2014 was an eventful year
for Neil Young - full of personal and professional turmoil, but also marked by
several major creative achievements. In June he took over the role of CEO at
Pono − the "ultra high-quality" digital audio system he had launched
officially in March − after John Hamm stepped down. In July he filed for
divorce from Pegi Young, his wife of 36 years, after getting involved with the
actress and environmental activist Daryl Hannah. In January he performed four
solo concerts across Canada dubbed "Honour The Treaties" − benefit
shows to support theAthabasca Chipewyan
First Nation in Alberta, which is struggling against the detrimental effects of
the oil industry in that province. Neil
published a second memoir in October − this one called Special Deluxe;
it's focused on the vintage American cars that he has acquired since the
mid-60s (over forty of them!). He has also found time to record and release two
albums: the first − the quirky A Letter Home −came out in April; and he
wound up a busy year by releasing his latest album, Storytone, in early November. Not bad for a 69-year old − and he
shows no signs of slowing down any time soon.
Neil Young
Storytone is
Neil Young's 35th studio album. At the time of release (on Reprise Records), it
was available in two versions on CD − either a single CD (with the orchestral
and big band tracks), or as a Deluxe 2-CD package, which also includes alternate versions of the songs
on a second CD (in the same sequence), done in simple demo-styled acoustic
versions, with Neil accompanying himself on guitar, piano, ukulele, and harmonica. The album is
also available as a double vinyl LP (180g). I got the 2-CD set. Why not? The
two versions available on CD were selling for the same price. The double-album release
allows you to hear the songs done in dramatically-different arrangements. If
the orchestral and band versions don't turn your crank, you can give the solo
tracks a try. Maybe there is more of a chance to appreciate the songs, if you hear them in two different contexts?
Both discs in the Deluxe
package were produced by Neil Young and Niko Bolas, under the pseudonym of The
Volume Dealers; they were recorded and mixed by Al Schmitt. Niko Bolas has served as producer or engineer on about a dozen previous Young albums, including Freedom (1989), Ragged Glory (1990), and Living With War (2006). The big band pieces
on Storytone were arranged and conducted by Chris Walden, who has worked with Michael Bublé,
Diana Krall, Paul Anka and Christopher Cross. The orchestral tracks were
arranged and conducted by both Walden and Michael Bearden, who has worked with
Michael Jackson and Lady Gaga. All the tracks were written by Neil Young and
recorded at various studios in California.
Well, Neil Young accompanied both
by a 92-piece orchestra and choir and by a big band? Something completely
different and new, you might be thinking. Actually he has tried this before.
Young recorded two tracks with orchestral arrangements on the Harvest LP ("A Man Needs a
Maid" and "There's a World"), way back in March 1971 - produced
by Jack Nitzsche with the London Symphony Orchestra. I was never a fan of those
tracks and have always thought they spoiled that album. And Neil did the big
band thing on the LP This Note's For You
back in April, 1988, with mixed success − aye to the slower blues numbers, nay
to the up-tempo R&B tracks.
So here we are again − in
late-career, Young takes a second crack at putting opulent and brassy
arrangements beneath his rather slight and idiosyncratictenor vocals. Does it work? In a word, no.
It's a brave attempt, from an artist who has never shied away from doing his
own thing and taking creative risks. But the problems here are weak material, dull
arrangements, and a performing style that just doesn't suit this sort of
musical presentation.
