Martha Gellhorn Research Articles

Lee Miller and Martha Gellhorn: Parallel Lives

Lee Miller and Martha Gellhorn: Parallel Lives

Book Review: Death Zones and Darling Spies: Seven Years of Vietnam War Reporting, by Beverly Deepe Keever

Death Zones and Darling Spies: Seven Years of Vietnam War Reporting. Beverly Deepe Keever. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013. 360 pp. $26.95 pbk.More than four decades after leaving South Vietnam, Beverly Deepe Keever looks back on her seven years as a reporter covering the early years of American involvement in the Vietnam War, from 1962 to 1969. She draws upon memories, photographs, clippings, and copies of communications with her editors in the United States and United Kingdom to re-create one reporter's attempt to make sense of the war by trying to understand the soldiers who fought it and the civilians whose lives were turned upside down.There is much here to distinguish Death Zones and Darling Spies from other journalists' memoirs of the Vietnam War. For starters, Deepe spends comparatively little time analyzing strategy and tactics. Instead of, say, Homer Bigart's keen military analysis or David Halberstam's indignation, Deepe gives a calm, fact-filled, eyewitness narrative of the war on the ground, as it affected ordinary families. In this sense, her memoir follows the traditions of the sorority that sprang up around Martha Gellhorn, Ruth Cowan, and Dickey Chapelle: To wit, women war correspondents, more so than their male counterparts, have covered the civilians more than the soldiers.Deepe brought to Vietnam her master's degree in journalism from Columbia University along with an unusual skill for a journalist in the 1960s: public opinion polling techniques she could adapt to give accurate measures of attitudes toward the South Vietnamese government and Viet Cong-accurate, at least, to the extent respondents felt comfortable responding on the record. (If I talk openly, my head leaves my neck, a South Vietnamese soldier told her when she questioned him about his country's government.) Deepe arrived a twenty-six-year-old naif, one of only eight full-time Western journalists when she landed in Saigon with expectations to stay two weeks, but grew in her understanding until she was both wise and skeptical upon her departure, seven years later, as the longest-serving war correspondent in Vietnam to that point.As with other memoirs about the Vietnam War, Deepe takes the reader through the United States' early high hopes for success, the crushing of optimism through South Vietnam's failure to offer a viable, popularly supported alternative to communism, and the tenacity of the Viet Cong to fight unconventionally until victory. New and significant to the history of the war and war correspondence are the details of her routines, and her recounting of many interviews in the countryside with peasants and ordinary soldiers, captured in anecdotes and telling vignettes.For one example, Deepe recounts a U.S. plan to win support of peasants by distributing free pigs of a variety that would grow faster and fatter than the locals' alternative. …

Ernest Hemingway and Enrique Serpa: A Propitious Friendship

New evidence from Cuba suggests that Ernest Hemingway enjoyed a lasting friendship with Enrique Serpa, the Cuban author of the novel Contrabando [ Contraband ], as well as the short stories “ La Aguja ” [“The Marlin”] and “ Aletas de Tiburon ” [“Shark Fins”]. Hemingway admired Serpa’s conspicuous talent, and both To Have and Have Not and The Old Man and the Sea show signs of the Cuban writer’s influence. Includes an appendix describing signed books by Serpa in the Finca Vigía library and the text of a letter to Maxwell Perkins from Martha Gellhorn, seeking to advance Serpa’s career

