Gellhorn
A Twentieth Century Life
by Caroline Moorehead
Henry Holt, 480 pp., $27.50 YOU CAN PROBABLY GUESS–if only from the time he shouted at her, “I’ll show you, you conceited bitch. They’ll be reading my stuff long after the worms have finished with you”–that the five-year marriage between Ernest Hemingway and the war correspondent Martha Gellhorn was not the happiest of literary matches in the twentieth century. Much of the time, it seemed to devolve into brawls over who was top literary dog.
Neither then nor now is Gellhorn the winner. For all her efforts to be a leading journalist and novelist–at any cost, including leading two marriages to divorce and procuring four abortions in order to report on wars from Spain to Vietnam–her name now barely resonates. She covered more wars than Hemingway and had a prodigious output: seventeen books and hundreds of articles for the likes of the Atlantic Monthly and the New Yorker on such milestones as Dachau’s liberation and the Nuremberg Trials. But Gellhorn, who committed suicide in 1998 at the age of eighty-nine, is remembered today only for her rocky years with Hemingway, spent largely in Cuba, where the couple lived, loved (at times), and fought in a house full of cats, and where Gellhorn, ever hostile to domesticity, dashed Hemingway’s hopes for a daughter by aborting their child.
AS CAROLINE MOOREHEAD tells the story in “Gellhorn: A Twentieth Century Life,” the future Mrs. Hemingway was born into an affluent home. Gellhorn and her brothers grew up atheists, attended an “Ethical Society” Sunday school, and later went to a co-educational high school where students gardened and were taught that there’s no difference between male and female physiognomy. Moorehead seems to love all this as the tale of the modern, independent woman. But the biographer also recognizes the attendant discontents and the perils such a woman faces in an uneven marriage.
Always an agonized writer whose talent never matched her ambition, Gellhorn once complained that Hemingway “never suffered from questions, but always felt that he was delivering the Tablets of Stone, in the best possible style.” While such resentment rendered her marriage to Hemingway a battleground–once, a drunken Hemingway slapped Gellhorn with the back of his hand, prompting her to ram his prized Lincoln into a tree–it was at least a productive one; at no other time did Gellhorn write as much as during her years with him. Yet, till the end of her life, no one was allowed to mention Hemingway’s name in connection with hers. To do so invited a cold stare or, in other cases, legal action. Part of that aversion spoke to the anger she felt over his name eclipsing her own. During their marriage, she was irked when a prepublication notice for one of her novels referred to her only as Hemingway’s wife. She reminded her editor at Collier’s that all her articles were to be signed Gellhorn, “always: that is what I always was, and am and will be.”
Gellhorn’s fierce dislike of introspection also explains her disdain for any discussion of Hemingway. For a woman who copiously filled notebooks with details on the war refugees she championed over her sixty-year career, her own personal dramas remained off-limits, even to herself. Not surprisingly, Gellhorn never wrote her autobiography (the only thing that comes close is a whimsical, self-deprecating account of her many journeys in “Travels with Myself and Another,” in which Hemingway appears in one story as UC, or Unwilling Companion). Carl Rollyson, in his 2001 biography of Gellhorn, “Beautiful Exile,” confirmed that the most important part of Gellhorn’s life was indeed her marriage to Hemingway, which Rollyson said she sacrificed for a “selfish life of adventure and glory.” (Gellhorn called Rollyson a “wretched man” and labeled an earlier version a “paean of hate.”)
Moorehead aims for more than Rollyson’s obsessions with Gellhorn’s good looks, and the flock of men she slept with. There’s still plenty of gossip, as Moorehead chronicles the St. Louis native’s rise from Bryn Mawr dropout to war correspondent who had affairs with married men, swam naked, and in later years, found herself devastated by writer’s block–“lockjaw of the brain,” as she called it–and fading good looks, both of which made her turn to anti-depressants and plastic surgeons. Gossip aside, Moorehead, whose mother was a close friend of Gellhorn’s, tries to show that the writer’s relevance lies not only in her connections to Hemingway, Eleanor Roosevelt, Leonard Bernstein, and H.G. Wells, but in her work as a war correspondent in a field that was largely the preserve of men.
BUT, THE TRUTH IS, Gellhorn’s journalism is largely dated. She sneered at what she called “that objectivity s–” and promoted causes with a partisan approach that sometimes got in the way of truth. In one of her earliest pieces, from 1936, she described a lynching as if she had witnessed it; she hadn’t. When she championed the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War, she, like Hemingway, turned a blind eye to atrocities committed by the Republicans, leaving her reportage with none of the timelessness of Orwell’s. And during a 1941 trip to report on Chiang Kai-shek’s regime, she never mentioned the brutality of the Chinese Nationalists. As for her novels, no one ever thought her a great novelist, arguably because she was always more comfortable recording than delving. As Gellhorn once observed, “Who said: ‘Je pense, donc je suis‘? Descartes? I think it wrong. I act, therefore I am. We must be the product and sum total of our actions.”
THROUGHOUT HER LIFE, Gellhorn, an American expatriate who ultimately lived in more than a dozen homes, traversed some fifty countries, often at a frenetic pace to escape boredom–that word is probably the most often used in Moorehead’s biography, that and “brood,” which Gellhorn did plenty of, as she pondered the world’s evils. “I feel angry, every minute, about everything,” she once said. In many ways, Gellhorn’s sympathies were with the American left. She hated McCarthy, opposed the Vietnam War, decried Thatcher and Reagan, and gushed over Clinton. But she was a hawk on Israel and had no sympathy for the Palestinian cause, which Moorehead attributes both to Gellhorn’s encounter with Dachau, which shattered her belief in man’s perfectibility, and with her Jewish roots (Both her parents were half Jewish).
“Blondes,” her father said, “only work under compulsion.” Gellhorn’s compulsion to work came from her desperate desire to escape restlessness and boredom. (As for sex, she later confessed that it never appealed to her.) Like many women who put off domestic life for a career, Gellhorn found herself at thirty-seven suddenly conscious of the passage of time. “I want a child,” she wrote around this time. “I will carry it on my back in a sealskin papoose and feed it chocolate milk shakes and tell it fine jokes and work for it and in the end give it a hunk of money, like a bouquet of autumn leaves, and set it free. I have to have something, being still (I presume) human.”
What Gellhorn got was a boy, Sandy Gellhorn, by adoption. She never did give him milk shakes. Obsessed over her son’s fluctuating weight, she stated in her will that his allowance would be contingent on his weight. Sandy, for his part, escaped into drugs. “I have no respect for you,” she wrote him. “You have absolutely no style, your mind is as interesting as blotting paper.”
Boredom equaled domesticity for Gellhorn, and her writing expressed personal feelings only in the abstract. Gradually, the very strengths she had relied on–writing and looks–failed her. In her final years, beset by writer’s block, she longed for a daughter. She read thrillers. She continued to travel, even though she was nearly blind and deaf.
One day, knowing she had inoperable cancer of the ovary and liver, she took the Hemingway route, ending her life. In the end, the only woman to walk out on Hemingway was best summed up by the man himself: “Martha loves humanity,” he once said, “but she can’t stand people.”
Lisa Singh is a writer in Richmond, Virginia.
