Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by Kaimei Zheng University of Massachusetts Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn. By Peter Moreira. Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2006. 244 pp. $26.95. With more than five major Hemingway biographies in print, including Michael Reynolds's monumental work, Hemingway's life is more than an open book to the world. Therefore it's easy to dismiss any attempt to add to that life, let alone another book about Hemingway's three-month trip to China with Martha Gellhorn in 1941. Yet, when I thumbed through Moreira's book with its rich detail and copious references, both its depth and its style and tone drew my attention immediately. Moreira has obviously mined a significant chapter in Hemingway's life that all previous biographers have failed to probe. Hemingway on the China Front is neither a trip report nor a honeymoon journal; Moreira has extended Hemingway's biography significantly. Most of Hemingway's previous biographers used readily available resources such as Martha Gellhorn's book, Travels with Myself and Another, and Hemingway's PM articles collected in By-Line. Moreira, by contrast, sat in the New York Public Library and dug into Gellhorn's Collier's articles from the trip, which give a very different impression than the memories she recorded in Travels with Myself and Another thirty-seven years later. Over the course of ten years, Moreira went from library to library, box to box, from Asia to Europe, digging, weaving, and piecing together the puzzle. Meanwhile, the 2003 publication of Caroline Moorhead's biography of Martha Gellhorn opened another treasure box of information about Hemingway and Gellhorn's life together, including Gellhorn's miserable experience during their China trip and her correspondence about it. Moreira also dug into Hemingway's letters about the trip to Ralph Ingersoll, Maxwell Perkins, and other friends. A journalist by training who lived in Hong Kong for four years, Moreira has first-hand experience in the exact environment where Hemingway and Gellhorn spent a month fifty years earlier. Following Gellhorn's details, Moreira recreates the sensations and the images of the British Colony at the time—the smells, the light, the streets, the hotel itself—he even interviews [End Page 115] the hotel doorman from the period when Hemingway and Gellhorn stayed there. In China itself, Moreira recognizes the place where Hemingway stayed in Chengdu as the same place where Jung Chang, the author of Wild Swans, would live seventeen years later. Moreira not only paints a telling portrait of each person that Hemingway and Gellhorn met during the trip—whether British, Chinese, or American—but also includes a short biography that often leads to another significant figure or event in Sino-American history, wwii history, and/or Chinese modern history. Moreira's delightful, often provocative style carries the reader through the adventure of being in wartime China, and the action in the book is continuous. With his keen eye for details, Moreira takes readers with the Hemingways on a plane ride with a skilled American pilot over Japanese lines and on an unimaginably rough trip on the North River towards the front line. Moreira is the first one to read between the lines of Gellhorn's three publications about the trip, and he provides a telling judgment on her various revisions over time: the Collier's stories (1941), The Face of War (1959), and Travels with Myself and Another (1978). Working with Gellhorn's life and correspondence, Moreira analyzes the psychological path she traveled during those thirty-seven years. This is not only a book about a moment in Hemingway and Gellhorn's life together, it is also a book detailing Chinese history at the time. Moreira unravels several tangled aspects, including the Roosevelt administration's policy towards China during early wwii (particularly the roles of Harry Dexter White and Henry Morgenthau), the history of Chinese Communism and the anti-Communist policy of Chiang Kai-Shek, together...