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
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| Ā« | The Mailer Review ā¢ Volume 4 Number 1 ā¢ 2010 ā¢ Literary Warriors | Ā» |
Kim Moreland
Abstract: An exploration of Hemingwayās interest in the topic of love and war in a number of his important works.
URL: the short link to the article using prmlr.us (this link will be filled in by the editor)
One of the central issues on which critics of A Farewell to Arms focus is the vexed relationship between love and war, a response Hemingway invites with his punningly ambiguous title. Certainly Frederic Henry rejects the arms of war in his āseparate peaceā (243), an act of desertion validated by the confused and murderous actions of the Italian officers in the army he serves. Yet Frederic is also pulled from the arms of war by the arms of love in the person of Catherine Barkley. The two flee the war arenaāshe abandoning her post as nurse in the American Red Cross Hospital in Milanāfor a safe retreat in neutral Switzerland, an idyllic haven that protects them from wartime reality. That Frederic must ultimately say farewell to the arms of love when Catherine dies in childbirth is tragedy of a different order from his first farewellāexistential or perhaps ontological tragedy, the tragedy of life itself, not the sociopolitical tragedy of war.
Some nine years later Hemingway revisits this same vexed relationship in his 1938 play The Fifth Column, whose setting is the Spanish Civil War. Whereas Frederic Henry ultimately chooses love over war, Philip Rawlings chooses war over love, declaring, āWeāre in for fifty years of undeclared wars and Iāve signed up for the durationā (80). He rejects his lover Dorothy Bridges, along with her fantasy of sharing āa long, happy, quiet life at some
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place like Saint-Tropez or, you know, some place like Saint-Tropez wasā (23)āthat is, an idyllic haven outside of time. Instead, he embraces the wartime reality, declaiming, āWhere I go now, I go alone, or with others who go there for the same reason I goā (83). Loyalty to his comrades in arms supersedes loyalty to his lover, whom he pointedly stops calling ācomradeā in a politically and emotionally significant act. Not a separate peace but voluntary enlistment āfor the durationā is the fate Philip Rawlings chooses.
Why love over war in the novel and war over love in the play? Independent critical discussions of the two works point to several explanations, including differing composition circumstances, differing perceptions of the warsā meanings, and differing characterizations of the female protagonists. These three reasons deserve brief discussion here because they point to an additional issue that has not been discussed in this context, that of the increasing breakdown of the boundary between the foundational western categories of āhome frontā and āwar front.ā This breakdown had two causes. One cause was the increasing penetration of the home front by so-called total war, which was enabled by changing military technology and a concomitant changing ethic of war. Another cause was the increasing penetration of the war front by women in various professional rolesāa change less abstract, more personalized, than the first. As home front and war front became increasingly difficult to distinguish, confusion and anger inevitably resulted.
Hemingwayās significance as a cultural icon reveals itself in his own confusion at this breakdown of boundaries. On the one hand, he repeatedly expressed anger at the impersonal forces of technology that characterize the āstrange new kind of warā represented in all his war fiction [1] (āNew Kindā 267). On the other hand, he also expressed anger at the strange new kind of woman who was invading the male war front, displacing his anger onto the personal behavior of individual women and expressing it dramatically by his characterization of his female protagonists. He thereby transformed geopolitical war into what he called āthe great unending battle between men and womenā (Baker 481ā82). As Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar brilliantly explore in their No Manās Land trilogy, the sexual struggle initiated by the suffrage movement of the mid-nineteenth century became āa key theme in late Victorian literature and ultimately a shaping element in modernist and post-modernist literature. . . [such that] writers increasingly represented womenās unprecedented invasion of the public sphere as a battle of the sexesā
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(1:4). Hemingway thus valorizes in Farewell the war nurse who abandons her military hospital for life as a wife at home in neutral Switzerland, whereas he repudiates in Fifth Column the female war correspondent who refuses to leave the war front of Madrid when her lover directs her to do so. Not one war but twoāthe geopolitical and the sexualāare thus fought in the pages of Hemingwayās works.
The composition circumstances of the novel and play are markedly different. Hemingway wrote Farewell some ten years after World War I had ended in victory for the Allies. The years between the warās conclusion and the novelās composition provided time for reflection on the warās meaning. Hemingwayās post-war novel offered the opportunity to call the war itself into questionāin effect, to argue against the war while not endangering the chance of victory. In contrast, Hemingway wrote Fifth Column while living in war-ravaged Madrid at the Hotel Florida, some fifteen blocks from the front. Ronald Fraser sums up many first-person accounts in his oral history by noting that Madrid was āthe only city where you could go to the front by tramā (455), citing an interview subject as remembering that conductors called out āTo the frontāfive cĆ©ntimosā(265). Peter Wyden notes that secret-police chief Alexander Orlov once told war correspondent Louis Fischer of The Nation, āThere is no front. Madrid is the frontā (202). The Hotel Florida was shelled over thirty times in the fall of 1937 while Hemingway was drafting his play, during the second and longest of his four wartime visits to Spain (completing a clean typescript manuscript titled A Play in Madrid on 23 November 1937, and revising the manuscript in Key West in the summer of 1938, between his third and fourth visits to Spain). Published in October 1938, the play was largely a propaganda vehicle designed to encourage American sympathy for the Republican cause, which might result in a change in American policy that would allow the sale of war material to Republican Spain. It was thus necessary that Philip Rawlings choose war over love, else the play would have seemed to support the American neutrality policy.
Perceptions about World War I and the Spanish Civil War were also markedly different. The causes of World War I were murky, the conduct of the war disconcerting because traditional ways of battle had been rendered obsolete, and the meaning of the Allied victory in this war of attrition was unclear. The only hope was that this was the war to end all warsāironic, given that the Treaty of Versailles in effect set up the circumstances that led to World War II. Speaking for an entire generation, Hemingwayās Frederic
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Henry famously says, āI had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury itā (185)āin short, a slaughter without meaning or higher purpose.[2] As such, Frederic Henry is justified in making his famous āseparate peaceā (243).
In contrast, the Spanish Civil War was āa most passionate warā (Thomas 616), indeed a cause cĆ©lĆØbre 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 Spaināin this regard āa conflict small enough to be comprehensible to individualsā (Thomas 616)āit 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.[3] Moreover, both sides regarded the war as important not only in itself and for what it represented, but also for what it presagedāeither the containment of fascism, or its expansion and a resultant world war. Everyone involved knew that the warās outcome would profoundly matter to the course of history. To make a āseparate peaceā 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 āfor the duration.ā
The attributes of the female protagonists of Hemingwayās two works also differ significantly, especially insofar as they reflect Hemingwayās attitudes toward the actual women on whom they were based. Catherine Barkley is based on Agnes von Kurowsky, Hemingwayās first love, a World War I nurse he asked to marry him during his convalescence under her care, who jilted him for an Italian artillery officer after Hemingwayās return to the American home front. The lyric passages of A Farewell to Arms, especially in Switzer- land, reflect Hemingwayās love for Agnes, just as Catherineās death (however
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tragic to Frederic) reflects Hemingwayās anger at Agnesās betrayal, as does the bitter portrait of Luz in āA Very Short Storyā (1925).
Dorothy Bridges is based on Martha Gellhorn, Hemingwayās lover during the Spanish Civil War and later his third wifeāonce 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 Hemingwayās own intensifying love for Martha. The daytime exchanges between Philip and Dorothy are marked by arguments and Philipās contempt, reflecting Hemingwayās 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 āinterven[ing]ā in his life, but he first wrote āinterfā (that is, interfering) and then marked out this slip of the pen that unconsciously revealed his continuing ambivalence.[4]
Though the characterization of Dorothy Bridges is typically read only in relation to Hemingwayās personal and psychological struggle concerning Martha Gellhorn, it is also a reflection of Hemingwayās complicated attitude toward the appropriate role for women at a time of radical change that was simultaneously independent of and precipitated by modern warfare. While the āNew Womanā in America and England had been demanding more political, economic, and social rights since the nineteenth century, the role women played in modern warsānotably World War I, when women were first encouraged to do āmaleā jobs to free men for the battle frontāexacerbated this sense of entitlement. If not on the surface of the text, at the subtextual level Dorothy Bridges threatens a set of foundational categories more or less operative in the western world since the chivalric code of the Middle Agesāthat is, the home front in binary opposition to the battle front. Love is for the home front, war is for the battle front. Women are for the home front, men for the battle front. Women are idealized because they symbolize the stakes of male combat, while men are realized by their role as combatants. According to this binary opposition, the role of āwifeā is at the home front, away from the intensity of battle, which enables male self-realization while also encouraging an inevitable live-for-the-moment mentality that socially
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and morally justifies brief sexual liaisons. Melissa Herbert notes that āthe military is a āgendered institutionā because soldiering has been about not only war, but being āa manāā (7), and she argues that āmuch of the strategy [designed to establish oneās status as soldier] seems to rely on being that which is not feminineā(8). To be a soldier in this sense is to not be a woman.