Recording "Who's Gonna Stand Up?" - conducted by Chris Walden
There are ten songs on Storytone (clocking in at 41:32). Three
of them deal with the environment. The album was promoted first through the
video "Who's Gonna Stand Up?", which decries the pollution of land
and water by our insatiable search for fossil fuels. "I Want to Drive My
Car" sounds like an addendum to his recent book Special Deluxe. It
too raises the need for fuel, but alternate fuels − not fuel that damages the
environment. The opening track ("Plastic Flowers") sounds like an
oblique reference to activist work done with Darryl Hannah:
"In the summer time
We met to
see a threat
That came to
harm
Something we
both loved"
New love with Darryl Hannah
But the dominant theme in
this album is love − lost love (goodbye to Pegi Young) and found love (hello to
Darryl Hannah). Neil makes a couple of passing references to his former wife:
"Tough love can leave you almost alone" (in "Plastic
Flowers"); and "There's still a glimmer of everything that I first
saw in you" ("Glimmer"). Half of the songs on the album, not
surprisingly, are focused on his new love; and it's strange to hear a 69-year
old addressing his love with the ardour of a teenage romantic − and pitching his messages of love to Hannah with a lush 92-piece orchestra and choir. A Man Needs A Mermaid, indeed! [Thanks to Rob Mitchum at Pitchfork for that joke.] But he does so
quite consciously − aware, no doubt, of the overripe sincerity and earnest tone
he brings to these lyrics: "I'm baring my soul to you" he sings
("Tumbleweed") − addressing, perhaps, not just Hannah, but also the
bemused listener; and in another song he
declares, "I have my guard down and love passes fast" ("Say
Hello to Chicago"). But he doesn't care how things appear:
"These
are the promises you make,
When your
eyes are blinded by love."
Fine, but open-hearted sincerity doesn't
excuse lyrics that are trite and cloying:
"Out by
the car,
Our
snowman's melting;
Nothing can
bring him back now;
His smile a
twig,
And his nose
a cucumber;
His eyes two
pinecones looking out."
And many of the lyrics are
just badly constructed − with Young seemingly grabbing for the first convenient
rhyme:
"She
held a vase;
Her misty
gaze brought them to life;
I was amazed;
She turned
to me,
With a tear
in her eye."
He's not offering much of interest in these
songs - not much insight, and very little for the listener to engage with; they
seem to have been tossed off quickly, with minimal revision or second
thought.
"The Volume Dealers" - Storytone producers Neil Young and Niko Bolas
And what of the music? Do these big arrangements
help the songs − do they enhancethe
overall effect? Unfortunately, they don't. The orchestral arrangements (seven tracks) are
straightforward and bland. It's more-or-less full-on symphonic style here. Not
the sort of subtle counterpoint that Nelson Riddle, for example, brought to his
arrangements − using soloists, or small groups of instruments, to punctuate the
drama in a song. The arrangements on this album are lush and melodramatic and tend
towards show-biz schmaltz. If Neil Young was a singer of any significant power
- I'm thinking of the great crooners of the '40s and '50s − he might be able to
mitigate against this mediocre accompaniment. But his style of vocalizing just
doesn't fit these earnest and hollow arrangements. The pumped-up orchestrations
are a good example of the adage that "more is less".
It's the same problem with the three big band
tracks. With these kinds of powerhouse brass arrangements you need a strong,
gritty vocalist − a soul-singer type belting out the songs, or an R&B-styled 'shouter'. And two of the brass arrangements sound strange with the
incongruous additions of electric guitar and harmonica solos. They remind you
that this is a Neil Young version of the big band sound, but by doing that they
undercut the authentic approach they were evidently looking for.
The accompanying CD (with the solo, demo-like
versions of all the songs − done in the same order) allows you to hear the
songs in a different context; and that offers some interesting comparisons.
"Tumbleweed", for example, sounds quite affecting with nothing but a
ukulele for accompaniment. The lush orchestral version features hokey winds and
chimes. "I'm Glad I Found You", on the other hand, sounds rather
pallid with its simple piano accompaniment; the orchestrated track gives it
more life. And the anthem "Who's Gonna Stand Up?" sounds pretty good
in both incarnations − with a chunky guitar riff in the solo track, and an
effective riff from the string section, which gives this orchestral track some
rare momentum. Overall, I preferred the solo CD. Neil's wan vocal delivery
suits his trademark guitar, or piano, backing.He just doesn't have what it takes to sell the big band or full-orchestra
approach.
Well, up until this post, Neil Young has been
"batting a thousand" on my blog - with two books and three albums.
But this one, I'm afraid, I'm calling a dud. I wouldn't recommend it, unless
you're a "completist", or you're intrigued to hear what Young can do
with this particular musical guise. Back to "Old Black", Neil − Crazy
Horse is calling!