The War of Wells’s Lives

H.G. Wells has often been unlucky in his biographers. He told the story of his own life in Experiment in Autobiography (1934), a two-volume work filled with vivid recollections and fascinating detail but weighed down at last by its author’s dedication to “The Idea of a Planned World,” which leads him to assert that his progression “from a backyard to Cosmopolis” has made him “the conscious Common Man of his time and culture” (417-18, 643). Here was a bubble waiting to be pricked, especially as the autobiography was supplemented by an episodic, unpublished “Postscript” containing suppressed details of his tangled love-life. The “Postscript” would make its first appearance fifty years later under the title (chosen by his son, G.P. Wells) H.G. Wells in Love, but by that time its contents had been heavily trailed in biographies stepping delicately around the British libel laws. (Though Wells was dead, most of his lovers were still alive and some, notably Rebecca West and Martha Gellhorn, were highly litigious.) From Vincent Brome’s H.G. Wells (1951) to Gordon N. Ray’s H.G. Wells and Rebecca West (1974), an air of scandal-mongering surrounded Wellsian biography, and to some extent this still remains. Andrea Lynn’s Shadow Lovers (2001) contained new revelations, particularly about Martha Gellhorn, and David Lodge's biographical novel A Man of Parts (2011) revisits Wells's earlier love affairs at great length. Lodge, however, seems to have been unaware of Wells’s unpublished correspondence with Amber Reeves (the mother of his daughter Anna-Jane), which is drawn on in Michael Sherborne’s biography. In his foreword to Another Kind of Life, sf novelist Christopher Priest calls Wells “a great writer” who “left us dozens of great works.” Moreover, he was “an interesting man, a decent man, and an honest one” (11). This verdict is strikingly different from that given by several of Wells’s earlier biographers, even though they were prepared to admit somewhat grudgingly that he was a great writer, at least of science fiction. Lovat Dickson in H.G. Wells: His Turbulent Life and Times (1969) and Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie in The Time Traveller: The Life of H.G. Wells (1973) found him both indecent and personally dishonest. The Mackenzies in a 1987 epilogue to The Time Traveller wrote of “the personal irresponsibility which so vitiated every aspect of H.G.’s life” (458), while Dickson found in that life “the almost complete absence of any moral values” (315). Still more outspoken was Michael Coren, whose The Invisible Man: The Life and Liberties of H.G. Wells (1993) added political debunking to slanderous personal assessment. Coren’s declared aim was to demonstrate that “Wells’s influence on his own age, and his influence on [the] ages to come, were, taken as a whole, pernicious and destructive” (11). At least

Between the Language and Silence of War: Martha Gellhorn and the Female Characters of Hemingway's The Fifth Column

The Fifth Column (1938) explicitly dramatizes militarized codes of behaviour among men in war. The play also documents the labour of women produced by the economic realities and imaginative possibilities of war time. Hemingway's written representations of women, intended for mimetic embodiment, enact both misogynist fantasy and feminist agency and embody, to draw from Teresa de Lauretis, the language of men and the silence of women. Dorothy Bridges is based on the real Martha Gellhorn who, in 1937, was crafting a burgeoning career as a war journalist. Dorothy, like Martha on whom she is based, remakes, from her own vantage point, a world unmade by spectacular violence. Simultaneously, Anita, a fictive prostitute, exposes the multiple sexualized spheres of inter- and intra- gender exploitation produced by militarism. Hemingway's fictional characters combine with their historical counterparts to disrupt the oppositional categorizations of masculinity versus femininity upon which the rhetoric of war depends.

On Their Own: Women Journalists and the American Experience in Vietnam (review)

