Martha Gellhorn's letters drape shadows on a life that transcended the woman and her times

By Lorna Scott Fox

“I cannot afford to die; I would so hate to be exposed in all my follies and failings and I know damn well it will happen when I am six feet under.” Martha Gellhorn was right about that. In 2004 — a mere six years after she voluntarily threw in the towel, aged eighty-nine — Martha Gellhorn: A Life appeared. This perceptive work gave Gellhorn her due as the first female war reporter as well as a trailblazer for a new kind of journalism, focused on how headline events were affecting people’s lives — “view from the ground,” as she called it, a perspective that has become commonplace. The biography’s author, Caroline Moorehead, now offers a selection of letters from Gellhorn’s thousands, one of which, addressed to her midlife lover David Gurewitsch, originally ran to forty-seven pages.

If reading A Life left one with a hunger for more of Gellhorn’s own vivid turns of phrase, the letters amply satisfy it. In fact, a certain queasiness may be induced, and not just by the voyeuristic thrill that always attends reading other people’s mail. Gellhorn’s letters were emphatically private, with none of the eye on publication that characterizes the correspondence of many other writers. “I take it for granted you would rather be drawn and quartered than share this letter with anyone,” she warned Campbell Bennett in 1934. Wishing only for greater public recognition as a writer and journalist, Gellhorn was repelled by celebrity culture and the modern flaunting of the personal. This book would have wounded her deeply. But it’s a rare gift to readers: a window on the inner life of a brave, perverse, groundbreaking woman; a study in outsiderhood; and an idiosyncratic diary of the last century.

We meet Gellhorn in 1930 as the breezy American in Paris. Having dropped out of Bryn Mawr and briefly reported for the Albany Times Union, she has succumbed, at twenty-two, to the wanderlust that will plague the rest of her life — and make her write letters. She has a novel on the go and a glamorous married lover, Bertrand de Jouvenel, a political journalist and the stepson of the novelist Colette. The volume’s first letter, to him, is amusing for its brassy sophistication: “I love that old goofer Dreiser for all his cheap journalese style: he’s angry and alive and that’s pretty rare these days. On the other hand I think Hemingway is pretty bum from what he did in In Our Times (. . .) because Hemingway doesn’t know how to talk.” She should have remembered that. During her miserable later marriage to Ernest Hemingway, Gellhorn often resorted to baby talk, as if to placate him.

Gellhorn blithely rides on de Jouvenel’s coattails into the big wide world. But we soon see her dark side take over in one of its most lasting forms: despair at her inability to surrender on a romantic or sexual level. Much later she was to tell the novelist Rosamond Lehmann, “I only loved the world of men — not the world of men-and-women.” And to the art critic Bernard Berenson, she confided, “I am astride the sexes, having the mind (and tastes and instincts) of neither a man nor a woman, but a scrambled mixture of both.” Men were drawn to her because she was both gorgeous and fun to be with, practically one of the guys; but whenever a man tried to turn her into the little woman, she abandoned him. Gellhorn paid the price of loneliness for her androgyny, or desire to remain a player in the world, throughout her life. In this sense she epitomizes the ambitious woman’s dilemma before mainstream feminism encouraged both sexes to reassess their roles: Gellhorn belonged to a generation that was fully aware of women’s handicaps within the system, but fought them individually, or not at all. Gellhorn used men as a ticket to the action she craved, and if heartache resulted, well, “only work heals” — a phrase she wrote in 1931 and held to forever.

That work is almost invisible in the letters, whose restless narrative of loves and hates, quests and failures contains large, achievement-shaped gaps. There is almost no correspondence from the grand periods in Spain, Czechoslovakia, and Finland during the thirties, the front lines of World War II in 1943-45, Vietnam in 1966, and Panama as late as 1990. In the heat of action Gellhorn’s writing priorities were her notes and copious diaries. There is also much passing talk of literary and journalistic projects — such as her ambition in 1940 to lighten her “disaster-girl” image by writing “3 bang-up American articles” — whose identity or fate remain unclear. With luck, the tantalizing allusions to these and other writings and the author’s own seductive personality will nudge new readers toward Gellhorn’s pioneering journalism, whether The Face of War or her wonderful collection of peacetime articles, The View From the Ground.

At the same time, anyone acquainted with Gellhorn’s work may be sobered by the back story of the years she struggled with writer’s block and her disastrous adoption of a child, and touched by the vulnerability of this outwardly formidable, sometimes merciless woman. Here is the self-hating Martha who chastises her brain for being “languid,” and constantly compares her legs to spaghetti and her sentences to cement.

A few letters redress the balance by giving us Gellhorn on the job. In 1934 she joined the Works Progress Administration and toured the mill towns of the Carolinas and New England. In one of many dense missives sent to her boss, Harry Hopkins, Gellhorn is at her best, empathetic and precise. “Clothes nil. Really a terrible problem here; not only of protection against the elements (a lot of pneumonia among children; undernourishment plus exposure) but also the fact that having no clothes, these people are cut out of any social life.” Such formulations lack the poise of Gellhorn’s finished reportage, but nevertheless operate on the cusp of the material and the ethical — fact plus feeling — that was her trademark.