Historically, the visible roles for women in the male arena of war have been limited. Always, of course, and especially in civil wars (āthe best war for a writer,ā Hemingway claims in Green Hills of Africa [71]), women have been war victims, often victims of rape, whereby the womanās body is regarded as enemy property to be looted, or as enemy military terrain to be invaded and conquered, as is Mariaās body by the Nationalist soldiers in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Women are even at risk from their own army, whose soldiers may regard use of the female body as rightful recompense for placing their own bodies on the line. Marion Merriman, the wife of Robert Merriman of the Lincoln Battalion, who was the figure on whom Hemingway based Robert Jordan, recounts her own rape by a Lincoln Battalion officer in her 1986 memoir, American Commander in Spain. Having traveled to Spain to nurse her husband after his first wounding, she chose to remain with him in the only way possible, International Brigade officials allowing her to enlist āif [she] would promise to never, under any circumstances, try to get to the front linesā (78). One of only two American women actually in the Lincoln Battalion (women comprising a majority of the staff of the twenty-five-or-so American medical units), she was assigned largely to office duties, at one point making an official trip with two officers under her husbandās command. She recounts her thoughts after one of her fellow officers raped her in the night:
I had to calm myself. This is a war, I told myself. Men are dying and maimed. This is my burden. . . . But should I tell Bob? . . . [I] finally concluded: I must not hurt Bob with this. No, this must be my secret burden. I cannot tell anyoneāever. I could not get the rape off my mind. But I went on with my work. I said nothing about the rape. The war filled Bobās mind. I could not trouble him further, and I did not. (148ā49)
Just as women historically, if often silently, have been war victims, so too have women historically functioned, in Hemingwayās term, as āāwhores de
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combatā (quoted by Kert 297). His pun suggests womanās dual role with regard to warāeither party to it at the battle front as whore, or apart from it (that is, āhors de combatā) at the home front as wife. As Katharine Moon notes:
Historical conditions of war and military occupation have helped foster socioeconomic conditions that have forced women and girls . . . into sexual labor for the military. In general, they have been grouped together as camp followers, women who have made their sexual and other forms of feminized labor, such as cooking and washing, available to troops either voluntarily or involuntarily (210).
In her study of camp followers in the American Revolution, Holly Mayer reminds us that camp followers should be understood broadly as the men and women who ālive[d] and work[ed] with the militaryā (1). They traditionally formed part of the European and American military communities, supplying many of the support services (transportation, nursing, laundry, food and other supplies) that were gradually absorbed into the military itself only beginning in the eighteenth century. The increasing professionalization of the army in the nineteenth century resulted in the decline of the camp-following community in which women, especially of the lower classes, had played a significant if historically unremarked role from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. This military change was supported by the nineteenth-century ācult of true womanhoodā or ācult of domesticity,ā which vigorously delineated the female and male spheres as private and public, respectively. In short, the boundary between home front and war front has always already existed in western society, and simultaneously it has been permeable to a greater or lesser extent.
Moon notes that ā[camp-following] women belonged to the army, but they belonged to it in the same way they belonged to anything elseāas domestic attachmentsā(275). Typically ordered to āaccompany the baggage and stay out of the wayā (14), they were regarded as outsiders, historically marginalized though they traveled with and supported the army. Mayer notes that this community was class-inflected, such that officerās wives were āladiesā who typically visited only during winter quarters and created a social life for the officers, while lower-class women not only traveled year-
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round with their men-folk but also necessarily worked to support themselves and their families, thus rendering them suspect since some female merchants inevitably āsupplement[ed] their incomes by engaging in prostitutionā (7). Prostitutes from nearby and typically urban areas also saw encamped armies as commercial opportunities. Moon notes that āthe degree to which military prostitutesā lives have been controlled or regulated by the armed forces has depended on [a variety of factors]ā (210), and Herbert asserts that āhistorically, in many instances prostitution was organized, or at the very least made available, by the militaryā (64). In A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway describes a relatively regulated degree of military control, Frederic observing that Gorizia has two separate ābawdy houses, one for troops and one for officersā (5). Rinaldi alludes to ābad administration,ā complaining that āfor two weeks now they havenāt changed [the girls, who have become] . . . old war comradesā (64-65).
It would seem that rape victims and prostitutes represent ways in which the boundary between women and war is breached, but women in these two categories are essentially redefined as war booty and are therefore appropriated to the war front by men. In effect, the only women who belong at the war front are rape victims and prostitutes, and their place at the front is validated by menāmore specifically, by male sexual activity, which reinforces the āmasculinity [that is] . . . one mechanism by which men become soldiersā (Herbert 6).
But the woman who goes willingly to war calls into question independently the boundary between women and war, between the private sphere of the home front and the public sphere of the war front. Perhaps that is why the Lincoln Battalion officer felt he had the right to rape Marion Merriman, simultaneously his commanderās wife and a corporal serving in what Marion herself called āwoman-less warā (148). And perhaps that is why, over the centuries, whenever women have approached the war front their activities have been marginalized and dismissed, rendered historically invisible, as in the case of the camp-following communities except insofar as they have been reduced to the single identity of prostitute.
While women have historically served as soldiers, until comparatively recently they have done so only by disguising themselves as men, and they have most often been discovered only after being wounded. Most important is that these women-disguised-as-men remain largely disguised in the pages of history. Those who succeeded in their disguises were neither identified
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nor counted; those who died were regarded as aberrations whose freakishness was buried with them; those who were wounded were removed behind the lines and warned not to return to the battle front.[5] From the male perspective, the more palatable motivation for such behavior was the search for a lover or husband, while less palatable was a desire to fight for the cause directly on the battle front rather than indirectly on the home front.
Atypically, in the early stages of the Spanish Civil War, Republican women fought openly beside men:
The first masculine sphere to which women had access was the military one . . . due, primarily to the initial troop disorganization and, second, to the fact that the Republican army was formed of militia columns organized by trade unions and political parties without any military hierarchy. Thousands of women under arms and in female battalions, for example, took part in the defense of Madrid in November of 1936 (Coleman 48).
But once the crises of the first six months or so had passed and the militias were increasingly professionalized as the Popular Front army (this so-called militarization a micro-version of the historical professionalization of armies in the nineteenth century), the Republican leadership moved quickly to discourage women from functioning at the front lines as soldiersānotably, not so much for their own comfort or safety, but that of the male soldiers: āRepublican soldiers were uncomfortable with the miliciana. For the most part, men expected milicianas to do kitchen and laundry duties and to act as nursesā (Coleman 49). One International Brigade soldier, for example, was āinfuriatedā by a womenās battalion that was fighting before the Segovia Bridge, for āwomen at the battle seemed to him the final degradation of the Republican sideā (Thomas 322, n. l). Because such responses testified to male embarrassment and threatened the destruction of male morale, Republican officials launched a propaganda campaign whose slogan was āMen to the front / Women to the home frontā (quoted by Coleman 49).
The Republican propaganda effort had a harsher side as well, the milicianas soon publicly redefined as prostitutes who endangered the army by transmitting sexual diseases. Allen Guttmann notes that the contemporary British and American publics were āfascinated by the females who fought
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with the Spanish militia in the early days of the warā (11), and he notes the pornographic combination of sex and violence in the overheated press descriptions of the milicianas as āRed Amazons, many of them actually stripped to the waist, carrying modern rifles, and with blood in their eye,ā and as āsupple-hipped Carmens of the Revolution, [who] for want of roses, toss bombs as they whirlā(quoted by Guttmann 11, 12). Hemingway offers a variation on this perspective in For Whom the Bell Tolls: āThe twenty-three-year-old mistress [of the Republican officer] was having a baby, as were nearly all the other girls who had started out as milicianas in the July of the year beforeā (399).
