“The most controversial of them all,” in Gurney’s words, was “full of hearty and bogus bonhomie. He sat himself down behind the bullet-proof shield of a machine-gun and loosed off a whole belt of ammunition in the general direction of the enemy. This provoked a mortar bombardment for which he did not stay.”
The visitor was Ernest Hemingway, thirty-seven years old and already one of the most celebrated authors alive. Having written his first two novels and classic short stories in the 1920s, his life had become partly taken over by the persona he had developed for himself, as brash and flamboyant as his early work was spare and understated. He was now profiled and photographed big-game hunting, hanging out with bullfighters, machine-gunning sharks, and landing giant marlin. Some of this he-man façade crept into his writing as well. It had been eight years since he had published a novel, two recent nonfiction books had drawn some bad reviews, and critics—and perhaps Hemingway himself—were wondering if he had lost his touch. “He appears,” wrote the poet John Peale Bishop, “to have turned into a composite of all those photographs . . . sunburned from snows, on skis; in fishing get-up, burned dark from the hot Caribbean; the handsome, stalwart hunter crouched smiling over the carcass of some dead beast.”
Although until then one of the least political of American writers—in the midst of the Great Depression he had written a book about safaris in Africa and he had not bothered to vote in the 1936 election—Hemingway had an almost proprietary love for Spain. A trip there had been the basis for The Sun Also Rises, the novel that first made the world notice him, and he had returned often, seeing Spanish friends and gathering material for Death in the Afternoon, his book about bullfighting. He was enraged by the Nationalist coup, which he saw as an act of great violence against a culture he loved. He also identified with the young Americans who had volunteered to fight, just as he had volunteered, less than a year out of high school, as a Red Cross ambulance driver in the First World War.
The Spanish war seemed made for him. “In Spain maybe it’s the big parade starting again,” he wrote to a journalist he knew. He even dressed the part, as if to recapture the days of his youth. When his friend the novelist Josephine Herbst met him in besieged Madrid, she found him wearing “a kind of khaki uniform with high polished boots.” He saved fragments of shells that hit the city’s Hotel Florida, where he stayed, marking on them the numbers of the rooms they had destroyed, and making one dud shell into a lamp.
“He was bigger than life,” wrote the Lincoln physician William Pike, “—generous, scrupulously honest and dedicated to his work but lurking somewhere was a mean-spirited, uncertain, frightened, aggressive child, overly impressed with physical courage, [with] a need to, over and over again, prove himself a ‘man.’ . . . He told me he had no use for psychiatry, others needed it, not he—to go to a psychoanalyst was a confession of weakness.”
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