Martha Gellhorn's Letters of Love and War 1930-1949
July 8, 2019
Novelist and war correspondent Martha Gellhorn (1908–1998) may be best known as Ernest Hemingway’s third wife, but that’s a disservice to a fascinating writer in her own right, as revealed in this rich, if occasionally hard-going, assemblage of her correspondence. Spanning the two most intense and productive decades of her life, the letters reveal a colorful, perceptive, compassionate, and, not least, quite opinionated person (of fellow writer Arthur Koestler: “He evidently thinks that he alone has a corner on the Light and the Way”). There is surprisingly little about Gellhorn’s war writings, but the letters do cast new light on her private life outside of her 1940–1945 marriage to Hemingway, including on her two other important romantic relationships during this period, with the French economist and historian Bertrand de Jouvenal and American general James Gavin. The compilation also reveals the depth of her connection to, and insight into, another frequent correspondent, Eleanor Roosevelt, whom she calls, in a 1962 letter to Adlai Stevenson after Roosevelt’s death, “the loneliest human being I ever knew.” A long and somewhat demanding book, with several hundred letters from and to Gellhorn and fewer annotations than readers might appreciate, this compilation nonetheless provides a fitting tribute to a remarkable life and career.