After a Republican decree was issued that forbade women from fighting at the front, the āmiliciana iconā reappeared, now a āsymbol of Republican resistanceā rather than a celebration of military heroines, which was used āto inspire men to serve their patriotic dutyā (Coleman 50). The balance between the female home front and the male war front was thus reestablished, at least as a useful fiction.
But in point of fact, the ātotal warā strategy that Nazi Germany was practicing in Spain meant that besieged Madrid (and later Barcelona, as well as the infamous Guernica and other less famous towns) was itself a war front where women died daily without the opportunity to fight for the Cause or even to defend themselves. Martha Gellhorn observes in The Face of War, a collection of her war correspondence, that āwhat was new and prophetic about the war in Spain was the life of the civilians, who stayed at home and had war brought to them The people of the Republic of Spain were the first to suffer the relentless totality of modern warā (22). Gellhorn describes her arrival in Madrid as follows: āI had not felt as if I were at a war until now. [The] whole city was a battlefieldā (20-21). Marion Merriman describes the combination of terror and frustration engendered by her own trip to Madrid: āIn the trenches I had been nervous but not afraid. That was war. In the city I felt defenseless, trapped. In the city the bombing was a deep personal affront, with no reprisals except a soul-shaking hatred There was no way to fight backā(139). Gellhorn similarly describes āthis helpless war in the city,ā where women cannot fight back but can only scatter for cover āprofessionally, like soldiersā (Face 32, 43).
Though the milicianas were banned from the battle front, guerrillerinas continued to work behind the fascist lines, as Maria Teresa Toral describes in her historical account, providing at great personal risk āaid to the
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wounded, to the hungry, to the sick guerrilla, who had descended from the sierra to the villageā (308). In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway creates an unforgettable portrait of a guerrillerina in the sympathetic and psychologically complex character of Pilar. A miliciana like many other women at the start of the war, she participated in her lover Pabloās takeover of their village for the Republicans. When the fascists retook the village, she fled into the mountains as the only female member of Pabloās guerrilla band, not providing food and nursing care to guerrillas who had descended to the village, as Toral describes, but participating in sabotage activities like Robert Jordanās blowing of the bridge. Though General Golz had noted that āthe more irregular the service, the more irregular the lifeā (8), Pilar is a most irregular figure indeed. She announces, āHere I commandā as she accepts āthe allegiance. . . given [by the guerrillas]ā once they lose confidence in the increasingly unstable Pablo (55, 53). She is admired as a model of courage by Robert Jordan: āYouāre shaking, like a Goddamn woman. What the hell is the matter with you? . . . Iāll bet that Goddamn woman up above isnāt shaking. That Pilarā (437).
An admirable figure, Pilar is constructed by Hemingway as simultaneously revolutionary and conventional in her military role. While her aberrance draws the most attention, it is her conventionalism that is ultimately most telling. Certainly her physical presence is unusual. She is massive, ugly, even masculine in appearance (in this regard reminiscent of the female soldiers who have historically disguised themselves as men), and she sexually admires both Robert and Maria. Her Gypsy blood is invoked throughout the novel as an explanation of her sexual power and her supernatural ability to read the future and smell death. Having been the lover of three matadors, among more casual liaisons, before becoming Pabloās woman, she has āthe heart of a whore,ā according to Pablo (53). When she describes her years of traveling with the matadors, she represents herself as a camp-follower of sorts, typically describing the women present as āgypsies and whores of great categoryā (185).
Pilarās status as guerrilla leader is unusual not only in terms of history but also Hemingwayās canon. But she supplants Pablo only after Robert Jordan arrives, serving largely as symbolic leader while Jordan acts as operational leader. When Pablo returns after having deserted and sabotaged the band, Pilar largely cedes her authority to him, sympathizing with his need to appear as leader before the men he has newly recruited to help blow the
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bridge. So by the end of the novel, Pilar willingly shares with Pablo the role of symbolic leader and Jordan continues as operational leader until Pablo takes charge of the bandās escape.
Provocatively, Pilarās combat activities are never dramatized in the novel, despite her putative role as guerrilla leader. For example, though she identifies herself as an active participant in the initial Republican takeover of her town, thereby sharing moral responsibility for its excesses, her description reveals her to have functioned largely as an observer. She watches Pablo execute the four guardia civiles. She stands in the gauntlet through which fascists run to their death though she never wields a flail. She leaves the gauntlet to watch from a bench after becoming sickened by the action. She does not enter the bullring where the remaining fascists are imprisoned, instead witnessing their execution while standing on a chair. Even then she misses the final horrific events because the chair breaks. Pilar sums up her experience by unconscious reference to her role as witness rather than participant: āThat was the end of the killing of the fascists in our town and I was glad I did not see more of itā (126, emphasis mine).
As a member of the guerrilla band, she participates in the dynamiting of a train, but the only action of Pilar that is actually represented involves her rescue of Maria, who is being transported to prison.[6] Pilar insists that the guerrillas carry Maria away, beating them when they want to drop her during the dangerous retreat, and also carrying Maria herself. Even during Jordanās military action, when Pilar directs her own small band above the bridge, separate from Pablo and his small band below the bridge, she is never represented in actual battle (even though gunfire is reported from her position), in contrast to the male characters whom we actually see shooting at the enemyāRobert, Anselmo, Rafael, even Pablo shooting ineffectually at a tank. In short, we never see Pilar in the act of shooting a gun, only holding a gun, carrying a gun, or reloading guns for the men. Instead, Pilar is almost always represented performing domestic activitiesācooking, cleaning, sewing. When Pilar declares herself leader, Pablo grudgingly cedes his position while simultaneously undermining her power by commanding her to perform her domestic duty: āāAll right. You command,ā he said. āAnd if you want he [Jordan] can command too.ā . . . He paused. āThat you should command and that you should like it. Now if you are a woman as well as a commander, that we should have something to eatāā (56ā57).
In representing Pilar in a military role, whether as miliciana or guerrille-
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rina, Hemingway clearly presents her as sympathetic and admirable, yet he also restricts his representation of her actions to the domestic sphere, ignoring dramatically her military actions as though they were unthinkable or inappropriateāindeed, not to be witnessed. Moreover, insofar as Pilar is represented as a woman comfortable at the battle front, she is represented as a whoreāsexually knowledgeable, widely experienced, at ease describing herself in the company of prostitutes, indeed at ease hearing herself described in rough language by the male guerrillas and using such language herself. She is located in binary opposition to Maria, the virgin raped by Nationalist soldiers, who is simultaneously part of and apart from the guerrilla band.
Tellingly, Pilar wants to send Maria, whom she has nursed back to sanity, to a āhomeā (32, 70)āthat is, to the home front. Robert Jordan first promises to send her to a home for war orphans that also provides shelter for female war victims, but when he falls in love with her, he determines instead to locate a home in Madrid and later Montana for her to inhabit as his wife. Agustin tells Jordan that āPilar has kept her away from all as fiercely as though she were in a convent of Carmelites,ā carefully explaining, āBecause she sleeps with thee she is no whore. You do not understand how such a girl would be if there had been no revolution She is not as we areā (290ā91).
