I briefly met the writer, novelist and journalist Martha Gellhorn in the 1990s, towards the end of her life, at a bed and breakfast in Melville, Johannesburg, of all places. After a few pleasantries, she waved me away, excusing herself. She was tired, she said, and wanted to sleep. I never discovered why she was in SA, but presumed a curiosity about the end of apartheid had compelled her to make the journey, despite her failing health.
She was totally blind when she died, aged 89, in 1998. Considered one of the great war correspondents of the 20th century, Gellhorn reported on virtually every major world conflict that took place during her 60-year career. She was also briefly the third wife of Ernest Hemingway, from 1940 to 1945, and would come to resent the fame that came with that relationship. As a condition for granting interviews, she would insist there be no mention of Hemingway’s name. “I’ve been a writer for over 40 years,” she once noted. “I was a writer before I met him and I was a writer after I left him. Why should I be merely a footnote in his life?”
I was a writer before I met him and I was a writer after I left him. Why should I be merely a footnote in his life?
— Martha Gellhorn
The marriage was not a “happy” one, at least when it came to intimacy. “My whole memory of sex with Ernest,” she said, “is the invention of excuses, and failing that, the hope that it would soon be over.”
But then Gellhorn never did regard herself as being good in bed, and in 1972 wrote: “If I practised sex out of moral conviction, that was one thing; but to enjoy it … seemed a defeat. I accompanied men and was accompanied in action, in the extrovert part of life; I plunged into that … but not sex; that seemed to be their delight, and all I got was a pleasure of being wanted, I suppose, and the tenderness (not nearly enough) that a man gives when he is satisfied. I daresay I was the worst bed partner in five continents.”
This characteristic candour is greatly evident in a new collection of her correspondence with Hemingway, and her family and friends, Yours, for Probably Always: Martha Gellhorn’s Letters of Love & War 1930-1949, edited by Janet Somerville (Firefly Books). This follows the 2006 publication of Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn, edited by her official biographer, Caroline Moorhead.
Those anticipating a sequence of responses between Hemingway and Gellhorn will be disappointed by the new collection. Somerville reveals that, just months before her death, Gellhorn went through her personal papers, throwing most of them into a fire — including almost all of her letters from Hemingway. Only two survive, which were saved from the blaze by her adopted son.
The best of Gellhorn’s journalism, meanwhile, can be enjoyed in two magnificent anthologies: The Face of War, which, apart from her coverage of World War 2, also contains dispatches on the conflicts in Spain, Finland, China, Vietnam, Israel and Central America; and View From the Ground, a collection of peacetime pieces.
Her 1940 novel, A Stricken Field, is probably the best start to exploring Gellhorn’s fiction. Based on her own experiences, it is commonly regarded as her most powerful novel. Gellhorn had visited Prague in 1938, shortly before the Munich pact, and witnessed Czechoslovakia’s occupation by the Nazis. Her novel follows a journalist who returns to Prague after its annexation and finds her efforts to obtain help for the refugees and to convey the shocking state of a region terrorised by the Gestapo both frustrating and futile.
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