AMERICAN AUTHORS CHALLENGE--DECEMBER 2022--MARTHA GELLHORN

Martha Gellhorn may be primarily thought of as one of Ernest Hemingway’s wives, but before she took up with him she had established herself as a highly respected journalist who brought the human anguish of the Great Depression sharply into focus with her reports, accompanied by Dorothea Lang’s stunning photographs, to Harry Hopkins of FDR’s New Deal. She was married to Hemingway for only 4 of her nearly 90 years, and much of that time she was either away from him on an assignment, or fending off his efforts to control her work and manage her time; as the marriage collapsed she wondered "if it ever really worked".

Gellhorn was a woman with strong opinions and the vocabulary to express them. While she had admired Hemingway and his work long before she met him, never did she intend to let his shadow obscure her life’s work, which was more important to her than any of her relationships. She made it a condition of interviews throughout her life that Hemingway’s name not be mentioned, stating that she would not be a "footnote in his life".

Having read a fair amount of Gellhorn’s work, I think it is a shame that Hemingway's name shows up on list after list of great American writers, and hers is much less frequently featured. Her journalism tops his every time, and her fiction is sometimes brilliant. Approximately 10 years before the publication of The Old Man and the Sea, Gellhorn wrote her novel Liana, a classic Pygmalion tale in which this passage appears: "Two men came in one day with a five hundred pound mako. It was amazing that two men in a skiff, using a handline, could have fought and killed that monster...He loved to fish too; he knew that beautiful harsh wonder of a man in a small boat alone on the sea." (Italics mine) So who influenced whom?

Martha Gellhorn covered political upheavals and wars from the 1930s through the 1980s all around the world. She filed what have been described as the best dispatches to come out of Spain during the Spanish Civil War. She was the only woman to land at Normandy on D-Day, and she did it through stealth and deception because her application for press credentials to cover the operation was denied by the British government. She was present for the liberation of Dachau and reported on the Nuremburg trials; she covered the Vietnam war and the Arab/Israeli conflicts of the ‘60s and ‘70s for Atlantic Monthly and The Guardian.

Through her long life, Gellhorn was involved with several men, including General James Gavin of the 82nd Airborne, and her second husband T. S. Matthews, managing editor of Time Magazine. None of those relationships could be described as successful, although some sources have suggested that she and Gavin were very well matched.

Always a traveller, she lived for a time in Kenya, spent most of the last two decades of the 20th century in Wales, then returned to London when blindness and ill health overcame her. She died, probably by swallowing cyanide, in 1998. The following year, a journalism prize was established in her name, to be awarded to those who would "tell an unpalatable truth, validated by powerful facts, that exposes establishment conduct and its propaganda, or ‘official drivel’, as Martha called it."

Wildcard for December will offer Birds of Wisconsin by Owen Gromme.

I've only read about the first 15 pages of Meg Waite Clayton's Beautiful Exiles and I will confess that I am charmed. I may have to hunt down Paula McLain's Love and Ruin this weekend.

I found a copy of Travel's with Myself and Others so if I get time, I will read it.

>1 laytonwoman3rd: The intro has now been populated with gripping information for your enlightenment.

>3 RBeffa: Thanks for the novel tips. I've got Love and Ruin, somehow missing (or just not remembering) that it is about Martha and Ernie. But I definitely want to possess a Gellhorn-written book. Have to look up her publication list.

I also have to complete the book I've been reading on and off about the Little Bighorn (for November's challenge).

I think I have to give Meg Waite Clayton's novel Beautiful Exiles a 4 star rating. This is written as if Martha Gellhorn is telling us her story from December 1936 in Key West Florida when she is travelling with her mother and they encounter Ernest Hemingway, to when it ends with Paris, France, August 1944 with a few quick pages afterwards for the years till Hemingway's death. Before this story starts there is a one page intro from Catscradle Cottage, Wales, 1994 where Martha's son is reading to her, going through some of her letters. "He reads from my exchanges with editors and with H. G. Wells and Eleanor Roosevelt .... When he extracts a crinkly airmail sheet and reads, "Dear Mookie," though, I take it from him and set it to the fire in the grate ..."

If I read a straight biography of Martha Gellhorn I'm not sure I would have gotten a sense of her life during these 8 years as imagined as they are by the author. I knew next to nothing about Gellhorn before this book. This brings Gellhorn and Hemingway to life so to speak. Perhaps I should check that film out of the library before too long.

And also before too long I should read an actual book that Martha Gellhorn wrote such as The Face of War.

"And also before too long I should read an actual book that Martha Gellhorn wrote such as The Face of War." Yes. Yes you should.

Just sort of stumbled onto this thread via Mark's thread. I've been on a bit of a Gellhorn binge the last couple of months and am a huge fan now of her non-fiction anyway. I haven't read any of her fiction yet. I started with The Correspondents: Six Women Writers on the Front Lines of World War II by Judith Mackrell which of course covered more than Gellhorn but she was the star as far as I was concerned. I went on to read her travel memoir Travels with Myself and Another which covered her time in China in 1941 (with an unknown companion 😉who remains unnamed throughout the book), Russia in 1972, the Caribbean in 1942 and Africa in 1962. Fabulous. Not because you'd ever want a similar experience. These travel horrors will stay with me. The description of her hotel in Russia is priceless. Last week I finished Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn (5 stars) and feel now like I am a part of her life, which is pretty much how I feel whenever I read a letter collection because they're so personal. I could easily be talked into reading either The Face of War or The View From the Ground this month. I'm not very interested in her fiction because she didn't think much of it herself, although she produced plenty of it.

>10 laytonwoman3rd: Our county libraries have exactly zero copies of Martha Gellhorn books. There is one copy north of here in St Helena (Napa County), Travels with myself and another which I could request. I'm hoping I will find one at the friends of the libe before too long. I do have a copy of The Face of War however.

>11 brenzi:, >12 RBeffa: I have not read The Face of War, but The View From the Ground was terrific.

I have read two selections from Gellhorn's The Trouble I've Seen: Four Stories from the Great Depression They remind me a bit of Dreiser and a bit of Steinbeck. I like them a little less than I like either of those authors at their best. I'll probably carry on with the remaining two stories in the collection after a break for some other things.

The Amazon deliverer came in the looong driveway yesterday and left packages of books by Martha Gellhorn. I started The Face of War. I'm still reading The Day the World Ended at Little Bighorn for last month's challenge, but I'm edging toward the conclusion.