Beautiful Exile
The Life of Martha Gellhorn
CONTENTS
Introduction
1. The Spirit of St Louis 1860–1923
2. A Window on the World 1923–1926
3. Liberation 1929–1930
4. Beautiful Exile 1931–1934
5. A Dangerous Communist 1934–1936
6. Hemingway Hell or High Water 1936–1937
7. A Window on War 1937
8. The Agony of Her Own Soul 1938
9. Trapped 1938–1940
10. Horror Journey and Husband 1941–1942
11. The Unending Battle 1942–1943
12. War 1943–1945
13. Point of No Return 1945–1947
14. A Private Golden Age 1948–1952
15. Open Marriage 1952–1960
16. Heart’s Desire 1960–1963
17. A New Kind of War 1965–1969
18. Hope Against Hope 1967–1972
19. The Legend of Martha Gellhorn 1972–1998
Acknowledgments
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Where does a biographer begin? After reading Gellhorn’s work, I turned to Jacqueline Orsagh’s informative Ph.D. dissertation on Gellhorn’s life and work. Orsagh had the inestimable advantage of having interviewed Gellhorn, so I could draw on Gellhorn’s own words. Similarly, Bernice Kert, (The Hemingway Women) not only interviewed Gellhorn but was given access to letters which Gellhorn later sequestered in her closed archive in Special Collections, Mugar Memorial Library, Boston University.
Of course, biographies of Hemingway also provided leads and documentation.
I got help at just the right time from a friend and fellow biographer, Ann Waldron, who gave me the address of Delia Mares, one of Edna Gellhorn’s close associates. Mrs Mares, in turn, provided me with the names, addresses and phone numbers of several people in St Louis whom I was able to visit and interview: Mrs Virginia Deutch, Mrs Aaron Fischer, Mary Taussig Hall and Emily Lewis Norcross. Mrs Hall suggested I see William Julius Polk and Martha Love Symington, both of whom were very helpful on Martha Gellhorn’s St Louis years. Mrs Deutch provided an invaluable tape recording of Edna Gellhorn and helped me to secure an important early photograph of Martha. I was fortunate enough to record all of my interviews, which are now deposited in my archive at the University of Tulsa.
When I visited St Louis, Carol O. Daniel, Director of the Library of the John Burroughs School, took me on a tour of the school, provided me with Gellhorn’s publications in the John Burroughs Review, and assisted me in obtaining several photographs. Patricia Adams, Associate Director of the Western Historical Manuscript Collection, University of Missouri-St Louis, was especially helpful in locating information on the Gellhorn and Fischel families. Charles Brown, Reference Librarian of the St Louis Mercantile Library, retrieved from clipping files a number of important items. Noel C. Holobeck in the History and Genealogy Department of the St Louis Public Library, patiently dealt with my inquiries about the Fischels and the Gellhorns, and put me in touch with Mrs Coralee Paull, who did some of the genealogical investigation for me and turned up several items that proved useful. Beryl Manne and Kevin Ray of the Washington University Archives, John M. Olin Library made available files from the Edna Gellhorn Collection and Katherine Burg sent materials from the Mary Institute.
Outside St Louis, several librarians and archivists have supplied me with invaluable information: Fred Bauma, Manuscripts Reading Room, Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Denison Beach, Houghton Reading Room, The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Mary Burkee, Norman B. Brown, Anne E. Champagne, John Hoffman, Special Collections, University Library, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Ned Comstock, Archives of Performing Arts, University Library, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California; Megan Floyd Desnoyers, John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library, Boston, Massachusetts; Fiorella Superbi Gioffredi, Villa I Tati, Florence, Italy; Alan Goodrich, John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library, Boston, Massachusetts; Cathy Henderson, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas; James R. Hobin, Albany Public Library, Albany, New York; Patrick Lawler, Rare Books and Manuscripts, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York City; Jane Moreton and Jean Preston, Firestone Library, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey; Caroline Rittenhouse, Bryn Mawr College Library, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania; Dean M. Rogers, Special Collections, Vassar College Library; Elizabeth Shenton, Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Andar Skotnes, Biographical Oral History Collection, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York City; Audrey J. Smith, Humanities Reference Services, New York State Library, Albany, New York; Raymond Teichman, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York; Ann Van Arsdale, Firestone Library, Princeton University, Princeton, New jersey; Patricia C. Willis, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Library, New Haven, Connecticut.
