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Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn

Henry Holt and Company

Setting Forth, 1908–1936

Martha Gellhorn was born on November 8, 1908, in St. Louis, Missouri. Her father, Dr. George Gellhorn, the son of a merchant from Breslau in Germany, was a distinguished gynecologist and obstetrician, an expert on cancer and syphilis, who had trained in hospitals in Berlin and Vienna before emigrating to America at the turn of the century. Her mother, Edna Fischel, was a feminist, a campaigner for women's suffrage, and a greatly loved figure in St. Louis, where she was born. Both her parents were half Jewish. Martha had two older brothers: George, born in 1902, and Walter, born in 1904. A third son, Alfred, followed in 1913. The family was close, prosperous, happy – and happy children, Martha would say, like happy families, have no history.

When Martha was twelve, the Gellhorns helped found a progressive coeducational day school, called John Burroughs after the naturalist, in order to provide their two younger children with a more enlightened and interesting education than anything offered by St. Louis's more conventional schools. By the time Martha moved on to Bryn Mawr, she was writing poetry and stories for the school magazine, and had been both Speaker of the school assembly and president of its Dramatic Association, two positions she would say later that had given her a taste for being leader. Although Martha was close to her father, whom she admired but with whom she quarreled, her real love was for her mother, who remained her "true north," her one point of certainty and unconditional love, until Edna's death at the age of ninety-one in 1970. The first letter in Martha's archive is to her mother, written when she was six. "Dear Mother. You are so pretty. Mother I love you. I think you are lovely to me." Their devotion was mutual. When Martha left home for Bryn Mawr, Alfred wrote to her: "She loves you so thoroughly it makes me ache."

Bryn Mawr and college life never suited Martha, and she did little to adapt herself to it. She failed one set of exams through carelessness, and, though she passed the next with ease, she had grown bored and left without completing her degree. However, it was at Bryn Mawr that she discovered the excitement of hard work, and the refuge it could provide, and she pinned up over her desk Mauriac's maxim: "Travail: opium unique." All her life she would repeat these words, to herself and to friends. Work was Martha's bolt-hole, as well as her duty, the place to which she escaped at times of trouble. And Bryn Mawr provided her with a lasting friend, and a second model – her parents being the first – of a happy marriage. Hortense Flexner,a poet little read today but much admired in the 1930s, was married to a small genial cartoonist called Wyncie King; she taught Martha English. They began to exchange letters, and went on writing to each other until Hortense's death some forty years later. Martha wrote to her as "Teecher" and signed herself "Gellhorn." She said that Teecher was for her the perfect example of "endurance, courage and gayety," all things she believed in strongly.

Dr. Gellhorn had taken his children to visit his native Germany when Martha was seventeen, and this visit, and others the family paid to Europe, had made her long to return. On leaving Bryn Mawr, she found a job as a cub reporter on the Albany Times Union, to cover women's clubs and the police beat, and when that came to an end after six months she knew that the moment had come to leave America. She was twenty-one, restless, impatient, and full of curiosity. No one was surprised to see her go.

Not long after Christmas 1929, Edna gave Martha the money for a ticket to New York, and from there she boarded a ship of the German Lloyd line, paying her passage with an article about their service to Europe. "I knew," she wrote later, "that now I was free. This was my show, my show." Dr. Gellhorn's parting words were affectionate. "I love you – not because you are my child but because of your essential honesty and sincerity and fearlessness and cleanliness."

When Martha reached Paris, with a typewriter, two suitcases, and 75, France was the leading economic power of the day. The city was elegant, exciting, full of possibilities. Cinemas were showing the films of Buñuel, Cocteau, and Man Ray; Josephine Baker, in a single pink flamingo feather, was the queen of the many musical reviews, more lavish and more spectacular than any seen before. The city was everything that Martha had longed for. She took a series of brief jobs – as a junior assistant in a beauty shop, as a copywriter for an advertising agency, as an occasional contributor to a news service. She had very little money but she was, if not beautiful, extremely attractive. She had also started to write a novel, later published as What Mad Pursuit, and which she rapidly dismissed as embarrassing juvenilia and suppressed. To write it, she went to the Riviera and found a cheap pension, paying her way by making up fashion articles and sending them off to magazines in America. A young lawyer friend from St. Louis, G. Campbell Beckett, took her to Morocco on holiday. Campbell Beckett, who would handle all Martha's affairs, fell in love with her. Many years later, she wrote about him: "I was the spoilt friend, the taker ... He looked after people."