Hotel Florida was located on
the Gran Via in central Madrid - at the north-east corner of the Plaza de Callao. It was designed by
Antonio Palacios and opened in February, 1924. It was a grand hotel in its day:
its entire ten-storey facade was constructed out of marble; and each of its 200
rooms had an en suite bathroom -
quite a luxury in those days. Hotel Florida became a little shabbier over the
years, and then in 1964 it was demolished, to make way for a department store
called Galerias Preciados. When that
store went into receivership in 1995, the site was acquired by El Corte Ingles, a rival department
store chain.
But it's not the commercial
fate of Hotel Florida that concerns us here. Our interest is the role that the
hotel played during the Spanish Civil War. From 1936 to 1939 it became the host
of many noteworthy journalists and writers who came to Madrid to cover the
struggle between Franco's "Nationalist" rebels - the falangistas (supported and armed by the
fascist governments in Germany and Italy) - and the republican
"Loyalists" (made up of an alliance of various communist, anarchist
and liberal parties, who were supported and armed primarily by Stalin's
bolshevik government in Russia). Most governments in Europe and North America
maintained a non-interventionist neutrality throughout the conflict, but about
35,000 idealistic volunteers (brigadistas)
came from all over the world to serve in various International Brigades -
including about 1,500 from Canada (the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion), about
2,500 from the U.S. (the Abraham Lincoln Brigade), and about 2,500 from the
U.K. (the British Battalion, which included men from many other countries in
the Empire). These men fought - and many of them died - to stop a fascist
takeover of Spain, seen by many at the time as the probable precursor of a
continental-wide struggle that would provoke a new world war.
Amanda Vaill's book, Hotel
Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in The Spanish Civil War (published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), is centred on the Spanish Civil War, but it is not intended as a
comprehensive history of the conflict. She uses the hotel as an organizing
principle for her account, which is ostensibly about the War, but traces its
course by focusing on the activities of three couples, who spent time in Madrid
at the Hotel Florida and at the Telefónica
building (just a few blocks down the Gran
Via) - which housed the Office of the Foreign Press, where media
correspondents went to have their stories censored and transmitted.
The three couples we read much
about in Hotel Florida are the American writers Ernest Hemingway and
Martha Gellhorn, the photographers Endre Friedmann (a.k.a. Robert Capa) and
Gerda Taro, and the press censors Arturo Barea and Ilse Kulcsar (later Lisa
Barea). Only Barea was a native-Spaniard; the rest were outsiders, drawn to
Spain by a combination of professional interest and political commitment. There
is a host of other interesting people who make regular, or cameo, appearances
in the book: American writers John Dos Passos, Josie Herbst, Archibald MacLeish
and Lillian Hellman; British writers Eric Blair (a.k.a. George Orwell), Claud
Cockburn, Sefton Delmer, and Diana Forbes-Robertson; Dutch film-makers Joris
Ivens and John Ferno; and Spanish politicians Francisco Caballero, Constancia
de la Mora y Maura, Juan Negrin, Andres Nin, and Luis Rubio Hidalgo. The bulk
of the book moves chronologically, month-by-month, through the years of the
Spanish Civil War, moving locales from Florida, to New York City, to Paris, to
Barcelona, to Valencia and to Madrid - following the exploits of the book's
main protagonists. We also get lots of descriptive vignettes and scenes about
activity at the front - as the photographers and reporters chase the latest
military maneuvers and clashes.
Hemingway and his son Gregory ("Gigi') at Sun Valley - by Robert Capa(1941)
Ernest Hemingway knew Spain
well from his years following the summer bullfighting season. His first trip in
1923 - to experience the festival in Pamplona - was a mere 10 days. In seven of
the years that followed, however, between 1924 and 1933, he spent an average of
6-8 weeks in Spain. But his visits tapered off, after he and wife Pauline had
moved from Paris to Key West in Florida. There, in December 1936, Hemingway met
the writer Martha Gellhorn in Sloppy Joe's Bar. He became fascinated with her;
and when she announced her intention to go to Spain, in order to cover the
Civil War that had recently erupted there, he determined to follow along. But
their status as companions had to be hidden.
