Hemingway and the Spanish Civil War by Gilbert H. Muller

Author:Gilbert H. Muller
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030281243
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Gilbert H. Muller1

(1)City University of New York, New York, NY, USA

Gilbert H. Muller

In late August, Ernest reunited with Martha and Herbert Matthews in Paris. 1 He found that the City of Light was overflowing with visitors to the International Exhibition. The German and Soviet pavilions towering over the International Exhibition on rival sides of the Trocadero fountains reflected the geopolitical tensions hovering over Europe. Lost among these massive structures was the much smaller Spanish pavilion, which because of the Civil War had opened later than other installations and was frequently ignored by the more than 33,000,000 visitors who ultimately would attend the Exhibition.

Those who did manage to find the Spanish pavilion were typically bewildered, even repelled by the militant spirit of its installations: Pablo Picasso’s monumental contribution, Guernica ; the photographs of dead children; Joan Miró’s oversized canvas depicting an upraised arm and clenched fist. Contributing to the revolutionary atmosphere inside the building were films celebrating the Spanish Republic that ran in a continual loop including Luis Buñuel’s Madrid ’36 and The Spanish Earth by the documentarians Joris Ivens and Ernest Hemingway.

Although he was anxious to get back to Spain, Ernest took time to enjoy the cosmopolitan ambience of Paris—the crowds at the Café de la Paix, the Meurice, the Deux Magots, and the Closerie des Lilas where he spent time with old friends. Sara and Gerald Murphy were in Paris, trying to assuage their grief over the death of their son Patrick, and Sara fussed over Ernest as though he were a surrogate son. There were meals with the Campbells and a meeting with Janet Flanner. Ernest also had a quick obligatory drink with Dottie Bishop before running back to Martha and Herbert Matthews “like a horse that has escaped from a burning stable” as Gellhorn described the scene. 2 One day he met Ring Lardner’s son Jim who was studying German and Spanish and planning to visit one nation or another as a correspondent for the Herald Tribune.

One night, if the notoriously unreliable Lillian Hellman is to be believed, Ernest pounded on the door of her hotel room carrying with him page proof for To Have and Have Not, which he wanted her to read and express an opinion. Hellman proceeded to plow through the novel, offering a running commentary that seemed to annoy Hemingway. As dawn broke and Ernest prepared to depart, he informed Hellman, “I wish I could sleep with you, but I can’t because there’s somebody else. I hope you understand.” 3

For her part, Martha felt overwhelmed by the Hemingway mob, many of them friends of Pauline. 4 Escaping his orbit for a few days, she traveled down to the Côte d’Azur for a nostalgic return to Lavandou. She and Bertrand de Jouvenel had often spent time there together in the early 1930s before she met Hemingway. Marty swam in the Mediterranean’s warm waters for two days before rejoining Ernest in Paris.

Hemingway was dismayed by the slanted coverage of the Spanish Civil War in the

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