Martha Gellhorn

St. Louis

Martha Ellis Gellhorn was born on 8 November 1908 in St. Louis, Missouri. Her father, George Gellhorn, was a gynaecologist; her mother, Edna Fischel Gellhorn, was a suffragist and one of the founders of the League of Women Voters.[1]

She grew up in a household where campaigning was normal. She marched with her mother as a child, went to a progressive school her mother had helped establish, and then to Bryn Mawr College, which she left in 1929 before graduating because she wanted to be a reporter.

She talked her way into newspaper work, moved to Paris in 1930 with almost no money, and worked there for the United Press until she was dismissed after reporting sexual harassment by a colleague. She spent the next few years in European pacifist circles rather than reporting, and wrote her first novel out of them.[1]

The Depression

Gellhorn returned to America in 1934 and was hired by Harry Hopkins, who ran Franklin Roosevelt's relief administration, to travel the country and report what the Depression was actually doing to people.

She spent months in mill towns and among unemployed families, at times travelling alongside the photographer Dorothea Lange, and filed reports that were read in the White House. She became a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, and that friendship lasted until Roosevelt's death.

The work became her second book of fiction, The Trouble I've Seen, published in 1936: four novellas about people ruined by the Depression, drawn from the interviews.[1]

Spain

In 1937 Gellhorn went to Spain to report the civil war, with a knapsack, fifty dollars and a letter from Collier's magazine describing her as a special correspondent, which she had obtained mainly to get across the border.[2]

She wrote about the war from ground level: what shelling does to a street, what people eat, how children play in a city being bombed. Collier's printed her first piece and then put her name on the masthead, which made her a correspondent in fact.

She met Ernest Hemingway in Key West in 1936, before Spain, and they were both in Madrid in 1937. Their relationship began there.[3]

Hemingway

Gellhorn and Hemingway married on 21 November 1940, after his divorce from Pauline Pfeiffer. They bought the Finca Vigía outside Havana, which she had found, and lived there between assignments. They had met in Spain, where they both reported the civil war, and the experience went into For Whom the Bell Tolls, which he dedicated to her.[4]

The marriage failed over her work. Hemingway wanted her at home; she kept leaving to report, from Finland, from China, from the Caribbean, and finally from Europe. In 1944 he took the Collier's accreditation she had held — the magazine could accredit only one front-line correspondent, and he was the more famous name — which left her without official standing for the invasion of Europe.

They divorced in 1945. She was the only one of his four wives to leave him. She refused for the rest of her life to be interviewed about him, and would end interviews if he was raised. Her stated position was that she had been a working writer for years before she met him and did not intend to be remembered as his third wife.[3]

D-Day

Women correspondents were barred from the invasion beaches. Denied accreditation and refused a place on the press transports, Gellhorn went to the docks, told the authorities at a hospital ship that she was going to interview nurses, and locked herself in a lavatory until the ship sailed.[5]

She crossed on the night of 6 June 1944 and went ashore at Omaha Beach the next morning as a stretcher-bearer, collecting wounded from the sand. She was the only woman to land in Normandy during the invasion, and her piece for Collier's described the field hospital and the men, not the strategy.[1]

She was arrested by military police on returning to England, held at a nurses' training camp outside London, and escaped by climbing a fence. She reported the rest of the war without accreditation, hitching rides with pilots and units, and reached Dachau days after its liberation in 1945.[5]

Dachau

Gellhorn reached Dachau days after its liberation and wrote about it for Collier's. She described the dead, the survivors, the ovens, the freight cars in the siding and the medical experiments.[6]

She said afterwards that she never fully recovered from what she saw there, and that everything she wrote afterwards was affected by it. She lost, by her own account, the belief that reporting the truth would in itself prevent atrocities.

Reporting after 1945

Gellhorn kept working for another forty-five years. She reported the Java conflict against Dutch rule, the Arab-Israeli wars, Vietnam, the wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, and, at eighty-one, the American invasion of Panama in 1989.

Her Vietnam reporting in 1966, for the Guardian, concentrated on civilian casualties, and it got her barred from returning to South Vietnam.[7]

Her method never changed. She reported what happened to ordinary people in a war rather than what generals said about it. She called this the view from the ground, and she was contemptuous of what she called all that objectivity shit, arguing that a reporter who watched atrocity and stayed neutral was not being professional but useless.

The novels

Gellhorn wrote five novels, fourteen novellas and two story collections alongside the journalism, and she considered the fiction her real work. It is now much less read than the reporting.

A Stricken Field, published in 1940, is a novel about a woman journalist in Prague after the Munich agreement. Liana, from 1944, is about a marriage on a Caribbean island. The novellas, collected in The Weather in Africa and elsewhere, are generally rated higher than the novels.

Her collected war journalism, The Face of War, published in 1959, is her most important book. She expanded it three times as she added wars, in 1967, in 1986 and in 1993. Travels with Myself and Another, from 1978, is her funniest: an account of five disastrous journeys. Hemingway travels with her on the journey to China, named in the book only as U.C., for Unwilling Companion.[8]

Later life and death

Gellhorn adopted a son from an Italian orphanage in 1949. She named him George Alexander and called him Sandy. She married Tom Matthews, a former editor of Time, in 1954, and they divorced in 1963.

She settled in London, with a cottage in Wales, and travelled constantly into her eighties. Her last reporting trip was to Brazil in 1995, by which time she could no longer read her own manuscripts. She became a mentor to younger reporters, and the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism was established in her memory.

By the mid-1990s she was nearly blind from a failed cataract operation and had ovarian cancer that had spread to her liver. On 15 February 1998, at her flat in Cadogan Square, she died by suicide, swallowing a cyanide capsule. She was eighty-nine. She had made it clear for years that she intended to end her life rather than be reduced by illness, and had kept the means to do it.[1]

English Heritage later placed a blue plaque on the building.[9]

Why Martha Gellhorn matters

Gellhorn covered wars on four continents across six decades, which almost nobody has matched. She did it with a method that is now standard: ignore the briefing room, go to where the war is happening to people, and write down what it does to them.

She was the only woman to land in Normandy during the invasion, and she refused to build a career on it. The landing is the story everyone tells, and it is a good one, but her own emphasis was on the fifty years of work either side of it. The Face of War shows why: it collects half a century of war reporting in one volume, by a writer who kept going back because she thought someone had to keep the record.

Martha Gellhorn, illustrated

Six scenes from fifty years of reporting — drawn illustrations, not photographs.