Gellhorn: A Twentieth Century Life (review)

With the publication of this solidly documented, gracefully written biography, readers finally have a large serving of the true gen on Martha Gellhorn as the subject of her own life and master of her own work, rather than as the third wife of Ernest Hemingway. The biographer is the daughter of Martha's friends Lucy and Alan Moorehead. Sandy Matthews (Martha's stepson and literary executor) and Sandy Gellhorn (her adopted son) gave Moorehead access to Martha's papers and letters. When the letters appear next year, readers will have more information—kind, but unsparing—about Gellhorn than we ever expected. Much of it will be useful to Hemingway scholars and will enlighten those who have long been fascinated by the Swiftian complexity of Martha's commitment to ameliorating the condition of the human race and her intolerance of the individual.

Martha was born in 1908 into a good St. Louis family of secular Jews. Her maternal grandparents, the Fischels, were founders of the Ethical Society, and the Gellhorn children, like their mother, were brought up in an atheist household and attended the Ethical Sunday School. All her adult life Martha referred to as her mother, Edna, as her "true north" and she seems to have been the only person for whom Martha was capable of unqualified love. A graduate of Bryn Mawr, Edna married George Gellhorn, a German-born and educated gynecologist who had become her father's protégé. The couple produced four children between 1902 and 1913. Of her three brothers, Alfred, the youngest, became Martha's rock after her mother's death, and in February 1998 it was he, along with Sandy Gellhorn and Sandy Matthews, who scattered her ashes on the outgoing water of the Thames.

The Gellhorn home must have been quite classically beautiful (pale oak-paneled walls, Persian carpets, stained glass and heavy mahogany furniture). As in the nearly one-dozen homes that Martha later furnished around the world, once the decor was pleasing and comfortable, nothing new was ever added. One can only imagine how repellant to her way of living the Finca Vigía (which she had labored to restore as Hemingway wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls) became when she came back from journalism assignments—where she often lacked comfort and safety—to find the Finca increasingly infested with Hemingway's "Crook Factory" mates.

But in the ethical and aesthetic ambience of her childhood home, her strong-minded father abused his scientific intellect and confused his daughter by telling her that the bones of the skull separate all human beings from one another and that her tendency toward "inconsolation" came from "unhappiness genes" inherited from her maternal grandmother. The adult Martha was narcissistic and probably bi-polar. Further, his sexual information to her was limited to a cryptic dictum that men wanted something from women which when denied caused them pain, but when given degraded the woman. Martha contended that sex was painful to her all her life, and that she enjoyed only the cuddling-of which there was always too little.

Martha, who had dropped out of Bryn Mawr after two years, set out for Europe in 1929. When she returned a year later pregnant by Bertrand de Jouvenel (who gave her the nickname "Rabbit" over which so much ink has been spilled in Hemingway scholarship), her father condemned her as a "slut." In January 1931 she went to Chicago for an abortion, the first of many. Of these she left only the factual record, revealing no emotional reaction. Sometime during the disruption that Martha's unconventional personal life and vehement socio-political stances brought to the family home, Edna warned her husband that if he forced her to choose, her loyalty would be to Martha.

Bored with the complacency of St. Louis, Martha set out again in search of experience for fiction, a personal hero, and a cause. She began her career as a journalist with a per...