In one sense, Hemingway presents in Pilar a revolutionary portrait of a woman active as a soldier at the front, indeed behind enemy lines. Yet in another sense he invokes the familiar stereotype of the female at the battle front as whore (indeed, whore with a heart of gold), while invoking in his portrait of Maria the other familiar stereotype of rape victim. These two women in the otherwise male guerrilla band thus represent the only two historically visible roles for women at war. Moreover, even Pilar is restricted dramatically to the domestic sphere, as Maria always is (to the degree that is possible given the constraints of her environment). Paradoxically, Hemingway participates by these strategies in the historical erasure of women other than the whore and the rape victim from the war front, despite his seemingly revolutionary portrait of Pilar as guerrilla leader.[7]
But this ongoing historical erasure was countered, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, by the emergence of new professional roles for women at war. The New Woman was first incarnated on the battlefield as the female war nurse.[8] This new development was marked in England by the Crimean
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War (1853ā56) and in the United States by the American Civil War (1861ā1865). In part, this new female identity developed in response to the actions of men who were themselves creating a new male identity, that of the war correspondent. William Howard Russell of the London Times is most often cited as the first war correspondent, though other challengers inevitably exist. It was the reporting of Russell and several others, for example Edwin Lawrence Godkin and especially Thomas Chenery, that roused the English public to outrage over the despicable conditions of the British army in the Crimea, especially regarding medical care.[9] Florence Nightingale responded to the request for nursing aid (female nurses from France were already on scene), and her āaristocratic backgroundā and āsocial and political connectionsā enabled her to overcome the prejudice against sending female nurses to the field (Garrison 12). But the nurses nonetheless suffered under public charges of immodesty and worseāthat is, sexual promiscuity and prostitutionābecause they breached the boundary between home front and war front. They left the private for the public sphere, even though they did so while practicing the traditionally female actions of nurturing and caretaking, often fulfilling specifically domestic functions such as cooking and cleaning. In this regard, Hemingwayās Pilar is ironically like them.
Nightingale and her party of thirty-eight women constituted āan historic deputation which established a precedent for women determined to serve as nurses in military hospitals, and became the model for respectable female Sanitarians [members of the US Sanitary Commission, a volunteer organization established during the American Civil War] as they entered a male environment previously forbidden to themā(Garrison 13). In fact, the precedent was class-inflected, concerning middle- and upper-class women, since female camp-followers had long functioned as nurses in earlier wars, though their actions went unremarked (Mayer 219-23).
Like the female war nurses of the Crimea, those led by Dorothea Dix in the American Civil War largely remained behind the lines, though more often near the battle front. Katherine Prescott Wormely wrote of her experiences, āI see the worst, short of the actual battle-field, that there is to seeā (131). Clara Barton responded yet more radically, providing independent nursing and relief services on the battle front itself. The middle- or upper- class status of these āladiesā rendered their wartime actions surprising on the one hand (why werenāt they satisfied rolling bandages in ladiesā aid societies?) yet also protected them to some degree from sexual gossip. As a
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mark of over-compensation, they were apostrophized as saints and angels, Nightingale known as āThe Angel of the Crimeaā and āThe Lady with the Lamp,ā and Barton as āThe Angel of the Battlefield.ā They were also apostrophized more domestically as mothers and sisters, which was especially appropriate for the many Roman Catholic nuns who served as nurses in the American Civil War.[10] Their vows of chastity and obedience rendered them particularly appealing to male authorities, notably doctors; female doctors were forbidden from servingāa situation that also obtained in World War I, though many female doctors found their way around American Expeditionary Force regulations by attaching themselves to volunteer organizations.[11]
Nightingale, Dix, and Barton are the direct ancestors of later female war nurses, among whom are the VADs (that is, the Voluntary Aid Detachment, a British service auxiliary) like Hemingwayās Lady Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises and Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms, and also like American Red Cross nurse Agnes von Kurowsky. To combat the potentially salacious reputation of female war nurses, they labored under strict rules of appearance and behavior. Dix required her nurses to be middle-aged and āplain to the point of uglinessā (Garrison 18). American Red Cross nurses serving in World War I were āforbidden to carry on serious romances, even to be alone with a gentleman callerā (Villard and Nagel 239).
Hemingway reflects these rules in A Farewell to Arms when Catherine de- scribes the restrictions on the nursesā behavior at the hospital in Gorizia, only a mile from the front: āThe Italians didnāt want women so near the front. So weāre all on very special behavior. We donāt go outā(25). Though the rules are more relaxed at the American Red Cross Hospital in Milan, Frederic notes that āthey would not let us go out together when I was off crutches because it was unseemly for a nurse to be seen unchaperoned with a patient who did not look as though he needed attendanceā (117-18). Increased personal freedom resulted inevitably, however, in increased sexual freedom, as represented in the actions of Catherine Barkley and Brett Ashley; indeed, Clara Bartonās intimate relationship with the married Colonel John Elwell, quartermaster for the Department of the South, is illustrative in this regard.[12] Of course, the same point about increased sexual freedom might be made about male soldiers. But only the female nurses labored under moral opprobrium, whether external or introjected, as Hemingway represents. It is no accident that the name of the sexually promiscuous Brett rhymes with that
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of the prostitute Georgette, nor that Jake Barnes confuses their voices. Similarly, Catherine Barkley voices the internal anxiety surrounding the new female role of wartime nurse when she says, āI never felt like a whore beforeā (152) to her patient-lover. Of course, he is more truly her impatient lover, whose return to the battle front results in her agreeing to a sexual encounter as atonement for her sexual refusal of her now-dead soldier-fiancĆ©.
The type of position that Hemingway held with the American Red Cross as ambulance driver and canteen operator would be appropriated by women once America fully entered World War I. His volunteer service soon became an unwitting escape from the combatant role then urged upon healthy young American men; women were now encouraged to take on the non-combatant roles supervised by volunteer organizations like the Red Cross and YMCA, whose famous ādoughnut dolliesā operated canteens for the American doughboys fighting the war. By the end of the war, Hemingwayās Red Cross activities would have allied him more with the role of American women than menāhence, perhaps, his public exaggerations of his role on the Italian front and supposedly in the Italian army.
During the early twentieth century, another female figure publicly emerged at the battle front, one yet more troubling in terms of the prevailing paradigm since her activities could not be redefined as appropriately female because domestic: the female war correspondent. The first American woman to win accreditation from the War Department as an official war correspondent was Peggy Hull on 17 September 1918, but she was restricted from access to the battlefields of World War I (as were the few free-lance female correspondents); when the male correspondents realized the popularity of Hullās stories about āthe lives of the common soldierā away from battle, they ādemanded her removalā (Sorel xviii) and she was āforced to spend the rest of the war in Parisā (Knightley 127). Some eighteen years later, the women who covered the Spanish Civil War were still small in number but free of official regulations governing their behavior. Outsiders in Spain creating a new professional role, they were little regulated as to dress or behavior (as were the later female correspondents of World War II, who were required to wear uniforms and forbidden access to the front lines,[13] though individual resourcefulness frequently overcame this official restriction). These female correspondents ranged as freely as their inclinations, abilities, and contacts enabled.
It would seem that The Fifth Columnās Dorothy Bridges is a war corre-
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spondentāhow else to explain her residence in Madridās Hotel Florida, the presence of a large military map and war poster and typewriter in her room, and her announcement late in the play that she has āsent away three articlesā (82)? But her lover Robert Preston, himself a war correspondent, calls her āa bored Vassar bitchā (4)āa change from the 1937 Madrid typescript where she is identified with Martha Gellhornās own Bryn Mawr. Rather than protesting, Dorothy agrees that she doesnāt āunderstand anything that is happening hereā (5). Dorothyās stereotypical characterization as a dumb blonde renders her presumed identity problematic. For example, Philip confusedly shouts, āArenāt you a lady war correspondent or something? Get out of here and go write an article. This [the assassination of a Loyalist soldier in Philipās room] is none of your businessā (33). Her role as war correspondent cannot stand alone, but must be delimited by the modifier āladyāāor better yet relegated to the unnameable āor something.ā But if the assassination of a soldier is not the business of a āladyā war correspondent, then what is? Indeed, what is the appropriate material for the article Philip directs her to write while simultaneously identifying what is off limits to her? In this telling scene, Philip places Dorothy in an untenable position because her identity and her subject matter remain unsayable. She fits into neither of the historically accepted categories of women at the battle front, prostitute or rape victim, nor into that of the more recently accepted category of nurse. But there she is nonetheless, at the war front instead of the home front, practicing it would seem the male profession of war correspondent.
