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

In contrast, the Spanish Civil War was “a most passionate war,”{{sfn|Thomas|1961|p=616}} indeed a cause célèbre perceived as a fight for the soul of Spain and ultimately that of the world. Those who sympathized with the democratically elected Republican government of Spain regarded the war as a conflict between freedom and tyranny, offering an opportunity to stop fascism (most immediately in the person of General Franco and the rebellious Spanish Army, which was supported with material and men by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy). A war to determine who would govern Spain—in this regard “a conflict small enough to be comprehensible to individuals”{{sfn|Thomas|1961|p=616}}—it was more largely an ideological war, a war of competing belief systems. The Loyalists who supported the Republican government included a complicated coalition of Spanish and foreign communists, socialists, syndicalists, anarchists, and democratic liberals, ultimately subsumed into the Popular Front.{{efn|For a detailed analysis of the ideological positions of these various groups, and also for an analysis of the political in-fighting among them, see {{harvtxt|Orwell|1980|pp=46–71}}.}} Moreover, both sides regarded the war as important not only in itself and for what it represented, but also for what it presaged—either the containment of fascism, or its expansion and a resultant world war. Everyone involved knew that the war’s outcome would profoundly matter to the course of history. To make a “separate peace” from the Spanish Civil War, as indeed England and France in effect had done via the Non-Intervention Pact and America via a revision of the Neutrality Act, would unwittingly encourage the triumph of fascism, the destruction unleashed by another world war, and the possible end of political freedom and self-determination in the modern world. In these terms, it is unthinkable that Philip Rawlings not commit himself to the fight “for the duration.”

Dorothy Bridges is based on Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway’s lover during the Spanish Civil War and later his third wife—once Hemingway and Pauline Pfeiffer had divorced, a long process whose conclusion was often in doubt, Pauline insistent on maintaining the marriage, and Hemingway wavering between his wife and his lover. The few lyric passages of ''The Fifth Column'' occur at night, when Philip expresses his love for Dorothy and asks her to marry him, a reflection of Hemingway’s own intensifying love for Martha. The daytime exchanges between Philip and Dorothy are marked by arguments and Philip’s contempt, reflecting Hemingway’s anger at Martha for threatening his domestic life with Pauline and their sons. In a telling hand-written letter to Martha in June 1943, Hemingway reminisced about their Spanish Civil War love affair and their subsequent marriage, about which she had hesitated, to his terrible distress. He thanked her for “interven[ing]” in his life, but he first wrote “interf” (that is, interfering) and then marked out this slip of the pen that unconsciously revealed his continuing ambivalence.{{efn|This unpublished letter is dated 9–10 June 1943 and was written by Hemingway while he was submarine hunting on the Pilar.}}