A dime store Jane Austen
by Robert Messenger
-Late in her life, Martha Gellhorn (1908-
1998) produced a masterpiece of travel writ-
ing. Travels with Myself and Another (1978)
belongs in company with the classics of the
genre: Peter Fleming's Brazilian Adventure,
Robert Byron's Road to Oxiana, Eric
Newb/s Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, and
Bruce Chztwir^s In Patagonia—2iS a rule, the
work of self-deprecating young Englishmen.
Gellhorn's recountings of horror journeys in
China, the Caribbean, Russia, and Africa are
fiill of caustic humor, and the author comes
through as a strong-willed, difficult, and
thoroughly irresistable woman.
Travels was a departure as Gellhorn's
reputation was from earnest journalism. It's
ironic tone, though, had always been the
dominant note of her private correspon-
dence. She was also one of the last truly
prolific letter writers, at every turn of her life
finding outrage and pleasure to relate to her
friends. The letters have just been collected
and establish her as one of the last century's
best correspondents.^
Cannot tell you how I loathe lecturing, the
listening faces—I want people to talk back—
the awfiU "celebrity" angle which I have never
met before and makes me sick—the flattery
"Miss Gellhorn you are an inspiration," Good
God, I have been a not always admirable
[ The Collected Letters of Martha Gellhorn, edited by
Caroline Moorehead; Henry Holt, 531 pages,
$32,50,
22 The New Cmznon March 2007
character but nothing to justify being called an
inspiration—and the horror of those fright-
ened, lost, uninformed, grateful, faintly slob-
bering people.
The collection is five hundred pages of
literary gossip: "time is running out if I
wish to state that Mr. Spender is an ass. He
always was an ass but a nice timid type ass.
In his advanced years he has become a
pompous ass, which is deplorable." Confes-
sions: "Lamb: I haven't done any very con-
cise thinking about you and I don't believe I
will," to a new lover. And ironic travelogue:
"This afternoon I am going to the riots.
What I love about France is their sense of
order inside a framework of anarchy. The
Communists plan a manifestation at the
Pare des Princes, the Fascists automatically
arrange a counter-manifestation. All Paris
knows (they just avoid advertising it under
'theatres')." The book is a tantalizing
reminder of what we have lost by replacing
the letter with the telephone and email.
When Gellhorn is remembered today, it
is for her war reporting—and for having
been Ernest Hemingway's third wife. From
the Spanish Civil War to the struggles in El
Salvador and Nicaragua in the 1980s, she
hardly missed a war and filed reports filled
with self-righteous anger. She produced a
dozen books of fiction, and the work that
sold struck the same note. In the period of
her life when she struggled the most—the
1950s and 1960s, post-Hemingway and
 A dime store Jane Austen by Robert Messen£jer

postwar—she wrote a great deal of fluff for are the perils of getting what you want, and
light magazines to support herself and her Gellhorn was quite good at getting what
adopted son. It seeped into her fiction, she wanted. In a 1950 letter—a forty-seven
which, finally free of Hemingway's per- pager sent from Mexico to a new lover—
vasive influence, found dark humor in the GeUhorn quoted what her mother had told
world of society and wealth. Her mature her: "When you were very young what in-
fiction is the work of a sort of globalized terested you was France, and you found or
Dawn Powell, and that fine note is regularly were found by the most complete French-
struck in her correspondence. man available. Then you were interested in
writing, so you found or were found by
Adartha Gellhorn was born in St. Louis in what you thought the finest writer. In the
1908 into a comfortable, supportive family. war, you were interested in bravery and you
She was well-educated at progressive found or were found by one who was con-
schools, encouraged in her literary ambi- sidered perhaps the bravest of all."
tions, and thoroughly frustrated by her The Frenchman was Bertrand de Jouve-
years at Bryn Mawr. She longed for Europe nel, whom she met in 1930. He was one of
and got there in 1929 after six months as a the major political thinkers of the last cen-
cub reporter on a Hearst paper in Albany. tury—concerned by liberal democracy's in-
She was twenty-one and ambitious and very ability to preserve itself amongst the
sure of herself Just arrived in Paris, she freedoms it fosters. In these years, he was
presented herself at The New Tork Times^s involved in progressive politics and the
bureau and said she was prepared to work quest for Franco-German rapprochement.
