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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 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}}''Letters''  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|qtd. by Morehead|2003|p=212}}''Gellhorn'' 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” (qtd. in Moorehead, ''Gellhorn'' 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” (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.
+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|qtd. by Morehead|2003|p=212}}''Gellhorn'' 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|qtd. by Morehead|2003|p=212}}''Gellhorn'' 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” (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.
 In a matter of days, Hemingway met Mary Welsh, Martha’s opposite in appearance, social class, and temperament. Taking Mary’s attentions from fellow war correspondent and novelist Irwin Shaw in what must have been an ego-bolstering move, Hemingway almost immediately asked this female war correspondent to marry him, in yet another example of the repetition compulsion that structured so much of his life. And soon, despite serious doubts, Mary agreed, taking a leave of absence from her job that became permanent. Before the war had officially ended and while Martha was still covering it, Hemingway and Mary were together in Cuba. The only journalism that Mary ever wrote again concerned life with Hemingway on the home front.