The Fifth Column Review

The Fifth Column review: commitment under bombardment

This The Fifth Column review approaches Ernest Hemingway's 1938 drama as both a flawed play and an unusually exposed statement of political commitment. Set mainly in Madrid's Hotel Florida during the Spanish Civil War, it follows Philip Rawlings, an American who appears to be a journalist but works in counterespionage for the Republican side. His covert life collides with his relationship with Dorothy Bridges, an American correspondent who imagines a future with him away from the war. The premise makes private happiness and political duty seem mutually exclusive, then asks what kind of person can accept that choice.

The play's strongest idea is not that love distracts Philip from heroic work. It is that clandestine work has already altered his capacity for love. He cannot tell Dorothy what he does, cannot bring his public convictions into their intimacy, and cannot imagine domestic life without treating it as surrender. The bombardment beyond the hotel therefore has an inward counterpart: the habits required by espionage invade speech, trust, and desire. Hemingway is compelling when he lets those pressures remain unresolved. He is much less convincing when he makes Dorothy too shallow to serve as an equal moral alternative.

That imbalance defines the experience of reading the play. Its historical urgency is genuine, and its ethical discomfort can be productive, but its dramatic machinery often reveals the author's preferences too plainly. Readers who value transparent critical standards can consult our approach to literary recommendations and editorial policy for source-backed reviews.

A hotel room becomes a divided world

Hotel Florida is more than a picturesque wartime location. It is a temporary home in which the boundaries between witness, participant, tourist, lover, and agent repeatedly break down. Shelling makes safety provisional, while the gathering of foreign correspondents creates a peculiar social bubble: people discuss danger, drink, pursue affairs, and make plans inside a building exposed to the same violence they are trying to interpret. The contrast can feel theatrical in the best sense. Ordinary conversation is never insulated from the war; each intimate exchange takes place under pressure from an unseen public crisis.

Hemingway uses the hotel to divide Philip's identity. Dorothy and fellow correspondents see a restless, hard-drinking newspaperman. His Republican colleagues know that the pose conceals dangerous work against fascist infiltrators. The disguise is not especially subtle for the audience, but it produces an effective moral split. Philip's ease among journalists depends on their incomplete knowledge, and his closeness to Dorothy depends on an even more severe concealment. The room where romance should offer refuge instead becomes another operational cover.

This is why the offstage city matters so much. Madrid is present through bombardment, reports, interrupted routines, and the movements of people whose business cannot be safely explained. The play does not provide a panoramic history of the conflict, nor should it be treated as one. Its achievement is narrower: it conveys the unstable consciousness of people living inside a siege, where trivial appetites and mortal stakes occupy the same hour.

Philip Rawlings and the seduction of necessary action

Philip is designed around contradiction. He is disciplined in purpose but disordered in habit, capable of tenderness but trained in secrecy, repelled by violence yet willing to assist a system that uses it. He believes the Republican cause demands action against an internal enemy, and the play gives that belief considerable weight. Fascism is not presented as an abstract debating position. It is an organized threat operating within and beyond the city, and delay can carry lethal consequences.

Yet Hemingway does not make Philip comfortable in his role. Counterespionage requires deception, coercion, and a readiness to accept acts that civilized language would rather keep at a distance. The play's title directs attention to enemies within, but its more durable question concerns what the hunt for those enemies creates within the hunter. Philip's fatigue and self-division suggest that political necessity does not erase moral cost. It merely makes the bill harder to refuse.

The difficulty is that the drama often confuses moral seriousness with male hardness. Philip's appetite for risk, alcohol, and brusque speech becomes part of his authority. When the play grants him doubts, those doubts deepen him; when Dorothy expresses a competing desire, the text often uses it to diminish her. A modern reader can recognize the force of Philip's commitment without accepting the hierarchy the play builds around it. Indeed, resisting that hierarchy makes his choice more interesting. Duty is most meaningful when the rejected alternative is allowed genuine value.

Dorothy Bridges and the play's central failure

Dorothy should embody a persuasive claim on Philip: not mere comfort, but mutual life, truthful companionship, and a future outside the machinery of war. Instead, the play repeatedly narrows her into privilege, appetite, naivety, and insufficient political understanding. She works as a correspondent, yet the drama rarely lets her professional identity develop into independent judgment. Philip assesses her far more often than she gets to assess the war on her own terms.

That limitation damages more than the characterization of one woman. It weakens the central conflict. If Dorothy's imagined future is only shallow escape, Philip's decision to remain becomes nearly automatic. The play tells us he is sacrificing love, but it has already discounted the person he supposedly loves. The result is a romance that can generate emotion in individual scenes while failing to establish equal moral pressure across the whole drama.

There is, however, a revealing tension between what the play says about Dorothy and what its structure inadvertently shows. She is trying to understand a man who withholds the most important fact about himself. Her errors occur inside a relationship arranged around his deception. Seen from that angle, her wish to leave Madrid is not simply proof of frivolity; it is also a response to instability she cannot fully name. Reading against Philip's judgments recovers some of the complexity Hemingway denies her. Our guidance on how reviews handle difficult older works explains why this kind of limitation belongs in the verdict rather than in a footnote.

The ethics of fighting an enemy within

The phrase “fifth column” turns suspicion into the play's governing atmosphere. The threat is hidden by definition, so knowledge arrives through surveillance, capture, interrogation, and inference. That structure creates suspense, but it also creates a dangerous moral convenience: the less visible the enemy becomes, the easier it is for the defenders' methods to escape ordinary scrutiny.

