The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Hemingway and Women at the Front: Blowing Bridges in The Fifth Column, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Other Works: Difference between revisions

Hemingway hoped to keep Gellhorn “away from war, pestilence, carnage and adventure.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1981|p=511}} Nevertheless, shortly after their 1941 marriage she persuaded him to accompany her as a fellow war correspondent to the Far East (thereby reversing the power-relationship that had obtained between them in Spain), where she was to report for ''Collier’s'' on the China-Japan War as well as the defense of Hong Kong, Singapore, and the Dutch East Indies. Though Gellhorn tolerated the difficulties of this trip less well than did Hemingway, that did not quench her thirst for such assignments. While Hemingway remained at the Finca Vigía on the home front of Cuba, she traveled the Caribbean on assignment for ''Collier’s'' in 1942, investigating the impact of submarine warfare on the islands; the lack of action perhaps caused her to underestimate Hemingway’s own later submarine-hunting activities off Cuba and Bimini.{{efn|For Gellhorn’s description of her trip to the Far East with Hemingway, see her; {{harvtxt|Gellhorn|1978|pp=19–63}}''Travels'' for her description of her Caribbean trip, see her {{harvtxt|Gellhorn|1978|pp=19–64, 68}}''Travels''.}}

When she left Hemingway in Cuba for the European theater of World War II in 1943, she begged him repeatedly to accompany her or to join her there, as in this letter of 9 December 1943: “I so wish you would come. I think it’s so vital for you to see everything; it’s as if it wouldn’t be entirely seen if you didn’t."{{sfn|Hemingway|1981|p=156}}  The insistent tone of her letters reveals her desperate desire to recapture their best time together—in Spain, at the Hotel Florida, both comrades, both dedicated to the same cause, both writing.

But Hemingway was comfortable at the Finca and satisfied with his sub-hunting adventures (which incorporated the counterespionage activities that he had invested in Philip Rawlings). He resented Gellhorn’s demands, partly because he was no longer her teacher, but more importantly because she was now his wife instead of his lover. He cabled her, “Are you a war correspondent or wife in my bed,”{{sfn|Moorehead|2003|p=212}} thereby drawing an absolute boundary between the war front and home front, and announcing that he would no longer tolerate her conflation of the two. He desperately wanted her to return to the home front and to him, but after her repeated refusals he determined to go to the war front in 1944 in order to defeat her in the battle of the sexes their marriage had become. He wrote to {{pg|395|396}} her, “Will organize the house, close down boat, go to N.Y., eat shit, get a journalism job, which hate worse than Joyce would, and be over. Excuse bitterness”; in a letter shortly thereafter he labeled her “unscrupulous” and wrote, “Maybe will see you soon maybe not.”{{sfn|Moorehead|2003|p=212}} In his eyes she had betrayed him, and as he wrote in “Treachery in Aragon,” an article about the Spanish Civil War, “When one has become involved in a war there is only one thing to do: win it.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1938|p=26}} Thus he purposely did not travel with Gellhorn, instead flying to Europe while she was relegated to a twenty-day voyage on a dynamite-laden ship traveling through mined waters. World War II became a nightmare version of Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War dream.