Not Wanting to Look Away – A Life of War Zone Witness and Writing

The first time I heard about novelist, war correspondent, activist, pacifist, letter writer, and third wife of Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, was during a documentary about Hemingway. I became intrigued by the pluck of this woman, as I am about Maria Agnesi and Rose E. Livingston.

1944. To witness the D-Day landings on the beaches of Normandy during World War II, Gellhorn stowed away on a hospital ship (locked herself in a bathroom) and masqueraded as a medic. She impersonated a stretcher bearer.

All night she labored, with blisters on her hands, her mind and heart seared with images of pain and death she would never forget. Later she would learn that every one of the hundreds of credentialed journalists, including her husband, sat poised behind her in the Channel with binoculars, never making it to shore. Hemingway’s story soon appeared in Collier’s alongside hers, with top billing and more dazzle, but the truth had already been written on the sand. There were 160,000 men on that beach and one woman. Gellhorn.

– PAULA MCLAIN writing about The Extraordinary Life of Martha Gellhorn, the Woman Ernest Hemingway Tried to Erase ~A maverick war correspondent, Hemingway’s third wife was the only woman at D-Day and saw the liberation of Dachau. Her husband wanted her home in his bed.

Gellhorn’s reporting from the front lines of every major international conflict in six decades distinguishes her as one of the great war correspondents of the 20th century. Her war coverage spanned from the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s to the Vietnam War.

Martha would go to great lengths to get a good story. During the Second World War she rode with British pilots on night raids over Germany. She was one of the first journalists to report on Dachau once it was liberated by the Allies. She paid her own way to go to Viet Nam and cover the war.

I followed the war wherever I could reach it. I had been sent to Europe to do my job, which was not to report the rear areas or the woman’s angle. – Martha Gellhorn

From Martha Gellhorn: ‘A Twentieth Century Life’ : NPR:

Caroline Moorehead, author of Gellhorn: A Twentieth Century Life, says Gellhorn remained undaunted for most of her 90 years. “I think she was fearless but she knew what it was like to be frightened,” a toughness she got from her upbringing, Moorehead says.

Gellhorn covered wars in a different way than other journalists. “She didn’t write about battles and she didn’t know about military tactics,” Moorehead says. “What she was really interested in was describing what war does to civilians, does to ordinary people.”

Background

Gellhorn was born in Missouri in 1908. Her independent and determined nature along with the desire to champion the cause of the oppressed was formed in her by the examples of her father and mother. George Gellhorn, a German-born Jew, was a reputable gynecologist and social reformer in St. Louis. Edna Fischel Gellhorn championed women’s suffrage, child welfare laws, and free health clinics. Both parents were reformers, advocating for the disenfranchised.

Gellhorn was an activist early on. At age 7, she participated in “The Golden Lane,” a rally for women’s suffrage at the Democratic Party’s 1916 national convention in St. Louis. (Source)

She later attended Bryn Mawr College, a women’s liberal arts school. Her first published 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, but was fired after she reported sexual harassment by a man connected with the agency.” (Source)

In the fall of 1934 Martha would go on to work for FERA (Federal Emergency Relief Administration). There, she documented the lives of the unemployed, the hungry, and the homeless during the Great Depression, alongside photographer Dorothea Lange. Gellhorn became close to Eleanor Roosevelt during that time.

Gellhorn’s began her journalist career during the Spanish Civil War. She arrived in Madrid in 1937 to cover the conflict for Collier’s Weekly. There she met Ernest Hemingway, also in Spain as a correspondent. They married in 1940. The marriage lasted five years. Gellhorn left Hemingway. The breakup was due to Hemingway’s unhappiness about Gellhorn’s’ absence when she was on assignment and his drinking and infidelity.

From Paula McLain, author of a biographical novel about Martha Gellhorn titled Love and Ruin :

She saw herself as a champion of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, and worked hard, all her life, to give voice to the voiceless. She never wanted to be famous, and was enraged to know that the larger world knew her mostly through her marriage to Ernest Hemingway, which lasted from 1940-1945. “Why should I be a footnote to someone else’s life,” she noted ruefully in an interview, pointing out that she’d been her own woman and writer before meeting him, and would go on being just that. She in fact went on to publish for nearly fifty years after leaving him, writing a total of five novels, fourteen novellas, two short story collections and three books of essays.