Shooting The Spanish Earth, as depicted in the HBO film Hemingway & Gellhorn (a pretty dreadful film): Nicole Kidman as Gellhorn, Clive Owen as Hemingway, Lars Ulrich as Joris Ivens, and Santiago Cabrera as Robert Capa
Through the influence of his
long-term friend John Dos Passos - an ardent left-wing sympathizer with the
Republican cause in Spain - Hemingway joined a small group of like-minded
writers and film-makers, who set up in January, 1937 a film-production company
called Contemporary Historians, Inc. Their plan was to make a propaganda
documentary that might drum up support for the Republican, anti-fascist side in
the Civil War. The dramatist Lillian Hellman and the poet Archibald MacLeish
would write the story-outline for the film - with Hemingway and writer Dorothy
Parker assisting. Dutch film-maker Joris Ivens would direct the film, and his
countryman John Ferno would serve as cinematographer. The group left for Spain
in March 1937. In addition to the work done on the film - during most of April,
Hemingway was also writing articles for the North American Newspaper Alliance,
and Gellhorn was submitting work to Collier's magazine.
Hemingway and Gellhorn at the American Writers Conference in NYC (June, 1937)
When they were back in the
United States in June, Hemingway gave the keynote address at the annual
American Writers Conference in New York City. He was very nervous about doing
this - he was not a natural public speaker. He was sweating profusely - the
result of nerves and the tweed suit he was wearing - and his glasses were fogging
up. Hemingway began his talk by talking about the writer's problem: "how
to write truly and having found what is true, to project it in such a way that
it becomes part of the experience of the person who reads it." This kind
of writing, he said, and this kind of truth, was impossible under fascism.
"It is very dangerous to write the truth in war," he added, "and
whether the truth is worth some risk to come by, the writers must decide for
themselves. When men fight for the freedom of their country against a foreign
invasion, and when those men are your friends, you learn, watching them live
and fight and die, that there are worse things than war." The speech was a
triumph.
The Spanish Earth: documentary film (Reel 1 of 6) - narrated by Hemingway The entire film can be found on YouTube - in 6 sections (about 10 mins each)
The finished documentary, The Spanish Earth, had originally
featured narration done by Orson Welles, but the producers and director felt
the tone wasn't right. They got Hemingway to do it instead. His version was
less theatrical, less mellifluous; it seemed more authentic to the spirit of
the work, because of its less professional approach. The film was shown to
select audiences in carefully-chosen locations. Donations were taken in order
to provide funds for such matériel as
ambulances and medical supplies for the Republican side in Spain. Martha
Gellhorn, who was a personal friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, arranged for a
screening of the film at the White House in front of the President and his wife
and select members of their staff.
Hemingway and Gellhorn made
two more visits to Spain (September-December, 1937; and April-May, 1938) to
update their knowledge of the War's progress. They stayed at the Hotel Florida
in Madrid - and experienced several occasions there when the hotel was struck
by artillery shells. In September, 1937 Ernest and Martha visited the frontline
at Belchite, three days after the falangists had surrendered. They met some old
friends there - members of the Fifteenth Brigade, including its Chief of Staff,
Robert Merriman, the former commander of the American Lincoln Battalion.
Merriman had been a professor of economics before the war. He was tall and
unshaven. There was dust on his glasses and in his hair. He gave the visitors
an account of the battle for Belchite, using a stick on the dirt floor of his
lean-to to show the movement of the troops. Hemingway and Gellhorn were very
impressed with the man - both his quiet strength and the victory that he had
won. Merriman would become the key model for Hemingway's protagonist Robert
Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), his acclaimed novel about the Spanish Civil War.
Robert Capa handling his 16 mm Filmo camera - by Gerda Taro
Gerda Taro - Robert Capa's partner and fellow-photographer- by Robert Capa
Hemingway and Gellhorn fraternized often with
Robert Capa and his partner-companion Gerda Taro - both at Hotel Florida and at various military skirmishes at, or near, the frontline. Capa was a Hungarian
photojournalist; Taro was a Polish-born German photographer, who perfected her
photojournalist techniques under the influence of her partner. They were based now in Paris and had a work studio in rue Froidevaux. Robert Capa
became the most famous photojournalist of the Spanish Civil War. His work
appeared first in Parisian papers and magazines, and eventually found publishers
in North America. By the later stages of the War, his work was being printed in Life magazine, which had recently (1936) been acquired by Time owner Henry Luce and turned into a weekly news-oriented periodical, with an emphasis on photojournalism - a perfect venue for Capa's photographs. Capa worked exclusively with a Leica still-camera at the
beginning of the War, but later on he learned to use a 16 mm Filmo movie
camera, which was loaded with 100 ft, rolls of film. The most famous image Capa
ever shot - the Falling Soldier photograph - became the image of the Spanish Civil War. It was taken at Espejo in
September, 1936.