as a foreign correspondent. She was let He knew everyone in the European political
down fairly easy and also picked up the elite—at the League of Nations he had been
useful bit of information that the reason her private secretary to Edvard Benes. Gellhorn
hotel room had a mirror on the ceiling and saw a hero: a brilliant intellect and an ideal-
no central heat was that it was in a brothel. ist politician. He was already married (and
She was part of the Hemingway Craze. gossiped about for having been seduced by
Inspired by The Sun Also Rises, hundreds of his stepmother, Colette, at sixteen) when he
young Americans appeared in Paris lugging fell head-over-heels in love widi Gellhorn.
typewriters and dreams. In a 1931 letter put- For four years, the affair went back and
ting off an admirer, Gellhorn noted: forth—flight and pursuit, domestic bliss
and passionate separadon, pregnancy and
I take my code out of Hemingway. Unbeliev- abortion—until de Jouvenel orchestrated a
able, isn't it. Do you remember A Farewell to final break.
AtTus. The hero talks to the woman; she is Through it all she was trying to write. She
worried about something; and he says: produced her first novel, revised again and
"You're brave. Nothing ever happens to the again and finally published as What Mad
brave," Which is somehow enough—a whole Pursuit in 1934. It's a particularly hideous
philosophy—a banner—a song—and a love. all-too-autobiographical account of a trio of
And something to fill up time—busily, pas- callow young women whose youthful
sionately. idealism leads them to college rebellion,
journalism, mild acdvism, Europe, and sex.
It was quite a crush. Gellhorn's life falls into Gellhorn disavowed it. (She also began a
three distinct periods: 1927-1936 when she novel about pacifists in France and Germany
wanted to be Hemingway; 1936-1945 when that she abandoned as hopelessly muddled.)
she was with Hemingway; and 1945-1998 Back in America, she was taken up by Harr)'
when she wanted not to be known for Hopkins at the Federal Emergency Relief
having been married to Hemingway (she Administration (FERA) and sent off to report
referred to his name as the "H-word"). Such on how the New Deal was affecting textile

The New Criterion March 2007

 A dime store Jane Austen by Robert Messenger

workers. She found a subject worth writing Gellhorn admitted to literary social climb-
about and a heroine to replace de Jouvenel: ing: "also perhaps there was always a bad
Eleanor Roosevelt. When Gellhorn was fired weak point in everything: I did tend to col-
for encouraging some Idaho workers to lect kings." Wells was another of the kings
break the windows of the FERA office, she she collected on the way up. Their cor-
went to stay in die White House and there respondence cools when Gellhorn netted
wrote The TroubleFve Seen (1936). her lion: Ernest Hemingway.
The book is a sequence of four long
stories and begs die question of just what Ihey met in December 1936 in Key West
was "new" in die "New Journalism" of the where Gellhorn, her mother, and brother
1960s. Based on her FERA travels, the walked into Sloppy Joe's bar. He was in-
stories—of a woman trying to hold her standy smitten, but accounts vary of who
family together in the South with relief pursued whom. Gellhorn always claimed
money, workers trying to organize and they met by accident and he pursued her,
strike, a young man trying to find a job diat but most witnesses claimed she shamelessly
will fit with his ideals and romantic illu- inserted herself into the Hemingway mar-
sions, and a young girl who turns to pros- riage. (There is certainly no possibility that
titution to be able to affiard a desired pair of the meedng was accidental. Sloppy Joe's
skates—are grounded in a reporter's detail was famous as Hemingway's hangout,
and remain evocative in the way of Walker which the good reporter Gellhorn would
Evans's or Dorothea Lange's Depression have known.) He was finishing one of his
photographs. The characters never come weakest books. To Have and Have Not, and
alive, though; the details lack die telling na- itching to get out to Spain where a war was
ture evident in Hemingway's best stories, starting up. His best wridng from this
and they don't build the way that James period is the two African stories: "The
Agee's portraits of Alabama sharecroppers Snows of Kilimanjaro" and "The Short
do in "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men." Happy Life of Francis Macomber" (both
What's strongest in each story is the 1936). Each deals with a man destroyed by
opening pages where the kernel of the idea the woman in his life. Hemingway felt
is presented. That Gellhorn could flat-out trapped and finished as a writer. He hoped a
write comes dirough on every page, but she war might bring renewal, and the blonde,
had trouble seeing into diings. Her work tanned, tempting, and available Gellhorn
was an immediate and impassioned reaction appeared at just the right moment. The
to what she saw, one that didn't change early days of the affair were spent plotting
upon reflection. how they could meet up in Madrid and
Trouble was a success thanks to positive keep Hemingwa)''s wife, Pauline, at bay.