Reviewed by: On Their Own: Women Journalists and the American Experience in Vietnam Robert L. Bateman On Their Own: Women Journalists and the American Experience in Vietnam. By Joyce Hoffman. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-81059-6. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. 439. $27.50. On Their Ownis generally solid, fairly well documented in its journalistic elements, and the language is straightforward. It contributes a little bit to our understanding of the military-media relationship during that era. It is not, however, about the "American Experience in Vietnam," at least not to any appreciable degree. This is a book about female reporters, first and foremost, and their struggle for equality within the field of journalism. The fact that the setting is Vietnam, during the largest American war of the past sixty-plus years, generally seems to be little more than a backdrop to the real story journalism professor Hoffman wanted to present: How women gained equal rights in a traditionally male-dominated field. Hoffman's secondary point, that women reported the war in a different manner than male reporters due to some element inherent in their gender is interesting, but unproven. Beyond repeated assertions, Hoffman does not even attempt to prove the latter point with the presentation of evidence. Fifteen female journalists are highlighted here, although Hoffman takes care to note that over the course of the war there were some 467 women "accredited" by MACV public affairs. The majority of these women were, however, apparently the wives of journalists, clerical workers, and in some cases, girlfriends with connections. Indeed, only about 70 women wrote or broadcast from Vietnam during the war, although that alone was a change for journalism. Moving chronologically from the first visits to Vietnam by Gloria Emerson (in her case having gone to be with her paramour, CIA agent John Gates), through the semi-tragic story of photojournalist Dickey Chapelle, and to such notables as Frankie FitzGerald and Martha Gellhorn, Hoffman presents a sequential story of the social changes that took place in journalism from the late 1950s through the early 1970s. Although only seven of the women truly get in-depth treatment here, there is enough supplemental material to flesh out the others. One wishes, however, that Hoffman had taken the same space to provide evidence for the reader regarding her sub-thesis contention that women reported news in a way that was different than what men wrote. (The fact that in the early years of the war the women were prevented, by their stateside editors, from covering military events in the war zone is a different issue.) Hoffman's overwhelming focus is upon the individuals in this group biography and their places within the context of the history of women in journalism. This is fine, for a history of journalism, but in effect it means that this book might as well have been set in Des Moines. War, the military, and interactions of the subjects with anyone but other journalists seem to be a bother to the author. This detracts from the work as it makes it appear that Hoffman could be writing about any aspect of journalism that was male dominated...such as financial reporting from Wall Street in the 1950s-70s, or sports. Basic errors abound when she touches upon the military. In writing about a Marine Corps operation near Chu Lai, for example, she [End Page 1022]wrote: "It was the largest American death toll for any operation to date. Upwards of 5,000 Marines in the India and Hotel companies had trapped members of the Viet Cong 1st Regiment, which lost more than six hundred men in the battle" (p. 138). Somehow the Marines managed to put 5,000 men into two rifle companies? This must be a new record. Such mistakes, sadly, are typical in On Their Own. Her lack of research skills, historical knowledge, or perhaps merely her uncritical acceptance of journalistic accounts vice historical accounts, also led Hoffman to repeat several of the old journalistic saws that historians discredited long ago. For instance, she writes that, "From the time American ground troops first landed," African American casualties were disproportionate. As her source...

Ernest Hemingway: a literary life

List of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgements 'Fraid a Nothing Eighteen and Fear - and Agnes Dear Ernesto The Route to In Our Time : The Arrival Of Babies and Books Pauline Pfeiffer and Hadley Richardson Hemingway Marriage in the Midst of Men Without Women A Farewell to Arms Hemingway as the Man in Charge Esquire and Africa Hemingway in the World Martha Gellhorn and Spain War in Europe and at Home The Fourth Mrs Hemingway From Cuba to Italy Old Men, Prizes, and Reports of Hemingway's Death Endings Bibliography Index

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

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...

Gellhorn: A Twentieth Century Life (review)

Reviewed by: Review of Gellhorn: A Twentieth Century Life by Caroline Moorehead Rose Marie Burwell Review of Gellhorn: A Twentieth Century Life by Caroline Moorehead. Henry Holt and Company. New York, 2003. 439 pp. Paperback $16.00. With the publication of this solidly documented, gracefully written biography, readers finally have a large serving of the true gen on Martha Gellhorn as the subject of her own life and master of her own work, rather than as the third wife of Ernest Hemingway. The biographer is the daughter of Martha's friends Lucy and Alan Moorehead. Sandy Matthews (Martha's stepson and literary executor) and Sandy Gellhorn (her adopted son) gave Moorehead access to Martha's papers and letters. When the letters appear next year, readers will have more information—kind, but unsparing—about Gellhorn than we ever expected. Much of it will be useful to Hemingway scholars and will enlighten those who have long been fascinated by the Swiftian complexity of Martha's commitment to ameliorating the condition of the human race and her intolerance of the individual. Martha was born in 1908 into a good St. Louis family of secular Jews. Her maternal grandparents, the Fischels, were founders of the Ethical Society, and the Gellhorn children, like their mother, were brought up in an atheist household and attended the Ethical Sunday School. All her adult life Martha referred to as her mother, Edna, as her "true north" and she seems to have been the only person for whom Martha was capable of unqualified love. A graduate of Bryn Mawr, Edna married George Gellhorn, a German-born and educated gynecologist who had become her father's protégé. The couple produced four children between 1902 and 1913. Of her three brothers, Alfred, the youngest, became Martha's rock after her mother's death, and in February 1998 it was he, along with Sandy Gellhorn and Sandy Matthews, who scattered her ashes on the outgoing water of the Thames. The Gellhorn home must have been quite classically beautiful (pale oak-paneled walls, Persian carpets, stained glass and heavy mahogany furniture). As in the nearly one-dozen homes that Martha later furnished around the world, once the decor was pleasing and comfortable, nothing new was ever added. One can only imagine how repellant to her way of living [End Page 132] the Finca Vigía (which she had labored to restore as Hemingway wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls) became when she came back from journalism assignments—where she often lacked comfort and safety—to find the Finca increasingly infested with Hemingway's "Crook Factory" mates. But in the ethical and aesthetic ambience of her childhood home, her strong-minded father abused his scientific intellect and confused his daughter by telling her that the bones of the skull separate all human beings from one another and that her tendency toward "inconsolation" came from "unhappiness genes" inherited from her maternal grandmother. The adult Martha was narcissistic and probably bi-polar. Further, his sexual information to her was limited to a cryptic dictum that men wanted something from women which when denied caused them pain, but when given degraded the woman. Martha contended that sex was painful to her all her life, and that she enjoyed only the cuddling-of which there was always too little. Martha, who had dropped out of Bryn Mawr after two years, set out for Europe in 1929. When she returned a year later pregnant by Bertrand de Jouvenel (who gave her the nickname "Rabbit" over which so much ink has been spilled in Hemingway scholarship), her father condemned her as a "slut." In January 1931 she went to Chicago for an abortion, the first of many. Of these she left only the factual record, revealing no emotional reaction. Sometime during the disruption that Martha's unconventional personal life and vehement socio-political stances brought to the family home, Edna warned her husband that if he forced her to choose, her loyalty would be to Martha. Bored with the complacency of St. Louis, Martha set out again in search of experience for fiction, a personal hero, and a cause. She began her career as a journalist with a per...