Lisa Middents and Stephen Plotkin at the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library in Boston, Massachusetts were especially diligent and prompt in searching out items that might be of interest to me in the Ernest Hemingway Collection. Similarly, Hilary Cummings in Special Collections, University of Oregon Library, Eugene, Oregon not only did a thorough search of the Joseph Stanley Pennell Papers, she also put me in touch with two researchers, Mary Anteaux and Sally Hague, who found more material. It was my good fortune that Sally Hague, having returned to New York City, was able to do further research in Special Collections at the New York Public Library, where the Collier’s magazine archive, which had been under my nose, had been located by Rutherford Witthus, a librarian at Auraria Library in Denver, Colorado contacted by my old friend Joan Fiscella. Eric Neubacher, who is known as the genius of inter-library loan at Baruch College, saved me many hours of time and trouble in securing hard to find books and articles. Similarly, Diane DiMartino went out of her way to conduct successful searches for information that I could only define in the vaguest terms.
I have often found it profitable to call upon my fellow biographers for information and advice. Bernice Kert was very generous in giving me background information about The Hemingway Women. Jeffrey Meyers suggested several avenues of research, gave me a quick sketch of Gellhorn and directed my attention to a stimulating article he had written about researching his Hemingway biography. Michael Reynolds wrote me a very thoughtful letter. One of his suggestions led me to the discovery of a cache of material at the New York Public Library. Similarly, Kenneth S. Lynn suggested an archival source that was of immense help to my biography. Blanche Cook shared with me her formidable knowledge of Eleanor Roosevelt and the part Gellhorn had played in Roosevelt’s life. When I wrote to Genevieve Dormann inquiring about the life of Bertrand de Jouvenel, she recommended that I consult his associate, Jeannie Malige, who in turn gave me the address of John R. Braun, who sent me a detailed letter about his biography of Jouvenel. Marion Meade shared her Gellhorn correspondence with me and alerted me to a Gellhorn item in the Houghton Library at Harvard. Richard Whelan answered a letter of mine with a friendly phone call about his impressions of interviewing Gellhorn for his biography of Robert Capa. Other biographers, Joan Peyser, Robert Newman, Eric Gordon, have been great sources of inspiration, encouragement and advice.
Frederick Vanderbilt Field patiently went over his reminiscences of Gellhorn and Hemingway for me that are included in his autobiography – as did Stanley Flink who had only a passing but vivid recollection of Martha Gellhorn and T. S. Matthews when they made a handsome couple. Robert A. Martin respected Gellhorn’s injunction not to co-operate with an unauthorized biographer, but he wrote me a charming letter conveying a sense of his friendship with her. I also thank Cornell Capa for a brief phone conversation about his impressions of Gellhorn and her friendship with his brother Robert. Richard Cohen discussed his friendship with Gellhorn while I was at work on my biography of Rebecca West. Sydney Knowles shared his Gellhorn correspondence and his sharp memory of their meeting. Dan Brennan, Dr Heinz Richard Landmann and Ernie Sibley provided vivid vignettes of Gellhorn in action. Frances Saunders alerted me to the existence of David R. Meeker’s fine Hemingway collection. I am indebted to Mr Meeker (Nick Adams & Co., Rare Books) for allowing me to examine the superb materials he has collected. Similarly, Rob and Abby Mouat allowed me to read the Gellhorn and Hemingway letters in their collection. I regret that I cannot name all of my sources, many of whom knew Martha Gellhorn well but who preferred anonymity.
I am very grateful to all my interviewees who are listed in the Notes and Comments section. I would especially like to thank Alison Selford, Raleigh Trevelyan, Francis King and Pauline Neville for making the last period of my research so stimulating and rewarding. Julie Burchill was very kind to send the letter I quote in this biography. Veronica Horwell and Maggie O’Kane were also very helpful in supplying me with the names of interviewees to contact. Victoria Glendinning has been more of an inspiration than she can possibly know.
Minnie Magazine of the Time-Life Alumni Association tracked down several of T. S. Matthews’s Time colleagues for me, including Mrs Joseph Cowan (Content Peckham), who treated me to a memory of her first meeting with Gellhorn and to a rare glimpse of the inner workings of the magazine. Randall ‘Pete’ Smith provided what he called a worm’s eye view of what it was like in Spain during Hemingway’s and Gellhorn’s sojourn there. Pauline Gadd put me in touch with her uncle and aunt, Ron and Beryl Gadd, whose hospitality and helpfulness made my trip to Wales and the search for Martha Gellhorn’s cottage such a success.