reviews and heavy promotion by Eleanor The Spanish Civil War became one of the
Roosevelt in her syndicated column "My prime causes of Gellhorn's life, but she went
Day": "I cannot tell you how Martha to Spain in pursuit of a man. Hemingway
Gellhorn, young, pretty, college graduate, was in pursuit of inspiration. He had never
good home, more or less Junior League been much interested in polidcs, seeing
background, with a touch of exquisite Paris himself above such petty commitments. But
clodies and 'esprit' thrown in, can write as he fell in with the Comintern-dominated
she does." A preface from H. G. Wells, one left in Madrid and was content to remain
of the stars of the literary left at the time, there—preferring the better access to infor-
also helped. They had met while Gellhorn mation and drink the Russians could
was living at the White House. She stayed provide. His dispatches for the North
with him in England, he stayed with her in American Newspaper Alliance favored the
Connecticut. He helped her with publish- Republic to the point of outright lies. It was
ers. In diat forty-seven-page 1950 love letter. all minor work for the novelist anyway; he

24 The New Criterion March 2007


was hoarding his material for fiction. Once
back home writing stories and the novel
that became Eor Whom the Bell Tolls, he was
loyal only to his code of action and con-
cerned to evoke the pity of war, not any sort
of political line. His stories acknowledge the
communist infiltration of the Republic and
the atrocides committed by both sides.
Gellhorn felt differendy. She believed in
the Republican cause and turned a blind eye
to the Russians. She carried a righteousness
about the war with her for six decades. Even
in 1995, reviewing the movie Land and
Ereedom in the Daily Telegraph, she denied
that there had been Soviet influence on the
Republican government or that there had
been a campaign of terror orchestrated by
the government against the trade unions.
She told the historian Philip Knighdey
when he interviewed her for his book about
war reporting. The Eirst Casualty, that she
never read any books about the war as "they
might get the facts right but never capture
the emotions, the commitment, the feeling
that we were all in it together, the certainty
we were right."
Pacts are inconvenient for smug virtue.
Gellhorn was no fellow-traveler, though.
Her pity was evoked by the horrors of
Spain, and the devoudy leftist press corps
convinced her that the West had betrayed
the Republic with the arms embargo and
general disinterest. So was born Gellhorn's
and-Americanism, which was really a sort of
elite snobbery; hatred of the country that
gives you security and material comfort
seems to always be common among
privileged classes. But Gellhorn also hated
Russia and despised the Soviet-dominadon
of central and eastern Europe. She believed
that Israel was the great good to come out
of World War II. This conviction was born
out of witnessing the vicdms of the
Holocaust building their own state, nur-
tured by courage, determinadon, and
everything but self-pity. Israel sdrred a pride
and astonishment that was righdy never
shaken in her life, even when so many of her
lefdst friends chose to continue their and-
A dime store Jane Austen by Robert Messenger
Americanism with support for Nasser—she
called him "a plain pustullant sore" in a 1956
letter—and Arafat.
Ohe wrote her first pieces of war report-
ing—at Hemingway's suggesdon—from
Spain: accounts of daily life under siege in
Madrid. Her grasp was always of quoddian
details—how people lived when their house
was bombed out; how to get food in a city
under siege; how to dodge ardllery fire and
bombs. When Gellhorn is read today, it is
almost always diese reports and the others
collected in The Eace of War (1959, revised
1967 and 1986). She's famous for this work,
but it is maudlin stuff. There are two ways
to report on combat: to focus on what an
individual can know—confusion, violence,
horrors of batde—or to try to paint a
coherent, and hence larger-scale, picture.
