Hemingway and Luis Quintanilla

The artist and army commander Luis Quintanilla, like Picasso and Joan Miró, supported the Republic (Loyalists) in the Spanish Civil War.  Hemingway called him a great artist, one of his best friends  and “one of the bravest men that I have ever known”.  Quintanilla was born in Santander, on the north coast of Spain, in 1893 and moved with his family to Madrid when he was twelve.  He spent the 1920s in Paris.  He returned to Madrid, and in 1934 was imprisoned for revolutionary activities.  He exhibited 39 etchings at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York that year, with essays in the catalogue by Hemingway and John Dos Passos.

Quintanilla was released from prison in 1935.  In the summer of 1936, at the outbreak of the Civil War, he led Loyalist forces in the attack on the Montaña barracks in Madrid and drove out the Nationalist rebels who had seized it.  He then directed the failed assault on the fascist-held Alcazar in Toledo.  Later that year he organized a network of espionage in the Basque region and of counterespionage in Madrid.  In 1937 he toured the battlefields, made drawings and took photographs to publicize the Loyalist cause.

After the Loyalist defeat in July 1939, Quintanilla escaped from Spain and moved to New York.  He described his bitter mood when he first experienced defeat and exile:

“I arrived here sad and demoralized.  I didn’t know whether I should commit suicide or get married, which is to prolong life; I married.  I didn’t know whether to take to alcohol or to work, and I worked.  Little by little I took from my palette the bitter memories of Spain.”  During the war, “instead of making pictures I had been obliged to make history.  So has been my fate.”

He showed his work that year at the Spanish exposition in the World’s Fair and married an American.  He went to Hollywood in 1940, worked as a set designer for the director John Ford, and created the advertising poster showing Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman in the movie of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls.  He watched the film being made and declared it was “being systematically slaughtered and sabotaged by Paramount”. He also painted a portrait of Cooper in profile, oddly showing the slim and elegant actor with massive chest and thick legs, like a giant version of Hemingway.  Quintanilla left his wife and moved back to Paris in 1958.  In 1976, after the death of Franco and 37 years in exile, he finally returned to Spain, and died in Madrid two years later.

Gary Cooper as Robert Jordan, the hero of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. Hollywood, March 1943.

Hemingway first met Quintanilla, who’d fought as an amateur boxer, in Montparnasse in 1922, and maintained their friendship for the rest of his life.  Quintanilla later wrote of Hemingway, “He had the body of an athlete and movement of a dancer, walking on the  balls of his feet and greeting me like a boxer… Everything Spanish attracted him.  From the first moment he was eager to know about Spain and wanted to learn Spanish by ear.”  Quintanilla told him about the corrida [bullfight] and the festival in Pamplona, and described the concept of nada, the essential emptiness of life, which became the theme of “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.”   Hemingway recalled that in Madrid in 1931, they “met in the evening to drink beer in the Cervecería [brewery] in the Pasaje Alvarez and Quintanilla explained quietly and simply to me the necessity for the revolution.”  Two years later Hemingway, en route to his safari in Africa, prepared for hunting big game by shooting wild boar with Quintanilla in western Spain.  He told his wife Pauline, “Always have good talk with Quintanilla.  He doesn’t exhaust me but I exhaust myself because he stimulates my head very much.  Quintanilla is damned smart and very funny.”

In his essay for the Matisse Gallery exhibition, Hemingway explained how his friend had put his revolutionary ideas into action.  In April 1931, when King Alfonso XIII was forced to abdicate, “[It was] Quintanilla, in whose apartment the arms were stored when it was not known that it would be a bloodless revolution that sent out Alfonso.  Quintanilla raised the republican flag over the royal palace, climbing up and running it up with his own hands before it was certain there was an abdication.”

In November 1934 Quintanilla was arrested, jailed and charged with serving on a revolutionary committee in Madrid and trying to overthrow the Spanish government.  When Hemingway heard that his friend was held in the Modelo Cárcel and threatened with a sixteen-year sentence, he tried to get him out of prison by writing to the prime minister of Spain about the artist’s importance, protesting his incarceration and organizing the exhibition of his work at the Matisse Gallery.  Hemingway paid for the pulling of the prints and the expenses of the show, bought a number of the etchings and wrote an essay for the catalogue.

The essay drew on his own experience with urban strikes, political violence and horrific warfare, contained one of the finest but little-known passages in his work, and included a short sketch that recalled the atrocities in the stark vignettes of in our time (1924).  This long single sentence ends dramatically when the enemy suddenly arrives to capture or kill another victim.  Effectively repeating “who never” twelve times, as if the nightmare would never cease, Hemingway contrasted Quintanilla, the artist in action, to all those who write the word and have never been shot nor shot at; who never have stored arms nor filled a bomb, nor have discovered arms nor had a bomb burst among them; who never have gone hungry in a general strike, nor have manned streetcars when the tracks are dynamited; who have never sought cover in a street trying to get their heads behind a gutter; who never have seen a woman shot in the head, in the breast or in the buttocks; who never have seen an old man with the top of his head off; who never have walked with their hands up; who never have shot a horse or seen hooves smash a head; who never have sat on a horse or been shot at or stoned; who never have been cracked on the head with a club nor have thrown a brick; who never have seen a scab’s forearms broken with a crow-bar, or an agitator filled up with compressed air with an air hose; who . . . have never moved a load of arms at night in a big city; nor standing, seeing it moved, knowing what it was and afraid to denounce it because they did not want to die later; nor . . . stood on a roof trying to urinate on their hands to wash off the [incriminating] black in the fork  between finger and thumb from the back-spit of a Thompson gun, the gun thrown in a cistern and the troops coming up the stairs.

