"I didn't like sex at all"

Martha Gellhorn was a gorgeous, brilliant foreign correspondent once married to Hemingway. But underneath her glamorous exterior, her letters reveal a woman of awe-inspiring rage.

By Stephen Amidon

Read more: Books, World War II, Ernest Hemingway, Reviews, Book reviews

AP Photo

Martha Gellhorn with Ernest Hemingway in Sun Valley, Idaho, November 1940.

Aug. 12, 2006 | If Martha Gellhorn had not existed, George Cukor would have probably invented her. Born into an affluent St. Louis family in 1908 and educated at Bryn Mawr (where she was two years behind Katharine Hepburn), Gellhorn went on to become one of her generation's most respected foreign correspondents, sending back dispassionate, shrewd dispatches from the Spanish Civil War, World War II and the Vietnamese conflict. Blond and beautiful, she married Ernest Hemingway and counted among her lovers legendary World War II Gen. James Gavin and billionaire Laurance Rockefeller. Her seemingly infinite list of famous friends included Eleanor Roosevelt, Leonard Bernstein, H.G. Wells and Adlai Stevenson. By her own estimate she traveled to more than 50 countries and owned houses in at least six of them. On the downside, she was by all accounts a lousy cook, though one imagines Cukor would have been able to find comic relief in that shortcoming.

Given Gellhorn's iconic status, perhaps the greatest virtue of Caroline Moorehead's dexterously edited selection of her letters is the way it depicts the irascibly human personality behind the legend. Though Gellhorn was usually on the side of the angels when it came to politics, she could also be willfully naive on the subject of Israel and downright repellent when speaking about the Arabs. Possessor of a remarkably full dance card of charming lovers, she was by her own admission indifferent to sex and continually disappointed by romance. A woman whose wartime reports were filled with compassion for children, she could be a mother from hell to her adopted son. Most notably, her letters reveal that her glamorous exterior and her cool journalistic prose concealed a volcanic, lifelong anger at the liars, frauds and politicians she deemed to be ruining the world she loved to travel.

Although the man with whom Gellhorn will always be most closely associated is Hemingway, he was by no means her first big love. That honor goes to Bertrand de Jouvenel, an unhappily married left-wing French journalist whom the 22-year-old Gellhorn met soon after her arrival in Paris with a typewriter and $75 in cash. Her letters from this time are among the book's most poignant, not just for their tales of impossible love (de Jouvenel's wife would not divorce him) but also for the prescience with which Gellhorn already viewed her role in a world hostile to ambitious, self-reliant women. "It's all getting me down," she wrote to a former high school teacher in 1931. "I think it's horrible to scare people about life merely because they are female and have the emotional make-up -- in certain respects -- of males, or what males supposedly have." Later, she writes with remarkable foresight about what will be her lifelong difficulty embracing domesticity. There is, she already knows at the age of 24, "too much space in the world. I am bewildered by it, and mad with it. And this urge to run away from what I love is a sort of sadism I no longer pretend to understand."

After a break with de Jouvenel and the unexpected death of her beloved father, the 27-year-old Gellhorn met Hemingway at Sloppy Joe's bar in Key West, Fla. Although the world's most famous novelist was still married to Pauline Pfeiffer, it was Gellhorn who accompanied him to Spain, where she covered the civil war as a special correspondent for Collier's magazine. Her letters from Spain to Eleanor Roosevelt are among the book's most memorable (and its saddest, as it is doubtful that our current first lady cultivates similarly provocative and enriching correspondents). "And you know something else," Gellhorn writes Roosevelt from Barcelona in 1938, "this country is far too beautiful for the Fascists to have it. They have already made Germany and Italy and Austria so loathsome that even the scenery is inadequate, and every time I drive on the roads here and see the rock mountains and the tough terraced fields, and the umbrella pines above the beaches, and the dust colored villages and the gravel river beds and the peasant's faces, I think: Save Spain for decent people, it's too beautiful to waste."

Gellhorn moved with Hemingway to La Finca Vigia, their famous Cuban estate, in early 1939, but before long the spacious world beckoned her, and she was soon back in Europe to cover the Russian-Finnish war. From the beginning of their marriage, there is evidence in her letters that she was living with an egomaniacal child who did not like sharing a bed with a literary rival. A spoof pre-wedding contract contains what turns out to be some unintended truth when Gellhorn promises Hemingway that "he and his business are what matter to me in this life, and that also I recognize that a very fine and sensitive writer cannot be left alone for two months and sixteen days." Readers who are tempted to look unkindly on Gellhorn's wifely dutifulness here will be relieved to find that 10 years later, upon reading Hemingway's "Across the River and Into the Trees," she writes to a friend that "I feel quite sick, I cannot describe this to you. Shivering sick. I watch him adoring his image, with such care and such tolerance and such accuracy in detail ... I weep for the eight years I spent ... worshipping his image with him, and I weep for whatever else I was cheated of due to that time-serving." After the bitterness wore off, Gellhorn was able (in a 1969 letter to her son, Sandy) to view her relationship with Hemingway with as much wisdom and equanimity as any of his celebrated biographers:

"He hated his mother, with reason. She was solid hell. A big false lying woman; everything about her was virtuous and untrue. Now I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother ... Deep in Ernest, due to his mother, going back to the indestructible first memories of childhood, was mistrust and fear of women. Which he suffered from always, and made women suffer; and which shows in his writing."

As their marriage dissolved during World War II, Gellhorn focused on her career, though she was frustrated by the U.S. Army's refusal to let female correspondents serve on the front lines. To overcome this, she simply evaded her handlers and worked without escorts from D-Day until the war's end. When she was picked up by soldiers of the 82nd Airborne, she managed to avoid deportation by causing their legendary young commander, Gen. James Gavin, to fall in love with her. At war's end she adopted an infant from an Italian orphanage whom she named Sandy and moved to Mexico, then Rome, from where she watched the plague of McCarthyism squander European goodwill toward her native country. "Having spent my youth reporting on Fascism in Europe, I have a haunted sense of déjà vu, as I watch the ugly, pointless, witless process beginning at home and spreading back to Europe," she wrote to two-time Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson. "As a new experience, [Americans abroad] realize what it is to suffer from moral shame for one's country."

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