Gellhorn adopted the former but consis-
tendy failed to ground the stories in a single
person's experience—almost essendal to
create an accessible narrative. She instead
wrote up what she had seen as travelogues
that read as nothing more than random
thoughts. Take this from her 1944 piece
about "The Gothic Line"—a German
defensive works in northern Italy:
A fat old Italian in Cattolica, who had worked
for twelve years on the Pennsylvania Railroad,
was trundling his pitiful possessions home on
a handcart. The Germans had occupied Cat-
tolica for three months and had evacuated the
citizens one month ago, and during this
month they looted with horrid thoroughness,
like woodworms eating down a house. What
they did not wish to steal, they destroyed; the
pathetic homes of the poor with smashed
sewing machines and broken crockery and the
coarse linen sheets and towels torn to shreds
bear witness to their pointless cruelty. This old
man was going home to a gutted house, but
he was a healthy happy old man, and he was
overjoyed to see us and he invited me to visit
him and his wife next day. The next day his
wife was dead, as the Germans came over that
night and plastered the little town with and-
personnel bombs.
The New Criterion iVfan:^ 2007 25
 A dime store Jane Austen by Robert Messenger
This is one complete paragraph towards
the end of her essay, preceded by one
describing how the faces of German
prisoners seemed to show signs of atrocities
committed and followed by one where she
sits on an Adriatic beach reading and
watching ships bombard the coast. That her
experiences are more important than the fat
old Italian's is the basic message. Yet if
Gellhorn had told his tale in fiill, she would
have climbed from the pathetic to the truly
mournful: showing us the tragedy of war in
the specific. When I read about that poor
old Italian, I thought of Hemingway's tiny
Spanish Civil War story "Old Man at the
Bridge," which uses an old Spaniard to
evoke the actual day-to-day cost of modern
warfare. Gellhorn could have transformed
the man she met at Cattolica into some-
thing lasting, but instead she moved on
with the Canadian troops and got on with
her time at the wars. When people admire
her combat reporting, they are admiring her
pluck in going and getting around U.S.
Army censorship, not the finished product.
Yet, her style of impassioned reporting
could work when she had the whole story.
She filed "Obituary for a Democracy" from
post-Munich Prague, and the piece is a
powerful tableau of a coimtry in the throes of
defeat. Her reaction—that Czechoslovakia
had been betrayed and was finished—was
dead-on, and the piece leads the reader to the
same conclusion. It remains a powerflil in-
dictment and a poignant reminder of the
costs of appeasement. She never had a com-
bat story so completely in hand, and the
pieces in The View from the Ground, the 1988
collection of her non-combat journalism, are
much stronger than those in the oft-
reprinted Face ofWar.
Cjellhorn abandoned Europe in 1938 and
set up house with Hemingway in Cuba. He
bullied her, but he put her on the path to
literary success, insisting on her writing
every day and on the immense efforts good
fiction requires (as well as passing along a
celebrity that was an entree with editors and
publishers). In their short marriage, she
26 The New Criterion Afarc^ 2007
wrote two novels, A Stricken Field (1940)
and Liana (1944), and the stories collected
in The Heart of Another (1941), as well as
long pieces for Collier's. But the marriage
was a battle royal. They'd been companion-
able and happy in the turmoil of Spain.
Once home, her independence rankled him;
he preferred a nursemaid/sex object for a
spouse. She dragged him to China to report
on the war there in 1940, and then chided
him about staying in Cuba after the Pearl
Harbor attack. She went to Europe without
him—covering the air war, D-Day, the
Italian campaign, the race for the Rhine, the
Bulge, and Dachau—which eflfectively
ended their marriage. He followed and
covered the liberation of France, but they
were at war, while at war. They were
acrimoniously divorced in 1945.
For the rest of her life Gellhorn was
thought of as a war reporter and—to her im-
mense chagrin—as an ex-Mrs. Hemingway.
