Martha Gellhorn

Beautiful Exile: The Life of Martha Gellhorn — Reporter, Lover, Traveller and Rebel

By Carl Rollyson

Duffy and Snellgrove, 2001

284 pages, $19.95 (pb)

REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/26015

Even without being the lover of HG Wells and the wife of Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn would still be famous as a war correspondent whose sensitivity and power of prose portrays the human tragedy and moral barbarity of war.

A war correspondent from the 1930s to the 1990s, Gellhorn reported war in all its grimness — in Spain, China, Finland, Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Vietnam, Panama and El Salvador — "keeping the record straight" in the face of twisting propaganda of military and government.

Gellhorn was born in St Louis in 1908 to a family of liberal campaigners for social reform. A rebellious and irreverent streak made her passage through school and college a bumpy one and "her search for escape from the mundane and the mediocre" propelled her to Paris and journalism in 1929, an affair with HG Wells and the first of her three marriages to men of the non-Marxist left.

Swept up by the economic and political storms of the 1930s depression, Gellhorn worked for President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal administration as a field investigator into the living standards of the employed and unemployed. Appalled by scenes of social misery, Gellhorn was sacked after the FBI labelled her a "dangerous Communist" for inciting protest. She turned her experiences into a book, The Trouble I've Seen, whose depiction of the degradation and dignity of the Great Depression's victims shot her to national fame — and the attention of Ernest Hemingway whilst holidaying in Sloppy Joe's bar in Key West, Florida.

Gellhorn convinced Hemingway to accompany her to Spain, then in the throes of civil war, where her implicit support of the Spanish Republic and hatred of fascism, and her ability to vividly portray the horrors of war through "direct, concrete and deeply felt" writing, combined to outshine Hemingway's self-centred reportage.

Strafed and machine-gunned, Gellhorn showed courage to get the story of Spain out to the world, standing out from the pack of war correspondents whom she criticised for "writing less than they know and caring less than they should". Journalism for Gellhorn was "more than a trade or profession — it was a commitment to fighting for a better world".

Marrying Hemingway after his divorce, Gellhorn found that the intellectual, artistic and sexual passion began to sour as the possessive Hemingway became increasingly erratic and emotionally unstable in response to her independence. As World War II raged, Hemingway languished in Cuba, wasting away his talent, while Gellhorn threw herself into war reporting.

Women were not being allowed into combat zones, so Gellhorn contrived to reach the action. She hid in a hospital ship bathroom, sneaking ashore just after the Normandy landing by the Allies in France. Confined to a nursing training camp outside London after this breach of army discipline, Gellhorn absconded and took an unauthorised flight to Naples to report on the war in Italy.

Aside from her military adventures, Gellhorn's journalism delved into the social and political aspects of the war, reporting on the London poor, Polish Jewish refugees, Dachau concentration camp victims and Dutch anti-Nazi resisters.

After the war, Gellhorn fired off an angry volley against the Cold War launched by the US, attacking the House Committee on Un-American Activities and deploring the obsession with "national security and the communist threat".

After a respite in Mexico, writing cheap journalism to pay the cheap rent and adopting an Italian war orphan, Gellhorn returned to the fray with a collection of her war reporting, The Face of War, in 1959. Updated and re-issued many times, it remains a model of conscientious and humanitarian reporting which lets the devastating human effect of war speak for itself.

This approach dominated her coverage of the Vietnam War (as a freelancer because none of the establishment media would employ her). Where the typical journalistic fare, studded with "kill ratios" and "body counts", was no better than sports reporting, Gellhorn's articles on orphanages, refugee camps and hospitals presented eyewitness accounts of relentless suffering in a war of "sheer terror" against a popular national liberation struggle. John Pilger has described Gellhorn as "the greatest US reporter in Vietnam".

A near total media embargo on Gellhorn's articles, and blacklisted by the US-installed South Vietnamese government which denied her a second visa, showed that her honest and humane reportage was hitting some raw nerves. Hemingway, who said many embittered and vindictive things about Gellhorn, was, however, on the money when he said that she "is at her best when angry or moved to pity". In Vietnam, as in Spain, she was both in abundance.

Further agitated by the social and political struggles of the late 1960s, Gellhorn returned to the economic class war. While the US was spending US$2 billion a month on the war and dropping more bombs on Vietnam than were dropped by all countries in WWII, Gellhorn reported on American streets "bombed by poverty". Gellhorn's hope in the radical youth briefly challenged her liberal politics of trust in Democratic Party presidents with "liberal rhetoric", from Roosevelt to Kennedy to Clinton.

Gellhorn rounded out her last decades reporting on the British miners' strike and the Greenham Common women protesting against nuclear weapons, the US-sponsored death squads in El Salvador, the lethal idiocy of nuclear weapons, the US invasion of Panama, the anti-Turkish immigrant pogroms in Germany. She always sided with the victims in their suffering and resistance. Cancer finally claimed Gellhorn's life in 1998.

Rollyson's praise of Gellhorn is genuine: "Journalism of the finest clarity" by the "finest observer of war's devastating results". He is, however, keen to berate Gellhorn for some of her views he opposes.

Rollyson claims that Gellhorn was a "fiercer critic of democratic governments than dictatorships". She was too harsh in her criticisms of the US as the "number one threat" to the world and too "soft" on the Soviet Union. She was apologetic about the "dictatorship" of Cuba, and she ignored "the ruthless future the Vietcong would bring about" in Vietnam after liberation. She failed to give "even the briefest hearing" to "the other side of the story" about the war waged by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's "democratic" government on the miners in 1984-85 — the "other side of the story" being Thatcher's "justified" strategy of "taking on the excesses of the labour unions" to attempt to "modernise" the economy and "to make Britain competitive in the world market".

Rollyson does admit that Gellhorn saw Stalinist Russia as a "claustrophobic prison-land" and reported the hardships and faults of Cuba along with its genuine achievements. The "Vietcong" bloodbath of imperialist propaganda did not eventuate and "making Britain competitive in the world market", decoded into its class meaning, meant making Britain's capitalist class stronger and richer by crushing working-class self-defence organisations. Rollyson's anti-communist fetishes are as childish in their absolutism as anything alleged in Gellhorn.

However, Rollyson has no complaint with Gellhorn's Zionism. Gellhorn remained an uncritical admirer of Zionist Israel and a hater of Arabs — her anti-war antennae failed her when she saw Israel's army as "democratic and humane" and "careful to avoid civilian deaths" of Arabs. Gellhorn also failed the Gulf War test (Iraq being an Arab country).

Her shortcomings aside, Martha Gellhorn made an enduring impact on war journalism because she cared deeply about people's suffering at the hands of cruel, lying governments and their abuse of power.