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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 Yet Dorothy clearly goes out on her own in besieged Madrid when no one (neither the playwright, nor the other characters, nor the audience) is “watching,” and her criticism of Preston for writing articles without visiting the battle front suggests one of her probable destinations. She tells Philip at one point, “You know I’m not as silly as I sound, or I wouldn’t be here”{{sfn|Hemingway|1968|p=57}}—a claim that Philip himself could have made yet to which he does not react. Just as his career requires him to act silly, so too perhaps does hers, for it cannot have been easy to be one of only a few female correspondents in the male realm of war. Indeed, Philip’s cynical comments and bored manner find their corollary in Dorothy’s Vassar idiom and equally bored manner. Just as Philip’s manner masks his deadly seriousness as a counterespionage agent, so may Dorothy’s manner mask her own seriousness as a war correspondent.{{efn|For perhaps the only other interpretation that takes Dorothy seriously, offering a subtextual reading, see {{harvtxt|Nakjavani|1992|pp=159-184}}. His argument differs from mine, however, insofar as he focuses narrowly on ideology and politics, associating Dorothy with ideology (a positive value in Nakjavani’s argument) and Max with politics (a negative value).}} Though she earlier claimed that she didn’t “understand anything that is happening here,” she follows up by commenting, “I understand a little bit about University City, but not too much. The Casa del Campo is a complete puzzle to me. And Usera—and Carabanchel. They’re dreadful.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1968|p=5}} She cites four critical locations, neighborhoods and suburbs of Madrid where the Nationalist enemy had been dug in since November 1936, sites of horrific battles between Republican militias (soon supported by the International Brigades) and the Nationalist Army that determined whether Madrid would stand or fall. Madrid suffered mightily, but La Pasionaria’s cry "No Pasarán”—“They shall not pass”—became the city’s watchword. For the rest of the war, the Nationalists maintained their positions on the outskirts of Madrid, shelling the city and inhibiting the movement of supplies, while Madrid held fast despite terrible punishment until the very end. It was a “City of Anguish” as Edwin Rolfe titled one of his Spanish Civil War poems. These battle sites were indeed “dreadful,” as Dorothy asserts in her understated idiom (and as Robert Jordan recollects in ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'', having fought at Usera and Carabanchel himself). And she keeps her promise to write “just as soon as [she] understand[s] things the least bit better.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1968|p=10}}
-Employing understatement like Philip’s own, Dorothy later comments to Philip in passing, “I work when you’re not around,” a claim that Philip could also make.{{sfn|Hemingway|1968|p=57}} Yet Philip has a history on which to draw to enact his role successfully, whereas Dorothy must create a new role without history’s support, {{pg|392|393}} rendering her circumspect as she defines this identity. Nancy Sorel notes of the women war correspondents who reported World War II—“fewer than a hundred in all”{{sfn|Sorel|1999|p=xili}}—that “every women felt vulnerable in regard to her professional status,” whether because of “discriminatory treatment by generals,” “denigrating remarks from hostile male reporters,” or unwanted romantic or sexual advances (xiv). Dorothy disguises her vulnerability at enacting her new role as war correspondent just as Philip does at enacting his role as counterespionage agent. But Dorothy has no one to talk to about her secret life, while Philip has Max, to whom he confides his doubts and fears, and even the hotel manager, to whom he confides information in a code they both understand. As Pilar tells Robert Jordan in ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'', “Everyone needs to talk to someone. Now for every one there should be some one to whom one can speak frankly, for all the valor one could have one becomes very alone”(89). And secretly valorous Dorothy is in this regard far more alone than Philip.
+Employing understatement like Philip’s own, Dorothy later comments to Philip in passing, “I work when you’re not around,” a claim that Philip could also make.{{sfn|Hemingway|1968|p=57}} Yet Philip has a history on which to draw to enact his role successfully, whereas Dorothy must create a new role without history’s support, {{pg|392|393}} rendering her circumspect as she defines this identity. Nancy Sorel notes of the women war correspondents who reported World War II—“fewer than a hundred in all”{{sfn|Sorel|1999|p=xili}}—that “every women felt vulnerable in regard to her professional status,” whether because of “discriminatory treatment by generals,” “denigrating remarks from hostile male reporters,” or unwanted romantic or sexual advances.{{sfn|Sorel|1999|p=xiv}} Dorothy disguises her vulnerability at enacting her new role as war correspondent just as Philip does at enacting his role as counterespionage agent. But Dorothy has no one to talk to about her secret life, while Philip has Max, to whom he confides his doubts and fears, and even the hotel manager, to whom he confides information in a code they both understand. As Pilar tells Robert Jordan in ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'', “Everyone needs to talk to someone. Now for every one there should be some one to whom one can speak frankly, for all the valor one could have one becomes very alone”(89). And secretly valorous Dorothy is in this regard far more alone than Philip.
 In one sense, of course, Dorothy’s secret life is that of Martha Gellhorn. Accomplished journalist and author of two books, the novel ''What Mad Pursuit'' (1934) and the much-lauded fiction collection ''The Trouble I’ve Seen'' (1936), Gellhorn had considered covering the Spanish Civil War before she met Hemingway, who had come to a similar decision. His longtime marriage to Pauline Pfeiffer breaking down, he and Gellhorn quickly followed up on their initial attraction in Key West once they arrived separately in Spain in March 1937. Their mutual commitment to the Republican cause, her long-time admiration for him as a writer, her newfound appreciation for his talents as a war correspondent (including a tactical understanding of war and great personal courage), his ease at living in Spain, his willingness to teach an apt and adoring pupil—all combined with the intensity of war such that their love affair ignited almost immediately. During their four stays in Spain, Gellhorn often followed Hemingway about, whether in Madrid, to the front, or on longer battlefield trips around Spain. She actively participated with Hemingway and Joris Ivens in the filming of ''The Spanish Earth'', a propaganda film for which Hemingway wrote the script and which he ultimately narrated. Because of her personal friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt, Gellhorn was able to arrange for the film to be viewed by the Roosevelts at the White House, with her and Hemingway and Ivens in attendance to plead the cause of the Spanish Republic.