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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 Hemingway’s attitude toward the female war correspondent was complex, reflecting that of the culture at large with regard to women “at-home” in the public sphere. He knew a number of such New Women, among them Josephine Herbst (a longtime friend from 1920s Paris) and Virginia Cowles in the Spanish Civil War, and Helen Kirkpatrick and Lee Carson in World War II, along with Martha Gellhorn and Mary Welsh—women venturing into the heretofore male realm of war, venturing yet further into it than had the female nurses he had come to know during World War I. He admired their sexual independence and also their courage, since grace under pressure was an ideal appropriate for women as well as for men, and war provided the ultimate pressure-cooker in which grace could be measured. He married two female war correspondents.
-Yet Hemingway came to resent the very qualities that had attracted him because he was fearful, not without reason, that these women would refuse to return permanently to the home front upon becoming his wife—an iden- {{pg|396|397}} tity to his mind that subsumed all others. When angry at Mary in later years, he called her a “camp-follower,”{{sfn|qtd. by Kert|1983|p=455}} saying, “I haven’t fucked generals to get my information”{{sfn|Hemingway|1981|p=511}} (quoted by Whiting 20)—a sexually demeaning remark that redefined her war-front identity from war correspondent to whore while simultaneously signaling his uneasy sense of professional rivalry. In calling Mary “you goddamn smirking, useless female war correspondent” (quoted by Lynn 515), he indicted all female war correspondents because the adjective “female” is joined in this list by uniformly pejorative adjectives. And Hemingway’s indictment of Mary was an indictment of Martha Gellhorn, whose war correspondence he chose to criticize at one of their last meetings, knowing exactly how to hurt her. Indeed, it was an indictment of all those women whose positions at the home front had been compromised by their experiences at the war front, which were among the most exaggerated of the public-sphere activities in which modern women were involved. Such activities rendered them simultaneously more fascinating and more terrifyingly unpredictable to modern men.
+Yet Hemingway came to resent the very qualities that had attracted him because he was fearful, not without reason, that these women would refuse to return permanently to the home front upon becoming his wife—an iden- {{pg|396|397}} tity to his mind that subsumed all others. When angry at Mary in later years, he called her a “camp-follower,”{{sfn|qtd. by Kert|1983|p=455}} saying, “I haven’t fucked generals to get my information”{{sfn|qtd. by Whiting|1999|p=20}}—a sexually demeaning remark that redefined her war-front identity from war correspondent to whore while simultaneously signaling his uneasy sense of professional rivalry. In calling Mary “you goddamn smirking, useless female war correspondent” (quoted by Lynn 515), he indicted all female war correspondents because the adjective “female” is joined in this list by uniformly pejorative adjectives. And Hemingway’s indictment of Mary was an indictment of Martha Gellhorn, whose war correspondence he chose to criticize at one of their last meetings, knowing exactly how to hurt her. Indeed, it was an indictment of all those women whose positions at the home front had been compromised by their experiences at the war front, which were among the most exaggerated of the public-sphere activities in which modern women were involved. Such activities rendered them simultaneously more fascinating and more terrifyingly unpredictable to modern men.
 Hemingway wrote a self-justifying letter to his adolescent son Patrick, explaining the breakdown of his marriage to Gellhorn while also preparing Patrick for his new relationship with Mary Welsh: “We want some straight work, not be alone and not have to go to war to see one’s wife and then have wife want to be in different war theatre in order that stories not compete. Going to get me somebody who wants to stick around with me and let me be the writer of the family” (''Letters'' 576). He wrote similarly to his eldest son John, “[I] would swap her for two non beautiful [sic] wives I might occasionally have the opportunity to go to bed with”(Moorehead, ''Gellhorn'' 228). While Hemingway had gone to war to see his lover quite willingly, the change in Gellhorn’s identity from lover to wife was a sea-change that Hemingway could not get past because, by definition, wives were for the home front. Husbands might go to war as an act of self-realization, but wives should not, as he made very sure Mary understood. In his 1950 novel ''Across the River and into the Trees'', he provides a thinly veiled attack on Martha that doubles as a warning to Mary: “You mean she went away, from ambition, when you only were away from duty,” Renata says to Colonel Cantwell about his former wife, adding, “You couldn’t have married a woman journalist that kept on being that” (212).