Not at peace
Caroline Moorehead
BLOOD AND CHAMPAGNE: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ROBERT CAPA by Alex Kershaw Macmillan, .£20, pp. 298, ISBN 0333739574 In Hungarian, `capa' means shark. It was the nickname given to a shy, clumsy, goodnatured boy with thick, very black hair and one extra finger, called Andre Friedmann, born in Budapest just before the first world war. By the time he was 18, Capa, by now a veteran street fighter of the revolutionary Left, was on the move, using a grant to help young Jews study abroad to get himself to Berlin. And by the summer of 1932 he was at work as a photographer for Dephot, one of the main German agencies of the time, taking the pictures that would soon make him the most famous war photographer of his age. The way in which he reinvented herself, from gauche child to assured war reporter, a man who moved from woman to woman rapidly, casually, breaking hearts as he went, is the theme of Alex Kershaw's new biography, Blood and Champagne.
The very early 1930s were a good time to be young in Berlin, if you were interested in the arts, theatre, film. Capa's first important pictures were of Leon Trotsky, lecturing on the meaning of the Russian revolution. Driven from Germany by the Nazis, he made his way to Paris where he became friends with another exile, the Polish photographer David Seymour, known to him as Chim, who introduced him to Cartier-Bresson. A portfolio began to take shape: the military cemeteries of the first world war, France in chaos under Leon Blum and the Front Populaire, Haile Selassie at the League of Nations.
Then came the Spanish civil war. Kershaw has been no more successful than anyone else in solving the riddle of Capa's photograph of the falling Republican sol
dier. Since he presumably examined all available evidence, we will never now know for certain whether the manoeuvres were real or staged or whether the man was really dead. It hardly matters. The dying soldier became the single most famous photograph of the Spanish war, a symbol of the doomed heroism of the Republicans, and it made Capa, at the age of 24, the most sought after photographer in Europe. From the moment that Life magazine picked it up, Capa could go wherever he wanted, cover the wars and conflicts he wished to cover, his photographs bought and published all over the world. With David Seymour and Cartier-Bresson, he founded Magnum, the agency all photographers soon longed to be invited to join. As an employee of Life, he was with the first American soldiers landing on Omaha beach on D-Day; before that had come the Sino-Japanese war, the battle for North Africa and the Italian campaign. Later came liberated Europe and Germany. It was in Indo-China, as a temporary replacement for a photographer going on compassionate leave, that Capa was killed by a land-mine. He was 41.
What Capa did when he was not taking war photographs or, memorably, photographs of refugees, was drink, in huge, exuberant quantities, mostly wine, whisky and champagne, and play poker, which consumed him more and more as the years went by. And he pursued women, though pursuit, given that so many fell in love with him and wanted to marry him, is perhaps not the right word. Young girls, friends' wives, movie stars, call girls, duchesses, everyone and anyone, but he was unwilling to settle for any of them after the one woman he appears to have genuinely loved, the red-haired German photographer Gerda Taro, was killed by a tank in the Spanish civil war. Kershaw's task of making sense of Capa's driven, frenetic nature was clearly made harder by having no letters or papers to draw on, either because there were none or because he had no access to them. His biography was not authorised — Capa's brother Cornell, who has collected and catalogued Capa's photographs with loving care, is barely mentioned — which may explain one of the book's great omissions, the absence of any of Capa's own pictures. Given how exceptional they were, and how much these images of people destroyed by fear and loss convey about the man who took them, it makes a vast and regrettable hole in the book.
Many people have written about Capa — among them John Steinbeck and Irwin Shaw, both of whom knew him well, and Richard Whelan, in an earlier, more considerable and thoughtful biography — but none perhaps have captured his elusive nature more convincingly than Martha Gellhorn in a short story called 'Till Death Do Us Part'. Gellhorn was never his lover, but after they met through Hemingway in Madrid in 1937 she became one of his closest friends. Written soon after his death, her story is about friendship — that between herself, Capa and Chim — and it is as a friend that Capa comes alive, funny, intense, loyal, full of doubts about himself and his work. By contrast, Kershaw's Capa is a shadowy figure. The bones of the life are there, and the names of the many woman who loved him, but there is little understanding either of what made him the photographer he was, or why he was driven to keep changing the women about him. Kershaw is at his best in his descriptions of Capa at work, and in documenting a kind of courage all the more impressive for being based on a knowledge of fear.
Like other war reporters, Capa seems to have been at his most unhappy when not covering a war. Nothing in his life, neither the poker, nor the women, nor taking photographs of a world at peace, ever quite replaced the adrenalin of the front line. It is as a somewhat sad figure, at increasing odds with himself, that he stays in the mind.
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