30. Martha Gellhorn
AMY: Hey everyone! Welcome to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I’m Amy Helmes…
KIM: And I’m Kim Askew…
AMY: And so, we are actually recording today’s episode a week before the Ken Burns/Lynn Novick Ernest Hemingway documentary starts airing on PBS, but by the time this episode airs, it will be readily available for everyone. I live for these documentaries. I’m so excited. I’ve been looking forward to this one for probably the last 10 months … the minute they announced it.
KIM: As soon as you mention Hemingway, I think of the podcast episode we did a few months ago on Stella Gibbons. She actually said her idea of hell was having to go shopping with Hemingway for fishing rods at Harrods (or something like that).
AMY: Yeah, exactly, I know Hemingway is a literary legend, but he’s also kind of divisive. You either probably love him or you can’t stand him, and it definitely goes without saying that his relationships with (and portrayal of) women are both complicated and, at times, pretty problematic.
KIM: Right, he had some serious “Mommy” issues, didn’t he, as I recall. And he actually had four different wives, is that right?
AMY: Yep. He was notorious for lining up the next lady in his life before he walked out on the current one, but there is one exception to that: Martha Gellhorn, his third wife — she dumped him after five years of marriage. She was sick of his drinking, bullying and jealousy. (Granted, he did kind of have the next wife pretty much waiting in the wings by that point, but it was Martha who officially ended things.) She was a journalist and author with a career of her own, and she had no interest in dialing back her own professional pursuits to suit him, which is what he wanted from her.
KIM: The fact that she had this writing career of her own very much reminds me of Charmian Kittredge London, Jack London’s wife, whom we devoted an entire episode to back in March. In Charmian’s case, she did end up putting her husband ahead of her own career, but I’m intrigued by the fact that Martha Gellhorn was kind of like, “No, I’m outta here.”
AMY: For sure, yet in some ways it’s kind of sad that she’s always been best known for her association with Hemingway. Because there’s so much more to her than that. She famously noted, “I was a writer before I met him, and I have been a writer for 45 years since. Why should I be a footnote to someone else’s life?”
KIM: Uh, yeah, exactly! And I mean, we did learn the repercussions of that with Charmian, because that’s sort of what ended up happening to her. Had you ever read anything by Martha Gellhorn?
AMY: Honestly, no, I hadn’t (which I kind of feel bad about) but I did get a book of her novellas in preparation for this episode, so I’ve been reading those. She published 14 novellas, 5 novels and two collections of short stories. And we can touch on some of the novellas in a moment… her extensive travels and her experience as a journalist definitely shaped the fiction-writing that she did.
KIM: Ooh, I want to borrow those soon when you’re finished — the novellas. Looking into Gellhorn’s life, completely independent of Hemingway, she’s pretty fascinating on her own. Her mother was a famous suffragette, from whom she clearly inherited that fearless, “take-no-crap” attitude. Martha got her start as a foreign correspondent in 1930 when she dropped out of Bryn Mawr college and moved to Paris. But she got fired from one of her first gigs working for the United Press after she reported being sexually harassed.
AMY: Yeah, and I was surprised by that fact. (I mean not surprised that she was sexually harassed on the job because we all know that’s not a new phenomenon), but to think of a woman in the 1930s blowing the whistle and not standing for it is interesting and cool. And then, of course, for her to be fired for it is just so maddening, but not surprising. She obviously did not let this slow her down, though. Her journalism career continued for several years abroad, and then in 1934 she returned to America. She was really interested in the plight of the common man, and so when she was 25, she ended up taking a job working for the Roosevelt administration’s Federal Emergency Relief Administration. As part of this gig she traveled all over the American South observing the grim poverty that so many people were living in during the Great Depression. She later used these experiences and observations as a basis for a book of four novellas called The Trouble I’ve Seen, and these are among the stories that I’ve recently read. They reminded me a lot of Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath kind of thing. They’re very grim, and very journalistic in the portrait that they paint.
KIM: Right, and she may have been a champion of ordinary people, but for a time there, she was actually living in the White House before she even met Hemingway, right? How on earth did that happen?
