Salon | Media Circus: Martha's quest


- - - - - - - - - - T A B L E__T A L K God or some disastrous force suddenly destroys TV and the Internet. The end of civilization or redemption for mankind? Speculate in the Media area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y All Karen, all the time By Christopher Hawthorne Performance artist Karen Finley is now selling her thoughts and confessionals on a pay-per-minute line (03/11/98) The crying over Lot 49 of Thomas Pynchon's letters By Dwight Garner By making her collection of the reclusive author's correspondence public, an agent has become the Linda Tripp of the literary world (03/10/98) The (not so) mighty Quinn By Harry Jaffe Washington society maven Sally Quinn has been on a mean-spirited crusade against the Clintons ever since they refused to kiss her ring (03/09/98) Hollywoodland By Catherine Seipp And the loser is ... (03/06/98) A bad week for the First Amendment By Eric Alterman Can a reporter write a book about a subject he covers? (03/05/98) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE MEDIA CIRCUS ARCHIVES		m a r t h a ' s...q u e s t______ With compassion and guts, pioneering reporter Martha Gellhorn revealed the real face of war. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - BY KEVIN KERRANE \| When Martha Gellhorn died Feb. 15 at the age of 89, many obituaries headlined her as the third wife of Ernest Hemingway. She would have resented that. Gellhorn once remarked that she had no intention of being a footnote in someone else's life, and she granted some interviews only on the condition that Hemingway's name not be mentioned. In her own right, she was an estimable fiction writer (author of eight novels and collections of stories) and, more importantly, a pioneering journalist whose war dispatches spanned more than half a century -- from the Spanish Civil War to the U. S. invasion of Panama. In January 1996 I visited Gellhorn in London with my friend Ben Yagoda. We were editing an anthology of literary journalism and hoped to secure reprint rights for "The Third Winter," a 1938 dispatch from war-torn Barcelona. We could have handled the permission request by mail, of course, but both of us loved Gellhorn's writing and the brave spirit behind it, and we jumped at the chance to meet this heroine of journalism. As we made our way to her apartment in Cadogan Square, Ben and I kept reminding each other: "Don't mention Hemingway ... Don't mention Hemingway." After being buzzed inside Gellhorn's handsome building, we took a small elevator to the top floor, which was one large apartment, all hers. The elevator opened into a foyer, where we were greeted by a lean and luminous woman who shook our hands firmly. Her accent was American -- St. Louis by way of Bryn Mawr -- but with a few distinctly British phrasings. Her first question became an announcement: "Would you chaps like coffee or whiskey? I'm having whiskey." She led us into a big, book-lined sitting room with a spectacular view of South Kensington. The books and the view weren't much good to her, she explained, since her vision had deteriorated badly after a cataract operation five years earlier. But her gaze was direct and penetrating. She lit a Salem, sipped her whiskey and said: "Tell me about this anthology. First of all, what other women will be in it?" I mentioned Rebecca West and Svetlana Alexiyevich. Ben added Joan Didion and Lillian Ross. "Oh?" Gellhorn asked. "What work of Ross will you reprint?" Ben looked at me helplessly. "Well," he said, "we're planning to include a profile that appeared in the New Yorker about 1950 ... called ... 'Portrait of Hemingway.'" There was a second's silence, and then Gellhorn's laugh boomed through the room. "Oh, that thing," she said. "It made Ernest look like such a fool that it's a wonder he didn't go and shoot himself ... which of course he did do a few years later." She laughed again, but without malice. The ice, if there ever was any, had been broken. Over the next hour, and another tall whiskey, Gellhorn reminisced about Bryn Mawr, where she knew (and didn't much care for) Katharine Hepburn; about a London party where she and T.S. Eliot tried to top each other by reciting the names and stops of all the streetcar lines in their hometown of St. Louis; and about the house of H.G. Wells, where she once stayed for weeks as a guest. Wells nagged her to write an article, then surreptitiously plucked it off her desk, submitted it to the Spectator without her knowledge and pocketed the fee. Ben and I were dizzy when we left, and not just from the whiskey. We were charmed by Gellhorn's fierce honesty and bright energy. In a few weeks, she said, she would be flying to Brazil to research an article about the murder of street children. While there, she hoped to keep herself sane and fit by snorkeling as much as possible. Her article appeared that August in the London Review of Books. It had been hell to write -- not only because she had to report on terrible crimes, but because she was trying to compose by touch-typing when she could barely see the keys and the text. But her curiosity and compassion were undimmed, even at 87, and the story justified the admiration expressed long ago by British journalist James Cameron, who observed that Gellhorn "writes with a cold eye and a warm heart." N E X T+P A G E+\| "Perfect bombing weather"