Caroline Moorehead: Martha Gellhorn: A Life

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

A salutary effect of biographies of writers is that they can send you back to the subject's own work, to read or re-read with fresh eyes.

Of course, this process links the writer and her work in a way some writers, who believe art should fly free of earthly shackles, might prefer to deny.

However, readers remain endlessly fascinated by the writing life, and there's something enticing, hypnotic even, about the chronicling of a life like this.

Martha Gellhorn's novels were minor, "quasi-factual fiction", as one reviewer put it, but her journalism ranged decisively and with great impact over the 20th century, and seems only enhanced for being fixed within the passions and journeying of a lifetime. And what a life!

She covered the Depression in the United States in the 1930s. She was based in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War, in England and Europe in the agonising advance towards World War II, in Czechoslovakia during its fall to the Nazis, as a stowaway in a hospital ship at the Normandy landings, at Dachau just two days after it was liberated by United States soldiers.

She sat through the opening of the Nuremberg trial and, back home, railed against McCarthyism. Later, aged 58 and increasingly sickened by American foreign policy, she went to Vietnam. At 81, she covered the United States invasion of Panama.

She had a talent for making friends with influential people. Through her mother, a St Louis suffragist, she met Eleanor Roosevelt, who became a lifelong mentor, and Gellhorn even moved into the White House for a spell.

H.G. Wells would like to have been her lover, and helped her to get her second book published. Much later, denying they had an affair, she said: "Why the hell would I sleep with a little old man when I could have any number of tall, beautiful young men?"

She seemed unstoppable, until she called a halt herself in February, 1998, when, aged 89, blind and with inoperable cancer, she committed an orderly suicide in her London flat.

Moorehead's excellent biography sent me searching for my dusty The View From The Ground. This collection of Gellhorn's peacetime writings reminded me of the passion and immediacy of her writing - "In war, I never knew anything beyond what I could see or hear," she once said, and the same applies to all her writing.

She had a great ability to see freshly and share her experiences with her readers as she snared "the exact sound, smell, words, gestures which were special to this moment and this place".

What struck me most forcefully was her prescience, and her continued relevance. Her discussion of "the American fear neurosis" is right on the nail for the state of mind of that country, especially post 9-11, today.

She had no time for "all that objectivity shit". Her best writing, as Moorehead often notes, was when her anger and passion were most sharply engaged, as at Dachau, where she lost forever her belief in "the perfectibility of man".

She considered herself a witness, and as she wrote in The Face of War, her 1959 collection of war writings: "War happens to people, one by one. That is really all I have to say."

In Vietnam, for instance, she "was not interested in military tactics", but visited hospitals, refugee camps and orphanages, and became one of the first journalists to change the way her Western readership saw the war - and also helped to shape coverage of it from then on.

She was vastly attractive to men - blond, long-legged and unfailingly elegant. "Martha looks like she's covering the war for Vogue," Lillian Hellman quipped.

She had many affairs and two marriages, one of them to Ernest Hemingway, whom she managed to leave before he left her. That relationship is recounted in fairly chilling detail, although, to be fair, it was Hemingway who first suggested to her in Spain that the "daily life" of civilians in besieged Madrid would be interesting to her readers - an approach that became the hallmark of her work.

Moorehead knew and admired Gellhorn and her mother was a close friend, yet she steers a scrupulously even-handed course through the jagged rocks of the older woman's life.

Gellhorn's impetuosity, which partly propelled her career, also got her into situations that she could not really handle. Notably, her adoption of an Italian war orphan leads to some of the most uncomfortable moments, as Gellhorn failed to see his great need for love, and persecuted him for his bad habits, even stipulating that his inheritance depended on his not being overweight.

She was capable of great rudeness and insensitivity. In her many affairs with married men, she showed not one jot of compassion for their wives; yet she could not tolerate infidelity from her own husbands.

Her passion for justice was not entirely consistent, and Moorehead points out that Gellhorn and Hemingway "walked a thin and nervous line between truth, evasions, bias and propaganda ... This contradiction - choosing not to write what you knew to be true in order to promote a greater good - was something that Martha would avoid confronting all her life".

The flipside of the journey from biography to original writing is that, in turn, one is filled with admiration for the biographer able to create sense and coherency out of the subject's own disparate writings, inaccurate claims and memories.

Moorehead makes great use of Gellhorn's own voice - she wrote hundreds of letters to friends each year, many of which come across as literary and personal therapy and analysis, better than any professionals' couch. The self-reflection, at times, feels almost unbearably indulgent, but when it came to her public writing, her journalism, she preferred to keep herself out of the picture: the witness, nothing more.

Gellhorn liked this quote, from a justice of the United States Supreme Court, and it well sums up her life: "As life is action and passion, it is required of man that he should share the passion and action of his time, at peril of being judged not to have lived."

Chatto & Windus, $69.95