As soon as Philip falls in love with Dorothy, a romance that she boldly initiates, he demands that she āmove out of this hotel and . . . go back to Americaā (31). But Dorothy refuses to leave, calling him an āimpudent, impertinent manā (31). An independent woman, she need not comply with his demand that she return to the home front. That is, after all, the realm of wives, as evidenced by Prestonās wife, about whom he is āalways going on,ā according to Dorothy, who adds, āLet him go back to his wife and children if heās so excited about them. Iāll bet he wonātā (25).
Though Dorothy commits herself to remaining near the battle front, she has simultaneously worked to make her own room homey, and she makes over Philipās adjoining room as well. In the context of the play, Dorothyās redecoration of Philipās room signals her desire to domesticate him, to lure him away from the war to the home front. Certainly that is how Philip interprets it. His ambivalence about this domestication is revealed by his dis-
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comfort in the redecorated room and by his conflicted responses to Dorothy. In the midst of the war, she has created a home front of sorts, a conflation that confuses Philip. He attempts to reestablish the division by associating nighttime with the home front and daytime with the war front, declaring during the night not only his love but more tellingly his desire to marry her, and repudiating these declarations during the day. Dorothy reacts to both nighttime and daytime pronouncements with equanimity, enjoying Philipās nighttime fantasies which she also shares, yet recognizing them as such. When Philip rejects her at the end of the play, he does so because he fears he will be unable to withstand the temptation she represents to abandon the war front for the home front, a concern that his German comrade Max reinforces. But Philipās rejection of Dorothy, however painful, does not result in her departure from Madrid.[14] Just as Philip has volunteered for the duration, so too, it would seem, has Dorothy. But she is better able to assimilate fantasy and reality, nighttime and daytime, home front and war front, into a complex whole. For Dorothy, the conversations about other places are ājust playingā (62), a kind of bedtime story ritual. Realist to his romantic, she accepts the constraints placed on them by their mutual presence at the war: āBut canāt we just go on now, as long as we have each other, I mean if we arenāt going to always keep on, and be nice and enjoy what we have and not be bitter?ā (63).
In creating a home front at the war front, Dorothy does not split but compounds her loyalties, voluntarily remaining at home in war-torn Madrid. Gellhorn asserts in her 1959 Introduction to The Face of War: āWar was our condition and our history, the place we had to live inā (viii). In making the war front their home, women were thus making themselves at home in the public sphere of the world at large. In āThe War in Spainā section of The Face of War, Gellhorn specifies: āThanks to Collierās I had the chance to see the life of my time, which was war For eight years, I could go where I wanted, when I wanted, and write what I sawā (22). In a 1945 Collierās article describing the end of World War II in Europe, āYouāre on Your Way Home,ā Gellhorn writes that āthe war, the hated and perilous and mad, had been home for a long time too; everyone had learned how to live in it, everyone had something to do, something that looked necessary, and now we were back in this beautiful big safe place called home and what would become of us?ā (qtd. in Sorel 389).
For women at the war front, now at home in the public sphere, what in
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fact was there to return to, since the home front was publicly defined by the presence of a waiting wife? Yet such a return was necessary if the balance between the male public sphere and the female private sphere was to be reestablished. Margaret Mead addressed this male anxiety, complaining about the ācontinuous harping on the theme: āWill the women be willing to return to the home?āāā and noting the male self-interest involved in this particular skirmish between the sexes: ā[This question was] repeated over and over again. . . by those to whose interest it will be to discharge women workers . . . as soon as the war is overā (qtd. in Gilbert and Gubar 3:214). The female war correspondent at the battle front was an extreme example of the millions of women who had entered the public sphere of war work, if most often on the home front.
Dorothy Bridgesā identity as female war correspondent is undermined not only by her characterization but by the very structure of the play, which rigidly confines her to the domestic sphereāa strategy that Hemingway later employed more subtly in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Act One, where Dorothy is prominent, has three scenes, all set at the Hotel Florida. Act Two, where Dorothy is less prominent, has only one scene set at the Hotel Florida; the other two scenes are set at Seguridad headquarters, where two Loyalist soldiers are being interrogated for suspected treason, and at Chicoteās Bar, the hangout for International Brigade soldiers, prostitutes, and war correspondents. Act Three, where Dorothy is again less prominent, has two scenes set at the Hotel Florida; the other two scenes are set at Seguridad headquarters, and at a Republican artillery observation post that Philip and Max infiltrate. The active Philipās scenes include not only those in his and Dorothyās rooms at the Hotel Florida, but also those at Seguridad Headquarters, Chicoteās Bar, and the Republican observation post. In contrast, Dorothy is never presented outside of the Hotel Florida, almost always in her own room (only once entering Philipās room). Indeed, she is most frequently seen in bed, for example āsleeping soundlyā through Philipās extended conversation with the hotel manager (16), āgo[ing] back to sleep for just a little while longerā after waking for breakfast and conversation (26), pushed by Philip ātoward the bedā in a protective gesture when the Loyalist soldier is shot in Philipās room (33), eating breakfast in bed, reading in bed, lying in bed with Philip while she wears her new silver fox cape,[15] āasleep in bedā when Philip and Max discuss the initial failure of their counterespionage plan (55). Jeffrey Meyers de-
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scribes her with understandable hyperbole as āvirtually narcolepticā (318). The bed is Dorothyās locus classicus, both defining and containing her.
In the second scene of the play, Dorothy easily switches her sexual loyalties from Preston to Philip, thereby introducing the motifs of loyalty and betrayal that suffuse the play. These motifs are appropriate given the complex politics of the Spanish Civil War, but also the complicated personal situation of Hemingway, who was emotionally torn between his wife and his lover. In an unlikely judgment, the prostitute Anita criticizes Dorothy for ātak[ing] a man just like you pick a flowers [sic]ā (43). Dorothy casually rejects Preston, who makes bad puns and takes cover during shelling, in favor of Philip, who does not take cover but otherwise seems Prestonās inferior. A war correspondent who spends his time drinking and carousing rather than writing, he is certainly ālivel[y]ā (5), as Dorothy notes with approval, but not productive. On the other hand, she scorns Prestonās productivity since āhe never goes to the front . . . [but] just writes about itā (20)āa scruple that suggests her own ethics concerning war correspondence. Of course, Dorothy does not know that Philip is deadly serious, his carousing a cover for counterespionage activities at which he is extraordinarily successful. In company with Max, he overcomes a Nationalist command post, kills multiple soldiers, captures a general and a political leader, and gains information that ultimately results in the capture of three hundred Fifth Columnists in Madrid. Petra the hotel maid explains that the Fifth Column is āthe people who fight us from inside the cityā (46). This term gained its historical currency from Nationalist General Mola who, āwhen asked by a group of foreign journalists which of his four columns he expected would take Madrid . .. replied, in words repeated incessantly during the . . . years of treachery and espionage since that time, that it would be that āFifth Columnā of secret Nationalist supporters within the cityā (Thomas 317)āa term that Hemingwayās play popularized. General Molaās words unleashed in Madrid and elsewhere a charged atmosphere of mistrust and paranoia, which promoted a civil war within the civil war, given the uneasy coalition of political parties that eventually composed the Republicās Popular Front.
That Philip, the seeming playboy-correspondent, is involved in something secret and serious is realized even by the idiot hotel manager, a point emphasized not in the 1937 Madrid typescript but in Hemingwayās 1938 Key West revision of the play. But dim Dorothy, who lives with Philip in adjoining rooms at the Hotel Florida, never suspects his other life, the resulting
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dramatic irony redounding always to Philipās credit. Philipās apologia for loving Dorothy sounds instead like an indictment: āGranted sheās lazy and spoiled, and rather stupid, and enormously on the make. Still sheās very beautiful, very friendly, and very charming and rather innocentāand quite braveā (44). While Dorothy is here damned by faint praise, Philipās description calls his own values into question. Philip loves her because of her superficial qualities, only his appreciation of her bravery hinting at something deeper. In this sense, they are well matched, each largely drawn to the other because of physical size and sexual appeal. Dorothy is referred to as āthat great big blondeā (41), and she is attracted by Philipās sexual prowess,[16] noting that āhe made me happier than anyone has ever made meā (47). When he throws her over, asserting, āYouāre uneducated, youāre useless, youāre a fool and youāre lazy,ā she responds, āMaybe the others. But Iām not uselessā (83). She here indirectly refers to her sexual utility, which Philip identifies as āa commodity you shouldnāt pay too high a price forā (83). Hurt and angry, Dorothy retaliates by asking Philip, āDid it ever occur to you that youāre a commodity, too? A commodity one shouldnāt pay too high a price forā (84). Philip is amused, never having had to think of himself as a sexual object, indeed a whore (ācommodityā an economic term saturated with Marxist significance). But Dorothy does not have the luxury of Philipās laughter. She is psychologically vulnerable to the charge, for āwomen who push the boundaries of gender are censured for such behaviorsā in gender- specific ways (Herbert 2). Just as the milicianas were figured forth as whores to discourage their presence at the front lines and to render them a familiar female type if they stayed, so too is Dorothy when she will neither leave the war front for the home front nor deny the interrelationship of war front and home front that she herself has created and represents.
