Customer Reviews

Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Martha Gellhorn did not cooperate with her biographers when she was alive and she did not make it easy for them after she died. She made her opinions on this matter quite clear: "...writers are diminished by having their lives known: they should only be known by what they write." She left many of her manuscripts and some letters and other papers to Boston University before she died, but she deliberately destroyed most of her letters. She probably hoped her correspondents would destroy the letters she sent them as well, and even specifically requested them to in some cases, but she knew a clean sweep would not be possible.

Well, then. Should we respect her wishes and read only her many stories and articles? Or should we pry into her private life, in the hopes of learning something valuable that will add to her published writings? Or should we be completely honest and read her biographies and letters, knowing full well that although we will find out nothing that adds to her journalism or literature, we'll get an adventure story that rivals anything she ever wrote.

Having tossed aside my misgivings when I picked up the first biography of Gellhorn, Nothing Ever Happens to the Brave by Carl Rollyson, I didn't hesitate when Caroline Moorehead's Gellhorn: A Twentieth Century Life came out. It was a foregone conclusion that I would read The Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn. Sorry, Martha.

In The Selected Letters, as in the Moorehead biography, we find out that Gellhorn was a difficult person. She could be rude and something of a bigot, although it may not be fair to judge her based on letters she wrote to friends. Still, suffice it to say that if I were to quote her on African Americans, or the Chinese, or the Italians, my review would not be published on this website. And while she loved to discuss and argue with friends and colleagues about politics, apparently she would not listen to anyone who disagreed with her regarding the Palestinians.

Her relationship with her adopted son was painful to read about. Much has already been said about whether she was a good, or even a fit, mother, so I won't add my amateur opinion. However, it is interesting to note that, like so many parents in the Sixties, she considered her son's recreational drug use altogether different from her own frequent and liberal use of alcohol and amphetamines.

An odd discrepancy occurs in a letter she wrote in 1991 to an old friend from the Spanish Civil War. In it, she mentions having taken four marriage vows. Even counting her early relationship with Bertrand de Jouvenal as a marriage, which it probably wasn't, she was married three times. Curious.

The Selected Letters is a fascinating companion to Moorehead's biography of Gellhorn, although I can't honestly say it is a valuable addition. Gellhorn's best stories have already been told by Gellhorn herself. The letters show an unpolished side of Gellhorn's writing, for what that's worth. She wrote so many letters and such long letters that one is tempted to speculate that writing them was a way of putting off real writing, or perhaps a way of writing through all the clutter in her mind that had to be cleared out before the real writing started.

Regrettably, Gellhorn was right about a writer being diminished by having her life known. But she would surely understand that the curious reader can't resist getting to the bottom of a great story.

This book is beautifully edited by Caroline Moorehead, the one woman in all the world who knows more than any other about dear old, trying old, basilisk-fierce Martha Gellhorn. The odd thing is that the publishers sent out an advanced uncorrected proof claiming that this was Gellhorn's "COLLECTED LETTERS" and now, months later, the dust has settled and the book has changed its title to "SELECTED LETTERS," perhaps a subtle difference but one that makes you wonder what went south at the last minute. If only the beloved investigative snoop, Gellhorn herself, was still here to look into this minor mystery! Warning, there is indeed a lot in it about Hemingway, but that's why many will be drawn to Gellhorn in the first place, and the other half of the readers will be wanting to know how a dogged spirit stays independent, especially in the face of huge sadnesses, There's an inspirational feel about the collection, surprising as it may seem, and even though tragedy seemed to overshadow her fun no matter where she went.

Her dedication to reporting is in itself remarkable. Wasn't there ever a point where she paused and wondered what on earth good it did to do this particular job, or did she merely shrug off the moral niceties. She doesn't seem to have cared whose feelings she hurt, even those she loved (one of her novels was withdrawn from the UK when a dear friend, whose love life Gellhorn had written up and lightly salted with fiction, complained, first to the author, then to the courts) and her ire hangs high against those who have crossed her (especially Lillian Hellman, who must have been scared silly every day of her life with that menace Gellhorn still out for her blood).

She had a weakness for "sophisticated" (often bisexual) men and Moorehead prints some "NOTES ON A SCANDAL" style letters outlining her embarrassing obsession with Leonard Bernstein, his genius, his private life, and his body. Really everything about him. "He's got quite a nice voice, plummy and deep, as if his mouth was pure, as if he'd never had a filling. The complexion of a white peach. He's worth it, this one. He's the one I've waited for." (My paraphrase of Judi Dench.) Another set of letters between Martha Gellhorn and Betsy Drake, the former wife of screen star Cary Grant, elicits more rueful confessions, for Drake shared a great secret with Gellhorn, that it may be liberating to step away from an adored and celebrated spouse, but at the same time every day you look in your mirror and you know that your obituary is going to say, "Ex-Wife of Blank."

Gellhorn's passion for action, in Africa, Spain, wherever, covering the war in Vietnam for the Manchester Guardian, is rather better covered in Moorehead's great bio of the journalist, than in this book of collected, I mean selected, letters. In fact if you didn't have Moorehead's notes coming in every now and then to re-ground the story and put it into real perspective, you might as well be on a cloud.