“Memory and Imagination Are the Great Deterrents”: Martha Gellhorn at War as Correspondent and Literary Author

“Memory and Imagination Are the Great Deterrents”: Martha Gellhorn at War as Correspondent and Literary Author

Money and Marriage: Hemingway's Self-Censorship in For Whom the Bell Tolls

For most of his career as a professional writer, Ernest Hemingway fought a war against what he called "genteel writing." An examination of his career from the 1925 publication of In Our Time to the 1938 publication of The Fifth Column and the First Forty-nine Stories reveals that Hemingway enjoyed with every book he published greater freedom in his use of words generally considered to be obscene by his publisher and others. This greater freedom of expression did not extend to Hemingway's biggest commercial success, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Hemingway wrote the novel without using any of the obscene words he had fought to include in his previous works. In writing the novel, he gave in to commercial pressures, writing the novel in the way that he did to increase the chances of serializing it or of selling it to a book club. Quite directly, For Whom the Bell Tolls was shaped stylistically by Hemingway's divorce from Pauline Pfeiffer and desire to marry Martha Gellhorn. The novel provided Hemingway with financial independence and the money to maintain the lifestyle he had grown used to in the 1930s, but which he would have lost with the loss of the Pfeiffer family fortune.

Beautiful exile: the life of Martha Gellhorn

Martha Gellhorn reported on wars from Spain in the 1930s to Panama in the 1980s, and was a voice filled with outrage against the perfidy of governments and the posing of phonies. She was married to Hemingway and Colette's stepson.

Shadow lovers: the last affairs of H.G. Wells

Nearing age 70, and in what would be the decade of his life, H. G. Wells fell in love at least three times--once with the much younger Baroness Moura Budberg, and soon thereafter with two well-born Americans, Constance Coolidge and Martha Gellhorn, twenty-five and forty years his junior, respectively. These would constitute what Wells himself described as his last flounderings towards the wife idea and demonstrate in many ways that Wells was driven less by his considerable intelligence than by his obsession to find his ideal lover - what he called his lover-shadow. In Shadow Lovers, Andrea Lynn has created a fascinating study of the very personal side of one of this century's greatest thinkers. This self-proclaimed Don Juan was said to have radiated energy: intellectual, emotional, physical, and sexual. Drawing on papers recently made public by the Wells estate, Lynn documents Wells' relationship with each of these femmes fatales. She also paints a vivid portrait of the early part of this century in the United States, Paris, and London.Shadow Lovers is the winner of the 2001 Society of Midland Authors Book Award for Biography.

