A woman left unexplained

Caroline MOOREHEAD’S biography of pathbreaking journalist Martha Gellhorn is subtitled “A Twentieth-Century Life,” and a quick look at Gellhorn’s friends and intimates suggests why: They included Robert Capa, Eleanor Roosevelt, H.G. Wells, Leonard Bernstein and Ernest Hemingway (a husband). But it’s the places she wrote about as an eyewitness that reveal much more: Spain and China, during their civil wars; the American South, crushed by the Depression; Czechoslovakia, betrayed by the great powers; Finland, invaded by Russia; Dachau, on the day the Germans surrendered; Israel, soon after its declaration of state; Vietnam, bombarded by America.

Gellhorn’s life was a 20th century one in other ways too, for she epitomized what Doris Lessing dubbed, albeit with irony, a “free woman”: Gellhorn had numerous love affairs, two marriages and several abortions, and she raised an adopted child on her own. Moorehead’s “Gellhorn” is the study of a fascinating woman, so how could it fail to be fascinating too? Indeed, it often is. And yet it shies away from contemplating the most interesting questions raised by Gellhorn’s life and work.

“Happy children have no history,” Moorehead writes, and Gellhorn’s early years were blissfully undramatic. She was born in 1908 in St. Louis to parents who enjoyed what Moorehead calls “a singularly happy marriage.” Her father was a prosperous, progressive doctor, her mother a suffragist. From her father, Moorehead writes, Gellhorn learned “about justice, independent thought, and compassion,” and she remained extraordinarily close to her mother throughout her life.

After dropping out of Bryn Mawr, Gellhorn embarked on a career in journalism and began the restless travels that would become her signature. In 1930 she arrived in Paris, and there, it may be said, her life began. She was 21, tall, blond, rebellious, self-confident, and she plunged: into the political debates of the prewar left, her education conducted “in the smoky meeting rooms of the poorer Parisian districts”; into a four-year affair with journalist Bertrand de Jouvenel, a former lover (and stepson) of Colette; and into learning the craft of writing. “Already,” Moorehead writes, “the bones of what was becoming her particular style were being laid: the subject pinned down by the memorable and seemingly insignificant detail ... which would later turn into a talent for describing the ordinariness in tragedy, the horror of war framed by the smallest of scenes.”

Gellhorn’s style in men was forming too: Like virtually all her loves, de Jouvenel was married when she met him, and, as with virtually all her paramours, she was neither deeply in love with nor sexually drawn to him. “A man is of no use to me,” she once wrote, “unless he can live without me.” For better or worse, her womanhood would be more eventful than her childhood.

The Spanish Civil War was Gellhorn’s Rubicon. It made her into a writer, brought her and Hemingway together and transformed her from a pacifist into an anti-fascist. Spain, she later succintly explained, is “the affair of us all, who do not want a world whose bible is Mein Kampf.” Spain broke her too, for the Republic’s defeat shattered her belief that the “angry sound against injustice” would ultimately be heard. Beyond all this, though, I would argue that Spain and the Spaniards gave Gellhorn something priceless that present-day journalists often sorely miss: a vision of courage and solidarity as simultaneously heroic and quotidian.

After Spain, Gellhorn moved to Cuba with Hemingway and enjoyed an idyll that combined what Moorehead calls “the two aspects of life she most valued -- loving the right person and doing the right work.” (There was also a beautiful old house and lots of sun, which Gellhorn adored -- she preferred to write sitting outside, naked.) But Gellhorn wasn’t good at idylls; as she wrote to journalist John Gunther, “Where I want to be, boy, is where it is all blowing up.” So she returned to a blown-up Europe to cover its liberation, perfecting what Moorehead terms “her particular trademark, the ability to weave the daily scenes of war into an infinitely large picture made up of history and memory and hope.” Hope, though, became harder to come by. The discovery of Dachau, Gellhorn would write 25 years later, created an unhealable wound: “I have never again felt that lovely, easy, lively hope in life which I knew before, not in life, not in our species, not in our future on earth.”