She would cover more wars and especially
write passionately about Vietnam, but she
lost her perch at Collier's and worked only
intermittently as a journalist. (She would
write what she called "bilgers" for the glossy
magazines when she needed money, but she
had trouble finding regular venues for her
essays.) She was forty-eight and settled into
an unsettled life that altered only in geog-
raphy and the cast of characters about her
until her death in 1998. There were many
lovers, even a husband for nine years. She
built and fied homes—London, Washing-
ton, Mexico, Rome, London again, Spain,
Africa for a long stretch, and finally a Lon-
don flat with a Welsh cottage—seemingly
utterly dissatisfied with her life and reputa-
tion and in fear of boredom. Travel was her
refiige, and her letters are full of admoni-
tions to herself to live only in hotel rooms or
to make certain trips annually. Just after the
war in another impulsive move—she had
recently had an abortion—she adopted an
Italian orphan. She thought motherhood
would bring her happiness, but Sandy was
an inconvenience that she often just ignored.
The references to the boy (and the letters to
him) in the Collected Letters are cringe-induc-

ing. From youth the boy was terrified of his
mother and ended up a drug addict and
serving three stints in prison. They came to
terms over the last ten years of her life, but
Martha Gellhorn was utterly ill-fitted to
motherhood and did appallingly little to
make up for this fact.
W h a t Gellhorn did do was write: fourteen
hours a day in good stretches. (Her motto
was a phrase from Mauriac: "'Travail,
I'opium unique^) When the war ended, she
was consumed by the need to write about
what she had seen at Dachau. The Point of
No Return (1948) is an engaging story of
two U.S. soldiers: an infantryman and his
Heutenant-colonel fighting their way across
Europe. The duo come to life but their
story is abandoned at Dachau. The young
Jewish infantryman is so horrified by what
he sees on a sightseeing trip to the camp
that he plows his jeep into a group of Ger-
man civilians by the side of the road. He
expects to be tried for murder, but the army
just wants to bury the incident. The novel
ends with him deciding to try to make a life
with his Luxembourger girlfriend. We do
not learn what comes of either of our two
heroes, and a book that had set itself up
well, just ends. Gellhorn was trying to make
some point about the death camps—still al-
most impossible for novelists—and fiimbled
a chance to make points about the dif-
ficulties good soldiers face in transitioning
from war to peace.
The Point of No Return did see her finally
breaking the Hemingway spell. Her wartime
fiction is marred by a mock-Hemingway in-
sistence on drawing metaphysical meaning
from small details. Point shows her begin-
ning to write with a different sort of passion,
giving vent to a despair that results in sharp
little stories that have depths of cruelty to go
with pleasant acceptance. She stopped trying
to expose political and social wrongs, and
instead wrote about the passage of time in
human relationships and the difficulty of
finding a place that is home. The break-
through was the short stories collected in
The Honeyed Peace (1953). They are sweetly
A dime store Jane Austen by Robert Messenger
dark, capturing the immense disappoint-
ments people feel in middle age when the
hopes of youth are gone.
The best piece of the collection is "Venus
Ascendant." A no longer young and quite
poor Englishwoman is living in Rome with
her cousin, whose husband is a diplomat. An
Italian lawyer pursues her solely to see if
English women "were as different from
other women as their cool hearty manner
and improbable clothes implied." His atten-
tions and money (and the sex) teach Moira
sensuality in dress and manners. She's
ecstatic, but the inevitable reality sets in—the
lawyer has a wife and soon enough eyes
another woman. Moira has nowhere to turn
when a crisis is brought on by her deteriora-
ting relationship with her cousin. It was at
such a point in her earlier books that
Gellhorn melodramatically had Liana, in the
eponymic novel, commit suicide or Rita, in
The Stricken Field, sneak into a safehouse to
overhear the Gestapo torturing her dissident
boyfriend. Moira pulls herself together and
prepares to return to London and menial
work. People make such decisions every day,
and Gellhorn's introduction of her personal
anti-romanticism—read cynicism—into her
fiction made the books that followed
humorous and touching.