Hemingway also praised the technique and excellence of the etchings, and compared Quintanilla to the greatest of all Spanish artists.  He scratched the image “on nickled zinc a line at a time, a million lines, that make a world where there is light and depth and space, humor, pity and understanding, and a sound earthy knowledge that gives us the first true Madrid that we have seen since Goya.”  Dos Passos asked the editor Malcolm Cowley “to circulate a petition of some kind that might induce the Spanish government to go a little easy on him.”  The steadfast Hemingway, in one of his finest moments, had exaggerated Quintanilla’s artistic achievement and military exploits.  But his idealistic crusade worked and secured Quintanilla’s release from prison in less than a year.  The artist attributed his freedom to Hemingway and Dos Passos, who had arranged the New York exhibition, and he became a Loyalist general in the Spanish War.

Hemingway begins his preface to Quintanilla’s book All the Brave: Drawings of the Spanish War (1939) with an emotional conversation he had with his stoical friend during the war in 1937:

A year ago today we were together and I asked Luis how his studio was and if the pictures were safe.

“Oh it’s all gone,” he said, without bitterness, explaining that a bomb had gutted the building.

“And the big frescoes in University City and the Casa del Pueblo?”

“Finished,” he said, “all smashed.”

“What about the frescoes for the monument to [the Socialist labor leader] Pablo Iglesias?”

“Destroyed,” he said.  “No, Ernesto, let’s not talk about it.  When a man loses all his life’s work, everything that he has done in all his working life, it is much  better not to talk about it.”

The bomb also destroyed all the letters Hemingway had sent to him.  Quintanilla recalled the different moods of the reporter and the soldier: “Although I was six years Ernesto’s senior he always had a paternal attitude toward  me and even my material possessions affected him.  It certainly is true that in March 1937 Ernesto still possessed his subtle sensibility, and that I had lost mine, in the same way that I had lost all the work of my youth.”

Hemingway then told Quintanilla about his own disastrous loss in December 1922 when his first wife, Hadley, had lost in the Paris Gare de Lyon the suitcase with the only copies of his early stories.  As she found it difficult to confess her unforgivable negligence, he imagined all the worst things she could have done.  He thought she must have either deceived him or fallen in love with another man.  Quintanilla recalled that Hemingway, forced to guess the worst, finally exclaimed, “Then you’ve slept with a Negro, tell me!”

Hemingway also paid tribute to the military prowess of Quintanilla, who realized the writer’s own dream of becoming a great hero: “When the Republic that he loved and believed in was attacked by the fascists, he led the attack on the Montaña barracks that saved Madrid for the government.  Later, studying military books at night while he commanded troops in the daytime, he fought in the pines and gray rocks of the Guadarrama [mountains]; on the yellow plain of the Tagus [River]; in the streets of Toledo, and back to the suburbs of Madrid.”  The Spanish composer Gustavo Durán, another Hemingway hero whom he praised by name in For Whom the Bell Tolls, explained his own astonishing transformation.  Like Quintanilla, and without previous military experience, he changed from musician to Loyalist general: “the history of Spain is full of examples (particularly during periods of invasion and civil wars) of non-professional soldiers who have been quite capable of grasping military problems.”

In the fall of 1940 Hemingway had an emotional reunion with Quintanilla, who was then artist-in-residence at the University of Kansas City, in the town where the teenaged Hemingway began his career as a  journalist.  He introduced his new wife, Martha Gellhorn, kissed his friend’s wife and flirtatiously said cambiamos (“let’s trade”).  Then, as usual when they met, they got drunk.  Hemingway praised the soldier’s splendid record in the war: “Luis went up fast in the Spanish Loyalist army and became a general.  Later, he was in charge of counterespionage against the fifth column in Madrid.”

The two old friends met for the last time in Paris in the summer of 1960 and revisited the memorable places of their youth.  Hemingway introduced him to Sylvia Beach at the Shakespeare & Company bookstore and said, “both materially and spiritually she helped me out during those difficult years when I was just starting out.”

In the year before his suicide, Hemingway expressed concern  about his own physical illness and deep depression.  In his obituary of Hemingway in Cuadernos (November 1961), Quintanilla gave a perceptive description of his character: “Ernest was noble, a good friend, generous, passionate in his ideas and feelings, sentimental at times, extremely reflective and cautious; but, above all, very, very complicated.”

Jeffrey Meyers has just published James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist.  His Parallel Lives: From Freud and Mann to Arbus and Plath will appear on July 3, 2024, both books with Louisiana State University Press.

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