The correlation between Dorothy and the whore would thus seem to be historically inevitable, a correlation that develops from the playās very first short scene, which exists solely to provide a gloss on the play. A whore sees the sign on the door to Dorothyās room: āWorking. Do Not Disturbā (3). When she asks her soldier-customer to read it to her, he responds with contempt: āSo thatās what Iād draw. A literary one. The hell with itā (3). She respondsāto the sign? to his contempt?āwith āa dry high, hard laugh,ā asserting, āIāll get me a sign like that tooā (3). The stage goes dark and the scene ends, these allegorical characters disappearing forever, having provided their implicit commentary on all that follows.
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In the next scene Anitaāāa Moorish tartā as the stage directions initially refer to her rather than by nameāis brought by Philip to Dorothyās room, where Anita objects to the sign because āall the time working, isnāt fairā (10). She insists that Dorothy give her the sign as a means of forestalling unfair competition. Anita is, in fact, in competition with Dorothy for Philipās affections and his sexual favors. At one level, the play presents a choice between Dorothy and Anita. And the final scene of the play presents the high-minded Philip, having rejected Dorothy, initiating a sexual encounter with Anita. Sexuality without strings is preferable to the entanglements of love and marriage when one has committed oneself to fighting for the Cause, although this loveless encounter seems like torture to Max, who responds to it exactly as he does to an interrogation scene earlier (76, 85). In āNight Before Battle,ā one of the Spanish Civil War stories that Hemingway blocked out while revising The Fifth Column in Key West, the only difference between ātwo American girls at the Florida [who are] newspaper correspondentsā and two prostitutes is that a soldier must talk to the female war correspondents before sex, while he may simply pay the prostitutes for their sexual services (118). Maxās confused articulation of Dorothy Bridgesā nameāāBritches?ā (64)āreinforces her redefined identity as sexual object, indeed as whore.
In both characterization and structure, then, the play works against the recognition of Dorothy as a serious woman, a competent journalist, a war correspondent. Malcolm Cowley asserted in his review of the play that āif Philip hadnāt left her for the Spanish people, he might have traded her for a flask of Chanel No. 5 and still have had the best of the bargainā(qtd. in Trogdon 213), thereby wittily suggesting her triviality, decorative quality, and stereotypical femininity.
But just as Dorothy does not catch on to Philipās secret life, perhaps neither does Philip catch on to Dorothyās. Though she is never represented as writing, only once sitting down at her typewriter and then only for a moment (as though to emphasize her disengagement from it), she somehow writes three articles during the playās time period, not merely the one article whose potential completion Preston doubts, saying, āYou never do work anywayā (10). Philip shares this judgment, labeling her ālazyā (83). In the final scene of the play she is presented in the stage directions as returning āhomeā (81) to her room at the Hotel Floridaābut from where? Her activ-
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ities outside the confines of her room, if occasionally referenced, are never dramatized like Philipās.
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 āwatching,ā 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, āYou know Iām not as silly as I sound, or I wouldnāt be hereā(57)ā 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, Philipās cynical comments and bored manner find their corollary in Dorothyās Vassar idiom and equally bored manner. Just as Philipās manner masks his deadly seriousness as a counterespionage agent, so may Dorothyās manner mask her own seriousness as a war correspondent.[17] Though she earlier claimed that she didnāt āunderstand anything that is happening here,ā she follows up by commenting, āI understand a little bit about University City, but not too much. The Casa del Campo is a complete puzzle to me. And Useraāand Carabanchel. Theyāre dreadfulā(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 Pasionariaās cry "No PasarĆ”nāāāThey shall not passāābecame the cityās 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 āCity of Anguishā as Edwin Rolfe titled one of his Spanish Civil War poems. These battle sites were indeed ādreadful,ā 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 ājust as soon as [she] understand[s] things the least bit betterā (10).
Employing understatement like Philipās own, Dorothy later comments to Philip in passing, āI work when youāre not around,ā a claim that Philip could also make (57). Yet Philip has a history on which to draw to enact his role successfully, whereas Dorothy must create a new role without historyās support,
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rendering her circumspect as she defines this identity. Nancy Sorel notes of the women war correspondents who reported World War IIāāfewer than a hundred in allā (xili)āthat āevery women felt vulnerable in regard to her professional status,ā whether because of ādiscriminatory treatment by generals,ā ādenigrating remarks from hostile male reporters,ā 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, āEveryone 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 aloneā(89). And secretly valorous Dorothy is in this regard far more alone than Philip.
In one sense, of course, Dorothyās 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 Iāve 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 pupilāall 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.
But Gellhorn also spent many days in Spain on her own, learning Span-
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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 Hemingwayās 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 Hemingwayās prodding encouragement. Collierās published it as āOnly the Shells Whine,ā a title that Gellhorn changed to āHigh Explosive for Everyoneā 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 "Spainās no place for women,ā then promising to āphone to say whether āthe womenā might comeā (quoted by Wyden 450). Gellhorn did not wait for his approval to join him in Barcelona, thereby again demonstrating her independence.
Like Dorothyās 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, āThose 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 themā (25).
Gellhorn most valued her comradeship with Hemingway as they worked together (thereby reversing the priorities of Dorothy and Philip, whose sexual relationship is primary and comradeship a farce). Gellhorn was an apt pupil, and Hemingway loved the role of teacher. His tutelage, born of hard experience, demonstrably influenced Gellhorn, who learned fast and with a gusto that delighted Hemingway, as did her courage.
Yet once Gellhorn and Hemingway were able to live together outside the war zone (even before his divorce was finalized), Hemingway resented Gellhornās continuing career as war correspondent because it resulted in what he viewed as her abandonment of himāfor example, when she left him in 1939 at Sun Valley in order to cover the Russo-Finnish War. In effect, she thereby
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relegated him to the role of home-front wife. Having experienced that role long before during World War I, he must have feared being jilted again as Agnes had jilted him when he returned to the home front of Oak Park while she remained in Italy, and as he had recently jilted Pauline, who had begged to accompany him to Spain but whom he had insisted remain on the home front in Key West.
Hemingway hoped to keep Gellhorn āaway from war, pestilence, carnage and adventureā (Letters 511). Nevertheless, shortly after their 1941 marriage she persuaded him to accompany her as a fellow war correspondent to the Far East (thereby reversing the power-relationship that had obtained between them in Spain), where she was to report for Collierās on the China-Japan War as well as the defense of Hong Kong, Singapore, and the Dutch East Indies. Though Gellhorn tolerated the difficulties of this trip less well than did Hemingway, that did not quench her thirst for such assignments. While Hemingway remained at the Finca VigĆa on the home front of Cuba, she traveled the Caribbean on assignment for Collierās in 1942, investigating the impact of submarine warfare on the islands; the lack of action perhaps caused her to underestimate Hemingwayās own later submarine-hunting activities off Cuba and Bimini.[18]
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: āI so wish you would come. I think itās so vital for you to see everything; itās as if it wouldnāt be entirely seen if you didnātā (Letters 156). The insistent tone of her letters reveals her desperate desire to recapture their best time togetherāin 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 Gellhornās 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, āAre you a war correspondent or wife in my bedā(quoted by Moorehead, Gellhorn 212), 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
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her, āWill 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 bitternessā; in a letter shortly thereafter he labeled her āunscrupulousā and wrote, āMaybe will see you soon maybe notā (qtd. in Moorehead, Gellhorn 212). In his eyes she had betrayed him, and as he wrote in āTreachery in Aragon,ā an article about the Spanish Civil War, āWhen one has become involved in a war there is only one thing to do: win itā (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 Hemingwayās Spanish Civil War dream.
