Martha Gellhorn, a woman who changed the face of war reporting.

Courageous, outrageous, fearless, wanderlust and quick-witted lady of her era are some of the adjectives that best define America’s foremost female war journalist Martha Gellhorn. Without any hyperbole, she dedicated her life reporting and documenting hue and cry of people affected by war and conflict. She virtually reported on nearly every major conflict for 60 years at a time when such female journalists were a rarity. Believed to be the first female war correspondent, an American novelist and a travel writer, she led quite a controversial and strong headed female life. She had witnessed the ravages of the American Depression; covered the Spanish Civil War; stowed away in a hospital ship during the D-Day landings; been present at the liberation of Dachau and attended the Nuremberg Trials. “She brought a fresh approach to war journalism, writing passionately about the dreadful impact of war on the innocent,” her Washington Post obituary said. To her supporters, she was heroic to embrace advocacy journalism. For her, journalism equaled truth, a truth that can inspire people to protest, to intervene and for any journalist, writer or a reporter, their pen is their sword.

A saying that childhood defines your adulthood was seen in Martha Gellhorn case as well. A Jewish origin, she was born on November 8, 1908, in St. Louis, Missouri to Edna Gellhorn and George Gellhorn. Much do we know that children imbibe their traits from their parents, Marth’s mother was an American suffragist and reformer, who advocated for female rights to vote. She even played a prominent role in founding the National League of Women Voters. On June 14, 1916, the opening day of the Democratic National Convention in St. Louis, more than 2000 women took part in the ‘Golden Lane’, a silent demonstration along Locus Street vouching for women rights. In the front row were two little girls, one was Martha Gellhorn, representing future voters.

Martha, a reporter!

She was a woman who lived on her own terms. Her rebellion nature was quite evident when she left her college to pursue her passion for journalism. Martha left her studies in 1927 and dive into the passion of becoming a journalist. ‘The New Republic’, an American magazine published her maiden articles. Later, she took a job in Albany, in New York as a crime reporter. In February 1930, adamant on becoming an international reporter, she traveled to Europe, where she wrote a brochure for Holland American Line and worked at the United Press Bureau. In an addendum to this, she even became an active participant in the pacifist movement. On her return to St Louis with her first infamous and supposedly husband Bertrand de Jouvenel, a French writer, she traveled as a reporter for the ‘St. Louis Post-Dispatch’ and even penned down her experience in her novel ‘What Mad Pursuit’ (1934). Nonetheless, her novel caught the attention of Harry Hopkins, an official in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration, who hired her as a field investigator for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). At 25, Martha was the youngest of a squad of sixteen, handpicked reporters who were tasked to file accurate, confidential reports on the human stories of the Depression directly to Roosevelt's White House. From reporting its effects on town people of Gastonia to working with Dorothea Lange, a photographer, she documented the everyday lives of the hungry and homeless. Later, their reports became part of the official government files for the Great Depression. They investigated topics that were not usually open to women of the 1930s, made Martha and Dorothea major contributors to American history.

She wrote about the lynching of a black man in the South and encouraged North Caroline factory workers to break the windows of their factory in protest. The window-breaking cost her her job. Martha met Ernest Hemingway in 1936 in Florida, then an American journalist and a novelist and storyteller. A short time later they traveled to Spain to report the Spanish Civil War. There, she was hired to report for ‘Collier’s Weekly’. Further, she sympathized with the democratically elected socialist government of Spain in its fight against fascist generals led by Francis Franco. Although her Spanish dispatches voicing the same would be difficult to find in print, it “revealed a gift for unflinching observation and unforced pathos”, was reported by ‘Washington Post’. She reported on the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany and Czechoslovakia in 1938. She recounted the war from other countries like Hong Kong, Singapore, Burma, England, and Finland. She penned down the activities of World War II in the novel 'A Stricken Field' (1940).

Adamant as she was, lacking official press credentials to witness Normandy landing on D-Day on June 6, 1944, she impersonated herself as a stretcher carrier. She was the only woman to land at Normandy on D-Day. She was also among the first journalists to report from Dachau concentration camp, soon after it was liberated by US troops on April 29, 1945. Her article became one of the most famous accounts of the discovery of the camps. She covered the Vietnam War and the Arab-Israel conflicts in the 1960s and 70s for the ‘Atlantic Monthly’. She continued to cover the civil wars in Central America even at the age of 70. After World War II, she left the United States, criticizing it for being a colonial power. In her later years, as Nazi atrocities continued to occupy her and people around, she covered the trial of Adolf Eichmann for ‘Atlantic Monthly’. In 1966, she traveled to Vietnam to write about the war for the London ‘Guardian’ and her writing vividly protested the war.