The Younger Generation: The Labour Party and the 1959 Youth Commission

In 1956, Martha Gellhorn spent an evening exploring the uncharted territory of London's espresso bars. Her impressions were recorded in an article on “the younger generation”: “Full of expectations and ignorance, I made the long sight-seeing trip through the Espresso-bar country of London, stared at the young natives, and came gladly home at last with many pictures in my mind but little understanding …. The youthful Espresso-ites remained hopelessly strangers, in their strange, small, chosen land; I can only report what I have seen.” Gellhorn's account was punctuated by references to the “strangeness” of her experience. The decor of the bars invoked “distant places” with “bull-fight posters, bamboo, tropical plants, an occasional shell or Mexican mask.” As she traveled through this “strange country,” the sight of a tortilla was “terrifying,” the customers' clothing was breathtakingly exotic, and their skin tones suggested amalgams such as “Chinese-Javanese-Siamese” or “Spanish-Arab-Cuban.” At times, Gellhorn heard French and Italian spoken freely among the espresso bars' young patrons.The foreign topography of youth culture described by Gellhorn was not unusual among accounts of young people in the 1950s, yet until recently this period has been characterized principally as a time of social peace and political apathy, “an age of prosperity and achievement” shaped by “consensus” and a return to normality after the disruption and sacrifices of the Second World War. Following an extended period of austerity, the welfare state and the managed economy seemed to have ensured full employment and an unprecedented standard of living, while the election of successive Conservative governments in 1951, 1955, and 1959 has been explained as the political reflection of rising personal prosperity and security.

The World Wars through the Female Gaze

For some women writers and photographers during the two world wars - Edith Wharton, Mildred Aldrich, Martha Gellhorn, Lee Miller, H.D. and Gertrude Stein - the construction of the female subject as an observer of combat became a vital concern. Their explorations of vision took place against the backdrop of a larger shift in Western culture's understanding of what meant in common practice and philosophical discourse alike. role of visuality in their lives was transformed not only by the rigid gender roles of war but by the introduction of new combat practices and technologies such as aerial surveillance, trench warfare and civilian bombardment. In The World Wars Through the Female Gaze, Jean Gallagher maps one portion of the historicized, gendered territory of what Nancy K. Miller calls the in representation. Expanding the notion of the gaze in critical discourse, Gallagher situates a number of visual acts within specific historic contexts to reconstruct the wartime female subject. She looks at both the female observer's physical act of seeing - and the refusal to see - for example, a battlefield, a wounded soldier, a torture victim, a national flag, a fashion model, a bombed city, or a wartime hallucination. book begins with two instances of wartime propaganda written by American women in in 1915. Both Edith Wharton's Fighting France and Mildred Aldrich's A Hilltop on the Marne offer a complex and often contradictory sense of a woman writer's struggles with authority, resistance and killing. In the process, Gallagher teases out the role of specular vision and the impossibility of directly seeing the war. Gallagher then turns to literary and visual texts produced by two female journalists between 1940 and 1945. Martha Gellhorn's 1940 novel A Stricken Field exhibits a range of gendered seeing positions within and in opposition to the visual ideologies of fascism during the Nazi occupation of Cezchoslovakia. Lee Miller's war correspondence and photography for Vogue show how Miller constructed herself and her predominantly female American audience as antifascist observers of war by working with and against some of the conventions of surrealist fashion photography. Gallagher concludes by focusing on the experimental autobiographical prose of H.D. and Gertrude Stein to explore the functions of vision on two World War II homefronts - London during the Blitz and Vichy France.

The World Wars through the Female Gaze (review)

On the second page of The World Wars through the Female Gaze Jean Gallagher explains the mysterious and unnerving picture of two strangely [End Page 1049] masked female figures on her cover: "a 1940 photograph taken by Lee Miller for Vogue magazine shows two women perched on the edge of a Hampstead bomb shelter, looking toward the photographer and viewer. Each wears an elaborate mask or visor, protective eyewear suggested for use during incendiary bombing raids." The picture serves as a "parable" for this intriguing study of gender, vision, and war: the construction of women as "actively seeing subjects who are at the same time exposed to the dangers of wartime vision." In six critically sophisticated chapters, Gallagher looks at a series of diverse texts by female American fiction writers, poets, photographers, and journalists who lived in Europe during the First and Second World Wars. Her choice of subjects does not make her task easy, as she contends with World War I propaganda works by Edith Wharton and Mildred Aldrich, the antifascist projects of journalist Martha Gellhorn and photographer Lee Miller, H.D.'s oblique meditations on the bombardment of London, and Gertrude Stein's problematic and controversial writings about Vichy France.