Hemingway does not entirely hide that problem. Philip's work carries psychic damage, and his hardened German colleague Max embodies a history in which political brutality has already marked the body. Their operations suggest that anti-fascist resistance may require conduct that cannot be made clean through noble intention. The play is strongest when it allows urgency and contamination to coexist.

Still, its ethical examination is compressed. Coercive acts and their consequences are often displaced from the stage, while Philip's explanations receive more room than the victims of the machinery. This can make necessity feel asserted rather than tested. Readers should be cautious about treating Philip's choices as a complete political argument. The play is better understood as a record of a committed imagination under wartime pressure: valuable because it exposes its loyalties and blind spots, not because it resolves the ethics of counterespionage.

Stagecraft: charged rooms, awkward architecture

As drama, The Fifth Column is uneven. The Hotel Florida rooms offer an immediately legible visual arrangement, and bombardment can make pauses, entrances, and ordinary objects feel precarious. Hemingway also knows how to give dialogue a combative surface. Characters probe, deflect, tease, and conceal; affection is often expressed through resistance rather than confession. When a scene stays close to Philip's conflict between attachment and secrecy, the writing can accumulate real pressure.

The larger architecture is less successful. Crucial actions are reported or occur away from the audience, which reduces the very tension the espionage plot promises. Explanatory dialogue sometimes substitutes for staged discovery. The movement between romantic drama, political argument, hotel comedy, and covert operation can feel less like deliberate counterpoint than a novelist testing what the theater can contain.

That awkwardness is historically and artistically informative. Hemingway's prose often derives force from omission: what remains unstated shapes what appears on the page. Onstage, omission works differently. An absent event cannot always acquire weight through a character's later account, especially when the audience has been prepared to expect immediate danger. The play demonstrates that the famous pressure beneath Hemingway's sentences does not automatically become dramatic action.

Context within Hemingway's war writing

Hemingway wrote the play after working in Spain as a correspondent, and the drama first appeared in 1938 as part of a larger collection. Those origins help explain its mixture of observed wartime detail, autobiographical projection, and political urgency. Philip resembles an authorial ideal of the committed correspondent who crosses from recording history into acting upon it; Dorothy has long been read in relation to journalist Martha Gellhorn. Biography can clarify the intensity of the pairing, but it should not excuse the play's distortions. A character based partly on a real person remains a character the dramatist chose to simplify.

The work also anticipates concerns Hemingway would handle with greater imaginative breadth in later fiction about the Spanish Civil War: solidarity across national lines, the moral strain of violent commitment, the conflict between love and a chosen cause, and the uncertain line between courage and self-dramatization. Here those ideas appear in a rough, exposed form. That makes the play less accomplished than the major fiction but unusually useful to readers tracing how a writer converts reportage and conviction into art.

It also belongs to the literature of besieged cities, where private routine persists beside public catastrophe. Meals, drinks, flirtation, professional rivalry, and fatigue do not vanish when shells fall. Hemingway understands that coexistence. His people are not solemn every minute, and their lapses into appetite are not automatically cowardice. For more on how we frame such historical and literary context, see what this library is built to do.

Who should read it, and what should come next

The Fifth Column is best for readers already interested in Hemingway, modernist drama, wartime journalism, or representations of the Spanish Civil War. It is not the ideal first encounter with his work. The play asks patience with expository passages, a romance whose imbalance is difficult to overlook, and a protagonist whose moral authority is never examined as rigorously as it should be.

Readers seeking a more fully realized Hemingway treatment of love under the pressure of war may prefer A Farewell to Arms, while those interested specifically in commitment and sabotage during the Spanish conflict should turn to For Whom the Bell Tolls. The Spanish Civil War stories often collected with The Fifth Column offer a useful companion perspective because the shorter form suits Hemingway's powers of compression more naturally. Outside Hemingway, George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia provides a very different firsthand account of political fracture and wartime experience, while André Malraux's Man's Hope offers a broader fictional canvas of collective struggle.

These are not substitutes in a simple ranking. They reveal what this play attempts and where its form constrains it. Reading across them makes it easier to see that The Fifth Column is neither merely a curiosity nor a hidden masterpiece. It is a transitional, politically charged work whose incompleteness can sharpen a reader's understanding of Hemingway's strengths.

Final verdict

The Fifth Column is worth reading for the intensity of its setting, the candor of its political allegiance, and its troubling portrait of a man who can defend a cause only by surrendering part of his ordinary emotional life. The siege of Madrid gives the drama an atmosphere of compressed time, and Philip's divided identity turns secrecy into a personal as well as political condition.

Its weaknesses are substantial. Dorothy is written as an obstacle more often than an equal consciousness; offstage action blunts the espionage plot; and the moral claims surrounding coercion receive less scrutiny than they require. Those failures keep the play from achieving the tragic balance its premise promises.

Even so, the work has critical value precisely because its seams show. It reveals Hemingway testing the stage, converting correspondence and wartime proximity into drama, and arguing with his own attraction to action, sacrifice, and masculine hardness. Read with resistance rather than reverence, it becomes a sharp document of artistic ambition under ideological pressure. The best reason to read it is not to discover an overlooked masterpiece, but to encounter a major writer exposing both the force and the limits of his moral imagination.