At Baruch College I have found colleagues eager to hear about my work and to help in a variety of ways. I am indebted to Martin Stevens for his recollections of Germany in the 1930s and to Martha Kessler for the glimpse she gave me of Gellhorn working in the McGovern campaign. Several members of Baruch’s staff helped with the countless tasks involved in producing a biography. I thank them all: Denise Cascini, Connie Terrero, Marcia Laguer, Eileen Leary, Ken Liebowitz, Joyce Marrotta, Violet Parnass, Carmen Pedrogo, David Thomas, Marlene Thompson, Jacqueline Gathers, Tessa Rougier, Debra Dorry and Alison Wong. My thanks to Dian-yu Yu, the best research assistant I have ever had. Norman Fainstein, my colleague and good friend, provided strong support during a period when I was balancing the demands of scholarship and administration. I am also grateful to several former Baruch administrators: Joel Segall, Paul LeClerc, John McGarraghy and Louanne Kennedy. My secretary, Lenora Rock, performed more services for this book than she knows – as have Katherine Curtis and Miriam Allen.
An American Council of Learned Societies grant-in-aid provided the assistance and recognition that made it possible for me to complete my research more quickly that I had anticipated.
My agent, Elizabeth Frost-Knappman of New England Publishing Associates, has been a joy to work with in shaping the original idea of this book. I am greatly indebted to my London agents, Gloria Ferris and Rivers Scott of Scott Ferris Associates, for their persistent faith in my work and their sound suggestions for its improvement. My editors, Sheila Murphy and Piers Burnett, helped me locate interviewees in London and significantly improved the shape of the story I wanted to write. I have been buoyed by their enthusiasm for this project. In the day-to-day existence of the writer – when I have needed the right word – I have always turned to my wife, Dr Lisa Paddock. I have never felt the need of another muse.
INTRODUCTION
When Martha Gellhorn died on 15 February 1998, just shy of her ninetieth birthday, the press reacted with shock: to her many friends in journalism it seemed that she would go on for ever. The redoubtable Martha – as the newspapers called her – had reported on wars from Spain in the 1930s to Panama in the 1980s. She had beguiled H.G. Wells, with whom she lived for a time in London. He wrote a preface to her short story collection, The Trouble I’ve Seen. Married to Ernest Hemingway, she was the only woman ever to walk out on him. She smoked and drank and travelled with abandon. In a single article in Paris Review, Gellhorn cut down Lillian Hellman at the height of her influence, demolishing the playwright’s pretensions to being a witness to war in Spain and an anti-fascist courier. Gellhorn seemed perpetually young, a voice filled with outrage raised against the perfidy of governments and the posing of phoneys. She had outlived most of her generation. She was planning new trips. Nearly blind, she persevered, gallant and without a shred of self-pity. Indeed, she would say she had had it better than she had any right to expect. Who could not admire such an intrepid personality?
Reading about Gellhorn in the Hemingway biographies would not tell you that she was the better journalist – and funnier. She took on life with an exuberance that had her still snorkelling in her eighties and charming men half her age. It was the feisty, outspoken Martha who provoked me into writing the only biography of her, published in 1990. She opposed it – ‘nothing personal,’ she wrote to me, she just did not want it done. Yet when she claimed to have an authorized biographer – apparently a ploy to disarm me – I renewed my biographical quest. If she could have one biographer, why not two?
While interviewing friends of Rebecca West for my biography of her, I found that many of them knew Gellhorn. Then I discovered that library collections of West’s papers also contained Gellhorn’s correspondence. Her friends wrote to me, enclosing letters and photographs. And so I began to collect material for a new biography of increased scope. I discovered a long suppressed Wells manuscript in which he spoke candidly of his love affair with her.
Wells numbered Gellhorn’s letters among the liveliest he ever received and the specimens I have collected recently bear him out. She often sounds like the wisecracking women of 1930s screwball comedies – but one that is uncensored, who refers to herself as a ‘bitch’, a ‘girl-author’ who sometimes writes ‘on one foot’ for money that will support her trips abroad. This is the uncensored Gellhorn. To another of her intimates, Alexander Woollcott, Gellhorn describes a fellow writer as a ‘little man with a mouth which I like to think looks like a hog’s ass in fly-time’.