In the summer of 1930, back in Paris, Martha was introduced to Bertrand de Jouvenel, a left-wing political journalist who had not long before published his first book, L'Économie Dirigée. Bertrand was the son of Henri de Jouvenel, a newspaper editor and politician, and his mother had a salon in the Boulevard St. Germain. He was married to Marcelle, twelve years his senior, and was widely known in France as the boy seduced, at the age of sixteen, by Colette, his father's second wife, who, even as they were having an affair, was writing Chéri, the story of an exquisitely beautiful boy being seduced by an older woman. Bertrand was now twenty-six, a thin, good-looking man with high cheekbones and eyes that in some lights looked green. He was also charming, perceptive, and intelligent. He fell in love with Martha. She fled to the lake of Annecy, near Geneva; he pursued her there.

Their affair was, from the first, troubled. Martha's parents, and particularly her father, vehemently opposed the idea of her living with a married man, even though Bertrand kept promising, and trying, to get a divorce. In Paris, Martha and Bertrand lived together, but both were often away – Martha writing her novel in Bertrand's house at La Favière, Bertrand acting as his father's secretary on his official travels – and when apart they wrote to each other every day, sometimes more. In the summer of 1931, having broken with Bertrand, she persuaded the St. Louis Post Dispatch to take a series of articles about America, and she traveled through Texas, Nevada, New Mexico, and California, recording her journey in a series of letters to Stanley Pennell, later author of The History of Rose Hanks, who had taught her English at John Burroughs school. Like Campbell Bennett, Pennell was clearly in love with her.

From this early period, hundreds of letters from Bertrand to Martha survive, but very few of hers to him. Bertrand was, for almost all the four years they were together, the more in love.

To: Bertrand de Jouvenel

[?] 1930 Villa Noria La Favière

Dear love:

There is four inches of snow. Joke. I've re-written the first chapter with what pain and I'll never be content with that chapter (the most re-done of the lot.) It moves slowly, setting no key-note and I just can't make it jell. I'll have the second re-done before I go to bed. I see the book pretty clearly up until the end and then I don't know what to do. Of course it's all going to be much more banal when I'm done with it; lots of the fire has flickered out.

I walked five miles in the wind today and my head hurt from the cold. I'm losing my appetite which is a good thing; why didn't you tell me I was plain fat these days. I shall come back to you as usual thinner and with gobs of discipline which I'll lose the instant I lay hands on you (I meant lay eyes on you but there you are – the subconscious coming out.) ...

I listen for the telephone hoping it will be you and then I'm glad it's not because if you phoned I'd be tempted to come home at once and I must stay until I finish this damn thing. I love you passionately as you no doubt know by now.

I'm reading Tragic America and I love that old goofer Dreiser for all his cheap journalese style: he's angry and alive and that's pretty rare these days. On the other hand I think Hemingway is pretty bum from what he did in In Our Times: the story about skiing is written about an exbeau of mine who used to ski with him. Hemingway makes him inarticulate simply because Hemingway doesn't know how to talk, and as a matter of fact that guy can talk in 9 syllable words all night long. So I'm not impressed. Anyway Hemingway has affected my style which is really too bad; but there you are.

Dearest you'll be very cool and stern with Marcelle won't you? I want so terribly to go to St Louis with you. Oh God if only that female will crash through with a divorce; she's hideously hopeful, isn't she?

Sixty seven kisses and a friendly greeting to the dog.

Marty

To: Stanley Pennell

April [?] 1931 The Sunshine Special

Dear Stan,

I think life's damn funny. And almost fun. One ought to travel more – farther –. It makes one come alive. I got on the train in a brand new outfit – more chick than I've been for years – pretty dazzling – and there was no one to see me off. Such waste. I felt sad and alone till I began reading Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall which is magnificent not only in architecture but in his lovely distorted truthful diagnosis of (and non-conclusion about) this footling planet of ours. I wish I knew that man but would doubtless be disappointed. I see how he feels better than I can understand Huxley. It's all swill for Evelyn but laughing swill; and really people are only laughing swill and if one forgets to laugh swill becomes noxious unendurable, whereas it really isn't important enough to be that.

Dear, I think I am probably sexually repressed and all queer because I have scrambled sex and aesthetics and morals and fear into a fine stinking mess and I'm suffocation somewhere at the center. I tried, God knows why, to explain to Mother that exercising, sleeping properly, keeping one's bowels open etc. was scarcely enough if one's chief function was going to be deformed, shut off. But Mother even (and she's much smarter than anyone I know) can't rid herself (or ourselves) of little phrases such as 'how like the animals'. It's all getting me down. I think it's horrible to scare people about life merely because they are female and have the emotional make-up – in certain respects – of males, or what males supposedly have.

Am I making any sense?

A man with a horrid, jerky, apologetic, perpetual cough has been sitting next to me. And a man across the aisle with narrow, concentrated eyes whose mouth sags and would like to touch me or the girl next to me who sits with her fannie curved against the chair-back, and her legs folded off the floor – whichever one of us is easiest to touch.