"Falling Soldier" - Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death, Cerro Muriano, September 1936 The most famous photograph from the Spanish Civil War - by Robert Capa
Capa and Taro often worked
in tandem, but they also did assignments separately, when their paths divided
for one reason or another. They were both fearless and thought nothing of
running with troopsat the forefront of
any military action. Taro was the first female photojournalist to die in the line
of work. She was crushed accidentally by a Loyalist tank, after the car she was
riding (the vehicle was full inside, and she was riding the running-board) was
struck by the tank during a frenetic retreat from the frontline at Brunete.
Taro was given a grand, hero's funeral in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris
on August 1, 1937.
Gerda Taro - by Robert Capa (1936)
The third couple featured in
Amanda Vaill's Hotel Florida are Arturo Barea and Ilse Kulcsar. Barea was a
would-be writer. He worked first as a patent engineer. But in September 1936,
because of his knowledge of French and English, he was assigned to work as a
press censor at the Foreign Ministry's Press Office in the Telefónica building. This was where a host of foreign journalists -
including Hemingway, Gellhorn, Dos Passos, Antoine de Saint-Expuréy, Claud Cockburn,
Sefton Delmer, and Canadian Ted Allen - went, in order to have their reports
read and transmitted. The Telefónica was the tallest building in
Madrid - the Republican army used its observatory as a perch from which to
observe the movements of Franco's troops on the outskirts of the city. During
the long siege of Madrid, Barea also worked for the Radio Service, writing and
broadcasting articles for Latin America. He was dubbed An Unknown Voice of Madrid. Every night he told human-interest
stories about life in the besieged city.
Arturo Barea
Barea met Ilse Kulcsar in
November 1936. She had been a social activist and journalist in her native
Austria, and had come to Spain because of her political sympathies with the
Republican struggle against the fascists. Austria had become a proto-fascist
state in 1934 (the Nazis would move into Austria in March 1938). Kulcsar spoke
half-a-dozen languages. When she offered her services to the Loyalist
government in Valencia, Arturo Barea's immediate superior, propaganda minister
Luis Rubio Hidalgo, sent her to Madrid to confer with Barea. After a shaky
beginning to their relationship, Barea found himself increasingly attracted to
this intelligent and politically-committed translator. Eventually he divorced
himself from his wife and took up with Ilse. They had to flee Spain when the
government finally fell to Franco's falangists; they moved to England. Both
became writers and Barea did broadcasting work with the BBC.
Ilse Kulcsar - later Ilsa Barea
Hotel Florida is
not a history, or an academic treatise, of the Spanish Civil War. As Amanda
Vaill explains, it is a narrative - but not a fictional narrative. It focuses
on the experiences of her six main subjects, and some of their closest
associates. She attempts to provide in-depth and contrasting accounts of their
inter-locking destinies in those eventful three years. Vaill bases her account
on letters (published and unpublished), diaries, personal accounts, official
documents, film, biographies, histories, and contemporary news media. She
claims to offer some new insights into the material, especially since some of
the material she used has only recently come to light.
For those familiar with my
blog post archive, it will come as no surprise that what enticed me to pick up
this book from my local library - it was displayed in the New Books section -
was the tie-in to Ernest Hemingway. I already knew a great deal about his activities in Spain, but here was an opportunity to get a lot more detail
about his experiences there during the Civil War and, perhaps, some insight
into his relationship with Martha Gellhorn (Hemingway wife #3). Hotel
Florida delivered on those expectations, but it also scored in its
treatment of its other main subjects. It is often more interesting to learn
about historical events when they are filtered through in-the-field experiences
of committed individuals. History comes alive when we read about it with the
eyes and ears of intriguing contemporaries. Phil Graham, the co-owner and
publisher of The Washington Post, famously said in a speech to
fellow-journalists in 1963 that journalism was "a first rough draft of history that will never really be completed
about a world we can never really understand…". Journalism may lack the
sagacity and careful analysis that hindsight can provide; but, conversely, it
does convey the immediacy of the moment and the flavour of specific context.