Gellhorn was not the first female war correspondent – as some naïve obituaries put it – but she might as well have been, for she had a way of erasing other women from memory. In A Stricken Field, her novel about her experiences in Prague on the eve of Munich and World War Two, she seats her fictional surrogate in a room full of men, giving as good as she gets but never losing her charm. (One woman covering the recent war in Bosnia took A Stricken Field along as a kind of primer.) Although brought up by a feminist mother, Gellhorn disdained special pleading for women and bashing male chauvinists. She grew up with two brothers, and early on she learned how to enjoy and often best the male competition.
A handsome woman who never lost her sexual allure, Gellhorn kept her chaps (her word for them) in thrall. She knew how important sex was for most men, and she used it not only to please men but to get good stories. She slept with generals; she had one-night stands with ordinary soldiers who might not survive the next day. She dressed elegantly, used make-up skilfully, flirted and coaxed men to do her bidding. If employing a bit of glamour helped her on her way, Gellhorn played along – whether it was modelling French designer dresses in Paris when very young, or posing like a Hollywood starlet for the jacket of an early novel, or playing the grande femme in her later years. She hated publicity and the world of self-promotion that her second husband, Ernest Hemingway, succumbed to, but Gellhorn used the machinery of celebrity when it suited her. She thought she could turn it off and it always perturbed her when others still wanted to play the fame game with her long after she had tired of it.
What is missing in the British obituaries of Gellhorn is an acknowledgement of her ambition and of her refusal to reflect on the implications of international affairs. One would suppose from reading the encomiums that Gellhorn was fired only by outrage at injustice – whether it was Margaret Thatcher putting down the noble miners, or America bombing North Vietnam (as was often said at the time) back into the Stone Age. Outrage plays well, especially in the press. Gellhorn got rave reviews for saying trust no government, suspect all politicians. In the context of her melodramas of good and evil, such statements have enormous appeal. The trouble is that they also shut down thinking, allowing reporters to withdraw from a complex reality to report only what they see. And this was Gellhorn’s advice: ‘Write what you see. I never believed in that objectivity shit.’ Well, she was a remarkable observer, but the testimony of the eyewitness is never enough. Reading all of her reports on Spain, for example, with their impressive evocation of events on the ground, one would never suppose that the Stalinists were systematically eliminating all opposition, that the brave Spanish Republic that Gellhorn so loved would have been swallowed into the Soviet maw if the fascists had not devoured it first.
The Spanish Civil War broke Gellhorn’s heart. She never forgave the United States for not intervening to save the Republic. She never believed in the ‘free world’ rhetoric of the Western powers or in the perfidy of the Soviet Union. ‘If one wants to be depressed, I think the US is subject number one’, she wrote on 21 April 1990 to Milton Wolff, her friend from the Spanish Civil War days. She confessed to having no interest in the USSR – she ‘thought it was their problem to solve’. It posed no threat to Western Europe or to the United States, although she had no illusions about the tyranny of Soviet life: she ‘could not stand living there even ten days’. She was no ‘ideologue but a simple soul’. She hated the US government. Hate is, of course, blinding, and in her case it accounts for many instances in this biography when her views will seem simplistic for such a well-travelled writer.
Biographies are necessary to remedy the sentimentality that creeps into obituaries and the lionizing that inevitably follows the death of a figure as legendary as Martha Gellhorn. It takes nothing away from her achievement to document how cannily she made her way in the world. Her fierce drives were every bit as political as those of the politicians she deplored. Her careerism was just as intense as Hemingway’s, even if she rejected the idea of mythologizing her life. Indeed, she went to the opposite extreme, supposing that she could threaten and sue (if necessary) anyone who produced a version of her life that did not accord with her own. It is a very strange position for a reporter to take. And it is a very controlling attitude – one which is understandable in writers who want to command the narratives of their own lives. Gellhorn’s success in writing her own story is demonstrated in those obituaries and memoirs that flooded the press. She is always pictured as an opponent of cant, always in the right place at the right time. What the obituaries never ask – what her friends fail to note – is how Martha Gellhorn got there.
In her old age Gellhorn made her friends – mostly adoring males half her age – think that Bertrand de Jouvenel (her first husband) and Hemingway (her second) were her youthful follies. Poor Bertrand, poor Ernest, these yearning males wanted sex with her and she obliged. What she omitted from the story was her overwhelming need for a male hero, a need that made her gush over John F. Kennedy and take the dashing paratrooper general, James Gavin, to her bed. Men were a huge disappointment, but Gellhorn still went after them like Hemingway after big game.