To others she made more unguarded comments about the human cost of the Depression: “I am constantly shocked at their unkindness to their own people; their suspicion of each other; their treachery,” she confided to de Jouvenel. “I know this system is lousy; profits are a criminal menace to society and we are so geared that all our national life is one long yearning towards profit. But still, how about those unfit; how about the large percentage of the unemployed who would never be useful or competent human beings?” A certain revulsion always vied with crusading love in her attitude toward people en masse. Gellhorn adored her chosen “pals,” and felt furiously for the victims of power and stupidity everywhere. But she became — especially after entering Dachau upon its liberation by U.S. troops in 1945 — disillusioned and misanthropic, a stance softened only by the compassion of her writing. “In life I dislike almost everyone and can hardly bear to waste my time with the human race, but when I write I always see what is ok about them or how they got to be un-ok,” she told William Walton in 1950.

Her anger at the wreckage of the Depression was sublimated into the dignified realism of The Trouble I’ve Seen (1936), probably her sole outstanding piece of fiction. Gellhorn’s down-to-earth temperament equipped her better for journalism, and it’s sad to watch her wrestling with what she considered a higher form of writing. Elsewhere there is much shrewd and principled commentary about the press, but she is regularly beset by doubts about journalism’s usefulness: “I think it changes nothing.” There is also some illuminating background. Her 1938 piece for Collier’s on Czechoslovakia, “Obituary of a Democracy,” gains from being read alongside her letter to her editor, which is far harsher about the “long planned betrayal” known as the Munich Pact, when Czechoslovakia was ceded to Hitler in a gesture of appeasement.

The product of a wholly American brand of straight-talking liberal progressivism, Gellhorn was dismayed by what she saw as her country’s descent — even under the New Deal — into materialism and dishonesty. Never a Communist or any other -ist, she blasted the House Un-American Activities Committee and its politics of fear in The New Republic as early as 1947, before turning her back on the United States altogether. Among the letters is a tract to Adlai Stevenson about postwar European disaffection with America that could have been written yesterday — just substitute “war on terror” for “McCarthyism.” During the cold war Gellhorn expressed mounting grief at U.S. sins, both at home — “I follow with horror the organized and growing and successful attack on the mind” — and abroad: “We, the greatest self-advertising and self-loving democracy on earth, have mutilated, exterminated, destroyed a distant people.” Her anger boiled over in 1994, when she told Howard Gotlieb, “My idea of the future U.S. is a Nazi state called Christian America.”

But most letters only touch on political-professional matters with comic or tragic abandon, for Gellhorn dreaded to bore her friends. There was little risk of that. She was entertaining even when complaining. Her voice strikes a flapperish note at first, with its slangy glitter between bouts of earnestness; but the less it changes over the decades, the more unique and yet timelessly modern it sounds. By the 1980s, when her body was old and her world had almost vanished, her voice made contemporary sense once more. Gellhorn’s work was rediscovered and she was taken up by young, admiring British intellectuals such as John Pilger and James Fox, whose grannies were probably nothing like her — a grande dame and feisty blonde rolled into one.

Sixty-six years’ worth of one-sided conversation is frustrating stuff at times, but then the words of the addressees — even when it’s a “Dearest Mrs. Roosevelt” or a “Mr. Warp Dimpy Gellhorn Bongie Hemmy” — might have paled beside Gellhorn’s range and verve. As she sighed to one correspondent, “I make people laugh — but what good is that? They don’t make me laugh.” Maybe they lacked her way with images. On the rich: “Mrs. B had on a star ruby the size of a tumor.” On politics: “Perhaps it is simply a revolting profession, essential like garbage collection and sewer cleaning, but revolting.” On fame, as represented by the composer Leonard Bernstein: “Lenny’s an embarrassing bore now, like the intellectual’s Liberace.” On her own career: “I rise and sink like a hippo in a lake.”

Moorehead has supplied valuable interstitial material to help readers piece the story together. Other resources, however, raise questions about the editor’s target audience. Notes to identify some of the welter of people and events are fine, but how many of this book’s readers are going to need help with “[Evelyn] Waugh and [Arthur] Koestler,” let alone a succinct note on “Mme Bovary” (in case we thought she was another chum, perhaps?) or elucidation of the term “Watergate”?

Despite such flaws, this is a book of historic import, for it must be one of the last contemporary records worth collating of a very old expression of human relations — the intensely personal mix of ordinariness and art, chatting and pondering, that goes into the production of a “proper letter.” Precisely around the time of Gellhorn’s death, most literate people in the West stopped writing them. Look at your Sent file, and squirm. n

Lorna Scott Fox is a journalist and translator based in London.