The long stories collected in Two by Two
(1958), Pretty Tales for Tired People (1965), The
Weather in Africa (1978) and the novel His
Own Man (1961) all draw the reader into a
similar world of urban sophistication and
post-colonial whites. (In 1992, Knopf pub-
lished a convenient collection. The Novellas of
Martha Gellhom, which is easily acquired in
second-hand shops.) In a 1961 letter to
Leonard Bernstein, Gellhorn described her
own surprise at her new style: "I have evi-
dently had a moral change of life; I am be-
coming a dime store Jane Austen, the poor
man's Nancy Mitford (with vermiform con-
science)." She was also now confident in her
writing, honing and revising to make the
stories move swiftly. The novels became
novellas, the novellas stories.
Mrs. Hapgood, a woman noted for her sense
The New Criterion March 2007
 A dime store Jane Austen by Robert Messen£er

of order, drove aimlessly through the Loire In i960, in another letter to Leonard
valley. From time to time she wept at the Bernstein, she summed up the presidential
wheel. The Loire valley might have been made election: "One never thinks in terms of
for Mrs. Hapgood since its order verges on good, but only in terms of least bad: Ken-
the sublime. When not blinded by tears or by nedy preferable to Nixon, but imagine
that clenching of the ego which also blinds, having such a choice of manpower." (She
Mrs. Hapgood was able to see the castles on eventually had dinner at the Kennedy White
their spread lawns, the river running silver be- House and got sucked into the Camelot
tween sandbanks and willows, the forests. mythos: "Brains are fashionable again, and
This beauty affeaed some unused part of her so is laughter.")
anatomy, neither her brain nor what she In these years, she was away in Africa for
would have called her heart. She supposed large parts of the year and kept up with
that the emotion which then invaded her must friends—particularly SybiUe Bedford, Lucy
be joy. Mrs. Hapgood had never traveled un- Moorehead, and Diana Cooper—by mail.
accompanied and without a plan. Mrs. Hap- She was profoundly upset about the Viet-
good was fifty-one years of age and tortured nam War, and letters were her primary
by growing pains. literary output. Finally in the mid-1970s, she
began writing again and produced Travels
Such is the opening of "The Fall and Rise of with Myself and Another and The Weather in
Mrs. Hapgood," a wicked little story from Africa. These sold well, and Gellhorn found
Pretty Tales for Tired People about a woman herself rediscovered. The 1980s were an In-
whose discovery of her husband's infidelity dian summer for her amongst the young
drives her into the arms of another man London literary set: Bill Buford, who got
whom she uses to get the life she realizes her books back into print; Nicholas Shake-
she wants and deserves. The weighting is speare, who published her in the Telegraph;
careful, and Gellhorn makes us feel for all the travel writer and publisher John Hatt;
three characters and enjoy their fates. the biographer Victoria Glendinning; the
The impulses that influenced her postwar journalist James Fox; and left-wing repor-
fiction had ever been present in Gellhorn's ters like John Simpson and John Pilger.
letters where the bright light was turned They eulogized her on her death as a war
upon herself. Here is not a nice person, but correspondent and anti-fascist first and
one whose laughter was infectious and foremost—and buried a minor but dis-
whose faults can be taken as human. She tinctly pleasing literary achievement.
was a woman of strong hates and en- Martha Gellhorn was not some leftist
thusiasms: saint. In her letters at least, she never took
herself so seriously. When her peers were
I got a book by one William Burroughs, read settled into producing their memoirs, she
about forty pages and I would be literally sick. wrote her best book. Travels with Myself, and
What a scurvy thing. The printed and glorified avoided the elderly writer's trap of insisting
(by critics) work of a dope addict; filled with that everything just used to be smarter and
ugliness and hate. There's another, much ad- sharper and better. Gellhorn had a durable
mired, called John Updike; I did plow through sense that work was better than idleness and
Run Rabbit Run and was again amazed at the laughter was better than sorrow. "Late in
total recall these chaps have—no detail too life, to my rage, I've become a woman writ-
small to forget or note—but bored; and could er. Until they speak of 'men writers' this is
not even dream of reading a book called "Cen- an insult." Someone who could write this is
taur." hard to resist.

28 The New Criterion March 2007