The reactions of engaged and intelligent observers can be more revealing than
the considered opinion of the desk-bound pundit.
Ernest Hemingway and Joris Ivens with his Eyemo movie camera - by Gerda Taro
And what key themes emerge
from Amanda Vaill's book? What do we learn about its main protagonists? And
what do its contents tell us about the Spanish Civil War?
Given that Hemingway,
Gellhorn, Capa, and Taro were all working as journalists in Spain, and Barea
and Kulcsar were working as censors for the government, the problem of truth
versus propaganda runs through the entire book. In his speech at the American
Writers Conference of June 1937, Hemingway had raised the issue. How do we find
the truth, he wondered; and, more importantly, how do we report it, when to do
so is so dangerous? And - to paraphrase Pontius Pilate - what exactly is the nature of
truth during wartime? "The first casualty when war comes is truth,"
U.S. senator Hiram Johnson declared in 1917. That sentiment can actually be
traced right back to ancient times. The Greek dramatist Aeschylus is said to
have uttered a similar idea: "In war, the first casualty is truth." Australian-British
reporter John Pilger begged to differ on this notion. In a speech in 2006, he
argued that it was journalism, not truth, that was the first casualty of any
war. Governments seek to control information not only to assist and to protect
their military forces, but also to maintain morale and generate support amongst
the civilian population.
Gerda Taro using her Leica (1937) - by Capa
This natural tendency
towards secrecy and treachery in wartime is exacerbated further when the
conflict is driven by ideological differences - and in Spain, the normal
duplicities that governed information about the war effort were exacerbated to
the nth degree by the sectarian divisions in the Republican movement. The
Republican side was already an unstable alliance of communists, socialists,
anarchists and liberals before Franco's rebellion led to the War; but once the
conflict morphed into a greater struggle against German and Italian fascism,
the Soviet Union intervened - which created a virulent, internecine struggle
amongst the communist elements in the alliance.
Gerda Taro at the front - by Robert Capa
People who are familiar with
George Orwell's book about the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia,
will be familiar with this story. Orwell served in Spain with POUM, a
Trotskyite political party. He witnessed first-hand the move by the Comintern -
the bolsheviks - to purge the communist parties in Spain of any anti-Stalinist
tendencies. His disgust with how this all played out inspired his book Animal
Farm (1945). As the Soviets became the dominant group amongst the
international elements supporting the Republican war effort, it exerted tight
ideological control. There may have been military and civilian victims of
Franco's forces, but there were also many ideological victims of Stalin's
totalitarianism. In Hotel Florida we see this threat throughout the book
embodied in the fates of Arturo Barea and Ilse Kulcsar. They constantly chafed
at the propaganda requirements of their job, constantly pushing for more
honesty in the way that the war was being reported. Barea came under constant
scrutiny, and he was eventually reassigned, when his loyalty to the movement
(i.e. Stalinism) was suspect. His partner, Ilse Kulcsar, was also deemed
unreliable, because of the ideological unorthodoxy of her socialist past in
Austria.
Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn in Spain
A more dramatic example of
these dangers is the case of Jose Robles Pazos. Robles was a Spanish academic
and left-wing activist. He had been teaching at John Hopkins University in the
States before returning to Spain. He was also the Spanish translator of
American novelist John Dos Passos. When Dos Passos, Hemingway, Ivens, et al.,
came to Spain in April 1937 to make The Spanish Earth, Dos Passos had learned
that Robles had been detained by the authorities back in December 1936. Dos
Passos was determined to find out what had happened to his friend. Eventually
it emerged that he had been shot as a spy. The source of the trouble was that Robles
had worked as translator for a senior Soviet military envoy who knew no
Spanish; Robles seemed to have been caught in the classic situation of being
innocent of any wrong-doing, but knowing too much - specifically, being privy
to too much of the behind-the-scenes Soviet machinations in Spain. Dos Passos
was crushed by the news. And the pain was made even worse when Hemingway
condoned the killing as "necessary in time of war." It caused a
permanent rift between the long-term friends.
