Title: Martha Gellhorn 1908 1998
1Martha Gellhorn (1908 1998)
Serious, careful, honest journalism is
essential, not because it is a guiding light but
because it is a form of honorable behavior,
involving the reporter and the reader.
2A wonderful life
- Martha Ellis Gellhorn born 1908, St Louis to
liberal, - upper-class activist parents
- Attends Bryn Mawr College, St Louis, Missouri
(but drops out) - Begins career writing for the New Republic, 1929
- Launches career as foreign correspondent by
talking her way into free passage to Europe
leaves US with 75 in her pocket and works
freelance, culminating in a position at the
United Press bureau, Paris - Returns to US and finishes first novel, What Mad
Pursuit, 1934 - Works as relief investigator for the US Federal
Emergency Relief - Administration and forms lifelong friendship
with Eleanor Roosevelt
"I'm over-privileged. I've had a wonderful life.
I didn't deserve it but I've had it."
3- Publishes acclaimed novellas on Depression-hit
America, - The Trouble Ive Seen
- Returns to Europe as war correspondent for
Colliers Weekly, 1937 - Becomes Ernest Hemingways third wife, 20
November 1940 (divorced 1945) - he dedicates his novel For Whom The Bell Tolls
to her, 1940 - Travels to China to report on the China-Japan
war, 194, for Colliers - Returns to the United States, 1947, but soon
leaves, disillusioned, to continue career abroad - Adopts son Sandy Gellhorn from Italian orphanage
- Covers Vietnam War for The Guardian, 1966
- (later refused Vietnam visa by US govt)
- Ends war reporting career by covering US invasion
of Panama, 1989, aged 81 - Dies in London, 16 February 1998, aged 89
She will get up earlier, travel longer and
faster and go where no other woman can get and
few would stick it out if they did.' Ernest
Hemingway
4The War Correspondent
- Gellhorns career as a war correspondent covered
the wars in Spain, Finland, China World War Two
in England, Italy, France and Germany Java
Israel Vietnam and Central America. - She focused on wars civilian victims and those
fighting to survive. - She saw herself as a witness and her war
reporting partial testimony on wars and
partial explanation of my own motives and
emotions.
War happens to people, one by one. That is
really all I have to say and it seems to me I
have been saying it forever.
5- I belonged to the Federation of Cassandras, my
colleagues the foreign correspondents, whom I met
at every disaster. They had been reporting the
rise of fascism, its horrors and its sure menace,
for years. - If anyone listened to them, no one acted on
their warning. The doom they had long prophesied
arrived on time, bit by bit. In the end we became
solitary stretcher-bearers, trying to pull
individuals free from the wreckage.
There is a hard, shining, almost cruel honesty
to Gellhorns work. Guardian
One of the great war correspondents of the
century brave, fierce and wholly committed to
the truth of the situation. The Telegraph
6Blending journalism with art
- During her lifetime, as well as creating
ground-breaking journalism, Gellhorn wrote five
novels, 14 novellas, a play and two collections
of short stories. -
Reading Martha Gellhorn for the first time is
a staggering experience. She is not a travel
writer or a journalist or a novelist. She is all
of these, and one of the most eloquent witnesses
of the 20th Century. Bill Buford, fiction
editor, The New Yorker
7Bibliography
- Fiction
- The Trouble I've Seen (four novellas), Morrow,
1936 - The Stricken Field (novel), Duell, Sloan
Pierce, 1940, - published with a new afterword by Gellhorn,
Virago, 1986. - The Heart of Another (short stories), Scribner,
1941. - Liana (novel), Scribner, 1944
- with new afterword by Gellhorn, Virago, 1987.
- The Wine of Astonishment (novel), Scribner, 1948,
published as - Point of No Return, with a new afterword by
Gellhorn, New American library, 1989. - The Honeyed Peace (short stories), Doubleday,
1953. - Two by Two (four novellas), Simon Schuster,
1958 - His Own Man (novel), Simon Schuster, 1961.
- Pretty Tales for Tired People (short stories),
Simon Schuster, 1965. - The Lowest Trees Have Tops (novel), M. Joseph,
- 1967, Dodd, 1969.
- The Weather in Africa (three novellas),
- Penguin, 1978, Dodd, 1980.
- The Short Novels of Martha Gellhorn,
"Have a new housemaid named Martha and it
certainly is a pleasure to give her orders. Marty
was a lovely girl though. I wish she hadn't been
quite so ambitious and war crazy..." Ernest
Hemingway, post divorce
8-
- Non Fiction
- The Face of War
- (collected war reporting), Simon Schuster,
1959, revised edition, - Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986.