I am drinking an orangeade and then I shall take a new dope Dad has given me which produced sleep and if one takes more than three a day one will sleep for five days quite unconscious and I may experiment with that too.

Darling everything a bit scummy. Apparently – unconsciously because I am not a sadist – I did to you exactly what a guy did to me (equally unconsciously). I hope to God that I don't stick in your guts the way he sticks in mine. I hope to God I don't turn out to be as much a blight for you as he has been for me. I hope you are shorter of memory. Because if you aren't – though you may hate me (as I am beginning to hate him) – nothing else will do very well.

Christ what a quaint situation.

I kiss you because that is pleasant.

M

To: Campbell Beckett [?] May 1931 4366 McPherson Avenue St Louis

Dear;

I am home. The word as you know has always had merely dictionary meaning for me. This is no longer true. I am home. It is like saying, rest, peace, honorable things. I love my family; their love for me is an unaccountable blessing. I feel protected from unnecessary ugliness and I feel that there is after all some meaning to my brief transit of this globe.

My fingernails are as beautiful as my toenails, and I have bought an outfit of that new dead-white jewelry which deludes me into believing myself sunburned. There are cornflowers in my study and when I return from an insignificant but pooping shopping tour, I find orangeade coolly on my desk. None of this implies vast histories to you. I have travelled so much, lived so thoroughly alone, that these piffling details of comfort and thoughtfulness come as a sweeping surprise.

I would rather not go to Mexico but shall go – in two days time. Naturally. One doesn't die on jobs; and besides I shall doubtless be glad of it, as memory, if nothing else.

A letter from Audrey delights my risible muscles; the girl belongs in Henry James novels, and in music by Couperin. Two letters from Bertrand are almost more than I can stand. I have been unable to cope with my own optimism; though I wrote him that we might as well abandon each other because of his wife, I hoped – yes, hoped terribly ... And now without meaning to he has so surely finished that hope, and his own blindness, his child-like refusal and inability to see what is what and what can be anything, merely adds to the piteousness and futility of it all. I have talked to Mother about this, and we have arrived at the conclusion – she wisely, I bitterly – that only work heals those stranger wounds, those sick deep wants that clamor in one's memory. I am not sure I shall do anything more about Russia next year; but probably try to get a job on a local paper; work, work, and home at night quietly. Some sort of anodyne; I have been counting my losses honestly and know that if I am to live with any joy or usefulness, without hideous waste of days and enthusiasm, I must forget all that B. means. Because he has meant too much. And I have spoiled months of my life already groping backwards, praying, weeping and wondering why I was doomed to this ignominious frustration. Enough about all this too. I am saying several 'goodbyes to all that' in this letter.

Dearest thank you 1000 times for your sweetness in N.Y. And for giving Kitten a good time, and for being alive, and wise. As for you – well, my old playmate, you will have to guess.

Write me here.

Yours, for probably always, M

To: Stanley Pennell May 8 or 9 Saint Luke's Hospital St Louis

Stan – dear Stan:

I'm in the hospital. My right foot slowly ripens into red beef under a battery of lights. I bruised the bone it would seem – I remember – three o'clock one morning, hurtling down the mountain side above Ponte Tresa to Lugano ... walking has always been a slightly dubious pleasure since.

I want to write – feeling uneasily that there is much to say: explanations; knowing also that you don't want words, that words are no good anyhow, all one can ever do is stroke someone's cheek helplessly, wondering why it is all such an inchoate thing, loving.

I want to say all sorts of things. And you will turn and say, 'Martha, you are a child aren't you'. I like your mouth, when it is almost surprised, and your voice, and I think you have eyes belonging to the truest fauns. But this is not to make you think anything at all – anything which has to do with you and me.

I didn't mean to say I loved you a little. You cheated – looking hurt and silent and rather obstinate. It isn't fair. It's like the children in the Luxembourg – I have no weapons for that.

Meantime, I take my code out of Hemingway. Unbelievable, isn't it? Do you remember A Farewell to Arms. The hero talks to the woman; she is worried about something; and he says: 'You're brave. Nothing ever happens to the brave'. Which is somehow enough – a whole philosophy – a banner – a song – and a love. And something to fill up time – busily, passionately.

Why do you care whether I go or stay? Can't you see with your eyes? you confuse stupid hair with inner loveliness or believe the former is productive of the latter. You are all lost – Wolfe'scry in the darkness – lost, lost, and so you build idols out of shaving cream and sawdust and worship looking inward.

A strange world, don't you think. I am in need of the far lands.

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Excerpted from Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn by Caroline Moorehead. Copyright © 2006 Caroline Moorehead. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
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