by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched a PBS
item called Extraordinary Women: Martha Gellhorn, which proved a lot more interesting than some of
the other shows in this series have been (though I can appreciate her struggle
to make it, I’m really not interested enough in the world of fashion to be that
big on the story of Coco Chanel, whereas Gellhorn covered wars and wrote
journalism, something I can identify with and legitimately admire). Like me,
she was a red-diaper baby, getting her politics almost literally with her
mother’s milk — her mom, Edna Gellhorn, was a suffragist and feminist in the
early part of the 20th century and Martha grew up with a low
threshold of tolerance for men who belittled women — which makes it seem
utterly preposterous that she would end up married to Ernest Hemingway, since
just about every word Hemingway wrote about women reveals his utter contempt
for them (Hemingway was one of those straight men who would probably have been
happier being Gay if his attractions had run that way; as it was, he needed
women for sex but had little other interest in them). In the mid-1920’s she
attended Bryn Mawr women’s college (also Katharine Hepburn’s alma mater) but
quit before graduating to pursue a career as a journalist. She also became a
pacifist, something this show makes sound as if it were merely a trendy view
she picked up in the inter-war years. In 1930 she went to Paris to make a
career as a foreign correspondent and ended up in an affair with a married
French nobleman (all her life she was attracted to men who were married —
including Hemingway, who divorced his previous wife to marry Gellhorn and then
wanted her to be the traditional housewife, cooking his meals, cleaning his
house, washing his clothes and presumably changing his typewriter ribbons for
him). She returned to the U.S. in 1934 at the height of both the Great
Depression and the New Deal, and she went to work for the government to report
on how the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) was helping the
plight of America’s rural poor — though, true to character, she was much more
interested in writing about the rural poor than documenting what the federal
government was doing for them. (The idea that the federal government both can
and should be doing something about
America’s poor people is itself an index of how dramatically the ideological Zeitgeist has shifted; these days both major parties pay lip
service to preserving the middle class but couldn’t give a damn about the poor
— the Democrats more or less defend the existing social programs left over from
the 1930’s and 1960’s but don’t dare suggest extending them, while the Republicans can’t wait to take full
power in Washington, D.C. so they can get rid of what’s left of the social
safety net once and for all.)
Gellhorn’s articles attracted the attention of no
less than Eleanor Roosevelt, who offered to put her up as a houseguest in the
White House so she could write a book based on her FERA researches. Then the
civil war broke out in Spain, and despite (or maybe because of) her pacifism
Gellhorn realized that it was essentially a dress rehearsal for World War II,
with Germany and Italy intervening on the side of Franco (and the Soviet Union,
more cautiously and less effectively, coming in on the side of at least some of
the elements in the republican government Franco was out to overthrow). She’d
already met Hemingway in a bar (where else?) in Florida, but they re-met in
Spain and became lovers, covering the war and ultimately getting married and
returning to the U.S. Once World War II broke out Gellhorn was determined to
get to the front and write about it — she made it to the D-Day landing by
disguising herself as a nurse and sneaking on board a hospital ship — and at
one point Hemingway tried to sabotage her by offering himself as a war
correspondent to the same magazine she was writing for, Collier’s. After the war she adopted a son, Sandy, from an
Italian orphanage, but given her peripatetic lifestyle she really wasn’t cut
out for motherhood — especially single motherhood — and he grew up estranged
from her and became a drug addict, though eventually he cleaned up and they
reconciled. In the 1960’s she returned to the battle front for one trip to Viet
Nam (the U.S. refused to let her back in once she wrote a series of incendiary
articles comparing the U.S.’s excuses for intervening in Viet Nam to those of
the Nazis and the Soviets) and did one final article about the youth gangs in
Brazil before she hung it up, retired and finally committed suicide that was
partly self-euthanasia (she’d been diagnosed with ovarian and liver cancer and
also had gone almost totally blind) and partly a determination that she ought
to decide for herself when she was going to leave this life instead of having
that decision made for her by the increasing decrepitude of her body. Gellhorn
is a fascinating character who towards the end (this show features an actor
reading from her works but also has some late-in-life interview footage from
Gellhorn herself) expressed only two regrets: she’d never written a
best-selling novel (one of her friends is quoted here as saying she was too
locked into the real to be a capable writer of fiction) and she’d never had a
successful relationship.
