~Oman of Letters

~oman of Letters \ The celebrated war reporter Martha Gellhorn revealed another side of herself in her personal correspondence. fiction, t~~:vel writing and reportage, is at its Yet no fiasco - romantic, marital or mater finest ih·1&·e letter form. If only in this regard, nal - really fazed Gellhorn. For the true loves one ~igfit compare her to Flaubert, whose let of her life were work and the homes she made ters ake ac:lmowledged by many to be his great in hot, sunny places, where she could indulge in est aesthetic achievement. her passions for swimming and sunbathing (she , Th.ls collection is equally notable be liked to sit at her typewriter in full sun, as scant cause it chronicles a life tightly intermeshed ily clad as possible). Fran~ois Mauriac's phrase with the_pivotal events of the 20th century. - "Travail, opium unique" - is often repeated in Gellhotil, 'a Bryn Mawr dropout who went to her letters, and her capacity for work was noth work as a cub reporter for The Albany Times ing short of extraordinary. In one three-week pe Union, had an almost pathological need to riod in 1950, she writes, she completed two 6,000- report on risky and dangerous situations. word articles, revised another, changed and cut As she wrote to her colleague John Gun- a short story, and wrote a book review. As for the . ther: "Where I want to be, boy, is where it is houses in which her work was accomplished: she all blowing up." "Make war not love" might was the ultimate nomad. By her own reckoning, w~ll have.served as Gellhorn's motto: she is over the course of some 40 years she created 19 ei6quetit, in these letters, about her years of homes, many of whose views and landscapes she se;,cual frigidity, writing that her "quiet cool portrays superbly in these letters. The sites in body ... is my tragedy." And notwithstanding cluded Marbella, Spain; Kenya, where she lived het; great number of lovers, I would surmise on a mountaintop several miles from the nearest that the frisson of witnessing acute historical other inhabitant, accepting her frequent bouts crises ·replaced, in her life, the excitement of loneliness as a precondition of freedom, "the other women have found in bed. most expensive possession there is"; and her Gellhorn found her literary voice - spare, favorite place of all, Cuernavaca, where she en terse, infused with reined-in anger - in a se joyed a torrid love affair with a man who finally ries of reports about the Depression she wrote deprived her of her ''virginity" - the word she for the Roosevelt aide Harold Hopkins. (The used to intimate her former incapacity to reach Robert Capa ©2001 by Cornell Capa experience persuaded her never again to live in orgasm. The nimble fellow was a New York doc Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway in Sun Valley, Idaho, at the time the United States, "a hurried unjust country.") tor she had met through Eleanor Roosevelt, and of their wedding, November 1940.The photo was taken for Life magazine. In her late 20's she went to cover the Spanish with whom she enjoyed (whew!) her life's only Civil War for Collier's magazine, then a pub moments of sexual "frenzy." lication with more than 10 million readers. On So enduring was Gellhorn's appeal that her SELECTED LETTERS the European front alone (she would also cov life's "best and longest" relationship, with Lau OF MARTHA GELLHORN er the Far East, on and off, for 30 years) she rence Rockefeller, was yet to come: it began Edited by Caroline-Moorehead. went on to chronicle the fall of Czechoslovakia; in her late 50's, and lasted until her death. The 531 pp. Henry Holt & Company. $32.50. the Soviet invasion of Finland; the liberation romance may have been abetted by distance - of Dachau; the Nuremberg trials; and, before the lovers met only two or three times a year By FRANCINE DU PLESSIX GRAY that, the Allied landings on Normandy Beach, at most, in "a hotel room high above Central into which she smuggled herself with her habit Park." "We played about like ancient kittens," NE might well argue that there's ual bravura and defiance. Because the United she writes, noting that they would soon be cel considerable advantage, for a gifted States Army did not permit women reporters ebrating their "illegal silver anniversary." woman, in having a take-it-or-leave at the front, Gellhorn sneaked into a hospital The Rockefeller idyll coincided with some of Oit attitude to sex, in being ever ready ship on the night of D-Day and worked along Gellhorn's most remarkable and controversial to abandon the most desirable men to pursue side the ship's nurses in the first days of the reporting: her dispatches from Vietnam, writ her vocation. An