Martha Gellhorn

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Martha Gellhorn
Martha Gellhorn
Born	8 November 1908(1908-11-08) St. Louis, Missouri USA
Died	15 February 1998 (aged 89) London
Occupation	Author, War correspondent
Nationality	American
Writing period	1934 - 1989
Genres	War, Travel

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].

Contents 1 Early life 2 War in Europe 3 Later career 4 Political and Religious Views 5 Marriages and love affairs 6 Bibliography 7 References 8 Footnotes 9 External links

[edit] Early life

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Gellhorn graduated in 1926 from 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.

On October 5, 2007, the United States Postal Service announced that it would honor five journalists of the 20th century times with first-class rate postage stamps, to be issued on Tuesday, April 22, 2008: Martha Gellhorn; John Hersey; George Polk; Ruben Salazar; and Eric Sevareid. Postmaster General Jack Potter announced the stamp series at the Associated Press Managing Editors Meeting in Washington. Martha covered the Spanish Civil War, World War II and the Vietnam War. ^[2]

[edit] Political and Religious Views

Gellhorn remained a committed leftist throughout her life and was contemptuous of those, like Rebecca West, who became more conservative. She considered the so-called objectivity of journalists “nonsense”, and used journalism to reflect her politics. Politically, Gellhorn had two major favorites, Israel and the Spanish Republic. For Gellhorn, Dachau had “changed everything” and she became a life-long champion of Israel. She was a frequent visitor to Israel after 1949, and considered moving to Israel in the 1960s. An uncompromising opponent of Fascism, Gellhorn's attitude toward communism was problematic at best. While she is not known to have praised communism and Stalinism, she equally refused to criticize it, and remained a believer in Alger Hiss until her death. A self-described “hater”, she attacked fascism, anti-communism, racism, Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and the Palestinian and German peoples with equal vigor. Gellhorn never forgave the German people for Hitler, and reveled in their suffering after WW II. Her hatred of the Palestinians was extreme and friends learned never to mention them in her presence.

Gellhorn was an atheist and did not believe in an afterlife. Although both parents were Jewish, Gellhorn was raised as a secular humanist. Her only religious instruction consisted of Sunday visits to the Society for Ethical Culture. She was sickened when her husband T.S. Matthews insisted their marriage be blessed by an Anglican priest. She called it “horrible, cannibalistic voodoo of the ugliest sort”.

[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^[3] (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.

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.[4]

”

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] References

[edit] Footnotes

[edit] External links

• Martha Gellhorn (Biography)
• "Martha's quest" (Salon.com)
• Review: Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn (Salon.com)
• Review of "Martha Gellhorn: A Life" (The Age)
• Martha Gellhorn talks about the Spanish Civil War (from a BBC Radio 4 live stream).
• Electric Sky - 'Martha Gellhorn - On The Record'

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