The Lowest Trees Have Tops
A foreign colony in a Mexican village in 1953, half of it driven out by the Red Scare. Gellhorn lived four years among people like them.
- 1967
About Martha Gellhorn
The story, briefly
Spoiler-freeSet in 1953 in the invented Mexican village of San Ignacio del Tule, the novel follows a small foreign community that has settled there — some of them Communists, some of them mild conservatives, none of them in much danger from each other. Gellhorn spent four years living in Mexico, and called the book a bit of fluff written to amuse herself. It has little plot and a reporter's eye for infidelity and illegitimacy.
The story, in more detail
San Ignacio del Tule is invented. The community in it is not, in the sense that Gellhorn had spent four years living among people like them. The village holds a colony of Westerners — Americans who are there because of what the Red Scare did to them at home, and Europeans who were there first — and much of the novel is about the distance between those two kinds of exile, and the different stories each group tells about why it left.
There is no strong central action, and Gellhorn did not pretend otherwise. What the book has instead is the social life of the settlement: who is sleeping with whom, whose child is whose, which suspicions get aired and which are kept, and the old resentments the colony brought along and did not put down. This record carries no full plot because the novel does not really have one.
Why we recommend it
Written from residence, not assignment
Most of her books come from arriving somewhere. This one comes from staying.
A community rather than a plot
The book is structurally closer to reportage than to a novel, which is either its problem or its method depending on the reader.
The late fiction
Published when she was fifty-eight, between the Vietnam reporting and the African novellas.
What this book explores
Timeline
1953
The novel's setting — the invented Mexican village of San Ignacio del Tule, drawn from the four years Gellhorn spent living among such an expatriate colony.
1967
Michael Joseph publishes it in London — Gellhorn fifty-eight, between the Vietnam reporting and the African novellas.
1969
A first US edition follows from Dodd, Mead in New York, two years after the London printing.
Book editions
Hardcover
- Hardcover
- Michael Joseph
- 1967
Hardcover
- Hardcover
- Dodd, Mead
- 1969
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The Lowest Trees Have Tops: frequently asked questions
Who wrote The Lowest Trees Have Tops?
Martha Gellhorn. The novel was published in 1967.
What is The Lowest Trees Have Tops about?
Set in 1953 in the invented Mexican village of San Ignacio del Tule, it follows a small foreign community that has settled there — some of them Communists, some mild conservatives — none of them in much danger from each other.
Is it based on Gellhorn's own life?
She spent four years living in Mexico, among the kind of expatriate community she invented for the novel.
Where does the title come from?
From a line of Elizabethan verse — the poem "The Lowest Trees Have Tops" attributed to Edward Dyer, whose conceit runs beneath the book.
What kind of novel is it?
A quiet novel of an expatriate community in a Mexican village, watched with Gellhorn's reporter's eye.