Martha Gellhorn: a life
Caroline Moorehead Chatto & Windus, 550pp, £20
ISBN 0701169516
Many of us dream of being something we are not, and undervalue what we are. Martha Gellhorn spent years agonising over writing novels and seemed to take for granted her skills as a journalist. Her novels, which received passing praise in their day, are now out of print and largely forgotten, but she is remembered as one of the greatest war correspondents of her generation. Her reporting spanned the Spanish civil war, the Second World War, Vietnam and even, in her eighties, the US invasion of Panama.
Caroline Moorehead portrays a difficult and at times contrary woman. She would frequently grow bored with friends, and she harangued her adopted son, Sandy, for being fat, once writing to him: "You have absolutely no style . . . your mind is as interesting as blotting paper, you do nothing . . . you're a selfish, lazy, pointless young man . . ." No wonder he took to drugs and for long periods refused to see her. Yet she loved him, as she loved others she pushed away. Her loneliness dissipated only towards the end of her life when she surrounded herself with younger journalists, who not only admired her, but with their tales from the edge recalled her own extraordinary past and reignited her anger against war and suffering.
In her twenties and thirties she was beautiful, brave, adventurous and determined. Refused press accreditation by the British and American armed forces on account of being a woman, she notoriously stowed away on a hospital ship during the 1944 Normandy landings. The stories with which she returned were more evocative and powerful than those written by most of her male colleagues. After this success, she hitched rides through ruined Europe, reporting for the American magazine Collier's which allowed her to take several weeks to write pieces up to 5,000 words long. Today's war correspondents can only envy her freedom - no satellite phone, no daily deadline, no rush into print before the facts are truly known. She went to Dachau and her life was never the same. In the face of such cruelty and depravity she could no longer believe that man was perfectible and she never recovered her optimism.
Moorehead devotes several chapters of her fine biography to the part of Gellhorn's life that she tried to suppress - her marriage to Ernest Hemingway. After their acrimonious divorce, Gellhorn refused to answer questions about him or even to mention his name; anyone who tried to do so was banished from the room. Moorehead reveals a tortured relationship, much of it documented in letters. Gellhorn seems to have been addicted to Hemingway, unable to get away - she nearly missed the Second World War because she was living with him in Havana, trying to write novels in his style. She eventually went to war to escape his drunken cruelty and refusal to wash. But he followed her, even insisting on writing for Collier's, thereby undermining her position on the paper. He was her opposite: while his war journalism - which was far outclassed by hers - has faded, his war novels have become classics. She felt she lived in his shadow as a writer, and while others may have seen her as confident, even arrogant, she was typically female in valuing his talent over her own. It was, in fact, her idea that he write for Collier's - an attempt to pull him out of depression.
Hemingway and Gellhorn's finest hour together was shortly after they met, when they both covered the Spanish civil war. Moorehead shows how Gellhorn found her eye for the details of everyday suffering in Madrid, describing the shelling of a cobbled square: "Then for a moment it stops. An old woman, with a shawl over her shoulders, holding a terrified thin little boy by the hand, runs out into the square. You know what she is thinking: she is thinking she must get the child home, you are always safer in your own place, with the things you know. Somehow you do not believe you can get killed when you are sitting in your own parlour, you never think that. She is in the middle of the square when the next one comes. A small piece of twisted steel, hot and very sharp, sprays off from the shell; it takes the little boy in the throat. The old woman stands there, holding the hand of the dead child, looking at him stupidly, not saying anything, and men run out toward her to carry the child."
You can forgive a lot for writing like that, but Moorehead does not shy from tackling the issue of what Gellhorn called "objectivity shit". She simply refused to report atrocities on the Republican side in the Spanish civil war. Having decided which side was right, she did not, it seems, want to acknowledge the complexities of war. For today's war correspondents, this is hard to square with her avowed determination to find the truth. Her truths were simple, whereas the ones thrown up by most wars are complex. Her experience at Dachau made her a lifelong champion of the Jews, to the point where the suffering of the Palestinians became her "blind spot".
Gellhorn knew many of the great figures of her day. She used to stay at the White House in the days of Franklin D Roosevelt and corresponded with Eleanor Roose-velt until her death. She was close friends with the photographer Robert Capa, and a terrific enemy of Lillian Hellman. In her wandering years after the Second World War, she lived in Mexico, Kenya, London, Italy and elsewhere, always looking for love and rejecting it when it came. She wrote potboiler short stories to make money and eventually settled in London.
Few journalists write well enough for their despatches to last. Martha Gellhorn was the exception. Yet this was unrecognised for many years. In her sixties, she determined to go to Vietnam, yet no paper in America wanted to send her, one of the best war reporters that country has ever produced. Eventually, she persuaded the London Guardian to take a series of six articles. In the way of editors throughout the ages, the Guardian calculated just how keen she was to return to war. It insisted she pay her own expenses.
Lindsey Hilsum is the Channel 4 News diplomatic correspondent
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