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THE FACE OF WAR by MARTHA GELLHORN | BOOKS JOURNALISM
Martha Ellis Gellhorn (b.08Nov1908 - d.15Feb1998) was an American novelist, travel writer, and journalist who is considered one of the great war correspondents of the 20th century.
She reported on virtually every major world conflict that took place during her 60-year career.
Martha Gellhorn was born in St. Louis and attended Bryn Mawr, but left in 1927 to begin a career as a writer. Her first articles appeared in the New Republic, but determined to become a foreign correspondent, she moved to France to work for the United Press bureau in Paris.
While in Europe she became active in the pacifist movement and wrote about her experiences in the book, What Mad Pursuit (1934).
When Gellhorn returned home she was hired by Harry Hopkins as an investigator for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, where she had the task of reporting the impact of the Depression on the United States. Her reports for that agency caught the attention of Eleanor Roosevelt, and the two women became lifelong friends. Her findings were the basis of a novella, The Trouble I've Seen (1936).
In 1937 Gellhorn was employed by Collier's Weekly to report the Spanish Civil War. While there she started an affair with Ernest Hemingwayand the couple married in 1940.
Gellhorn travelled to Germany where she reported the rise of Adolf Hitler and in 1938 was in Czechoslovakia. After the outbreak of the Second World War wrote about these events in the novel, A Stricken Field (1940).
Gellhorn worked for Collier's Weekly throughout World War II and later recalled how she "followed the war wherever I could reach it." This included reporting from Finland, Hong Kong, Burma, Singapore and Britain. She even impersonated a stretcher bearer in order to witness the D-Day landings...
After the war Gellhorn worked for Atlantic Monthly. This included all the major world conflicts, including the Vietnam War, the Six-Day War in the Middle East and the wars in Central America.
Gellhorn published a large number of books including a collection of articles on war, The Face of War (1959), a novel about McCarthyism, The Lowest Trees Have Tops (1967), an account of her life with Ernest Hemingway, Travels With Myself and Another (1978) plus a collection of her peacetime journalism, The View From the Ground (1988).
Gellhorn was also the 3rd wife of American novelist Ernest Hemingway, from 1940 to 1945.
She met Ernest Hemingway during a 1936 Christmas family trip to Key West, Florida. Gellhorn had been hired to report for Collier's Weekly on the Spanish Civil War and the pair decided to travel to Spain together.
They celebrated Christmas of 1937 in Barcelona. In Germany, she reported on the rise of Adolf Hitler and in the spring of 1938, months before the Munich Agreement, she was in Czechoslovakia.
The marriage was difficult.
He wanted her to be a deferential wife; she wanted to live life like he did! She was idealistic, tormented by the slave labor conditions she witnessed in Hong Kong; he stoically accepted the world as it was.
Both had terrible tempers.
They broke up 1945 while they were staying at the Dorchester Hotel in London. Afterward, Gellhorn would call Hemingway a bully, while he called her phony and pretentious.
In later years, she resented having more fame for being Hemingway's ex-wife than for her own work.
After the outbreak of World War II, she described these events in the novel A Stricken Field (1940). She later reported the war from Finland, Hong Kong, Burma, Singapore, and England. Lacking official press credentials to witness the Normandy landings, she hid in a hospital ship bathroom, and upon landing impersonated a stretcher bearer.
She later recalled, "I followed the war wherever I could reach it." She was the only woman to land at Normandy on D-Day on June 6, 1944.
She was also among the first journalists to report from Dachau concentration camp after it was liberated by US troops on April 29, 1945.
She passed her 70th birthday in 1979, but continued working in the following decade, covering the civil wars in Central America.
As she approached 80, Gellhorn began to slow down physically and although she still managed to cover the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989, she finally retired from journalism as the 1990s began. An operation for cataracts was unsuccessful and left her with permanently impaired vision. Gellhorn announced that she was "too old" to cover the Balkan conflicts in the 1990s.
She died in 1998 in an apparent suicide at the age of 89, ill and almost completely blind.
The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism is named after her.
The Face of War was published in 1959 and was frequently reprinted, while wars kept raging.
The book was editted to make room for other wars she witnessed. So the book went through several versions. 'Introductions' and 'conclusions' of these earlier versions are included in the back as essays.
Here are a few quotes from these¬
Leaders make wars. People cannot and do not rush off in an unruly mob to fight enemies. They must first be inflamed with fear and hate, the usual ingredients, then organized and directed. There are always agressor leaders, even in civil wars. The leaders are recognizable (am,bitious men ruthless with power are nothing new) but their followers are an enigma. Why is it always so easy to rouse men to kill eacht other?
Journalism at its best and most effective is education. Apperently people would not learn for themselves, nor from others. If the agnony of the Second World War did not teach them, whatever would? Surely the post-war world is a mockery of hope and an insult to all those who died so that we would survive.
My articles on the Vietnam War are a model of self-censorship. They were published in The Guardian, London; unsuitable for American readers. In 1966, the official American version of the war was accepted as truth. Opposing views were Communist propaganda and dismissed as such.
After all this time I still cannot think calmly about that war. It was the only war I reported on the wrong side.
We must always remember that we are not the servants of the state. As the British Attorney General said in his final speech at the Neremberg Trial, 'The state and the law are made for man that through themhe may achieve a fuller life, a higher purpose and a greater dignity,' The state has fallen down on its job: instead of a fuller life, the state has led man to a haunted life.
There has to be a better way to run the world and we better see that we get it.
Martha Gellhorn is truly an icon and the book stands in the records of war reporting in all its gruesome aspects.
carboninnovations.net/node/3025
en.wikipedia.org:_Martha_Gellhorn
www.literaryladiesguide.com/author-biography/martha-gellhorn
www.notablebiographies.com/- - -/Gellhorn-Martha
marthagellhorn.com
[16JUL2021]
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