"God's Gift to Us Girls": Crooning, Gender, and the Re-Creation of American Popular Song, 1928-1933

[After sings with the band] The audience goes mad. A murmur of delight rises like a tidal wave, becomes an envious moan, pants into a yearning sob, and dies down.... Suddenly picks up a megaphone, stands quietly at the corner of the stage and begins to sing. The audience holds its breath in joy, in adoration. The words drift from the megaphone like a caress, a billet doux for each gasping female in the vast theatre.... When he stops, the audience's breath, held in an exquisite agony of waiting, is unleashed.... The audience is enraptured, fanatical. It has been carried up Parnassus on this insinuating, wooing voice. He is their darling, their Song Lover. Give us Vallee.. this tall, slender, simple boy, with his blond, wavy hair, his tanned face, his blue eyes, and his gentle voice that makes love so democratically to everyone. Martha Gellhorn, Rudy Vallee: God's Gift to Us Girls, New Republic, Aug. 5, 1929

"Camp Follower of Catastrophe": Martha Gellhorn's World War II Challenge to the Modernist War

“Camp Follower of Catastrophe”: Martha Gellhorn’s World War II Challenge to the Modernist War Phyllis Lassner (bio) Near the end of The Eye in the Door, volume two of Pat Barker’s acclaimed 1992–1995 Great War trilogy, her fictional Dr. William Rivers responds to her fictional Siegfried Sassoon’s “smaller, more private, less hopeful” war protest by providing his “own defence” in sending Sassoon back to the front: “‘If at any time you’d said to me, “I am a pacifist. I believe it’s always and in all circumstances wrong to kill,” I . . . I wouldn’t have agreed with you, I’d’ve made you argue the case every step of the way’” (Eye 260; original ellipses). Pat Barker’s great talent notwithstanding, the success of her trilogy owes no small debt to the power of the Great War to haunt us still. Given the horrors and unjustifiable losses on its battlegrounds, the catastrophic and cavalier strategies of its generals, and its troubled victory, it’s no wonder that writers and readers still find this war a compelling ground for debates about pacifism. And yet as Barker’s trilogy attests, this is not solely a philosophical or historical debate, but an imaginative one, figured through [End Page 792] her soldier-poets writing war poetry and recounting and interpreting their recurring war nightmares. 1 Barker’s trilogy can be seen as a postmodern commentary on the modernist World War I text, highlighting through its self-reflexive shell shocks the making and staying power of a mythic Great War in which its soldier-poets lyricize their decentered fates in a national epic. As the neuraesthenic symptoms and moral dilemma of Barker’s Dr. Rivers mirror those of his patients’ stammering, war-torn narratives, their separate narratives form a postmodern cultural diagnosis, chronicling the Great War’s destabilizing but powerfully productive hold on the literary imagination. This textual interplay dramatizes the historical process that has given the Great War mythopoetic stature. 2 From the writing of the Western Front through its modernist reconstructions, from critical histories of modernism to feminist constructions of the Great “Sex Wars” and a gender-inclusive modernist canon, whatever their formal and ideological differences, writers and critics alike have reconfigured World War I as a mythic war for the defense of pacifism. 3 As ethnic and regional battles rage around the globe in our own time, holding current cultural criticism hostage to anachronistic paradigms of just and unjust wars, the Great War and its recurring nightmares remain paradoxically constant. Even as postmodern literary histories contest and destabilize its modernist grounds, the Great War stands firm as a cultural monument, memorializing the moral efficacy of judging wars as literary history and artifacts. The Great War’s modernist hold on ethical and literary memory is all the more intriguing if we consider that it was the unfathomable horrors of World War II that called the very definition and moral boundaries of literary representation into question, and so challenged modernist writers as never before. 4 It is not as though the major modernists did not respond to this challenge. But despite the fact that the poems of 1939–1945 by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot have been celebrated as modernist epics, World War II has failed to take root in our modernist literary histories or to inspire a mythopoesis of its own. 5 Even critical debates about the periodization of modernism, while they expand the meanings of war experience to include women in World War I, women’s “excitement and new freedoms” in the 1920s, and their “mysterious passage” into the politics of the 1930s, just stop cold [End Page 793] at 1940, as though reifying the very boundary that expansive efforts had challenged. 6 Clearly, the issue of including a Second World War text is not its lack of literary experiment so central to modernism. In her 1936–1938 novels, Novel on Yellow Paper and Over the Frontier, Stevie Smith takes us on a whirlwind ride through her heroine’s decentered consciousness and intertextual construction of a second world war, testing limits on language, the stability of self, and historical progression. Moreover, as Pompey Casmilus, Smith’s...