In a matter of days, Hemingway met Mary Welsh, Marthaās opposite in appearance, social class, and temperament. Taking Maryās 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.
Hemingwayās attitude toward the female war correspondent was complex, reflecting that of the culture at large with regard to women āat-homeā 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 Welshāwomen 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 wifeāan iden-
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tity to his mind that subsumed all others. When angry at Mary in later years, he called her a ācamp-followerā (quoted by Kert 455), saying, āI havenāt fucked generals to get my informationā (quoted by Whiting 20)āa 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 āyou goddamn smirking, useless female war correspondentā (quoted by Lynn 515), he indicted all female war correspondents because the adjective āfemaleā is joined in this list by uniformly pejorative adjectives. And Hemingwayās 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: āWe want some straight work, not be alone and not have to go to war to see oneās 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 familyā (Letters 576). He wrote similarly to his eldest son John, ā[I] would swap her for two non beautiful [sic] wives I might occasionally have the opportunity to go to bed withā(Moorehead, Gellhorn 228). While Hemingway had gone to war to see his lover quite willingly, the change in Gellhornās 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: āYou mean she went away, from ambition, when you only were away from duty,ā Renata says to Colonel Cantwell about his former wife, adding, āYou couldnāt have married a woman journalist that kept on being thatā (212).
Martha Gellhorn came to recognize the dilemma that inevitably resulted when modern men were attracted to modern women for qualities that they
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would abjure in a wife, playing it for comedy in the 1945 play she and Virginia Cowles wrote, Love Goes to Press (originally titled Men Must Weep and then, with wonderful ambiguity, Take My Love Away). The two female protagonists, Annabelle Jones (based on Gellhorn) and Jane Mason (based on Cowles), are successful war correspondents who report from the front lines of World War II, when āany decent woman would stay at homeā according to Philip, the British Public Relations Officer and Janeās love interest (10). Joe Rogers, war correspondent and Annabelleās ex-husband, āsays warās no place for a womanā according to his new fiancĆ©e, actress Daphne Ruther- ford (14). She is entertaining the troops rather nearer to the front line than she had expected, and he promises to ābundle [her] up and send [her] straight off to America where itās safeā (14).
While the male correspondents are satisfied to rewrite military communiques, Annabelle and Jane show remarkable ingenuity in finding ways to get to the front so as to report the action firsthand. However, their efforts are denigrated, Joe Rogers repeatedly complaining, to the widespread agreement of the other men, that they ārun this lousy war on sex-appealā (45, 49). As Sandra Spanier notes in her Afterword to the play:
The fact is, of course, that being female is a definite occupational handicap for a war correspondent, and both Jane and Annabelle know it. But because their womanhood is something that they have never been allowed to forget, they have great fun flaunting it. With a perfect understanding of the currency of power, they turn a handicap to their own advantage in repeated acts of subversion that the authors exploit to comic effect. (82ā83)
In considering the likely outbreak of World War II, Gellhorn had noted of her own plan to once again take up the profession of war correspondence, āIt is going to be a serious drawback to be a woman, it always has been but probably worse now than everā (Letters 90).
Jane and Annabelle find it a minor irritant that everyone assumes they must inevitably be nurses. āNo, Iām not a nurse,ā Jane patiently repeats (16). But this correction implies criticism of the stereotype alone, not the role itself. Indeed, Jane forgoes a scoop in order to render medical aid to a wounded officer on the battlefield, just as Gellhorn helped the medical staff with the wounded on the hospital transport ship where she had stowed away
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in the toilet so as to get to Normandy to report on the D-Day landing. Even the ārepugnantā Daphne is recuperated (36). When Philip criticizes Daphne because āall she can think about is her dreadful career,ā Jane responds with exquisite irony that āit isnāt the career thatās silly,ā and she notes with admiration that Daphne ācertainly knows what she wantsā (63).
Jane briefly thinks that what she herself wants is marriage to Philip, who suddenly expresses admiration for her independence and professionalism as a war correspondent. But soon he says, āI canāt have you going to the front any more. . . [because] youāre mine nowā(60). He sabotages her work by arranging for her to sleep through an attack she is to report, and he makes plans to send her to his family home in England. This last is too much for Jane. She is appalled by his description of the life his mother and sister lead thereānotably, not because she finds it trivial, but rather because the riding and hunting, the bee-keeping and cow-tending, the war committees and the uniformed āland armyā all require a different sort of courage and a different set of talents than she possesses (76). She is horrified to discover, for example, that there are no āfield dressing station[s]ā at fox hunts, and she bewails the fact that āthereās no one to pick up the woundedā (69, 64). Imagining a future where she will be ākicked by horses and stung by bees and finally die of mastitis from a cow,ā she envies Annabelle whom she envisions āin a lovely dry dug-out somewhereā (73, 69). Jane changes her mind about marrying Philip and lights out for the territoryāto Burma, in fact, with Annabelle, to report on the war front there.
Annabelle does indeed plan to continue her war correspondence, but she hopes to do so with Joe Rogers, who has proclaimed not only his continuing love for her but also a new attitude of respect for her work: āNo other girl would have dared to fly that mission Youāre everything. Youāre pretty and funny and brave. I think being so brave is one of the things Iām proudest ofā (67). He promises never again to steal her stories as he did during their brief marriage. āHe said he did it because he loved me so much he couldnāt bear to have me in danger,ā Annabelle tells Jane, but āit turned out he married me to silence the oppositionā (19). Joe now asserts, āNothing means anything without you,ā and he promises never to interfere in her work again (67). Annabelle imagines a future with this ābeautiful, funny, fascinating manā in which they will cover wars together in happy comradeship (20), having learned that marriage is ātoo dangerousā and that āyou risk ruining everything with marriageā (69). But Annabelle discovers that Joe has not
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changed when he steals her trip to Poland. The theft is bad enough, but his condescending explanation is still more infuriating: āHawkins sent for you, but itās too dangerous. I love you too much. It doesnāt matter for a man. P.S. Back tomorrowā (73). Annabelleās earlier comment, āIf thereās anything I really loathe, itās a woman protector,ā resonates for she senses personal motivations beneath this seemingly generous sentiment (25). Moreover, the same sentiment is expressed by Philip, as one of the male correspondents tells her: āYouāve got to be more tolerant, Annabelle. The poor guyās been away from England for three years, fighting to protect womankind from the horrors of war. And then the womankind walks in on him. He might as well have spared himself the trouble. You can see it would upset him for a whileā (25).
Annabelle is terribly hurt by Joeās betrayal, but she vows not āto let any worthless man ruin [her] jobā(74), and she is cheered at the prospect of covering the war in Burma: āIt sounds too terrible. Those poor men, and no one to tell what theyāre doing. Forgotten Army. How dare people treat them like thatā (75). Annabelle proves herself āstill out to save the world,ā as Jane had earlier described her, claiming, āWe have to write, Jane. The people who fight canāt. Itās our job. Our duty, reallyā (19, 18). So Annabelle and Jane go off to yet another war front, finding it ālovely to be at the same warā but regretting that the men they love cannot somehow tolerate sharing the ex- perience with them (23). Hemingwayās Philip Rawlings had criticized Dorothy, saying that āthe first thing an American woman does is try to get the man sheās interested in to give up somethingā (24), but in Love Goes to Press it is the men who try to change the women. As Sandra Spanier notes in her Afterword, "Love Goes to Press portrays men and women in love and at war from a distinctly female point of view, a lens through which we rarely have had the opportunity in American literature to view any war. And in this wartime drama, the European Theater of Operations is literally thatā the stage set for the main action: the War between the Sexesā (82).
