The above was said of journalist and writer Martha Gellhorn by her husband Ernest Hemingway. I do not agree. I sat up till all hours last night reading Gellhorn's letters spanning 60-odd years I recommend them to anyone in search of late summer holiday reading.
Gellhorn was a woman of immense physical and mental courage who covered the war in Spain, went into Dachau and witnessed the D-Day landings first-hand.
In her sixties, she went to Vietnam, a war she opposed passionately, and she loathed Nixon and the reactionary politics of the Republican Party.In her seventies, she wrote about the miners' strike for the Guardian.
A friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, her political commitment started in her youth when she covered the effects of the Great Depression in a book called The Trouble I've Seen. Which I now intend to try and track down.I will also be checking out her biography, published a couple of years ago .
By conventional standards, Gellhorn's personal life was a mess. Married twice, first to Hemingway and then to a serial philanderer, she was exceptionally bad at picking male companions and she deeply resented the fact that for most of her life she was known by her association with Hemingway rather than her own achievements .
In her youth, she was also exceptionally beautiful and the letters reveal with some poignance that she found it desperately hard to grow old and lose the sexual allure which, ironically, didn't interest her much at the time.
Gellhorn was a contradiction. A radical Democrat with left leanings who hung out ( as we say now) with the English aristocracy. She was clearly a bit of a snob and did not suffer fools gladly but her wit, intellect and style ensured that late in life she attracted a coterie of pals including journalists John Pilger , John Simpson and literati in London who finally got round to giving her writing the credit it was due.
The horrors she had seen in Dachau ( understandably) made her a lifelong champion of Israel and I could not help wondering what she would have made of the current furore over Libya and Lockerbie and the guilt, or otherwise, of Megahri.
My guess is that as a journalist who despised knee-jerk writing and emotional cowardice in any shape or form she would have wanted the truth of what happened in 1988 to be re-investigated - and established. Rather than the current bout of hysteria and abuse being thrown at the Scottish administration.
Those people who perished in the 1988 air crash deserve to have the facts established once and for all. And, whether some people like that or not, that includes the possibility that the wrong man was convicted.
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You probably know of it already but just in case, try 'abebooks' for second-hand or out of print copies.
By the way, Gelhorn sounds frightful from your description but nobody deserves Pilger as a friend,
David Duff
I do know Abebooks.........it is my current source of additional income. And no, obviously, I do not think Gellhorn was frightful. Nor indeed John Pilger. Kind of sums up our differences.
Hemmingway was a bullshitting misogynistic tosser in any case, full of posturing unconvincing machismo. Gellhorn on the other hand really put herself on the line.
For once I agree with you Susan. Martha was a giant among pygmies.
I often read 'The View from the Ground' to remind me of great journalism. The opening story of a lynching in Mississippi is one of the most harrowing and moving pieces of writing ever published.
Yes, Susan, but you don't know me sufficiently well to appreciate my many virtues such as ... er ... well ... look, I'll come back to you on this, OK?!
David Duff
This is not my fault, it's yours! Hitherto I could not have cared less about Martha Gellhorn but you aroused my interest. According to 'Wiki' - not always an impeccable source, I grant you:
"She considered the so-called objectivity of journalists “nonsense”, and used journalism to reflect her politics."
I wonder what you, a journalist, make of that?
"While she is not known to have praised communism and Stalinism, she equally refused to criticize it, and remained a believer in Alger Hiss until her death"
Well, we all get some things wrong, don't we? It is now indisputable that Hiss was a traitor as the Venona decrypts made clear.
"Her hatred of the Palestinians was extreme and friends learned never to mention them in her presence.[citation needed]"
Well, there's not much doubt that she hated Palestinians - and Arabs!
"She was faithful to Hemingway with the exception of a fling with US paratrooper Major General James M. Gavin, commanding general of the 82nd Airborne Division."
So, not all bad then! You can never do enough for a good Para, I say, but then I would, wouldn't I?
Anyway, Susan, I do wish you would pick your 'friends' more carefully!
David Duff
"The opening story of a lynching in Mississippi is one of the most harrowing and moving pieces of writing ever published."
That's exactly what I thought when I first read it thirty-odd years back.
Then a couple of years back I discovered that she had in fact made the whole story up.
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