By the war’s end, Hemingway and Gellhorn had split; he had somehow changed (or was it she?) from the “Siamese twin” she couldn’t live without into “a loathsome human being” she couldn’t be around. Alienated from America, she made her home in London, where she raised her son, Sandy, an Italian orphan she had adopted after the war. Theirs was one of Gellhorn’s most anguished relationships. Sandy became a drug addict from whom Gellhorn was frequently estranged; Moorehead quotes from a brutal letter she wrote to him that exposes Gellhorn’s utter incomprehension of unconditional love. (It is doubtful that she knew this.)

Gellhorn continued to cover wars -- in the Middle East, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Panama -- and to have affairs and then another marriage, which she abandoned after a decade. Throughout her 70s and well into her 80s she traveled voraciously, spending stretches of time especially in East Africa, and she gathered around her a new set of friends that included some of London’s most glittering younger writers.

Yet Gellhorn’s last years are a primer on how not to grow old. She was bitter about the state of the world, which remained stupid and unjust. She mourned the happy romantic relationship that had mysteriously eluded her. She was plagued by painful ailments and by knowledge of her lost beauty. She found writing excruciating. Perhaps worst of all, the lifelong reader was losing her sight. In 1998, at the age of 89 and ill with cancer, she swallowed a pill that ended her life, dying in a cream silk nightgown.

What is a 20th century life if not one of contradictions? Gellhorn had plenty. She was passionate and high-spirited -- one friend likened her to “a 1,500-watt bulb” who gave off “vitality, certainty, total courage” -- but Moorehead claims she was a depressive. She slept around a lot but disliked sex -- to enjoy it, she wrote, would be “a defeat,” and she described herself as “the worst bed partner in five continents.” Despite her parents’ satisfying union and her close bond with her mother, she continually sought out other women’s husbands and had, Moorehead writes, “no model for feeling.”Moorehead lays all this out clearly but offers scant analysis. “Neither Descartes nor Freud appealed to her,” Moorehead says of Gellhorn, but this shouldn’t be true of her biographer too.

Moorehead’s greatest flaw, though, is her failure to illuminate Gellhorn’s work. Take, for instance, “Das Deutsches Volk,” an article Gellhorn filed from defeated Germany in 1945 that was part of a series she would later term “paeans of hate.” Moorehead quotes briefly and innocuously from the piece but unaccountably bypasses its outraged, and outrageous, opening, so typical of Gellhorn: “I hid a Jew, he hid a Jew, all God’s chillun hid Jews.... Ah, how we have suffered.” The reader unacquainted with Gellhorn’s work will not, I suspect, come away from Moorehead’s book with a comprehension of Gellhorn’s powerful originality.

Or of its influence on subsequent journalists. Moorehead rightly describes Gellhorn’s approach to her stories: “Her idea of taking the pulse of the nation was to do so, as she put it, from the bottom.... She set out to explore dance halls, markets, factories, brothels.... Everywhere she went, she made notes about what the people ate and earned, how they lived, and what things cost.” In this, Gellhorn is surely the precursor of cultural reporters such as Janet Flanner and, now, Jane Kramer. (Ironic, then, that Graham Greene called Gellhorn’s style “amazingly unfeminine.”) And by focusing on the suffering of civilians (some civilians, that is), Gellhorn charted the brutal trajectory of the 20th century, in which war changed from, primarily, the contest of professional armies to, primarily, the slaughter of unarmed civilians -- a process the historian Eric Hobsbawm has called “the strange democratisation of war.”

In this, Gellhorn’s work foretells that of contemporary journalists such as Gloria Emerson, Philip Gourevitch and David Rieff reporting from, respectively, Vietnam, Rwanda and Bosnia. But Gellhorn’s work raises too -- as does theirs, sometimes more consciously -- the limitations of this approach: Can a concentration on civilian suffering guide a reader toward political judgment? And is the fostering of such judgment a journalist’s job? Are all suffering civilians created equal -- and are all victims necessarily innocent? Moorehead examines the conflict between truth and partisanship in Gellhorn’s work, but she ignores these thornier questions. Instead, she offers too much minutiae -- such as, for instance, far more than this reader needed to know about Gellhorn’s frequent earaches.

“Martha liked people who shaped their own lives,” Moorehead writes. Gellhorn did shape hers -- admirably, and of course imperfectly. “Gellhorn” tells us some important things about the 20th century, whose mad energy smashed the “lovely, easy, lively hopes” of millions. But after finishing this biography, readers should seek out the source -- Gellhorn’s work -- which tells us even more.