Though Hemingway found Gellhorn enticing in Key West, he did not pursue her. Instead, he left for Spain. Gellhorn expected an invitation to the war and safe passage there. Hemingway proffered neither. So she showed up on her own, angry at Hemingway, but determined to snag him nonetheless. Hemingway was not a fool; he knew this was a woman intent on goading him into action. Although he responded to her gambit, he also – well before they married – set down the conniving side of her character in his play The Fifth Column. This portrait has been treated as sour grapes, but it was written before the couple married, when Hemingway was smitten but no sucker. He was neither as self-involved nor quite as needy as Gellhorn made him out to be. In retrospect, with a hoard of Hemingway biographies treating him as a boor, it has been far too easy to accept Gellhorn’s denigration of his character.
Hemingway once told Gellhorn in a telegram that she should stay at home and be his wife. The truth is that she could never settle down and that she despised people who did so, including her third husband T. S. Matthews, a literary man who had started well at the New Republic, but later was beguiled by an offer from Henry Luce at Time. Somehow Matthews managed to convince himself that he was a prince of rectitude and not just the managing editor at Time. He persuaded Gellhorn to marry him and then set himself up as an English gentleman in 1950s Britain. But right at the outset Gellhorn wrote to Bernard Berenson clearly signalling her boredom with the stuffy Matthews. She thought she needed a secure home for her adopted son, Sandy, and Matthews admired her so, as all the men did. She thought she would have enough freedom in the marriage to drop everything for a story. Matthews, like Hemingway, assured her of this latitude, but for Gellhorn marriage – any sort of bond – was bondage.
A new biography of Martha Gellhorn has to cut through the bromides and eulogies to reveal a tough, sexy woman who lent journalism a sense of immediacy and responded to human suffering with an alacrity that startled her readers out of their complacency. She had a unique ability to register the suffering of others. It can even be said she had a professional eye for it. Personally, however, compassion often failed her. She could tell writer Sybille Bedford to her face that she bored her, thus ending a thirty-year friendship. Other friends would be cut off instantly for raising the wrong subject (usually Hemingway). She would show them the door. She went through a kind of courting procedure with young female academics interested in writing about her. First, she welcomed them, but then she turned sour as these women began to ask questions and probe sensitive areas. Many of them called me to share their dismay, bewildered that Gellhorn had turned on them. It is not – as the obituaries had it – that Gellhorn could not suffer fools (Bedford was no fool), she simply could not suffer most people. As Hemingway said, she loved humanity but hated people. She could only abide them in ones and twos, rarely allowing her friends to meet in her company. By rigidly adhering to certain protocols, she controlled her image with as much assiduousness as Hemingway massaged the media.
Not only did Gellhorn regulate what was said about her – she drove a friend to frenzy by omitting almost all biographical material from his BBC programme about her career – she never addressed certain key facts about herself. A number of the obituaries pointed out that she had a fanatical devotion to the state of Israel. To many of her friends this seemed odd, if not downright reactionary. She had no sympathy for Arabs, not even the Palestinians. She supported the Gulf War – again a very strange position for a liberal, indeed, an avowed socialist – to adopt. Gellhorn was a Jew, but in the 1930s world of internationalism, in which the Left looked forward to a world where ethnic and religious distinctions would not matter, she kept silent about her own Jewishness. (Hemingway, with his usual shrewd but loutish acuity, fastened on her Jewishness to the verge of anti-Semitism.) But this suppressed side of herself came out strongly in her unremitting hatred of Germany and in her adamant refusal to entertain any criticism of Israel.
Living in London for half her life, Gellhorn played the role of a cosmopolitan expatriate, disparaging her home town and deprecating America. She could not abide talk about her origins. She wanted to conquer other worlds, very much like the two female reporters in her play, Love Goes to Press, which was a hit in post-war London – as was Gellhorn herself.
After divorcing Matthews, Gellhorn remade herself in the 1960s, befriending reporters, newspaper editors, and later writers such as Victoria Glendinning, Bill Buford and Paul Theroux. When not making her periodic forays abroad, covering the US invasion of Panama and exploring the slums of Brazil at a time when cataracts made her nearly blind, she was campaigning at home for Labour, greeting Blair and company as the dawn of a new age. Gellhorn welcomed anyone who might open up the world for her, as she had done for generations of readers. Wells called her a writer of ‘instinctive directness and vigour’. It was a quality she never lost, a quality that also made her an arresting personality, a quality I hope I have captured in this biography.