imperviousness to lust is cer Normandy landing, thus witnessing the inva ten in 1966 for The Guardian of London, were tainly what Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998), the sion firsthand. the most ferocious (and prophetic) attacks on greatest female war correspondent of the mid Of all the eminent men in Gellhorn's life, United States foreign policy yet published in century decades, had in mind when she wrote the one most rattled by her ferocious indepen the Western press. to a friend, "I only loved the world of men - not dence was Ernest Hemingway, with whom the world of men-and-women." she lived for eight years, four of them spent N her 80's, Gellhorn continued to travel That steely penchant for independence in a contentious marriage. However admir obsessively, undertaking adventures that and man's work, repeatedly expressed in this ing Hemingway was, initially, of her marvel would phase most hardy 50-year-olds. Until remarkable collection of her letters, came to ous looks, her stoicism and her indifference to Iher sight began truly to fail, making it near Gellhorn very early. One of four children born physical discomfort, Gellhorn would write that ly impossible for her to read, write or enjoy to a prosperous St. Louis doctor, she had be he suffered from "abject bottom-licking nar landscapes, she readily traveled to five differ come, by her mid-20's, a tall, willowy, tomboy cissism"; and he was, to boot, "a ghastly lover." ent countries in one summer, believing that to ish blonde endowed with a sassy wit, a splendid (In her words: "Wham barn thank you ma'am, "keep moving" was the best cure for depression. prose style, an intense rage against all forms or maybe just wham barn.") Increasingly re In her late 80's she planned to go snorkeling off of injustice and a fierce self-reliance that made sentful of Gellhorn's long absences during her the Sinai peninsula. In London, which was her her all the more irresistible to men. (The goofy assignments, Hemingway wrote her the follow home base for her last decades, she was sur names she gave her lovers - one was "Muckle ing tirade when she left their Havana home, in rounded by a bevy of devoted young intellectu bugetski," another was "Trollycar," "Napoleon 1943, to cover the Italian front: "Are you a war als like Bill Buford and Victoria Glendinning. It Slice" and "Pissoir Attendant" - typified her correspondent, or wife in my bed?" took cancer and near-total blindness to defeat breezy attitude to them.) Beyond the illus "I wish only to be unmarried ... I am so free her. At 89, she took a pill she'd stored for the Gellhorn wrote triousness of her correspondents - Eleanor that the atom cannot be freer," Gellhorn wrote, occasion, choreographing her end as elegantly Roosevelt, H. G. Wells, Bernard Berenson, Ad shortly before her divorce from Hemingway, as she had lived her life - white tulips in sight to the journalist lai Stevenson, Leonard Bernstein and Sybille to a former lover who had remainec;l, like most of her bedside, her apartment immaculate. Bedford among them - what makes this book of them, a close friend. Another attempt at ty The only note of self-pity one detects, in the John Gunther: a literary landmark is that Gellhorn's prose, ing the knot, in 1954, was equally unsuccessful. last pages of this terrific collection of letters, 'Where I want to splendid enough in her 13 published books of Her letters intimate she married the Newport concerns Gellhorn's ire about the failure of her socialite Tom Matthews, a jovial former edi once superior body. "If the Devil had shown fie, boy, is where Francine du Plessix Gray's most recent book tor in chief of Time magazine, to create a more up at my house, instead of calling on dreary is "Them: A Memoir of Parents," which won stable home life for her son, Sandy, an Italian Faust, and offered me a perfectly functioning it is all blowing the National Book Critics' Circle award for orphan she had adopted wh~n he was 19 months body until death in exchange for my soul," she autobiography. She is currently working on a old, and who ultimately disappointed her by wrote with characteristic friskiness, "I'd have up.' biography of Madame de Stael. growing into an idle, indolent young adult. said it's a deal bud, with joy." 0 ~6 Sunday, Augµst 27,, 2006 • The Lionesses From war reporting to movie reviews and political profiles, a century ofjournalism by women. JOURNALISTAS Mary McCarthy, as well as a number of campaign, has been so overtaken 100 Years of the Best Writing and British writers who were less familiar to me, by Senator Hillary that Jong's per Reporting by Women Journalists.

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