"I didn't like sex at all"

In 1954 she married former Time magazine editor Tom Matthews and settled down in London to a cozy life of socializing. "The main thing to keep firmly fixed in your mind is: Tom is not Ernest. Correspondence will reach the addressee, unopened. Lunch will never be à trois. Passes will be freely received in the spirit in which they are delivered. All is well. No purdah, no chains, no scenes, no one shooting out the living room windows. Times are different now." Not surprisingly, security brought Gellhorn an ample dose of discontent. Marriage to Matthews taught her something most readers will have spotted 10 years earlier -- she was not built for lengthy cohabitation. Although she was prone to intense relationships with remarkable men (a long, secret affair with Laurance Rockefeller, brother of David and Nelson, was to come), her heart was never wholly in it. Nor, it seems, was her body, according to this 1972 letter:

"I started living outside the sexual conventions long before anyone did such dangerous stuff and I may say hell broke loose and everyone thought unbridled sexual passion was the excuse. Whereas I didn't like sex at all ... all my life idiotically, I thought sex seemed to matter so desperately to the man who wanted it that to withhold was like withholding bread, an act of selfishness ... what has always really absorbed me in life is what is happening outside. I accompanied men and was accompanied in action, in the extrovert part of life; I plunged into that; that was something altogether to be shared. But not sex; that seemed to be their delight and all I got was a pleasure of being wanted, I suppose, and the sort of tenderness (not nearly enough) that a man gives when he is satisfied. I daresay I was the worst bed partner in five continents."

After her inevitable breakup with Matthews, Gellhorn remained in London, which was to be her home until her death in 1998, though she also spent time at her houses in Kenya and Wales. Late middle age was tough on her, as she watched her looks and energy fade at just the time her professional star dimmed. "I have always looked forward to my old age," she wrote in 1960, "being more and more convinced that it would be far funnier than this neither fish-nor-fowl period of middle age, which I am bound to admit bores me."

The one quality she did not lose was her anger, which only seemed to increase as she got older, allowing her to become the sort of feisty grand dame who always seems to be surrounded by a coterie of younger artists and intellectuals. "I never for a moment feared Communism in the U.S. but have always feared Fascism; it's a real American trait," she wrote after observing Barry Goldwater in 1964. She was particularly incensed by the Vietnam War. "I cannot endure this hideous wicked stupidity; to be at once cruel and a failure is too much," she wrote about Lyndon Johnson. "Our President is a disaster and will get worse; never trust a Texan farther than you can throw a rhino." Her white-hot rage at the war was only stoked by a 1966 trip to Vietnam for the Guardian newspaper (that she was forced to pay for herself). Her 1971 letter to Pentagon Papers liberator Daniel Ellsberg is eerily prescient about our current constitutional mess: "The President assumes that the American people are moral imbeciles ... The Founding Fathers cannot have intended a President and his small group of appointed advisors to perform like a monarch surrounded by his court. As if the people's representatives and the people themselves were a general nuisance, and the job is to keep the whole tiresome bunch quiet: manipulate them." Even more prophetic is a 1962 letter to Stevenson, in which she claims that the "people of the United States of America need suffering to learn dignity; but I hope to Christ they are spared it, simply because they would not suffer alone and the rest of the world has had enough."

Less inspired is her lifelong fealty to Israel (brought about by a 1945 visit to a newly liberated Dachau), which caused her to refer to an Egyptian soldier in the Suez crisis as a "Wog" and leads to the following regrettable passage in a letter to Leonard Bernstein: "[The Arabs] are not endearing ... depressing and idiot, is my feeling, and inimical as well. I see perfectly why they hate Israel; it's too clean, and it makes some sense out of real life." Her bluntness also falls flat when turned upon her 20-year-old son Sandy, who is on the receiving end of a letter that might have just as easily come from the pen of Lady Macbeth. "You are a poor and stupid little fellow in my eyes. I'd be so damned ashamed to be you, I'd want to jump off a cliff."

Despite these sour notes, Gellhorn's capacity for anger remains the most beguiling aspect of this fine collection. Although there is plenty she can teach her successors about what it means to be a truly independent woman and a ferociously truth-seeking journalist in a world that does not always appreciate either of these virtues, it is her rage that truly endures, as freshly appropriate to our dark times as it was for the era in which it was born.

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