Martha Gellhorn and the Sickly-Sweet Lies of Women's Fiction
As their marriage frayed in 1944, Ernest Hemingway wished Martha Gellhorn dead and said he looked forward to refusing to speak at her funeral. To a crowd of their friends at a bar after the liberation of Paris, he belittled her stellar career and compared her vagina to the saggy neck of a hot water bottle. He slapped her when she begged him to let her drive when he was drunk, threw food, and shot out windows in the Finca Figía, which was her house before it was his. He once told her that women understood only brutality, and that uppity women like her needed extra beating.
Given the reverence (still) accorded everything Hemingway said and did, Gellhorn concluded that her only viable course after their split was silence. A war correspondent and novelist herself, she resented being a footnote to a famous man, let alone one she found contemptible and unhinged. For the rest of her life, she frosted interviewers who asked about him, and if they persisted, showed them the door. Hemingway’s misogyny carries such weight that in 1999, just after Gellhorn’s death at 89, the Virginia Quarterly Review published his review of her genitals.
Gellhorn would then likely despair of two new novels about their marriage, Love and Ruin by Paula McLain and Beautiful Exiles by Meg Waite Clayton. Though quite different in pace and tone, each novel begins when they meet and ends when they part, as if that’s where her value begins and ends.
Given her achievements as a path-breaking journalist and relentless antifascist, and given how badly we need such heroes at this moment in time, it’s strange to find Gellhorn, in Love and Ruin, stripped of her politics and her audacious voice, to be admired first for her marriage and then for her divorce. And it’s just plain extraordinary to read 80 pages about their time covering the Spanish Civil War with no mention of fascism. In the first year after she left Hemingway, Gellhorn made it to the beach at Normandy without Army accreditation (he never made it with accreditation, and called her a liar for saying she had), and wrote a landmark, searing essay about the death camps after seeing Dachau, neither to make a point about a woman’s independence.
Big market women’s fiction diminishes women as subjects and as readers, in service of sensationalism that fits a generic marketing plan. This is not news. (Sanitized) Hemingway sells. Gellhorn fought the distortions and indignities ostensibly required to sell her own books throughout her six-decade career, quaintly wishing to be known for her writing rather than her sex life.
She did tell intimates about Hemingway. In April 1950, Gellhorn fell headlong in love with David Gurewitsch, a refugee from Nazism and path-breaking physician. She wrote him a series of long, soul-baring letters, and said that Hemingway’s macho persona provided cover for his simple nastiness. Her biographer Caroline Moorehead edited the letters for publication but did not include one she wrote the next day, describing their sex life, no doubt out of respect for Gellhorn’s privacy. (Neither McLain nor Clayton consulted the unpublished letters, though this information is easily accessible.)
While Gellhorn admired Hemingway when they met, and relished the richness of their shared writing life, she was never sexually attracted to him. Raised with a Victorian morality, she avoided sex with him whenever possible, and found it brutal and painful. After she left him, she found a skilled, responsive lover and grew into her sexuality. Decades later, she told friends Hemingway never brought her to orgasm, nor showed the slightest interest in her pleasure. If we’re going to violate her privacy, we might at least believe her.
McLain imagines Gellhorn desperately tearing at Hemingway’s clothes, sometimes twice a day, but never mentions sex for the last 7 of their 8 years together. Clayton too rarely touches it, and does portray Gellhorn’s difficulty with sex. She comes much closer to capturing Gellhorn’s energy and nerve, but shows her melting with tenderness after Hemingway has swung at her and missed, and smashed the bedside lamp to the floor.
It’s maddening enough to find one of the great war writers of the 20th century reduced to auxiliary status. But must we also suffer Gellhorn sighing for a man who wouldn’t have known mutual sexual love if it slapped him? Just how great must a woman’s achievements be before her story can stand clear of romantic lies?
Meanwhile, such lies are (still) business as usual in women’s fiction, even when the writers, agents, and editors are all women.
Click HERE to learn more about another novel about Martha Gellhorn, one that covers her whole life, takes her work seriously, does not romanticize her relationship with Hemingway, and reveals her struggle to live with memories of wartime trauma.