- Travels With Myself and Another
- (autobiography and travelogue), Penguin, 1978,
Dodd, 1979. - The View From the Ground
- (collected peacetime reporting), Atlantic
Monthly - Press, 1986.
- Other
- Author with Virginia Cowles of play,
- Love Goes to Press, 1946.
"I wrote fiction because I love to, and
journalism from curiosity which has, I think, no
limits and ends only with death."
9The Face of War
- A selection of war reports, from Spain in 1937 to
Panama in 1990 - Originally covered reporting on wars in progress
and wars about to be, during eight years in 12
countries - Mirrored by The View from the Ground, a
collection of peacetime correspondence - Published 1959, updated 1967, 1986, 1988 with new
material, introductions and appendices - Introduction, 1959, famously analyses journalism
and its meaning
I had no idea you could be what I became an
unscathed tourist of wars.
10- The people in these articles are ordinary
people, anyone what happened to them happened to
uncounted others. - The pictures are small but there are many, and
it seems to me that they merge finally into one
crowded appalling picture. - There is a single plot in war action is based
on hunger, homelessness, fear, pain and death
War is a horrible repetition. - I wrote very fast, as I had to and I was always
afraid that I would forget the exact sound,
smell, words, gestures which were special to this
moment and this place. - The point of these articles is that they are
true they tell what I saw. Perhaps they will
remind others, as they remind me, of the face of
war. We can hardly be reminded too much or too
often. I believe that memory and imagination, not
nuclear weapons, are the great deterrents. - (Appendix, The Face of War, 1959)
All politicians are bores and liars and fakes. I
talk to people
11- A highly personal volume
- I hold to the relay race theory of history
progress in human affairs depends on accepting,
generation after generation, the individual duty
to oppose the evils of the time. The evils of the
time change but are never in short supply and
would go unchallenged unless there were
conscientious people to say not if I can help
it. - We must always remember that we are not the
servants of the state. - There has to be a better way to run the world
and - we better see that we get it.
- Painfully honest a writer and reporter
deserving of serious attention in her own right,
not just a woman once married to a famous man.
The Atlantic Monthly
12- It took nine years, and a great depression, and
two wars ending in defeat, and one surrender
without war, to break my faith in the benign
power of the press. - Gradually I came to realize that people will more
readily swallow lies than truth, as if the taste
of lies was homey, appetizing a habit. - Journalism at its best and most effective is
education - Journalism is a means and I now think that the
act of keeping the record straight is valuable in
itself. - We still have the right and duty, as private
citizens, to keep our own records straight.
You go into a hospital and it's full of wounded
kids, so you write what you see and how it is.
You don't say there's 37 wounded children in this
hospital, but maybe there's 38 wounded children
on the other side. You write what you see.
13Men of action
- Ethical beliefs about writers responsibilities
- "We have the obligation of seeing and
understanding what happens, of telling the truth,
of fighting constantly for a clarification of the
issues... - Politically engaged
- A writer must be a man of action now. Action
- takes time, and time is what we need most.
- But a man who has given a year of his life,
- without heroics or boastfulness, to the war in
Spain, - or who, in the same way, has given a year of his
life - to steel strikes, or to the unemployed, or to
the - problems of race prejudice, has not lost or
wasted time. - He is a man who has known where he belonged.
- If you should survive such action, what you have
to - say about it is the truth, is necessary and
real, and - will last.
Though notably lacking in political analysis,
her dispatches have a piercing clarity largely
absent in the work of modern embedded
correspondents. Nicola Walker, The Age
14Critical analysis
- Style according to the critics
- A camera-like objectivity Angelia Hardy Dorman,
A history of American Women - Focuses on details and the senses (influenced by
George Orwell) - Clear and passionate
- Sharpness and truthful observation
- Strong authorial presence
- An introduction to history in human terms and on
a human scale - First-hand accounts
- Subtle and effective messages
- Profoundly influenced by her experiences in the
Second World War - Politically engaged (although some consider her
lacking in political analysis) - Gellhorn writes with a cold eye and a warm
heart. - James Cameron, British journalist
15The War in China - Background
- No one in 1940 knew or cared much about the
war in China, but Japan had become an Axis
partner and what Japan did held a new menace. I
wanted to see the Orient before I died and the
Orient was across the world from what I loved and
feared for. Journalism now turned into an escape
route. - My China articles were not entirely candid. They
did not say all I thought, and nothing of what I
felt. There was a severe censorship in China, but
I was more troubled by an interior censorship,
which made it impossible for me to write
properly. - I had been included in luncheon parties given
by the Chiangs I had accepted their hospitality,
and since they owned China, it would be as if I
had visited them as a guest and thanked them by
writing unpleasant things about their house. I
have never again accepted hampering hospitality. - (The War in China, 1959)
16- Gellhorn was sent to China by Colliers in 1941,
to report on the Sino-Japanese war - She was accompanied by Hemingway, described
throughout as U.C. (Unwilling Companion) - The piece was later published in Travels with
Myself and Another and The Face of War - She was horrified by the state of Chiangs China
I was sure this China had always been drowning
in hopeless poverty and disease, - and war only made the normal state somewhat
worse.
