West Palm Beach, Fla.
It is likely that “The Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn” will be read mostly for the information to be gleaned about Ernest Hemingway. Gellhorn was Hemingway’s third wife, the one who always refused to speak about him after their divorce, mainly because she couldn’t stand him and didn’t care to relive the experience. But Gellhorn was also a novelist, and one of the premier war correspondents of the 20th century, so there is much to recommend about this bountiful collection besides fragmentary information about Hemingway.
Gellhorn was a spiky, utterly undomestic creature, a man’s woman and something of a trial, never more so than to the people who loved her. Late in her life, she sued Bill Buford, the editor of Granta and a good friend, because he hadn’t paid her royalties that she thought were due.
One of the things that clearly graveled her about the entire experience of being married to Hemingway was the emotional subjugation that any wife of his had to endure; on the basis of these letters, and her own radiantly direct professional prose, Gellhorn was a full-
fledged alpha female, one who would have found deferring to anyone, especially an alpha male, impossible. The wonder is not that they were divorced but that they didn’t kill each other.
The truly dire and funny thing is that when Gellhorn was with Hemingway, she felt compelled to compete and write a great deal like him. Her letters during the period they were holed up in Sun Valley, Idaho, while he was finishing “For Whom the Bell Tolls” are eerie simulations of Hemingway’s own prose. It is only after their divorce that she really developed her own style – fierce, passionately analytical, impatient of cant and relentlessly sympathetic to the privations of the dispossessed.
Gellhorn speaks of Hemingway only rarely in her letters. There’s a brutal, but not inaccurate passage about reading “Across the River and Into the Trees,” which she says made her “shivering sick … I watch him adoring his image, with such care and tolerance and such accuracy in detail … and I weep for the eight years I spent, almost eight (light dawned a little earlier) worshipping his image with him, and I weep for whatever else I was cheated of due to that time-serving; and I weep for all that is permanently lost because I shall never, really, trust a man again … To me, (the novel) has a loud sound of madness and a terrible smell as of decay.”
“Toughness is a pose”
Elsewhere, while railing about his narcissism, cruelty (“The toughness is a pose to get away with being nasty, and ungenerous”) and diminished literary gifts, she acknowledged his mastery in the early work, and his discovery of how the American language could be utilized.
Gellhorn lacked that personal ease that makes for successful domestic relationships; she was a restless spirit whose self-worth was largely wrapped up in her writing. She enjoyed solitude and spent years in an isolated house in Africa. Later, there was a cottage in Wales, and she finally ended up in London.
As her work was rediscovered – “Faces of War and Travels With Myself and Another” have been in print for about 25 years – she was hailed as an important female writer, which she found innately insulting, because nobody ever talked about important male writers.
Her second marriage, to former Time magazine editor Tom Matthews, broke up when she discovered he had a mistress. Early in her life, there seems to have been something of a problem with frigidity, and she speaks in passing of Hemingway’s sexual attentions as belonging to the school of “Wham-Bam” without so much as a “Thank you, Ma’am.” Later, she had a brief but torrential affair with Eleanor Roosevelt’s doctor, as well as a pleasing, very occasional 35-year liaison with billionaire Laurence Rockefeller.
Gellhorn’s novels are unreadable – they’re utterly dead on the page. She gives a hint as to why in one letter, when she says that she’s incapable of writing about anything that she hasn’t witnessed. This reliance on reality keeps her fiction from striking sparks in any unexpected, let alone imaginative, ways. Fiction is not a transcription of reality but a synthesis of it.
Gellhorn may have been a difficult woman – that is to say, one who lived her life more or less on the same emotional basis as many men – but what strikes me as particularly admirable is her horror of any kind of safe harbor. She spent her life sailing into danger, beginning with the Spanish Civil War – the transformative event of her life – and continuing right through World War II and into Vietnam.
“Like Everest, it lures”
“Why does one write in the first place?” she once rhetorically asked an old friend. “Because one sees, feels and must speak; because one wants to know what one thinks; because it is the hardest work there is, and thus, like Everest, it lures.”
In 1998, at the age of 89, mostly blind and riddled with cancer, Gellhorn killed herself. Years before, she had approved of her ex-husband’s suicide, saying that she thought it was an accurate response to declining health, not to mention declining literary powers.
Gellhorn would have made a great Roman; as it was, she had to content herself with being a great journalist.
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Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn
Edited by Caroline Moorehead
Holt, 531 pages, $32.50
