While I continue working on my narrative of Dinah and Vincent (Jimmy) Sheean, I thought it would be fun to resurrect this, written in 1990 right before my book about Dorothy Thompson appeared. My adventures in journalism were rarely so revealing — or ridiculous.
Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, together forever, like it or not.
Let me tell you about my hunt for Martha Gellhorn. Let me tell you how I ran afoul of a number of legends at once.
Does everyone know who I’m talking about? Martha Ellis Gellhorn: born in St. Louis, educated at Bryn Mawr, sentenced by temperament and circumstance to life as an American literary expatriate. She is a journalist, a novelist, a “tourist of wars,” part of that world-wide “Federation of Cassandras”—her own phrase—whose job it is to keep an eye on the deviltry of nations. Gellhorn has spent most of her eighty-odd years in peripatetic exile, moving from Paris and Madrid to Rome and Cuernavaca, with stops in Kenya, Cuba, and other places too numerous to mention. She has an apartment in London and a cottage in Wales, and is recognized in every sort of chronicle as one of the great reporters of the century.
“I belong to a global fellowship,” Gellhorn has written, “men and women concerned in the welfare of the planet and its least protected inhabitants.” During the 1960s her criticism of American foreign policy got her barred from Vietnam. Right now she is in a rage about Panama, but her objection to the American invasion that toppled General Noriega is only the most recent and heartfelt complaint in a lifetime of political bête noirs. It was Gellhorn, during the anti-fascist crusade of the 1930s, who pled the cause of Republican Spain in the Roosevelt White House. She covered the invasion of Normandy, the Battle of the Bulge, the fall of Berlin, the horrors of Dachau. She has known a majority of the literary notables of her era, but she is not impressed by her own or anyone else’s celebrity. Long ago she asked herself the question, “Whose side are you on, Martha?” and answered it to her complete satisfaction: “On the side of the downtrodden. Even, at the risk of pomposity, on the side of justice.” She regards fame as being useful only to the extent that it gives her a ready-made platform for views that are humanitarian, pro-people, liberal and even leftist in bent.
Otherwise, at the beginning of her career and for many years afterward, Martha Gellhorn’s publicity in a male-ordered society was concerned almost exclusively with her golden hair and her shapely legs. Her legs, indeed, turn up in the published accounts of her life and times almost as often as the name of her first husband, Ernest Hemingway.
There, I’ve said it. Martha Gellhorn was married to Ernest Hemingway. From 1940 to 1945. You would think that the mention of this long-dead literary union, this independent fact of history, would raise not an eyebrow, ruffle not a feather, anywhere in the world. But you’d be wrong, and you couldn’t be more surprised than I was to find it out.
Let’s get one thing clear before we go any further. I have no interest whatsoever in Ernest Hemingway. I don’t give a damn about the Lost Generation, deep-sea fishing, big game, bullfights, or macho rodomontade. If the Friends of Martha Gellhorn had advertised in the international press; if they had sent up a trailer with the Goodyear Blimp or hired the Wicked Witch of the West to write out their needs in the air in smoke, they could not have found a man more disposed than I am to ignore Ernest Hemingway. And when the editors of Lear’s magazine, excited by the prospect of doing a story about a legendary woman of letters, asked to me profile Ms. Gellhorn, we agreed that the story would be about her, not about HIM. I quote from the letter I sent Ms. Gellhorn by way of introduction:
I want to emphasize that Lear’s is looking for an intelligent story about your working life and public career, not a re -hash of Hemingway lore. I am especially interested in talking with you about the different kinds of writing you have done and what we might expect in the future.
I should have guessed I was in trouble before I even licked the stamp. Not long previously (and only by coincidence), I had had a call from my editor at Little, Brown, who wanted me to know that she had sent an advance copy of American Cassandra, my biography of Dorothy Thompson, to Martha Gellhorn in London. She was looking for a blurb, of course, but she can’t have been ready for the lecture she received.
What made Little, Brown think that Martha Gellhorn had time to read a book about Dorothy Thompson? Ms. Gellhorn enquired by return of post. Who would have the leisure (and, by implication, the want of serious purpose) to drop her work for such a thing? For the record - - and this information had not been solicited - - Ms. Gellhorn had met Ms. Thompson exactly once, sometime in the 1930s, and had found her “imposing but charmless,” words that were already ringing in my ears before I got acquainted with what I’m now regarding as the Martha Gellhorn Mafia. I had no kind of idea, when I started this piece, how difficult it would be to bring it to conclusion. More to the point, I have never encountered a surlier, less helpful bunch of characters than the tough -guy journalists (almost all of them British) with whom Ms. Gellhorn evidently likes to surround herself. Every phone call I made; every avenue I took to approach my subject turned out to be difficult, tiresome, and calculated to make me wish I was writing about royalty again. That, I can tell you, takes some doing.
