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MARTHA'S QUEST | PAGE 2 OF 2_ These qualities shone through her work from the beginning. In "The Third Winter," the young Gellhorn grounded her partisan reporting in the matter-of-fact details of civilian deprivation: "In Barcelona, it was perfect bombing weather. The cafes along the Ramblas were crowded. There was nothing much to drink; a sweet fizzy poison called orangeade and a horrible liquid supposed to be sherry. There was, of course, nothing to eat. Everyone was out enjoying the afternoon sunlight. No bombers had come over for at least two hours." Gellhorn visited the front when she could, but was drawn more often into shops and factories, homes and hospitals. The climactic scene of "The Third Winter" -- in a ward of wounded, sick and hungry children -- provides unforgettable images of what Gellhorn called "the face of war." She once said that she had never known any male reporters who even went near hospitals. "But I was a great frequenter of hospitals because that's where you see what war really costs." When I visited Gellhorn again, in January 1997, we talked mainly about her reporting in World War II -- which she covered from China to Finland and from Normandy to Dachau. "But in 1944 and '45," she said, "I could do my job only through stealth, because I had no press credentials. Ernest stole them!" She explained that her sponsor, Collier's magazine, was allowed only one correspondent in the European Theater, and that Hemingway, who could have obtained credentials from almost any newspaper or magazine, decided that he wanted to write for Collier's. In effect, he decommissioned his wife. Gellhorn stowed away on a hospital ship in the D-Day fleet and went ashore as a stretcher bearer. After she was caught and returned to England, she had to promise that she would report the rest of the war from well behind the lines -- but she then proceeded across Europe on her own, staying clear of any U. S. officer above the rank of captain. "I had no food rations," she said. "I ate only what was given to me by ordinary soldiers. And as a result, I saw the war from a truer angle, through the eyes of the infantrymen who finally won it." In Vietnam in 1966-67 Gellhorn criticized U.S. policy by scrutinizing its professed aim: "winning the hearts and minds" of Vietnamese citizens. Again she visited civilian hospitals, as well as orphanages and refugee camps, asking where in the official statistics these casualties were even acknowledged. "Hearts and minds, after all, live in bodies," Gellhorn wrote. Her stories were published in England, but American newspapers rejected them as too antiwar, and the South Vietnamese government refused to renew her journalist's visa. "I don't know if any of my reporting had the slightest use," she told me, "but it seemed necessary to do it anyhow, to get things on the record, if only to make it harder for somebody to lie later on." When Yagoda and I published our anthology last summer, I sent Gellhorn a copy with a thank you for her part in it. But her biographical note in the book included a poison passage: "Gellhorn's war reporting began in Spain. She traveled there with Ernest Hemingway, whom she later married. (He dedicated 'For Whom the Bell Tolls' to her.)" I had mentioned Hemingway because he was featured in the anthology, not only in Lillian Ross' profile but in an early story of his own from the Toronto Star. Still, I had overstepped my acquaintance with Gellhorn -- and worse, I had distorted the crucial facts of a daring journey. She had traveled to Spain alone, with only a knapsack and $50. "I was very cross," Gellhorn wrote, "that you insisted on putting in Hemingway and the information was false. I did not go to Spain with him; anything but. I made my own way with some difficulty crossing the border of Andorra on foot. I dislike terribly this harping on Hemingway and as far as I know you do not mention the marriages of other authors in your book. So if there is another edition please remove all that." The passage will indeed be removed, in belated penance for what Gellhorn considered a journalistic as well as personal offense. As a politically engaged writer, she sometimes made fun of "objectivity" as a byword. But she always remained a stickler for accuracy. After she could no longer read, she listened regularly to books on tape -- and wound up writing an angry op-ed piece for the Observer denouncing tapes that have been abridged and yet carry no warning labels. When I heard of Martha Gellhorn's death, I remembered my last sight of her, standing in sunlight, still lovely -- tall, fine-boned, bristling with energy. I remembered her enthusiasm about a snorkeling trip to Oman; she was about to go shopping for a wet suit. But most of all, I remembered a single sentence that Gellhorn had inserted as an afterthought in a 1967 essay: "I wrote fiction because I love to, and journalism from curiosity which has, I think, no limits and ends only with death."
Kevin Kerrane is the coeditor, with Ben Yagoda, of "The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism." |
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