Martha Gellhorn

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Martha Gellhorn
Born:	8 November 1908 St. Louis, Missouri USA
Died:	15 February 1998 London
Occupation:	Author, War correspondent
Nationality:	American
Writing period:	1934 - 1989
Genres:	War, Travel
Debut works:	What Mad Pursuit (1934)
Third wife of Ernest Hemingway

Martha Gellhorn (8 November 1908 - 15 February 1998) was an American novelist, travel writer and journalist, considered to be one of the greatest war correspondents of the 20th century. She reported on virtually every major world conflict that took place during her 60-year career. Gellhorn was also the third wife of American novelist Ernest Hemingway, from 1940 to 1945. At the age of 89, ill and nearly completely blind, she ended her life by taking a poison pill.

1 Early life
2 War in Europe
3 Later career
4 Marriages and love affairs
5 Bibliography
6 References
7 Footnotes
8 External links

[edit] Early life

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Gellhorn graduated from the John Burroughs School there and enrolled in Bryn Mawr College in Philadelphia. In 1927, she left before graduating to pursue a career as a journalist. Her first articles appeared in The New Republic. In 1930, determined to become a foreign correspondent, she went to France for two years where she worked at the United Press bureau in Paris. While in Europe, she became active in the pacifist movement and wrote about her experiences in the book, What Mad Pursuit (1934).

Upon returning to the US, Gellhorn was hired by Harry Hopkins as an investigator for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, which sent her to report about the impact of the Depression on the United States. Her reports for that agency caught the attention of Eleanor Roosevelt, and the two women became lifelong friends. Her findings were the basis of a novella, The Trouble I've Seen (1936).

[edit] War in Europe

Gellhorn first met Hemingway during a 1936 Christmas family trip to Key West. They agreed to travel in Spain together to cover the Spanish Civil War, where Gellhorn was hired to report for Collier's Weekly. The pair celebrated Christmas of 1937 together in Barcelona. Later, from Germany, she reported on the rise of Adolf Hitler and in 1938 was in Czechoslovakia. After the outbreak of World War II, she described these events in the novel, A Stricken Field (1940). She later reported the war from Finland, Hong Kong, Burma, Singapore and Britain. Lacking official press credentials to witness the D-Day landings, she impersonated a stretcher bearer and later recalled, "I followed the war wherever I could reach it." She was among the first journalists to report from Dachau concentration camp after it was liberated.

After living with Hemingway for four years, they married in 1940. Increasingly resentful of Gellhorn's long absences during her reporting assignments, Hemingway wrote her when she left their home in Havana in 1943 to cover the Italian Front: "Are you a war correspondent, or wife in my bed?" After four contentious years of marriage, they divorced in 1945.

[edit] Later career

After the war, Gellhorn worked for the Atlantic Monthly, covering the Vietnam War, the Six-Day War in the Middle East and the civil wars in Central America. Aged 81, she travelled impromptu to Panama, where she wrote on the U.S. invasion. Only when the Bosnian war broke out in the 1990s did she concede she was too old to go, saying "You need to be nimble."

Gellhorn published a large number of books, including a collection of articles on war, The Face of War (1959), a novel about McCarthyism, The Lowest Trees Have Tops (1967), an account of her travels (including one trip with Ernest Hemingway), Travels With Myself and Another (1978) and a collection of her peacetime journalism, The View From the Ground (1988).

Peripatetic by nature, Gellhorn reckoned that in a 40-year span of her life, she had created 19 homes in different locales. During a long working life, Gellhorn reported widely from many international trouble-spots.

Gellhorn died in London in 1998, aged 89, taking her own life after a long battle with cancer and near total blindness. Since her death, the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism has been established in her honour.

Gellhorn published books of fiction, travel writing and reportage. Her selected letters were published posthumously in 2006.

[edit] Marriages and love affairs

Martha Gellhorn was extremely attractive to men — particularly heroic, risk-taking men. She had only two marriages but countless lovers, who tended to be married men.

Her first major affair was with the French economist Bertrand de Jouvenel. It started in 1930, when she was just 22 years old, and lasted until 1934^[1] (plus, as a friendship only, well beyond that).

She probably had an affair with H.G. Wells in 1935, and definitely did with Englishman Paul Willert and New York journalist Allen Grover the following year. If Leonard Bernstein had had his way (and if they hadn't both been stoned on marijuana) he would have been added to her list of lovers^[2].

Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway

She first met Hemingway in Key West in 1936. They were married in 1940. Gellhorn resented her reflected fame as Hemingway's third wife, remarking that she had no intention of being a footnote in someone else's life. As a condition for granting an interview, at times she insisted that Hemingway's name not be mentioned.

She was faithful to Hemingway with the exception of a fling with US paratrooper James M. Gavin (Hemingway's own indiscretions were, of course, far more numerous). Between marriages she had romantic liaisons with "L", an American businessman (1945), journalist William Walton (1947), and medical doctor David Gurewitsch (1950).

She married Tom Matthews, editor-in-chief of Time magazine, in 1954; they were divorced in 1963.

In 1949, Gellhorn adopted a son from an Italian orphanage, Sandy Gellhorn. Although Gellhorn was first a devoted mother, she was not a truly maternal woman, and she left Sandy to the care of her relatives in Englewood for a long period of time. The child disappointed her by growing into an idle, indolent young adult. She later wrote chillingly to him: "You are a poor and stupid little fellow in my eyes."

Her spectacular sexual conquests seem to have been driven by the need for the companionship of alpha males rather than any kind of lust. In 1972 she 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.^[3]

”

[edit] Bibliography

What Mad Pursuit (1934) her time as a pacifist
The Trouble I've Seen (1936) Depression-era novella
A Stricken Field (1940) novel set in Czechoslovakia at outbreak of war
The Heart of Another, 1941
Liana, 1944
The Undefeated, (1945)
Love Goes to Press: A Comedy in Three Acts, 1947 (with Virginia Cowles)
The Wine of Astonishment (1948) WWII novel, republished in 1989 as Point of No Return
The Honeyed Peace: Stories, 1953
Two by Two, 1958
The Face of War (1959) collection of war journalism, updated in 1986
His Own Man, 1961
Pretty Tales for Tired People, 1965
Vietnam: A New Kind of War, 1966
The Lowest Trees Have Tops (1967) collection of travel writing
Travels With Myself and Another (1978)
The Weather in Africa (1984)
The View From the Ground (1988) collection of peacetime journalism
The Short Novels of Martha Gellhorn, 1991
The Novellas of Martha Gellhorn, 1993
Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn (2006), edited by Caroline Moorehead

[edit] References

Moorehead, Caroline (2003). Martha Gellhorn: A Life. London: Chatto & Windus. ISBN 0-7011-6951-6.

(re-published as Gellhorn: A 20th Century Life, Henry Holt & Co., New York (2003) ISBN 0-8050-6553-9)

Moorehead, Caroline: The Letters of Martha Gellhorn, Chatto & Windus, London (2006) ISBN 0-7011-6952-4

[edit] Footnotes

^ Moorehead, 2003, p.38 New York edition. She would have married de Jouvenel if his wife had consented to a divorce.
^ Moorehead, 2003, p.281 New York edition.
^ Moorehead, 2003, p.408 New York edition.