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| REVIEWS | BY CYNTHIA KEE |
 Martha in Cuba at the time of her marriage to Ernest Hemingway  With Hemingway photographed by Robert Capa |
Martha Gellhorn, A Life by Caroline Moorehead. Chatto and Windus, £20 THE late great Martha Gellhorn spent the last 65 years of her life (1908-1998) recording the truth, “telling what I saw”. She did this purposefully, almost greedily, determined to experience, “the action of her time …from the ground”. She wrote in spare, graphic prose – impassioned, enraged and often very funny. Prohibitions, convention, impossible conditions egged her on. She simply boarded a hospital ship, for instance, and locked herself in a lavatory when denied accreditation for the D-Day landings in the Second World War. Her courage had its roots, I believe, in the safe space inside her occupied by her mother, “the true north of my life”. Good looks helped. She looked great on the battlefield and took trouble to do so. Men flocked. She went to bed with scores of them, “like giving them a sandwich”. “Then you could get on with the jokes,” she’d say to me. We met in 1961 when she was married to Tom Matthews, ex-editor of Time Magazine. I got asked to amazing parties along with T S Eliot, James Thurber, was invited to dinner, taken to the theatre, advised some years later, on my children’s diet and our haircuts. But it wasn’t until 1989 when View from the Ground came out and I was sent to interview her, that we really became friends. Great friends in frequent contact until two days before she died. She filled some kind of space between the ideal and the intimate, answered some echo of longing for the best in life. I miss her to this day. Much of the time Caroline Moorehead was writing about Martha she was also working with refugee children in Egypt which maybe explains the strange lack of effect I experienced reading this book. It misses a sense of engagement, the current of gusto that swept up Martha throughout her life. It doesn’t quite measure up to the insatiable curiosity, the ability to celebrate the extraordinary in ordinary people, though it tells a lot about her pain, insecurity and self-doubt. I learned much and was surprised many times – most of all perhaps by Ernest Hemingway. Gellhorn and Hemingway were together seven years, four of them married. How attentive and affectionate he could be. How much he, at any rate, loved her: “I am lost without you. Can’t sleep, don’t want to move.” Martha at this point when they were living in Cuba, had left for the war in Europe and the thick of things were she liked to be. She never had a child, though she often expressed a wish for one. Maybe the distortion of shape was more that she could stomach. But she adopted a chubby two-year-old boy from an Italian orphanage. Weight became an issue between them, a moral issue on Martha’s part. Sandy Gellhorn’s share of her 1970 will was made dependent on his weight. Only cats got cream in Martha’s households. The rest of us got whisky, ad lib. She hated the curtailment of activity age imposed. “Why, for instance” writes Moorehead “did she (Martha) tell Sybille Bedford she was four years younger than she was?” “Why” is the odd word here. There’s a certain weaseling face to its insertion of which I’m often aware in this most comprehensive and conscientious of works. It’s perfectly easy to understand why Martha might have felt like saying she was, say 69 rather than 73. Several times she said to me: “I would never write anything I was ashamed of.” Similarly she re-wrote parts of herself she felt to be sub-standard. Signs of age which she took to be impertinent invasions of personal space were attacked as radically as she attacked corruption in the body politic or spare words in her own prose. She refused, as Moorhead points out, to be more than 125lb. The contents of her fridge (known to me because that’s where I got ice for the whisky) were limited to packets of fatless ham, Nimble bread and those containers of yellow low-fat spreads representative of industrialised food at it’s most denatured. At the end of the 1980s, after an operation for cancer of the nose, she said: “This body has become too much for even my lion heart.” She went on working; in Brazil (street children) in Oman (so well run she though we should invite the ruler in to take over this country). Not long after she took the “bye-by pills” she’d been keeping by her. At two o’clock that morning, February 14 1998, Sandy Gellhorn, in bed with his partner, was woken by a bird beating its wings against the window. When I telephoned her from the country there was no reply. I telephoned the writer Victoria Glendinning. She went straight round. Martha was in bed, yellow sheets, yellow nightdress, headphones on, Sebastian Faulks on the cassette player. “It has happened” said Victoria. There are too many adjectives, too many infelicities of style in this biography which is not quite up to its subject in spirit. But read it. Nothing can diminish Martha. Read her. n Cynthia Kee is a journalist, writer and educational therapist who lives in Camden. |
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