The good war

The Good War S.J. Raymond A. Schroth (bio) Reporting World War II, Part One: American Journalism 1938–1944. New York: The Library of America, 1995. 912 pages. $35.00. Reporting World War II, Part Two: American Journalism 1944–1946. New York: The Library of America, 1995. 970 pages. $35.00. It is June 1944. Martha Gellhorn, correspondent for Colliers, makes her way among the wounded on the hospital ship off the Normandy beachhead. A gentle-faced, blue-eyed lieutenant with a bad chest wound, who had lain bleeding in a field for two days before crawling back to our lines, suddenly realizes that the nineteen-year-old boy, also wounded in the chest and lying in the bunk behind him, is a German. Barely able to speak, he utters, “I’d kill him if I could.” The “German” boy, really an Austrian, who has fought a year in Russia and half a year in France, asks Gellhorn whether wounded prisoners are exchanged. He wants to go home. “So many men, all wounded, want to get home. Why have we ever fought one another?” (2:155) This is still a good question. Both boys’ fathers may have fought one another twenty-five years earlier; but too few survivors remembered the experience well enough to stop it from happening again. And now both boys—and Martha Gellhorn, who is still with us—risk being forgotten. America’s greatest talk-show host Studs Terkel, says in the introduction to his 1984 book, The Good War, that “the disremembrance of World War II is as disturbingly profound as the forgettery of the Great Depression. [End Page 657] World War II, an event that changed the psyche as well as the face of the United States and the world.” 1 That we would forget—or, rather, misremember—any period of history is disturbing for many reasons, but most of all because memory—whether the second-hand, mediated memory of scholarship or the immediate memories of personal recollections—is the foundation of our moral imagination. We act, choose, because of who we are; we are, collectively, a nation which has fought seven wars in my own lifetime—World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, and the Persian Gulf War. How we remember having fought and justified these wars will determine whether and how we will fight the next. No, of course I did not live through World War I; but I remember it. My father, an army sergeant war hero from Trenton, N.J., who led an attack against a German machine gun nest and, though armed only with an empty pistol, brought home a prisoner under fire, described trench warfare to me—with its waves and waves of men mowed down before a final assault would break through—for bedtime stories. And my memories of those stories, of my father’s admiration for Woodrow Wilson, and of my father’s attempt to reenlist in World War II, helped direct my moral compass through my own military service in Germany in the 1950s, on up through half of Vietnan. Then, after teaching All Quiet on the Western Front to high school students and studying traditional Catholic just war theory in my Jesuit seminary, I realized how memory can, in part, mislead us. I saw that there was no just proportion between the havoc our bombs and firepower were wreaking on that poor country and whatever good we could accomplish by keeping that corner of southeast Asia within our orbit of power. Twenty years later, last summer, I went to Vietnam, walked the bustling streets of Hanoi, Hue, Danang, and Saigon, and asked how a nation as “good” as America could so devastate this beautiful land, killing one million of its people. While they killed 58,000 of ours. Part of the answer, Studs Terkel would say, is in the way we have remembered the “good war.” We carried its Manichean worldview over into the Cold War. Winston Churchill called Adolph Hitler a “bloodthirsty guttersnipe” and we cheered; and we were right. Recently I listened to archival tapes of World War II news broadcasts and heard first-hand accounts of the two attempts...

Love Goes to Press (A Comedy in Three Acts). Written by Martha Gellhorn and Virginia Cowles. With an introduction by Martha Gellhorn. Edited by Sandra Spanier. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Pp. xiv + 88 + illus. $34.50 Hb.

Love Goes to Press (A Comedy in Three Acts). Written by Martha Gellhorn and Virginia Cowles. With an introduction by Martha Gellhorn. Edited by Sandra Spanier. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Pp. xiv + 88 + illus. $34.50 Hb. - Volume 21 Issue 2