While many consider Hemingway a better fiction writer, many consider Gellhorn a better journalist. Two of Gellhorn’s writings – an article and a letter – show how she analyzed what she witnessed in terms of what man is capable of doing to man. Her writing, biting and eye-opening, reveals her conscience.

Given the evil of ordinary, rather bland, bureaucrats and judges and the globalist tyranny that would make slaves of us all and the toxic air of nihilism, Gellhorn’s writing should serve as a warning to us all.

The Article

Martha Gellhorn was present at the Trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, as was Hannah Arendt, who wrote the 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

Gellhorn, in a February 1962 The Atlantic article titled Eichmann and the Private Conscience, writes “on some of the facts and some of the lessons to be learned from this Trial, which is unique in the history of the world”. The following quotes about Eichmann are from that article:

This is a sane man, and a sane man is capable of unrepentant, unlimited, planned evil. He was the genius bureaucrat, he was the powerful frozen mind which directed a gigantic organization; he is the perfect model of inhumanness; but he was not alone. Eager thousands obeyed him. Everyone could not have his special talents; many people were needed to smash a baby’s head against the pavement before the mother’s eyes, to urge a sick old man to rest and shoot him in the back of the head; there was endless work for willing hands. How many more like these exist everywhere? What produced them — all sane, all inhuman?

We consider this man, and everything he stands for, with justified fear. We belong to the same species. Is the human race able — at any time, anywhere — to spew up others like him? Why not? Adolf Eichmann is the most dire warning to us all. He is a warning to guard our souls; to refuse utterly and forever to give allegiance without question, to obey orders silently, to scream slogans. He is a warning that the private conscience is the last and only protection of the civilized world. (Emphasis mine.)

…

In a single sentence, Eichmann divided the world into the powers of light and darkness. He chose the doctrine of darkness, as did the majority of his countrymen, as did thousands throughout Europe — men with slave minds, pig-greedy for power: the Vichy police, the Iron Guard, big and little Quislings everywhere. He stated their creed in one line: “The question of conscience is a matter for the head of the state, the sovereign.”

Gellhorn’s Letter Writing

“She wrote several a day, often describing the same episodes to different people, sending letters by boat, sometimes adding to them over days until they stretched to 50 pages. Letters were, as her friend Bill Buford put it in his introduction to Gellhorn’s book, Travels With Myself and Another, her main form of social life. . .. Gellhorn’s friend George Brennan once suggested to her that letters were her ‘real genre, and it is where you yourself come through most genuinely and convincingly’.” (Source) (We have lost touch with hand-written humanness – our own and others – with email and texting.)

While Gellhorn’s wartime dispatches rank among the best of the century, her personal letters are their equal: as vivid and fascinating as anything she ever published.

Gellhorn’s correspondence from 1930 to 1996–chronicling friendships with figures as diverse as Eleanor Roosevelt, Leonard Bernstein, and H. G. Wells, as well as her tempestuous marriage to Ernest Hemingway–paint a vivid picture of the twentieth century as she lived it. (Source)

Gellhorn’s connection to Leonard Bernstein:

“While traveling in Israel in 1949, Gellhorn met Leonard Bernstein by chance in a “scruffy bar” in Tel Aviv. A few months later, Bernstein turned up unannounced (with a grand piano in tow, no less!), in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where she was living and proposed he move in with her for a while. She convinced him to rent a house up the road instead. One night, he persuaded her to try marijuana with him for the first time, having heard from local musicians that it “helped the music flow.” They were both sick all night, with “appalling nightmares.” While never romantic, the two remained close friends and confidants for decades.” (Source)

Gellhorn’s wrote to Bernstein after viewing West Side Story. She was affected by Cool, the most disturbing number (relentless unresolved tritones) of the musical.

“But what stays in my mind, as the very picture of terror, is the scene in the drug store, when the Jets sing a song called “Keep Cool, Man.” I think I have never heard or seen anything more frightening. (It goes without saying that I think the music so brilliant I have no words to use for it.) I found that a sort of indicator of madness: the mad obsession with nothing, the nerves insanely and constantly stretched–with no way to rest, no place to go; the emptiness of the undirected minds, whose only occupation could be violence and a terrible macabre play-acting. If a man can be nothing, he can pretend to be a hoodlum and feel like a somebody. I couldn’t breathe, watching and hearing that; it looks to me like doom, as much as these repeated H-bomb tests, with the atmosphere of the world steadily more and more irrevocably poisoned. I think that drug store and the H-bomb tests are of the same family.