AMY: I know! Who just gets to go live in the White House? But yes, Eleanor Roosevelt had gone to school with Martha’s mother, the famous suffragist that we mentioned earlier — Edna Gelhorn. Eleanor was very interested in the reports that Martha was making as part of her job with the Emergency Relief Administration, so she invited her to the White House so she could relay what she was seeing to FDR himself. (Sort of “Tell Franklin what you’re seeing,” that kind of thing.) And though Martha actually later got fired from that organization for inciting a riot among unemployed workers in Idaho…
KIM: Whoa!
AMY: Yeah, wow, she sounds like a firebrand! The Roosevelts were fans of hers, though, and they ended up extending an invitation for her to come stay with them for a spell at the White House. So she lived there for two months and she even helped Eleanor with her “My Day” newspaper columns that she wrote. (Sidenote: she was also friends with H.G. Wells. So Martha was hanging in some high circles.]
KIM: Wow. Okay, but it seems really crazy that she’s so associated with Hemingway when she has all this other stuff going on for herself. I mean, wow, how did she have time for him and all of his stuff? And let’s not forget that, like Hemingway, she was a war correspondent, as well, covering every major war for six decades, starting with the Spanish Civil War and ending with the Vietnam War. Wow. She was totally fearless. During World War II she convinced British bombers to let her come along on flights for night bombing raids for example.
AMY: Right, and then her coverage of the D-Day invasion is basically the stuff of legend, and I can’t believe I’d never heard this story before now. Just to set the stage for this, her marriage to Ernest Hemingway was very much on the brink of collapse by this point. It was the summer of 1944. He had even sent her a cable saying, “Are you a war correspondent or a wife in my bed?”).
KIM: First of all, whoa, and second of all, cables are great. I love getting these glimpses into the things that people would put in a cable! Can you imagine?
AMY: Yeah, that’s true. It’s a funny thing to telegraph. But you can imagine her reaction to receiving it, right? Not happy. And it gets worse for their relationship, because with the approach of D-Day, Hemingway managed to secure credentials to go cover the invasion for Collier's magazine. Gellhorn, though (she typically wrote for Collier’s) she was unable to get official press clearance to cover it because each magazine could only send one reporter. (So he basically swiped her spot for Collier’s). She did not let that stop her, though. She snuck onto a hospital ship by flashing an expired press badge, and she lied that she was there to interview nurses. They let her get on to the Red Cross ship. She couldn’t believe it even worked. But once she was on board, she locked herself in the bathroom of the ship in order to just be able to sneak along for the ride, basically! She stayed there for the course of the night and the next morning, she looks out a ship window and there are the beaches of Normandy! So she manages to get off the boat later by posing as a stretcher bearer. So she’s blending in, but she’s actually helping evacuate patients and all that. She’s doing her part to actually help with what’s going on. But in effect, she wound up getting to the invasion site before Hemingway did… so she beat him to the punch, because all of the other actual credentialed journalists had been kept farther offshore waiting on boats. So her report of the incident wound up being published in Collier’s first. Not only was she the only woman on the beaches of Normandy in the days following the Allied invasion. (It was her and 160,000 men!), she was also the first American correspondent to land on French soil after the troops did.
KIM: Okay, I feel like giving a standing ovation after that. I mean, that’s incredible! Where is the Steven Spielberg movie about this story? Oh my gosh, this is incredible! It’s movie-making stuff! Wow, wow, wow.
AMY: So much cooler than just the fact that she was married to Ernest Hemingway. This is the story, right?
KIM: Totally. This is the story, yeah. She also reported from Dachau when it was being liberated, which naturally was an extremely sobering experience, and her accounts of what she witnessed there are almost excruciating to read. She also ended up adopting an Italian orphan boy while she was in Europe. It required assistance from Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt for her to be able to bring him back to the U.S. with her after the war.