John Dos Passos (far left) and Hemingway (far right) in Spain (1937)
Another major theme of Hotel
Florida is the tension that exists in wartime between the locals and the
visitors. In Spain the war had begun as a struggle between the aristocracy and
the people, between the landholders and the peasants, between the monarchists
and the republicans. It had been primarily a political struggle. But when the
conflict morphed into a showdown between fascism and communism, people flocked
into Spain from all around the world. And they came for ideological reasons.
For them it wasn't just a specific, political struggle; it was a universal
fight against despotic fascism. Many of these foreigners lacked a nuanced grasp
of the local conditions. And they seemed, to weary and demoralized Spaniards
like Arturo Barea, to be a bunch of unreliable opportunists. Members of the
International Brigades, of course, were free of these criticisms - they were
laying their lives on the line. But the journalists and writers, who stayed
only for a while - to observe a few skirmishes at the front-line, spend most of
their time at swanky hotels, and then claimed to understand exactly what was
going on - really began to annoy. Barea, in particular, would lose his cool
once in a while and harangue the international press corps for their
exploitation and condescension. Were they in Spain to help the cause? Or were
they there to further their own selfish interests? How about it, Mr. Hemingway?
"Salud, hermanos!" said Prime Minister Juan Negrin to the International Brigades at Montblanch on October, 1938, thanking them for their service to the Republican cause - by Robert Capa
One final key theme of
interest to me was how each of the six main protagonists in this account can be
seen as embodiments of different attitudes, different political tendencies,
different personality traits, and different professional interests. Hemingway
is the novelist - the man-of-action keen to immerse himself in dramatic and
exciting situations, in order to find material to feed his fiction. Gellhorn is
the journalist - interested in covering the human element in the military
struggle, so that she can show how war affects the civilian population. Capa
and Taro are the brave, often reckless, photojournalists who are looking for
new ways to photograph military action. They combine a journalist's need to
document an event with the artist's interest in finding new, creative ways to
illustrate the same sort of front-line skirmishes. Barea and Kulcsar are the
bureaucrats with a conscience - civil servants who stray into dangerous
territory because they challenge the status quo and try to tell the truth and
stay loyal to their principles. Vaill shifts her focus constantly in this book
from place-to-place and person-to-person. It works really well because it tells
the story of the unfolding war, but does so in a way that keeps one riveted on
the way that the conflict affects particular participants.
Phil Kaufman (left), director of Hemingway & Gellhorn in front of the Hotel Florida set (exterior) built at the Amtrack Station in Oakland, California (the original hotel was demolished in 1964)
Hotel Florida is
a great read. It deals with a fascinating and important period in European
history - combining the excitement of military action with the intrigue of
political debate. The book conjures up the fear and exhilaration of living in a
war-zone. It dramatizes important, perennial issues by showing how they affect
individual lives; and it provides interesting detail about a relatively brief span
of time in the lives of several well-known figures of that period. And it shows
how history can be told, not as a dry succession of political decisions and
military actions, but as a complex, interweaving tale of fascinating people engaged
with the events of their time.
Hotel Florida
includes: maps of Spain showing the changes of territorial control over four years; a
chronology of key events; a list of principal characters; 16 pages of B&W
photographs; 38 pages of detailed notes; a glossary of terms and abbreviations;
a 6-page bibliography; and an 18-page index.
Amanda Vaill - author of Hotel Florida
Amanda Vaill is an American writer and editor, noted for her
non-fiction. She lives in New York City. She worked in publishing before
becoming a full-time writer in 1992. In the 1970s Vaill was an editor at Viking
Press alongside Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. In 1995 Vaill published Everybody
Was So Young, a biography of Gerald and Sara Murphy, prominent 1920s
socialites of the French Riviera (and friends of Hemingway). Her next book was Somewhere(2007), a biography of
choreographer Jerome Robbins.
For more about Ernest Hemingway,
check out these previous posts of mine:
