For ever taking leave
Victoria Glendinning
MARTHA GELLHORN: A LIFE by Caroline Moorehead Chatto, £20, pp, 550, ISBN 0701169516 1\4 artha Gellhorn, an American who lost faith in America, was one of the most important war-reporters of the 20th century. She was not interested in briefings from the top brass, though she sometimes used her blonde charm to get the top brass to fly her where she needed to go. What she did, in her own words, was to 'bear witness' to what war did to innocent people, especially children. She found her stories on the street and in the orphanages. Her style was pared-down and succinct, powered by outrage.
She believed in the ultimate supremacy of goodness and justice until she went into Dachau. Then, seeing what she saw, she gave up hope. Caroline Moorehead makes Dachau the hinge and the determining event of her intelligent and sensitive biography. Gellhorn never gave up, but after Dachau it was pure anger, not optimism, which fuelled her.
I am not without bias. I know the author of this biography. I knew Martha Gellhorn. My own name appears in the index, This is the kind of thing that gives book-reviewing a bad name. Blame the literary editor, who decides these things.
The upside is that I can, at least, tell you whether the Martha Gellhorn whom one meets in these pages is the Martha Gellhorn whom I knew and loved. The answer is yes, absolutely. But new friends such as myself whom she made in her seductive and generous old age in London could hardly have guessed what a wretched period her fifties and sixties had been for her. She went to Vietnam at the age of 58 and wrote about what she saw with her usual effective, pent-up fury; but she despaired of her frequent inability to write, of the loss of her youthful looks and elasticity, and of her stalled relationship with her adopted son Sandy (which came good in the end).
In her youth and in her prime, whenever she was in the front line, or on the move, or in bombarded cities, telling it how it was, she was fully herself, fearless, living (and often loving) in the present tense. Peacetime was the problem. She felt rest less. uneasy, as if she fitted in nowhere. All her attitudes were extreme. Sentimentality was a sin, as was humbug. (Being overweight was simply anti-social) She was partisan in her political attitudes. In wars, she always knew who were the goodies and who were the baddies, and had no time for 'all this objectivity shit'.
Moorehead has certainly 'got' Gellhorn — her funniness, her rage at injustices perpetrated on the poor and the powerless, and at the stupidity and immorality of governments: her remorselessness; her personal elegance and fastidiousness; and her intolerance of boredom. Relationships, houses, landscapes, cities that seemed to fulfil all her needs and desires, ended up boring her to extinction, rather soon. She had no capacity for permanence. Once she got bored, she took flight, abandoning whatever she had set up. I would not dare to guess how many hundreds of times in the course of this book Moorehead had to key in the words 'bored', 'boring', and 'boredom', usually in direct quotations. Gellhorn was a prolific letter-writer, her way of letting off steam, She was full of contradictions. She was an ace war-reporter, but longed for more recognition of her (highly autobiographical) fiction writing. She loved luxury, and could endure prolonged and unspeakable physical discomfort. She loathed domesticity and what she called 'the kitchen of life', and yet she built or renovated nearly 20 houses — from Cuba to Mexico to a Kenyan mountain-top, from six storeys in London's Chester Square to a Welsh cottage. And then she left — just as she left her first marriage to Hemingway, and her second to Tom Matthews. She loved the company of men, but didn't see the point of sex until she was over 40. Sex was just 'paying the debt' for companionship, informed conversation, laughter. She needed to be alone a lot. Yet she longed for tenderness, and for some masculine approximation to the unconditional love she had from her mother.
This can't have been an easy book to write. To put Gelthorn's war-reporting in context — and Gellhorn 'attended wars', as she herself put it, in Spain, Finland, Czechoslovakia, the Caribbean, Germany, China, Vietnam — Moorehead has had to condense chunks of political and military history spanning more than 60 years. She is more than up to this, though the necessary compression results, sometimes, in a breathless 1066 and All That quality. If she has 'got' the essential Gellhorn, and she certainly has, it's also true that Gellhorn has 'got' her, almost like a ventriloquist. Gelthorn's stories as told by herself, in her reporting, travel writing and correspondence, are unimprovably vivid, and packaged with deadpan humour. It is frequently unclear, in this dense and galloping narrative, what is Moorehead's own and what is a paraphrase or indirect quotation from Gellhorn — until you are arrested by some zany image or joke-mistake (such as 'Di° Button' for De Dion-Bouton, a make of car), and then you know.
In the end Martha, who was always leaving something or someone, left life itself at the time of her own choosing. Read this book in order to know who it is with whom you are dealing, and then read Martha Gellhorn's reportage in book form: The Face of War and The View from the Ground.
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