In The Fifth Column, Hemingway also portrays what he called āthe great unending battle between men and womenā (Baker 481-82), though he plays it for tragedy rather than comedy. His biting portrait of Dorothy Bridges, Philip Rawlingsā potential wife, provided a cautionary example that Hemingway proceeded to ignore, as so many critics have pointed out, and as Philip seems to know when he famously confesses, āIām afraid thatās the whole trouble. I want to make an absolutely colossal mistakeā (42). But in order to render evident this colossal mistake, which Philip actually avoids,
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Hemingway is reduced to caricaturing Martha in the role of Dorothyāin point of fact, underplaying those characteristics that he found most attractive in Martha and also most disconcerting. But the play didnāt work, critics citing most often as its primary flaw the unbelievable characterization of Dorothy. And so he easily ignored his own warning, as Martha also apparently did, though her fictional counterpart quite rightly says of Philip, āYouāre a very serious problem for any womanā (24). These two willful, talented, independent people came together in the heat of battle, then waged their own personal war, from which Martha emerged an accomplished war correspondent and Hemingway emerged as husband to a woman whom he had persuaded to abandon war correspondenceānot a pocket Reubens, as he affectionately termed her, but a pocket female war correspondent whom he packed up for the home front once he decided he wanted to leave the war behind. But given the modernist merging of home front and war front, Hemingway should not have been surprised to discover that in moving Mary into Marthaās room at the Finca VigĆa, he had not emerged as victor in the war between the sexes but had merely shifted the battlelines.
Citations
- ā For an extended discussion of Hemingwayās attitude toward the transformation of traditional warfare by modern technology, see my Medievalist Impulse 163ā83.
- ā Hemingway draws an equivalent relationship between the Chicago slaughterhouse and World War I, and then between the Spanish bullfight and the knightly tournament. He deconstructs the seeming equality of these sets of terms, revealing the hierarchical relationship that always already obtains, the first set of terms being subordinated to the second set of terms. For an argument as to the central significance of these terms to an interpretation of Farewell, see my āWorld War I.ā
- ā 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 Orwell 46ā71.
- ā This unpublished letter is dated 9ā10 June 1943 and was written by Hemingway while he was submarine hunting on the Pilar.
- ā For an account of two disguised female soldiers in the Spanish Civil War who were discovered only after being wounded, see Brome 206ā08. For an extended discussion of female soldiers in the American Civil War, see Leonard 99ā272.
- ā See Prago and Toral for discussions of conditions in womenās prisons. Prago notes that āin addition to the sufferings common to all political prisoners, women were subjected to unique humiliations and tortures, [including] the violations of the body by āmachoā guardsā (300).
- ā See Weitz for a brilliant discussion of the often overlooked military roles that women in Occupied France played, including as guerrillas. Weitz candidly discusses not only their contributions but also the difficulties they encountered; for example, they were often āassigned traditional feminine support roles, for the customary view was that āWar is a manās affairāā (147).
- ā See Reeves for an overview of the role female nurses have played in American wars from the Revolution to the Persian Gulf War. For a discussion of their role in the American Civil War, see Garrison, Maher, Oates, Pryor, and Wormeley; in World War I, see Gavin 43ā76; and as camp followers in the American Revolution, see Mayer 17, 142ā43, and 219ā23.
- ā This new male identity was initially suspect, the military deriding war correspondents as camp followers. For a discussion of the vexed question of the identity of the first war correspondent, see Mathews 31ā78. For a description of the role of the Crimean war correspondents, their treatment by the military, and their role in the introduction of female nurses to the war theater, see Knightley 6ā17. For a discussion of William Howard Russellās actions in the Crimea, see Bullard 31ā48.
- ā See Maher for a discussion of the role of Roman Catholic nuns as nurses in the American Civil War.
- ā See Hawks for a first-hand account of a female doctor in the American Civil War. For a discussion of the role of female doctors in World War I, see Gavin 157ā78.
- ā For discussions of the relationship between Clara Barton and John Elwell, see Oates 148ā58 and Pryor 112ā17.
- ā Gellhorn wrote in 1944 āa formal letter of protest to the military authorities about the ācuriously condescendingā treatment of women war correspondents which, she said, was as ridiculous as it was undignified, and was preventing professional woman [sic] reporters, with many yearsā experience, from carrying out their responsibilities to their editors and to āmillions of people in America who are desperately in need of seeing, but cannot see for themselvesāā (Moorehead, Gellhorn 221). She wrote more pithily to a friend that āfemale journalists were now seen as lepersā (quoted by Moorehead, Gellhorn 221).
- ā In Benjamin Glazerās adaptation of the play for production, the much-revised character of Dorothy does leave Madrid, hoping but not expecting Philip to follow her. Glazerās Dorothy is more conventional than Hemingwayās, an attempt to make her more sympathetic to the audience. Notably, she is only pretending to be a war correspondent while she is actually searching for her lost brother who has joined the Lincoln Brigade. In Glazerās adaptation she is, bizarrely, raped by Philip. She is thereby transformed from Hemingwayās female war correspondent into the conventional female rape victim of war. Despite the rape, Glazerās Dorothy falls in love with Philip, a response that the audience is expected to approve. For a discussion of Glazerās version as compared to Hemingwayās, see Fellner 5ā30.
- ā Dorothyās silver fox cape is a fictionalized version of Gellhornās own. Reynolds asserts that this cape was āa gift [to Gellhorn] from the Abraham Lincoln Brigadeā (270), but he provides no note for his source. Lincoln Brigade veterans Milton Wolff (the Brigadeās last commander) and Mo Fishman independently told me in telephone interviews in May 2001 that they considered this claim unlikely given the extremely low pay of the Brigade soldiers, most of which was donated to build orphanages, and the relative infrequency of contact with Gellhorn and her circle. Moorehead notes that in Gellhornās first few weeks in Spain, she āwent shopping with [fellow war correspondent] Virginia Cowles, . . . priced silver foxes and got desperately greedy wanting themā (Gellhorn 119ā20). In The Fifth Column, Hemingway represents Dorothyās fur as the morally dubious Black Market purchase of a self-centered woman, and in the context of the play he indicts Gellhorn as well. However, the reality is more complicated. Moorehead notes that āoften, [Hemingway and Gellhorn] walked together around Madrid, buying silver and jewelry ālike specula- torsāā (Gellhorn 136), and Kert notes that Hemingwayās sidekick Sidney Franklin not only scrounged food for Hemingway but also āfound bargains in furs and perfumesā (297). Hemingway must have found Gellhornās fur acceptable, indeed attractive, since she wore it when ac- companying him in 1937 to the Second Congress of American Writers, where he previewed The Spanish Earth, showing an excerpt from it, and gave his famous speech, āFascism is a Lieā; Gellhorn gave a speech the following day. In a 1937 radio broadcast from Madrid to the United States, Gellhorn āstressed for her radio listeners the composure of Madridās population,ā noting the irony that āwhile various staples were scarce, it was possible to purchase āfurs, fine silk stockings, and beautiful clothes, French perfume, victrolas, wrist watches, and every imaginable luxuryāā (Rollyson 115). In order to make such broadcasts, she was required to ādash across the road to the Telefonica, where Madridās only radio studio was based, at the moment of peak evening shellingā (Moorehead, Gellhorn 139). But despite her radio broadcasts and her journalism, she upbraided herself during this same period, āfretting about her own idleness, her visits to the dressmaker and furrier āStupid day, stupid woman. I am wasting everythingāā (Moorehead, Gellhorn 138)
- ā Hemingway here engages in an ego-bolstering move, since Gellhorn ādid not find [Hemingway] physically attractiveā and sex with Hemingway āwas never very goodā (Moorehead, Gellhorn 114, 135). Moorehead notes that Gellhorn ātold a friend [in a 1950 letter], [that] all through the months in Spain she went to bed with Hemingway āas little as she could manageā: My āwhole memory of sex with Ernest is the invention of excuses and failing that, the hope it would soon be overāā (Gellhorn 135ā36).
- ā For perhaps the only other interpretation that takes Dorothy seriously, offering a subtextual reading, see Nakjavani. His argument differs from mine, however, insofar as he focuses narrowly on ideology and politics, associating Dorothy with ideology (a positive value in Nakjavaniās argument) and Max with politics (a negative value).
- ā For Gellhornās description of her trip to the Far East with Hemingway, see her Travels 19ā63; for her description of her Caribbean trip, see her Travels 64ā108.
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