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
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But Gellhorn also spent many days in Spain on her own, learning Span- {{pg|393|394}} ish, visiting hospitals, talking with the common people, traveling to other battlefields. She was smart enough to know that she did not know much about being a war correspondent, but she learned quickly under Hemingway’s apt tutelage (and that of fellow correspondents Herbert Matthews of the ''New York Times'' and Sefton Delmer of the ''Daily Express''). In July 1937 she sent off her first article, under Hemingway’s prodding encouragement. Collier’s published it as “Only the Shells Whine,” a title that Gellhorn changed to “High Explosive for Everyone” in ''The Face of War''. | But Gellhorn also spent many days in Spain on her own, learning Span- {{pg|393|394}} ish, visiting hospitals, talking with the common people, traveling to other battlefields. She was smart enough to know that she did not know much about being a war correspondent, but she learned quickly under Hemingway’s apt tutelage (and that of fellow correspondents Herbert Matthews of the ''New York Times'' and Sefton Delmer of the ''Daily Express''). In July 1937 she sent off her first article, under Hemingway’s prodding encouragement. Collier’s published it as “Only the Shells Whine,” a title that Gellhorn changed to “High Explosive for Everyone” in ''The Face of War''. | ||
Far from wanting Gellhorn to leave the dangerous arena of war, Hemingway wanted her to stay, for it was the locus of their love affair. Only after their affair was firmly established did he once briefly forbid her from accompanying him, telling her in Paris to wait there with the wife of war correspondent Vincent Sheean, since "Spain’s no place for women,” then promising to “phone to say whether ‘the women’ might come.”{{sfn| | Far from wanting Gellhorn to leave the dangerous arena of war, Hemingway wanted her to stay, for it was the locus of their love affair. Only after their affair was firmly established did he once briefly forbid her from accompanying him, telling her in Paris to wait there with the wife of war correspondent Vincent Sheean, since "Spain’s no place for women,” then promising to “phone to say whether ‘the women’ might come.”{{sfn|Wyden|1983|p=450}} Gellhorn did not wait for his approval to join him in Barcelona, thereby again demonstrating her independence. | ||
Like Dorothy’s first lover Preston, Hemingway had a wife and children on the home front, and his coverage of the Spanish Civil War provided him with a reason to be away from his family as well as with an environment of danger and intensity where a shared cause subsumed any other differences, encouraging the pleasures of a sexual liaison without thoughts of consequences. Indeed, a wife and children seemed to preclude consequences. Hemingway demonstrates a degree of masculine self-awareness when he has Dorothy say, “Those wife-and-children men at war . . . just use them as sort of an opening wedge to get into bed with some one and then immediately afterwards they club you with them.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1969|p=25}} | Like Dorothy’s first lover Preston, Hemingway had a wife and children on the home front, and his coverage of the Spanish Civil War provided him with a reason to be away from his family as well as with an environment of danger and intensity where a shared cause subsumed any other differences, encouraging the pleasures of a sexual liaison without thoughts of consequences. Indeed, a wife and children seemed to preclude consequences. Hemingway demonstrates a degree of masculine self-awareness when he has Dorothy say, “Those wife-and-children men at war . . . just use them as sort of an opening wedge to get into bed with some one and then immediately afterwards they club you with them.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1969|p=25}} | ||