She traveled to El Salvador to cover the brutal war in the 1980s between the US military and Marxist rebels. Later that decade, her failing body slowed her down. However, before bidding adieu to journalism due to older age, she reported the US invasion of Panama, 1989. Call it the fate, an unsuccessful cataract surgery turned her near-blind making her unfit to report the Balkan conflicts in the 1990s. With much difficulty as with her failing eyesight she couldn’t read her own manuscripts, she somehow managed to complete her report on poverty in Brazil in 1995, that was published in ‘Granta’.

Martha, a writer!

She was a writer in her own right, a woman who had covered the heaviest of wars, and she wished to be remembered for that. Yet, all people recalled was the marriage she had with Ernst Hemmingway. Though often remembered for her brief marriage, she refused to be a "footnote" to his life; during a career that spanned some six decades, she covered a dozen wars and drew praise for her fictional work. 'What Mad Pursuit' (1934) was the first novel published by Martha Gellhorn. Her debut as a novelist wasn’t auspicious. A story of a protagonist much like her, a cynical female reporter who has many love affairs, was panned by critics. Some called it “palpable juvenilia” while others stated that it was “a rather futile book”. Later, her findings of the Depression Era formed the basis of her novel ‘The Trouble I’ve Seen’ (1936). Fiction crafted with documentary accuracy, it vividly renders the gradual spiritual collapse of the simple, homely sufficiency of American life in the face of sudden unemployment, desperate poverty, and hopelessness. Martha’s this novel, unlike the first one, had a successful response. She penned down the activities of World War II in the novel 'A Stricken Field' (1940). It talked about refugees in Prague just before the German invasion of Czechoslovakia. She even published articles on war. ‘The Face of War’ (1959), a miscellaneous wartime writing and ‘The view from the Ground’ (1988) a collection of peacetime essays, to bring out the sensibility of war and change in minds of the reader. ‘Travels with Myself and Another’, her only volume of autobiography was published in 1978, when Martha was seventy. Centered on what she described as “the best of my worst journeys,” the book was turned down by fourteen publishers before Allen Lane (who founded Penguin Books) offered her £ 5000 for a three-book deal. When the book was released, it hit a nerve and sold well.

Anecdotes

In 2008, she was honored in the American Journalists stamp series, with 5 people of which she was the only lady. She was the only woman to land at Normandy on D-Day on June 6, 1944, impersonated as stretcher carrier. The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism was established in 1999 in her honor.

Personal life

The legacy of Martha’s personal life remains shrouded in controversies with her adultery and extramarital affairs. Her first major affair was with Bertrand de Jouvenel, a French economist when she was 22 years old in 1930. It couldn’t turn into marriage as his wife did not consent to divorce. In 1936, she met American novelist and then a journalist, Ernest Hemingway. They got married in 1940. The marriage was difficult and they both had terrible tempers. She was idealistic, tormented by the slave labor conditions and he stoically accepted the world as it was. They parted their ways in 1945. She saw herself as a champion of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, and worked hard, all her life, to give voice to the voiceless. In later years, she resented having more fame for being Hemingway's ex-wife than for her own work. “I was a writer before I met him and I have been a writer for 45 years since,” she complained, according to the ‘Chicago Tribune’. “Why should I be a footnote to someone else's life?” Their commonality of being a journalist and writer initially did help them in getting along and going to places together but later, it became the cause of remorse.

In 1954, she married the former managing editor of ‘Times Magazine’, TS Matthew. History repeated itself and they got divorced in 1963. In 1949, Gellhorn adopted a boy, Sandy, from an Italian orphanage. As a mother she proved to be a disaster, first smothering the boy with love, then becoming increasingly weary and intolerant as he grew up. She eventually left Sandy in the care of relatives and the relationship got embittered. A collection of Gellhorn's early journalism was praised by Graham Greene in ‘The Spectator’ for its “amazing, unfeminine style”. She was pursued by HG Wells, who wrote to her, “I am strongly moved to ask you to pack up come to England and to bed with me.” Gellhorn declined. Throughout her life, Martha seldom found sex enjoyable and often found it painful. Regarding sex, in 1972 she wrote, “If I practiced sex out of moral conviction, that was one thing; but to enjoy it ... seemed a defeat.”

At 89, almost blind, caught in many illnesses with ovarian cancer that had spread to the liver, she hastened the impending end of her life by taking a fatal dose of a cyanide capsule. She died on February 15, 1998, at her London home.

Trivia

‘Hemingway & Gellhorn’, a movie was released in 2012, it starred Nicole Kidman and Clive Owen. She was also the subject of 2011 documentary named, ‘No Job for a Woman: The Women Who Fought to Report WWII’. A lifelong traveler and expat, she explored fifty-three countries in her life as well as every state in the US, barring Alaska. 

Note: the reason for me to read and write on her was, Martha as an individual was shrouded and always seen from the lens of Ernest Hemingway's ex-wife. There was so much more to her as a reporter, writer and as an individual that was somehow subdued under this romanticized, mere 4-year affair that nullified 60 years of experience. Much patriarchy!!!