All right, let’s be fair. There were two or three considerate people in Ms. Gellhorn’s entourage who endeavored to help me on my way to Nowhere. One is a lady biographer in London, friendly with Ms. G., who tried to warn me what I was getting into. Another is Gary Fisketjon, of Bright Lights, Big City fame, who is (or was) Gellhorn’s book editor and who remarked correctly that she is “absolutely sui generis,” that she bows to no one, that she doesn’t do anything she doesn’t want to do, and that, so far as he knew, while my deadline was whizzing toward me, she was cavorting underwater, “somewhere off Belize.”
I should explain that Martha Gellhorn is an avid snorkeler, and that she travels far and wide in the interest of her sport. Evidently, having failed to find time for Dorothy Thompson, she went straight to the Caribbean for a vacation. In the meantime, said Fisketjon, I would do well to check with Bill Buford, the editor of Granta, for whom Ms. Gellhorn regularly writes, and who would seem to know better than anyone else at any given moment a) where she is, and b) what she’ll do and what she won’t.
People have told me after the fact that I can count myself lucky to have dealt with Bill Buford as I did -- at a remove, on the trail of someone else. Granta is Britain’s and the world’s nobbiest literary magazine and Buford its originating genius. He is apparently also Martha Gellhorn’s eminence grise at the twilight of her career. To say that he’s “difficult” doesn’t begin to tell you what life with Buford is like. Gellhorn herself has been quoted as saying that “lots of people have Bill Buford stories,” and that “the angry people have the best.” I wound up, not angry, but amazed - - stupefied, flabbergasted to think that a single person could fail to return so many phone calls. Over a period of nearly three weeks, I left messages for Bill Buford everywhere but the men’s room at Kennedy Airport (where he was spotted more than once, I believe, because he jets back and forth from London to New York as often as another man might come down from White Plains). I managed to talk to him, finally, only when it was no longer necessary; that is, after Ms. Gellhorn had risen from the sea and come back to England.
I had hurried to London myself by that time, brow a-furrow, heart aflame, with the intention of throwing myself on Ms. Gellhorn’s mercy. We have friends in common, and I found it hard to imagine she would put the kibosh on my project when she found out how sincere I was. But she did. She wasn’t impressed at all by my protestations that Lear’s wanted a story about her professional, rather than her personal, life. She demanded to have it in writing - - “in writing!” she exclaimed -- that the name of Ernest Hemingway would not be mentioned anywhere in the story or even anywhere in the magazine.
She was serious: nowhere in my article was it to be revealed or even suggested that Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway had once been husband and wife. And there were to be “no tricks,” she said, no “biographical boxes” to give the game away. “I do not want my name associated with his,” Ms. Gellhorn announced.
Now: What would you have done? Would you have gulped, as I did, and told Martha Gellhorn that you understood her feelings and that you would do your best to honor her conditions? Would you then have asked yourself, when you hung up the phone, what the hell you were saying?
I hate to be the one who breaks this news, but Martha Gellhorn’s name is associated with Ernest Hemingway’s, and it’s going to be for as long as either one of them is remembered. It is no negative reflection on Ms. Gellhorn’s reputation that once, when young, she was mucked up with Papa. It is the height of something or other - - arrogance? egotism? abashment? remorse? - - to insist that the union be forgotten by history. “Goodness to Betsy,” I said to myself, cribbing a line of Ms. Gellhorn’s own from the Paris Review, where she once savaged Lillian Hellman as a “self -serving apocryphiar,” “what an important lady. How marvelous for Miss Gellhorn to be Miss Gellhorn.”
And wouldn’t you know it: At that very moment Bill Buford called me back. He was using his sexy, conciliatory voice (which I’d also heard about), and he assured me that Ms. Gellhorn meant what she said: No Hemingway.
Why not? I said.
“She wants to be known as a writer in her own right,” Buford replied.
I asked him who had ever disputed it. I had to repeat the question, because Buford didn’t answer, and I realized suddenly that there were people in his office and that he was carrying on several conversations at once. I asked him how I could get to write for Granta - - “Read a couple of issues,” he said -- thanked him, and hung up.
And Lear’s canceled the story. Of course. Who wouldn’t? When I called Ms. Gellhorn to tell her she had won, I thought I heard her whisper, “Good,” on the other end of the line. I know she breathed a sigh of relief, and for the first and last time ever I felt almost fond of her.
“It’s that connection to the Great Dead that they want,” she said. “I resent and loathe it.” She sounded tired, like an old lady, and I wondered if that wasn’t really the problem. She’s getting on, I figured. She’s had enough.
On the other hand, she had just returned from a holiday in Belize. Snorkeling, no less. She may have convinced herself that her willfulness in the matter of Ernest Hemingway is actually a form of discretion. She might regard it as a noble refusal to capitalize on a former heavyweight title - - “Mrs. E. H.” - - or as an expression of that right to privacy she insists on having while she mingles with the Great and Creative at the edge of History. But I say it’s silly. I say it’s too bad. I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.
Well, you’ve outdone yourself: the other side of Peter Kurth… Hilarious! I’m so happy you included a subject who ‘never made it.’ And what a character. Really? Notes on the airport mirrors? I don’t doubt it! Go Peter go!