1
THE SPIRIT OF ST LOUIS
1860–1923
Martha Gellhorn was the third-generation offspring of a family that had helped to establish their city’s tradition of community service. She bore the name of her maternal grandmother, Martha Ellis, whose family was descended from English settlers. Martha Ellis’s father, Turner Morehead Ellis, born in Kentucky in 1808, had been a commission merchant (travelling salesman). She herself was born on 25 May 1850 in Jackson, Mississippi. Only five when her mother died, she accompanied her father in ‘memorable excursions on river boats’ to St Louis, where he settled in 1860, becoming one of the city’s solid citizens.
In the heady milieu of a frontier capital and border state full of the remnants of its founding French families, Southern sympathizers and reform-minded immigrants, Martha Ellis launched her first act of public protest: defiantly displaying a Confederate flag, she picketed a federal prison. But she soon abandoned the lost cause, influenced by German liberals who had fled Europe after the failed democratic revolutions of 1848. Instead, she shrewdly subverted her genteel society and the institutions of a segregated, conservative city. She began by becoming a teacher. As one newspaper reported, she became ‘one of the first of social standing to earn her own living’. She did it gradually – taking care not to embarrass her family, finding her first position in a small country school teaching English language and customs to Russian refugees. A superb public speaker with a commanding platform presence, she served as principal of Howard College, the female auxiliary of Central Methodist College in Fayette, Missouri, and taught in the St Louis public schools.
In 1876 Martha Ellis married Washington Emil Fischel, a St Louis native whose Jewish family had come from Prague. He soon established himself as a distinguished physician known for his liberal convictions. A professor in clinical medicine at Washington University, he organized the medical staff of the Barnard Free Skin and Cancer Hospital. Dr Fischel died in 1914 before his granddaughter’s sixth birthday, but Martha Gellhorn remembered that her grandmother revered him as much for his humour and good temper as for his devotion to his poor patients. People liked to confide in this youthful man Martha Ellis called ‘Wash’. He brought gaiety to everything he did.
Martha Ellis promoted self-improvement and conscience; that is, she and her husband were part of a liberal generation of Jews who had forsaken orthodox Judaism for a more modern, secular progessivism that emphasized individual responsibility. Many Jews of her generation became Unitarians, finding in this tolerant version of Christianity a home for their cosmopolitan and radical politics. But Martha and her husband belonged to no church. Wash’s parents, Ephraim and Babette Fischel, were members of B’nai El, a small but very active Jewish congregation, and are buried in Mount Sinai Cemetery in St Louis. Their son and subsequent members of the family did not practise Judaism or identify themselves with specifically Jewish activities although, like many Jewish families, they became active in the St Louis chapter of the Ethical Society, founded in New York City in 1876 by Felix Adler, to promulgate ‘the supreme importance of the ethical factor in all relations of life, personal, social, national, and international, apart from any theological or metaphysical considerations’.
Even among broadminded Jews and other liberals, however, Martha stood out. There were no social workers, so she had to invent her own ‘home-making classes’ for the poor. She visited schools, picking out the students who seemed ‘most neglected’. From the teachers she obtained parents’ names and addresses. When she found a student’s mother lying about in a ‘dirty house’, she asked permission to send the child on Saturdays to the settlement house, the neighbourhood welfare institution, where educational and recreation facilities for the poor were provided. The mother usually consented, grateful to be relieved of family responsibilities. Then Martha Ellis engaged her female friends to teach these children and to treat them as they would their own offspring. In borrowed premises (a room over a bakery) she set up a stove, kitchen equipment, and bedroom and living-room furniture, so that children could be instructed in how to prepare and serve meals, and how to make an attractive, well-planned home. Eventually, these classes became the basis of the home economics curriculum in the St Louis public schools.
In the early 1880s Martha Ellis established the Shelley Club, thirty-two women devoted to analysing the poet’s life and work, including his atheism and radical politics. In St Louis, such subjects were judged not ‘fit for discussion in polite society’. She also organized the Wednesday Club, a group of one hundred women who began by discussing cultural and literary topics but soon became involved in welfare projects.
Before she married, Martha Ellis attended suffragist meetings. She believed in ‘equal pay for equal work’, but she ‘deferred to my husband in not flaunting my views on the subject. Dr Fischel admitted the principle of the thing, but he feared results that might lead to the lessening of home ties.’
