Martha Gellhorn: A Life
By Caroline Moorehead
Vintage, 550pp, $65
Martha Gellhorn's career, as we discover in Caroline Moorehead's fine biography, had its origins in an almost-fictional intrepidity: in the spring of 1930, aged 22, Gellhorn arrived in Paris with two suitcases, a typewriter and $75. She found cheap lodgings in what turned out to be a brothel and made her way directly to the offices of The New York Times, where she informed a bureau chief of her willingness to start work immediately as a foreign correspondent. The journalist laughed. Gellhorn didn't get the job - not then, anyway. But superficially she was personable and attractive to the men who largely monopolised the profession; and truly she was utterly fearless, a glutton for lived experience.
It helped that she lived in interesting times. Gellhorn's career proper began during W.H. Auden's "low dishonest" decade - overshadowed in America by the Depression and in Europe by the Spanish Civil War. In North Carolina she witnessed first-hand the corrosive effects of mass poverty, while in Spain she reported from Madrid when the destruction of the small Basque town of Guernica marked "the moment when indiscriminate bombing of civilians became an acceptable and terrifying tactic of war". By the time World War II drew to a close, Gellhorn was a veteran: when refused passage during the D-Day landings she stowed away on a hospital ship, reaching the conflict before many other correspondents - including her fully accredited then husband, Ernest Hemingway.
The signal event of Gellhorn's professional life occurred soon after, when she visited the recently liberated concentration camp of Dachau. The resulting article was chilling. She wrote: "We are not entirely guiltless, we the Allies, because it took us 12 years to open the gates of Dachau. We were blind and unbelieving and slow, and that we can never be again - if ever again we tolerate such cruelty we have no right to peace."
While she went on to cover wars, both hot and cold, in Eastern Europe, South-East Asia, the Middle East, Africa and even - at the age of 81 - the US invasion of Panama, this sense of guilt and horror lingered. After Dachau, Moorehead explains, Gellhorn "lost her belief in the instinctive certainty that truth, justice and kindness would always, in the end, prevail".
The biographer is excellent in tracing how this pessimism coloured Gellhorn's reportage. Despite a lifelong respect for the facts, she grew contemptuous of "that objectivity shit" - while her style became increasingly self-disciplined, suppressing pity in favour of practical response. Her motto was borrowed from the Russian dissident Nadezhda Mandelstam: "If there is nothing else to do one must scream."
But Gellhorn was less hectoring moralist than champagne humanist: lover of beautiful things, physically vain, someone who moved easily among the great and the good - although her talent for friendship had its blips. The determination that fuelled her career often manifested itself as ruthlessness in her personal relations: she could be callous and dismissive, and Moorehead (who knew her from childhood) admits to fear in her presence. Happily, it doesn't show here: Moorehead dispenses her censure judiciously, using just enough to inoculate the perfection of the work against the imperfections of the life. Moorehead's biography - like James Cameron's description of Gellhorn - has "a cold eye and a warm heart".
After several decades of relative neglect, the resurgence of interest in Gellhorn is timely: the re-publication of her non-fiction writings in the '80s and '90s placed her work back in the cultural frame just as attitudes to the way conflict was reported were being re-examined. The bodiless video game of the first Gulf War inspired nostalgia for a time when reporters entered war zones, notebook in hand, and reported what they saw. Today, in the aftermath of that conflict's sequel, her words (from her first article on Vietnam) surely vindicate such an antiquated approach:
"We are not maniacs or monsters; but our planes range the sky all day and all night and our artillery is lavish and we have much more deadly stuff to kill with. This is indeed a new kind of war and we had better find a new way to fight it. Hearts and minds, after all, live in bodies."
Geordie Williamson is a London reviewer.