When I read Going with the Boys, the snippets from Martha Gellhorn’s diaries and letters made a huge impression on me and prompted me to read her biography. What a fascinating, troubled, intrepid, complicated woman! Her marriage to Hemingway (which she refused to ever speak about after it fell apart) was really one of the less interesting things about her. She seems to have been fiercely principled but also incredibly cavalier towards other people, remarkably determined but also quite lost, brilliant and perceptive and funny but also callous and impatient and unforgiving. She agonized over not being a brilliant novelist, but in the meantime she was a brilliant observer of real life, throwing herself into war zones and writing powerfully about what she observed.

This is an engrossing, readable biography of Gellhorn. For all that she seems to have been quite prickly, intimidating, “difficult” and often just not very nice, I found myself relating to her in many ways. Debating with a friend about self-knowledge and being “in touch” with oneself, she wrote:

“I can’t help being in touch with myself, for God’s sake, no matter how much I would like to meet someone in me who is not me.”

That line made me laugh but also stopped me in my tracks because—well, yes, exactly.

Gellhorn was understandably angry at the injustices she saw throughout the 20th century, and at how easily people forgot the lessons of the past:

“I cannot endure the words spoken and it amazes me that everyone is not deafened by echoes—this is the very language of the Nazis, the Soviets … We used to live in a fearsome world, where the choices were aboslutely clear; we now live in a smeared and odious world and I can understand why the ostrich buries its head: the view is too sickening everywhere.”

She wrote those words in the 1960s. I can imagine how angry she would be today.

Further reading…