Articles
October 12, 2003
War correspondent, Hemingway wife, fiction writer, enigma
By John Keahey
© 2003, The Salt Lake Tribune
Martha Gellhorn, a war correspondent and fiction writer who witnessed firsthand a world in turmoil -- from the rise of Nazism through the Vietnam conflict -- was approached in the mid-1960s by Boston University archivist Howard Gotlieb and asked for her papers. Gotlieb's request was unusual. A famous person's papers are usually turned over to an institution after the subject has died and the will is read. Born in 1908, Gellhorn was just into her late 50s at the time Gotlieb arrived, and she still had three decades of work ahead of her.
But Gotlieb is a pioneer in asking famous people, while still in their prime, to commit their private papers to his institution, Boston University's Mugar Library.
The deal prompted Gellhorn to begin contacting lifelong friends and associates, asking them to return the vast numbers of letters she wrote over the decades. Most obliged, and these letters, along with her exhaustive diaries and reporter's notebooks, plus the letters her correspondents wrote to her, became part of this archive.
Gellhorn had one condition: The collection could not be opened until 25 years after her death.
That death, at her own hand, occurred on Feb. 14, 1998, just short of her 90th year.
Gellhorn's eyesight had rapidly deteriorated, and her ability to write was fading. Caroline Moorehead, her latest -- and clearly best -- biographer, writes in the final pages of Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life (Henry Holt 2003): "Time had, quite simply, run out."
Throughout her productive and adventurous life, Gellhorn had been an intensely private person. Without exception, she refused to cooperate with biographers. Gellhorn insisted that -- despite her large body of journalistic work and several novels and short stories, despite her tempestuous marriage to novelist Ernest Hemingway, her second of three husbands, and, earlier, her close friendship with late-Victorian writer H.G. Wells -- she was not a public figure.
A writer's private life should be of no interest to anyone, she believed. Her work should speak for her.
One early biographer, Carl Rollyson, had been rebuffed by Gellhorn in the late 1980s. He produced a shallow, incomplete biography, Nothing Ever Happens to the Brave: The Adventurous Life of America's Most Glamorous and Courageous War Correspondent (St. Martin's Press 1990).
It focused heavily on Gellhorn's role as third wife to Hemingway, with whom she experienced and wrote about the Spanish Civil War. They were married for only five years (1940-45) and, when Gellhorn refused to become the kind of partner Hemingway wanted -- someone who would focus her energies on him and his career and subjugate her own -- they parted.
She was outraged by Rollyson's book, which she claimed was full of errors. Then, after her death, Rollyson, who had written a biography of English journalist, novelist and critic Rebecca West, revised his 1990 Gellhorn book.
He wrote in the Introduction to that revised work -- Beautiful Exile: The Life of Martha Gellhorn (Aurum Press, 2001) -- that he had come across some letters Gellhorn had written to West, who had been H.G. Wells' companion for 10 years, and that some of West's friends also had corresponded with Gellhorn.
Moorehead, in an interview with The Salt Lake Tribune, said that about that same time, Gellhorn's stepson and literary executor, Sandy Matthews, approached Moorehead about doing a biography, allowing her access to Gellhorn's sealed boxes at BU's archives.
Why did Moorehead get unrestrained entry into this treasure-trove? Her mother, Lucy Moorehead, had been a close Gellhorn friend.
"Without being certain, I believe they met properly in the very early 1950s, when Martha was looking to adopt [a son] in Italy, though I suspect they probably encountered each other somewhere in the course of the war," Moorehead said.
And, she said, Gellhorn "was always part of the geography of my life [growing up]."
That close association with her subject gave Moorehead pause when Matthews asked her to do the "authorized" biography.
"I was hesitant," she said. "I didn't want my own memories to intrude."
Moorehead was able to get over her concern. She spent three years immersed in her subject and in the university's archive of previously unmined Gellhorn gold.
"I remember that Martha had a distinctive voice, distinctly American and unmistakable. I could remember that. When I was reading letters, I could compare [what Moorehead read on the page] with what I heard in my head."
Moorehead says that despite this unlimited access, she did not agree to submit the manuscript for the family's approval.
"I showed the [manuscript] to Sandy Matthews, and indeed to Martha's brother Alfred, but no one had any actual 'right' to make me change anything.
"Things have stayed in that they would have preferred out, but they were fine about it," she said, adding that if a biographer enters into any kind of approval deal with the estate, then "you are a dead duck. They were very generous and did not put any pressure on me of any kind."
Moorehead's book offers insight into the complex life of one of the 20th century's most astute observers. It goes well beyond Rollyson's attempts and, because of Moorehead's access to intimate diaries, digs deep into the underpinnings of Gellhorn's troubled relationships and insecurities about her work.
Moorehead also explores, for example, how Gellhorn, rigid in her quest for "truth" in her writing, could condemn atrocities performed by Franco's forces during the Spanish Civil War and yet ignore, similar atrocities by the other side, which she, Hemingway and other writers supported. And, as a young woman in the mid-1930s, traveling through the southern United States, Gellhorn wrote an eyewitness account of a lynching in Mississippi of a young black man. She was close by, but did not actually witness the atrocity. This apparently isolated act of journalistic fabrication weighed heavily on her throughout her life.
The book probes the complexities of Gellhorn's personality: how she thrilled to live in a world dominated by men, but could not form lasting relationships with them. While writing some of the best eyewitness journalism of the 20th century -- she wrote about war's impact on people's lives rather than battle strategy and military campaigns -- she went through three husbands and numerous love affairs; nearly all of those relationships failed. And while she had close friends all her life, she could drop them over a perceived slight and never look back.
Gellhorn was an enigma -- to everyone around her and, most particularly, to herself. Moorehead, dispassionately and thoroughly, cracks the shell and gives us a look, from the inside out, at this remarkable writer.
© 2009 John Keahey