American Audacity: Literary Essays North and South

Covering Her Century (Martha Gellhorn)

Covering Her Century h Whatever else she was—novelist, travel writer, celebrity wife, socialite—Martha Gellhorn was one of the greatest American war correspondents of her generation or any other. Through almost four decades, she covered in succession the Spanish Civil War, World War II, Vietnam, the Arab-Israeli con›ict, the civil wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, along with related skirmishes and horrors from Helsinki to Hong Kong. She was in Barcelona in November 1938—“perfect bombing weather,” she noted dryly— as Franco’s planes closed in. She was at Dachau when news came of the German surrender. Descended from German Jews herself, Gellhorn found Dachau “the most suitable place in Europe to hear the news of victory.” In 1994, four years before her death at age eighty-nine, Gellhorn was in Brazil, writing about violent deaths of street children there. Fearless, attentive, with a quick eye for the heartbreaking detail, she had the perfect temperament for the war reporter. “I never found my own private disorderly place in the world except in the general chaos of war,” she wrote to a friend in 1960, when she and the twentieth century still had plenty of war to go. Gellhorn’s distinctive voice fused two major strands of American reportage: the WPA-inspired documentation of the suffering of ordinary folk during the depression; and the hardboiled , ironic take on war of American reporters from Stephen Crane to Ernest Hemingway. Gellhorn’s four years of marriage to Hemingway, during the initial phase of his long decline, bolstered her fame while diminishing—at least among his legions of admirers —her status as a writer. He told anyone who would listen what 105 a bitch and a phony she was. She resented being reduced to “a footnote in history, a passing reference in others’ books and letters ,” while maintaining a digni‹ed public silence. Now that we have a generous selection of her letters, assembled by her authorized biographer, Caroline Moorehead, we can piece together her account of the marriage. She left him because he was a crybaby and got in the way of her work. Like so many nomads of her lost generation, Martha Gellhorn was a child of the Midwest who wanted out. She was born in St. Louis in 1908. Her father, son of a Breslau merchant, was a gynecologist and obstetrician who specialized in syphilis; her mother, a St. Louis native, campaigned for women’s suffrage. Both were half Jewish. Dismayed by the educational options for their three children, they helped to found a progressive school in St. Louis named for the nature writer John Burroughs. Martha went from Burroughs to Bryn Mawr, didn’t like it, and left to become a cub reporter for a newspaper in Albany, covered women’s clubs for six months, didn’t like it, and headed for Europe with two suitcases , a typewriter, and seventy-‹ve dollars. Gellhorn’s ‹rst brush with love was pure Henry James. In 1930, ›oating among odd jobs in Paris, she met a sophisticated, charming, and married journalist named Bertrand de Jouvenel. Half-Jewish like Gellhorn, Jouvenel drifted during the 1930s between anti-liberal positions on the left and right; and after the war he emerged as a signi‹cant political theorist, best known for works such as On Power, which analyzed the growth of the modern state as a threat to individual liberty. Bertrand was twenty-six when he met Gellhorn; ten years earlier he had been seduced by his stepmother, the writer Colette. Gellhorn could read all about it in the novel Chéri. Bertrand and Martha considered themselves married, but St. Louis, where they sought refuge, didn’t agree. Neither did Jouvenel’s wife, who refused a divorce. In 1931, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch agreed to fund her travels through the Southwest, as recorded in a series of letters to Stanley Pennell, her English teacher at the Burroughs school and later the author of the superb Gettysburg novel The History of Rose Hanks. She wrote to Jouvenel from the highway in California, where her platinumcolored Dodge, bought for twenty-‹ve dollars, had broken down: 106 “I’ve repaid ardor with impatience and sponged your assurance with icy water . . . forget me—I’m a shit face; and make yourself realize again what you knew before I came. I’ll write from Carmel.” The affair, like the Dodge, limped on for another three years—through faked orgasms, two abortions, and, in 1933, an encounter with...