This will appeal most to either Martha Gellhorn fans or Hemingway mavens. Martha was Ernest Hemingway's third wife, and the only one of four who told him to take a hike. This collection of her letters, from various repositories, represents events, periods and peoples in her life.

The main shortcoming is the paucity of narrative material threading it all together. Unless you're already familiar with the outline of her biography, the meaning of most of the entries is lost on the reader. I found myself going back to my shelf for previous Gellhorn biographies, just to keep the sequence of events straight in my head as I read the letters.

Nevertheless, Martha's extraordinarily open and frank about what's going on internally which her various biographers fail to do. She was a pained woman, lonely at times, bitter frequently, but always keeping it shiny and brittle on the exterior. She lived an extraordinary accomplished life for a woman in her era, but ultimately not one many would choose to emulate. She paid a heavy price for all she achieved.

She died at her own hand at age 89, alone in London, using a poison pill she'd stashed away previously for just such an occasion. (cyanide?)

If you're already a Gellhorn or Hemingway fan, this is an important addition to your library. If not, skim it at the library. There are no photos.

To turn the pages of a collection of letters in our time, is to return to a time when people wrote, at leisure, at length and in great detail, to one another about trifles, confidences, and assorted themes. In our age of e-mails it is almost inconceivable. Inconceivable too is that Martha Gellhorn's letters, by Caroline Moorehead, brings this world before us with such force, that we are held captive from page to page, from the start to the last. Yet while her correspondents are many of them famous, it is true, it is the letters themselves that shimmer, that gives us images rare, reflections profound, letters for all of time.

Intelligent, dauntless, and restlessly peripatetic, Martha Gellhorn refused to be encumbered by what she called "the kitchen of life." Travel, men, seclusion and adversity all were stimulants to Martha's agile mind. "Normal people depend on other people, I roam in space", she once remarked.

Like most complex personalities, Martha is difficult to peg, and even an intrepid reader who makes the effort to negotiate these 500-plus pages of letters may come away feeling dissatisfied. Martha was a prolific writer--these letters represent a minute fraction of her output, most of which she managed to destroy. Her surviving correspondences reveal a fluid writer, fueled by a "passionate desire to find SOMEONE to communicate with."

She is unfailingly candid and insightful. Only in a few instances is she less than cordial, and only in a few instances does she seem free to totally enjoy the act of writing. These instances are instructive, involving her adopted son--whom she wrote to in tones of fearfully harsh admonishment, and her stepson, to whom she allowed herself to write freely and playfully. Oddly enough, both of these young charges shared the same name: Sandy.

It is tempting at times to compare Martha's character to that of Katherine Hepburn (who attended Bryn Mawr at the same time), or to Isak Dinesen. Both of these women seemed to share Martha's brand of independence. However, Martha crossed paths with both, and in her recorded opinions, does not express admiration for either of them. To Martha, Hepburn and the Baroness Karen Von Blixen were both too patrician. Martha was not at one with the monied class, which she found wasteful and vainglorious. Martha liked to have things both ways in her life--she loved to mix it up, defending the underdog, and she also loved the freedom of getting away from the hurly-burly, keeping life at a distance.

What was most impressed upon me by these letters was how much Martha was devoted to, and suffered for, her fiction writing. Martha gained her reputation as a war correspondent, but these letters leave no doubt that Martha truly wanted to be remembered for her books of fiction. She often agonizes over writer's block, her failing memory, and the self-doubts that plagued her.

The final portrait that emerges here is of Martha as an unflaggingly energetic, unvanquished personality who periodically engaged with the world, and then fled to solitude in order to write about it. Her unflinching honesty and her humorous dismissal of all that was "bulls---t" are the qualities that drew people to her, and she is worthy of far greater renown than she currently holds.

Carolyn Moorehead has provided two great touchstones in the biography, "Gellhorn: A Twentieth Century Life", and this large volume of letters. Now, I will move on to the volumes about war, and the available fictional works that Gellhorn left behind.

As someone I would love to have known, Martha Gelhorn ranks right up there with Carly Simon...who, thankfully, is still alive. Gelhorn is the only one of Hemingway's four wives who left him rather than the other way round. This after an affair-turned-to-marriage that began when she walked into a Key West bar and introduced herself to him.

Her extensive correspondence detailed in this book, and her life subsequent to Hemingway, reveal a woman, who though emotionally healthier than Ernest, had her own demons to contend with. She is nevertheless a fascinating personality, widely traveled, a prolific author, and by all accounts a very engaging raconteur. She deserves to be notable in her own right and spent much of her life in a fight to be accorded someone other than Heminway's third wife. Though with a personage as large as Hemingway, that was a difficult struggle, this treatment of a segment of her correspondence certainly helps her individuality along by revealing the brilliant and complex person she was

The letters written by Martha Gellhorn reveal more about her than her books ever could. They show Gellhorn as someone very concerned about the rights and lives of the average citizen in whatever country she happened to be in at the time. She had a wide variety of people that she wrote to an a regular basis; artists, writers, her mother, and Eleanor Roosevelt with whom she had a personal friendship for many years. I've read all the books she wrote but find this that selection of letters by her finally reveals the person as she was; a gutsy concerned woman who gave a damn.