The notion that China was a democracy under the
Generalissimo is the sort of joke politicians
invent and journalists perpetrate.
17Analysis
- Major theme
- The Japanese can never conquer China by force.
People who can move their capital three times,
carry factory machinery and university equipment
over the mountains to safety, supply a front by
sampan and coolie carrier, burrow into rock and
survive endless bombing, build a thousand-acre
airfield in a hundred days without machinery will
endure to the end. (penultimate para, p91) - Time does not matter in China (last para, p91)
- High concept sentence
- Well, Mr Ma, I said, in the long run, Id
hate to be Japanese. (last para, p92, and
concluding sentence of the piece) - Voice
- First person (I)
- Member of unidentified group (We)
- A participant, as well as a keen observer and
historian - certainly meets Mark Kramers requirement for
felt life
18-
- Figurative language
- Rich in both metaphor and simile
- Kicking like a baby with a tantrum (p79)
- He looked like a cheerful Buddha (p80)
- Language
- Lean, vivid, detailed and descriptive
- The gait of the horses was like the bucking,
jerking movement of an electrical-horse machine
in a gymnasium. (p79) - Uses precise detail to paint pictures
juxtaposes surprising details - An emaciated, filthy man wearing a rain cape
made of dried grass, like a hula skirt, paused to
look at us - He was one of their secret agents. (p88)
-
-
The Third and Fifth brigades of the Guangdong
People's Anti-Japanese Guerrilla Detachment
19- Deceptively simple, crisp without excess -
absence of purple prose or melodrama - The wind blew wildly all night, and it was too
cold to sleep, but in the morning the sky was
swept clean and we could see ahead the - curving mountains, blurring in the distance.
(p87) - Thumbnail sketches
- His grandson was a tiny mysterious boy,
- like a Chinese version of Jackie Coogan in
- The Kid, with the same cap and the same
- enchanting, wistful face (p83)
- Tone
- Affectionate, intimate, opinionated, gently
ironic (viz. her hotel, a ramshackle palace,
p80) - occasionally humorous (viz. Mr Mas vegetarian
tiger, p87) - Includes direct speech (p87 p89 p90 p91 p92)
20- Sense of the authentic factual reporting
- It was very cold but there were plenty of
mosquitoes, that frail slow-moving kind with the
curled-up hind legs, the malarial mosquito (p80) - A common soldier earns four and a half Chinese
dollars a month (or twenty-three US cents) and he
has a rice allowance (p86) - Anecdote
- The Group of Devils play (p89)
- How they burn of the hilltop to get rid of
tigers (p87) - Prophetic
- Gellhorn is an author making what might have
seemed a bold declaration, but which history
proved to be true (Gene Mustain) - In the long run, Id hate to be Japanese (p92)
The late journalist Martha Gellhorn is
remembered for her radical openness and bravery
in discussing controversial political issues.
Sadly, Gellhorn, a model for female journalists,
has few followers who dare write articles with
principled insights and honestly expose the truth
behind the news. John Pilger, New Statesman
21- Many paragraphs have a nut sentence
effectively, an end sentence that serves as an
exclamation point on the paragraph (GM) - This strange system of military under-pay, and
the tragic lack of provision for the wounded, are
the two greatest misfortunes of the Chinese Army.
Always excepting war, which is a misfortune for
everyone. (p86)
22Postscript
- A writer publishes to be read then hopes the
readers are affected by the words, hopes that
their opinions are changed or strengthened or
enlarged, or that readers are pushed to notice
something - that they had not stopped to notice before.
- All of my reporting life, I have thrown small
- pebbles into a very large pond, and have
- no way of knowing whether any pebble caused
- the slightest ripple. I don't need to worry
about - that. My responsibility was the effort.
Martha was passionate and political, glamorous
and exciting. She loved to drink and gossip and
smoke and flirt. She was hugely entertaining. She
was motivated by a deep-hearted, deep-seated
concern for justice she was the friend of the
dispossessed, the oppressed, the neglected. And
she was a good writer. Bill Buford, fiction
editor, The New Yorker