KIM: So then following her divorce from Hemingway, she had a string of relationships, including another marriage, but really, her work remained her predominant passion in life. She even wrote, “Be advised, love passes. Work alone remains.” And she continued to report on wars until she physically could not anymore. That was in the 1980s — her eyesight was starting to fail her. I think being in the middle of war zones is where she actually felt most alive. She liked to live on that knife’s edge of danger and adventure. And a conventional life that most women of her era were living would never have suited her. She just needed that adrenaline rush all the time. In the later decades of her life, she called London home, and at the age of 89, like Hemingway, she took her own life — swallowing cyanide. She had been suffering from ovarian cancer and that just became too much for her to bear. That was in 1998.
KIM: Wow. What a life. And having learned all this about her makes me so much more interested in learning more about her. I know there was a movie starring Nicole Kidman and Clive Owen called Hemingway and Gellhorn, which could be worth checking out. And I’ll do that now.
AMY: Yeah, I think you can rent it on Amazon Prime. And of course, don’t forget to check out the PBS Hemingway documentary (which I’m sure she factors into) if you haven’t already. I know it’s not going to disappoint!
KIM: So if I wanted to start reading some of Gellhorn’s work, where do you think I should start?
AMY: Well, like I said, she’s wrote five novels including one called A Stricken Field, which is set among refugees in Czecholslovokia just prior to the Nazi invasion… There’s another book, Liana, which is set in the French Caribbean. But I would actually recommend starting with her novellas. Many critics deem her novellas better than the novels even. There’s a collection that came out from Knopf in 1992… and that includes The Trouble I’ve Seen, the one I’ve mentioned from her time working for the Roosevelt administration. That collection also includes The Weather in Africa, which is actually three novellas set in Africa. I expected those to be very “Hemingway-esque,” but they’re not at all. They reminded me more of maybe Isak Dinesen or something like that. I think my favorites, though, are the stories about marriage and relationships. Some are set in England, some in the States. There was one passage I loved from a story called For Richer or For Poorer that I’m going to read, because it will give you a sense of how (unlike Hemingway) she is really able to draw her female characters so well. So this is just about a character who is sort of luring a man in, and I think it’s just very telling:
She watched Tippy with a practiced, almost a scientific eye. She had seen this happen so often: the male blooming, expanding, flowering, and not because one took any real trouble, simply because one listened. Years of successful experiment had taught her that she need, in fact, hardly listen at all. It was done with a gleaming, approving look, while thinking of whatever one chose to think about; with an encouraging or admiring smile — you could always sense, either by their expressions or the note of their voices, when the moment had come to enlarge the smile into a delighted laugh; with an occasional frown of sympathetic agreement. It was unbelievable that women actually went to bed with men to get what they wanted, when all you had to do to ensnare the gentleman was listen or seem to listen. Heavens, Rose thought, while Tippy’s voice droned senselessly around her, how I listened to darling Alan. It was a completely safe and infallible method, and the first thing mothers should tell their daughters.
KIM: It even reminds me of all the dates I had through online dating where I would listen because the guy would just be talking and talking and talking and there wasn’t really much to say, and I wasn’t really interested in saying more because I knew it wasn’t the guy for me, or whatever. But they always wanted another date and they would desperately think that I was interested in them too!
AMY: I agree! I’ve had those conversations. They’re so wrapped up in their own ego that they don’t even get that you’re just like, “Uh-huh, uh-huh!” Just with a smile on your face.
KIM: It’s all it takes, it’s true. She’s absolutely right. For some men.
AMY: Maybe that’s how she landed Ernest.
KIM: It makes me wonder. So this mention of male/female dynamics reminds me also of the “lost lady” we’re going to be discussing next week. Amy Levy wrote a critique of the Victorian “marriage market” in her novel Reuben Sachs, which is set in an affluent Jewish community of London. We’ve got Dr. Ann Kennedy Smith joining us to discuss this one. Until next week, don’t forget to sign up for our Lost Ladies of Lit newsletter to keep up to date on all the future authors we’ll be covering. And if you have a moment, please give us a rating and review wherever you listen to this podcast.
AMY: Those five-star reviews really help! So long everybody! Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes.