined to telling Dos Passos about the execution and giving him a sanitized version of how it had come about. However, he seems by association to have acquired an aura of guilt in the affair. This picture of Pepe Quintanilla as a monster who typified the Republican security services derives from the accounts by Josie Herbst and Virginia Cowles of a lunch with him and Hemingway on 28 April. Because of Josie’s published account, and the fact that he is loosely portrayed as Antonio, the ‘thin-lipped’ security chief in Act II of Hemingway’s
The Fifth Column,
Quintanilla has been enshrined in Carlos Baker’s phrase as the ‘thin-lipped executioner of Madrid’. A week after the fiesta for the XV Brigade, Hemingway, Virginia Cowles and Josephine Herbst were having lunch at the restaurant of the Hotel Gran Vía. Virginia noticed ‘a fastidious-looking man dressed from head to toe in dove grey. He had the high forehead and long fingers of the intellectual and wore horn-rimmed spectacles which added to his thoughtful appearance.’ Noticing her interest, Hemingway could not resist showing off his inside knowledge and his contacts, saying dramatically, ‘That is the chief executioner of Madrid’, and inviting Pepe to join them. He did so on the condition that they let him buy them another carafe of wine.
First Pepe regaled them with stories of the first days of the war when foolhardy
Madrileños
had stormed the Montaña barracks where the rebels had made their stronghold. As Quintanilla spoke, shells began to rain down and he coolly counted the explosions, pouring wine, one, talking, then two, three, four. By the time he got to ten, the air was thick with fear. As the wine flowed ever more freely, Pepe kept counting, flushed now and increasingly drunk. When Hemingway pressed Pepe to talk about the struggle against the fifth column, the atmosphere grew even thicker. Hemingway beamed and the women squirmed as he told them about an officer who soiled himself ‘huddled in a corner’ then ‘had to be carried out and shot like a dog’. Nevertheless, when two soldiers and a girl walked, arm in arm, down the middle of the street in the direction from which the shells were coming, a frantic Quintanilla tried solicitously to stop them.
When Hemingway said he wanted to get back because he was worried about ‘the blonde’
(la rubia),
Martha, Quintanilla wouldn’t
hear of it and insisted that they wait until the danger was over. He ordered brandy and began to flirt outrageously with Virginia, which did not endear him to Josie, who was sourly wondering how Miss Cowles managed to get down the rubble-strewn Gran Vía from the Florida to the restaurant on such high heels. Quintanilla said he would divorce his wife, marry Virginia and make his wife do the cooking. At the time, they all laughed but, in retrospect, Virginia Cowles remembered only what she took to be sadism in ‘his bright marble-brown eyes’. When they left the restaurant, Hemingway said to her: ‘Now remember, he’s mine.’ He thus gave the game away, revealing that he saw Pepe both as a prize with which to show off his own privileged status and also as a unique source and even as a character in a short story or a play. He later used the conversation about the deaths of rightists in his play
The Fifth Column,
rendering Pepe as ‘Antonio’.
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This hair-raising lunch took place after a distressed Dos Passos had left Madrid. He spent some time in Fuentidueña del Tajo, a village where he wanted to film an irrigation project for the documentary
Spanish Earth.
Then he went back one more time to Valencia to tell Márgara Villegas what he had learned and to try in vain to get some answers from Julio Álvarez del Vayo. The minister still knew nothing, but at least he promised to try to secure a death certificate so that Márgara could collect José’s life insurance.
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The fact that he did not do so would rankle with Dos Passos in later years. However, in a letter to Claude Bowers at the time, he commented: ‘As nothing has come from Del Vayo, I imagine he has forgotten about it, certainly he has enough on his shoulders not to remember small personal details.’
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In fact, Del Vayo was replaced as Foreign Minister in mid-May 1937 and was unable to fulfil his promise. If Dos Passos did indeed inform Márgara Villegas of what he had been told, neither she nor her children chose to believe him. Letters written by Coco show that they continued to hope for more than two and a half months after Dos Passos’ departure from Spain. At the end of April, Dos Passos left for France, stopping en route for a few days in Barcelona.
Someone else in the Catalan capital was Liston Oak, who had been trying to get away from his job in Valencia for some time, citing health problems. He had spent time in Madrid in April; he was investigating
the possibility of opening a bureau there. He was photographed there with Hemingway and Virginia Cowles in mid-April. Given the camaraderie among the correspondents in the Hotel Florida, it is highly unlikely that he did not also see Dos Passos. Unnerved by the constant bombardments, he returned to Valencia. He stayed only long enough to collect his belongings and left for Barcelona, telling his boss, Constancia de la Mora, that it was merely for a short visit. It is not clear whether he planned to stay there, given a burgeoning sympathy with the POUM, or was already intending to return to the USA. At the Valencia press office, it took some weeks before they realized that he would not be coming back.
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In Barcelona, Dos Passos visited POUM headquarters and spoke with Juan Andrade and Andreu Nin.
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According to his fictionalized account, in his hotel lobby, he also bumped into George Orwell:
a gangling Englishman with his arm in a sling. He was wearing a threadbare uniform. A squashed overseas cap on the side of his head nestled in abundant wavy black hair. His long face with deep lines in the cheeks, was distinguished by a pair of exceptionally fine dark eyes. They had a farsighted look, like a seaman’s eyes. […] an extraordinary sense of relaxation came over him when he realized he was talking to an honest man. All these weeks since he’d landed in that horrid Casa de la Cultura in Valencia he hadn’t dared talk frankly to anyone. At first he was afraid of saying something that would endanger his chances of smuggling Ramón [José Robles] out of the country and afterwards he was afraid some misinterpreted word of his might lessen Amparo’s [Márgara] chances of getting out with the children.
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Although the notion of him smuggling José Robles and his family out of Spain was entirely invented, there is no reason to doubt that Dos Passos met Orwell. It is confirmed elsewhere, although it should be noted that, in the novel, he places the meeting during the May Days, when in fact he had already left Barcelona. Eighteen years later, in his factual account, Dos Passos wrote in similar terms of Orwell:
His face had a sick drawn look. I suppose he was already suffering from the tuberculosis that later killed him. He seemed inexpressibly weary. We didn’t talk very long but I can remember the sense of assuagement, of relief from strain I felt at last to be talking to an honest man. The officials I’d talked to in the past weeks had been gulls most of them, or self-deceivers, or else had been trying to pull the wool over my eyes.
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The drama surrounding the Robles case was now intensified one more time by Liston Oak. He visited Dos Passos one night in his Barcelona hotel claiming to be on the run from the security services after having been denounced as a Trotskyist. It is more than probable that Oak had become uncomfortable about the possible consequences of his lurch away from the American Communist Party and towards the anti-Stalinists of the POUM. This was surely related to his constant complaints about his health. However, this is some distance from Koch’s assertion that ‘Liston was also sick spiritually. There was a pestilence of fear and loathing in the depths of his soul.’
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Liston Oak may have been ‘sick with fear’, but he was starkly dramatizing the circumstances of his leisurely separation from the Republican press service when he said that he had escaped by the skin of his teeth after discovering that he been reported to be politically unreliable. What actually happened is that he had gone to Barcelona, and made contact with Andreu Nin, the POUM leader. In late April, he had written an article mentioning his meeting with Nin and sympathizing with the POUM standpoint that the war could not be won if the revolution was crushed. The article was written before the events of May 1937 and the disappearance of Nin, but would be published in London only afterwards, in mid-May. George Orwell read it in hospital three weeks later and found it ‘very good and well balanced’.
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Having worked in the English-language section of the Republic’s press office, Oak cannot have failed to realize that the publication of the article would be considered a subversive act, given the POUM’s opposition to the government’s policy of prioritizing the war effort over the revolution.
However, it is possible that, once in Barcelona, the already timorous Oak may have been startled into an outright funk by a chance meeting
with a Russian agent whom he had known in New York as George Mink. His real name was Mink Djhordis and he was born in Lithuania. He was said to be closely related to Solomon Abramovich Lozovksy, the head of the Profintern, the Soviet international of trade unions. According to testimony given to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, he was a serving officer of Soviet military intelligence. Despite Mink being a taxi-driver in Philadelphia, and utterly ignorant of matters nautical, Lozovsky had used his influence to raise him to an important position in the Marine Workers’ Industrial Union. He was arrested in Copenhagen in 1935 and jailed for eighteen months after police discovered espionage paraphernalia in his room. He was also linked to political assassinations in Germany and Spain. It has been suggested that he was one of the murderers of the Soviet defector, Ignace Reiss, in Switzerland.
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Mink did not know of Oak’s drift towards anti-Stalinist communism, invited him to have a drink and informed him that the Communists planned to move against the POUM and the anarchists in Barcelona within a couple of days. Oak, already jumpy, went into panic mode, assuming that he would be among those pursued.
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