“What now baffles me is that all the reviews, and everyone who has seen the show, has not talked of this and this only: the mirror held up to nature, and what nature. I do not feel anything to be exaggerated or falsified; we accept that art renders beautiful, and refines the shapeless raw material of life. The music and the dancing, the plan, the allegory of the story do that; but nature is there, in strength; and surely this musical tragedy is a warning. . ..” (Emphasis mine.)

The complete letter is here: Notes and Letters — West Side Story

Though I’ve not read of any religious practice in Gellhorn’s life and though her hard-drinking way of life is not something I would recommend – New York Times writer Rick Lyman described Gellhorn as “a cocky, raspy-voiced, chain-smoking maverick”; Gellhorn was a self-made woman who took cyanide to end her life at 90 – still, there is much to commend about Martha Gellhorn: her devotion to humanity and the eyewitness conscience-driven writing of her dauntless war zone life.

Gellhorn, who had a distrust of politicians, documented what the politicians’ war did to civilians. “I followed the war wherever I could reach it,” said Gellhorn. Hers was the Samaritan’s attitude of not wanting to look away. “I wrote very fast, as I had to,” she says, “afraid that I would forget the exact sound, smell, words, gestures, which were special to this moment and this place.”

Paula McLain, Gellhorn’s biographer, writes that Gellhorn saw herself as a champion of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, and worked hard, all her life, to give voice to the voiceless

Gellhorn said of herself “The only way I can pay back for what fate and society have handed me is to try, in minor totally useless ways, to make an angry sound against injustice.”

Gellhorn’s reporting was widely influential at the time and cleared a path for women.

There is a hard, shining, almost cruel honesty to Gellhorn’s work that brings back shellshocked Barcelona, Helsinki, Canton and Bastogne – the prelude and crashing symphony of World War II – with almost unbearable vividness.

–The Guardian, reviewing Gellhorn’s book The Face of War

In a journalism career that spanned 60 years, Gellhorn’s particular brand of nerve was rare as radium. Fear seemed to activate rather than suppress her, and it taught her courage in the face of injustice instead of despair. Sharpened by rage and wielded in the service of others, her voice became a sword. I’m not sure I have encountered its equal, even today. We could use an army of such voices, in fact. And precisely now. – Paula McLain (Emphasis mine.)

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Martha Gellhorn Quotes:

“Americans did not acquire their fear neurosis as the result of a traumatic experience – war devasting their country, pestilence sweeping the land, famine wiping out helpless millions. Americans had to be taught to hate and fear an unseen enemy. The teachers were men in official positions, in government, men whom Americans normally trust without question.”

“I do not see myself as a footnote to someone else’s life.” (Regarding her marriage to Hemingway.)

“Stop spying on the lawful citizenry. Democracy and dossiers go ill together. It is all right for God but all wrong for the State to keep its eye on sparrows.”

“From the earliest wars of men to our last heart-breaking worldwide effort, all we could do was kill ourselves. Now we are able to kill the future.”

“In more than half the nations of our world, torture certifies that the form of government is tyranny. Only tyranny, no matter how camouflaged, needs and employs torturers. Torture has no ideology.”

“The only way I can pay back for what fate and society have handed me is to try, in minor totally useless ways, to make an angry sound against injustice.”

“War happens to people, one by one. That is really all I have to say and it seems to me I have been saying it forever. Unless they are immediate victims, the majority of mankind behaves as if war was an act of God which could not be prevented; or they behave as if war elsewhere was none of their business. It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.”

“Gradually I came to realize that people will more readily swallow lies than truth, as if the taste of lies was homey, appetizing: a habit.”

“On the night of New Year’s Day, I thought of a wonderful New Year’s resolution for the men who run the world: get to know the people who only live in it.”

“Here one has the perfect example of justice: the men have kept their women enslaved…stupid and limited and apart, for their male vanity and power; result: the dull women bore the daylights out of the men.”

“Democracy is dying. It’s a disease called cowardice.” (From a 1938 letter.)

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Janet Somerville, author of Yours, for Probably Always, talks about novelist, war correspondent, activist, and iconoclast Martha Gellhorn.

Janet Somerville on Martha Gellhorn | The Hemingway Society

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A different war, a different correspondent:

Exposing abuse and corruption can be a thankless job. Powerful figures doing wrong often deny and attack those exposing them. And their supporters often join suit—attacking the messenger, rather than holding their leader accountable. . . why continue reporting, advocating, and shining a light when doing so comes at such a high personal cost?