Gellhorn Martha - Gellhorn : a twentieth-century life

Praise for Gellhorn

A perfect blend of soap opera and history lesson, Gellhorn is a vivid spotlight on one of the most undercelebrated women of the twentieth century.

Entertainment Weekly

In her enthralling new biography called Gellhorn, Caroline Moorehead briskly extracts Gellhorn from Hemingways shadow, and as a parting shot, convincingly argues that of the two, Gellhorn was both the better journalist and had the bigger pair of cojones. A nuanced and compelling portrait Gellhorn once said, You can do anything you like if you are willing to pay the full price for it. Throughout her superb biography, Moorehead chronicles Gellhorns triumphs and the bills that always came due.

NPRs Fresh Air

Moorehead had the cooperation of Gellhorns family and friends, and access to her copious correspondence. She has made good use of both, giving us not just the usual account of the career and the public person but an intimate look at the private person.

The Washington Post Book World

First-rate A vivid, balanced and fascinating portrait.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Moorehead succeeds with the sort of indefatigable research that Gellhorn herself would admire. Much has been written about Hemingways boorish behavior toward Martha. But Moorehead gives the best and most nuanced portrait yet of the union, assessing blame equally for its failure.

Detroit Free Press

A grand journalist and feminist emerges from Papas shadow in this hightonedbut oh-so-juicylife by veteran biographer Moorehead. A tough woman and marvelous writer gets her due.

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

This is the biography Ive been longing to read. Caroline Mooreheads thorough and balanced book sets Gellhorn before us, complete. She gives us the guts, the glamour, and the gusto, but also a perceptive accounting of the personal costs of this great reporters restless questing. It is, by turns, inspiring, exhilarating, and enraging.

Geraldine Brooks, author of
Nine Parts of Desire:
The Hidden World of Islamic Women

Imagine a cross between Dorothies Parker and Thompson in the body of Katharine Hepburn and you have an approximation of Martha Gellhorn, a woman who never met a war zone, a culture, a male ego, or an exercise routine from which she shied. Caroline Moorehead has resurrected her beautifully in this vivid and seamless biography.

Stacy Schiff, author of
Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov): Portrait of a Marriage

Superb [Moorehead] does a masterful job of weaving the political and personal strands of Gellhorns life into a thrilling twentieth-century travelogue.

New York Observer

A vital and riveting portrait.

Booklist

[Gellhorns] latestand clearly bestbiographer Mooreheads book offers insight into the complex life of one of the twentieth centurys most astute observers. Gellhorn was an enigmato everyone around her and, most particularly, to herself. Moorehead, dispassionately and thoroughly, cracks the shell and gives us a look, from the inside out, at this remarkable writer.

The Salt Lake Tribune

Exhaustive, engaging This textured, intimate biography does much to lift Hemingways shadow from a writer who gave readers a fascinating glimpse of world eventsand ourselves.

Sun-Sentinel (South Florida)

Also by Caroline Moorhead

Fortunes Hostages

Sidney Bernstein: A Biography

Freya Stark: A Biography

Beyond the Rim of the World:
The Letters of Freya Stark (ed.)

Troublesome People

Betrayed: Children in Todays World (ed.)

Bertrand Russell: A Life

The Lost Treasures of Troy

Dunants Dream: War, Switzerland
and the History of the Red Cross

Iris Origo: Marchesa of Val dOrcia

A TWENTIETH-CENTURY LIFE

CAROLINE MOOREHEAD

Henry Holt and Company, LLC
Publishers since 1866
115 West 18th Street
New York, New York 10011

Henry Holt is a registered trademark
of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

Copyright 2003 by Caroline Moorehead
All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Moorehead, Caroline.

Gellhorn: a twentieth-century life/Caroline Moorehead.1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8050-7696-4

1. Gellhorn, Martha, 1908- 2. JournalistsUnited StatesBiography. 3. Foreign correspondentsUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.

PN4874.G348M66 2003

070.92dc21

[B]

2003047755

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First published in hardcover in 2003 by Henry Holt and Company

First Owl Books Edition 2004

Designed by Victoria Hartman

Printed in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

To Daisy and Millie,
daughters
of my own Martha

GELLHORN

IN THE LAST years of her life, Martha Gellhorn wished to see her friends just one way. She liked to meet them in the late afternoon or early evening, in her own flat, over drinks that could go on for many hours but that very seldom turned into dinner. Though she was energetic and always on the move when away, at home she resisted leaving her sitting room. And since, in the over twenty-five years in which she lived in London, she never changed the bamboo furniture or the plain blue sofas, nor bought new pictures, nor allowed any clutter, nor varied where she sat or what she drank, these meetings with Martha have remained absolutely distinct in the minds of her visitors. It is as if the friendship itself were contained in the passage of a Greek play, one event, in one place, at one time. It gives a peculiar frame to memory.

In 1970, when Martha was in her early sixties, she had decided to stop wandering and to make London her home. She liked the easiness of the city and its parks, and it was where a few of the closest of the friends she had made while moving from country to country were then living. She found a flat in Chelsea, the top floor and attic of a tall, gabled, redbrick Victorian house in Cadogan Square. It was here that the visits took place. First, the heavy door in from the street, with its iron grille and beveled glass, so heavy that if you were carrying flowers, you needed to push hard with your shoulder to get past. In the hall, immediately to the right, above the bold black-and-white checked tiles, hung a large, rather ornate mirror in which to check appearance, for appearance, you knew, was not altogether unimportant. At the end of the hall there was a narrow elevator, which shuddered as it rose and threatened often to stall. The fifth floor had a deep red pile carpet; three steps led down to her front door. It was here that you would find Martha, leaning against the door frame, in black trousers and sweater and expensive shoes, fashionable and clean, with rather red lipstick, her fair-gray hair, short and slightly curly, brushed back, with a smile that was both expectant and quizzical. Her voice immediately suggested the anticipation of pleasurable laughter. She was always elegant.

The sitting room opened to the right of a large and airy hall, empty except for a bamboo coat stand, and it gave an immediate impression of lightness and the color blue: wide 1930s windows with functional metal frames, looking out across a view of the rooftops of Chelsea and Kensington as far as the Brompton Oratory, because viewsthe low round bumps of the Welsh hills, the plains and volcanoes of Africa, the wooded valleys of Spainwere always necessary. Two sofas, at right angles to each other, both covered in the same cobalt blue linen that never seemed to fade, with bamboo-and-glass tables for lamps and ashtrays in between and on either side. Above one, an oil painting of a trout (done by a friend in America, Bernard Perlin), swimming in shallow water over round, smooth, speckled stones; above the other, a picture of flowers, by the same painter, and on either side bookshelves, though most of the books were upstairs in the study or in the bedroom by her bed. The drink was kept on a dresser made of pine: glasses on the shelf, bottles and the ice on a tray below. It was essential to have ice. By the window stood a bamboo screen and a tall, green plant, which, like the sofas, never seemed to age. Tidy, clean, neutral: what one interviewer described, to Marthas irritated surprise, as austere. This outer tidiness, she would explain, was to counteract the extreme disorder of her mind.