In 1939 Martha Gellhorn wrote a memorial tribute to her grandmother. She recalled the epitaph Martha Ellis had put on the gravestone of her dearly beloved husband, ‘Ich Dien’ – I serve. That was her grandmother’s credo, Gellhorn explained: you should help others, especially if you are safe and secure, and well-sheltered and educated. Martha Gellhorn saw herself in her grandmother’s image, for she used virtually the same words in A Stricken Field to describe Mary Douglas, the foreign correspondent modelled on Gellhorn herself, who feels she must ‘pay back’ her privileges and good luck by helping refugees fleeing Hitler’s persecution.
Edna, Martha Ellis’s only child, was born on 18 December 1878. She quickly became her mother’s pride, a beautiful child who grew up to carry on and extend her mother’s liberal campaigns for social and political reform. As Martha Ellis put it, ‘My light shines through my daughter.’
In 1894 Edna’s mother boldly decided to send her east to the Baldwin School in preparation for the following year at Bryn Mawr College. To all but the most liberal families in St Louis Bryn Mawr represented a radical choice for a proper young woman. Founded in 1885 by Quakers, the college was dedicated to obtaining for women the right to a full and equal participation with men in public affairs and professional life – hardly a conventional goal at a time when women did not even have the vote. Bryn Mawr educated individualists and activists.
Four years later Edna returned as a suffragist, an ardent advocate of women’s rights and with an accent ‘clear and unstrident and quite un-Midwestern’. But she behaved with such ‘natural and unconscious pride’ that she won many people to her side. In 1903, visiting the Bryn Mawr campus for her third reunion, she was ‘trailed’ by a group of sophomores who were immensely taken with ‘this gorgeous creature. With her masses of golden braids and her blue eyes, she was like a tall, slim Norwegian princess.’ T. S. Matthews, Martha’s third husband, observed that Edna ‘wasn’t the embattled clubwoman or the crusading social worker type at all’. In fact, organizations per se did not appeal to her – even though she ran them and shook them up. She once said to a neighbour, ‘Political science will not get you very far.’ Better to model yourself after ‘priests and gangsters’ who knew their own people well and got things done.
When Edna travelled the state in milk train cabooses conducting voter education classes, she struck a proper ladylike pose by pretending to knit. Public work, she implied, need not negate a woman’s domestic life. Male politicians ridiculed Edna’s zeal for social reform – but not to her face. They wanted her good opinion and courted her support. A legislator who did not vote her way asked mutual friends to ‘square me with Edna’. He knew and she knew that there would be occasions when they would help each other out; neither one could afford to offend the other.
In 1908, the year Martha Gellhorn was born, her native city was undergoing a campaign of moral and civic renewal. The impetus for much of this improvement came from more than a decade of discussion and planning for the St Louis World Fair of 1904. That year Edna became involved in one of her first major projects: cleaning up the city’s water supply in preparation for the Fair’s Louisiana Purchase Exposition. St Louis wanted to celebrate a century of growth and to commemorate President Jefferson’s acquisition of a territory that stimulated the settlement of land and the development of a new civilization.
In fact, the city had been seriously damaged by the Civil War. It took more than a generation to recover its position as a major trading centre, and by the turn of the century it faced stiff competition from Chicago, which had surpassed St Louis in population, industrial output and trade. The World Fair, then, was a bid to recoup some of the economic strength St Louis had lost, to regenerate the glory of its role as the gateway to the West and to deliver on promises of progress that had never been fulfilled.
Thus Martha Gellhorn grew up in an era of reform promoted by her own mother, who would achieve a national reputation. During World War One, she would be a Civil Service Commissioner and regional director of the food rationing programme, and later she would actively involve herself in the American Association of University Women and in the United Nations. In 1920 she became a founder and first vice-president of the National League of Women Voters. Through her many efforts on behalf of civic reform Edna made important friends, including Eleanor Roosevelt, who would become Martha’s friend, supporter and adviser.
Early on in her career Edna staged big demonstrations for causes that also entertained the public. Raising funds for a new hospital, she paraded eight elephants through town while she herself sold peanuts at a concession stand. The herd got separated and the event turned into a ‘big game hunt’.
Edna included Martha in marches for women’s suffrage. Martha rode on floats festooned with slogans championing the cause and pointing to her as ‘the spirit of the future’. For the Democratic Convention held at St Louis in June 1916, Edna organized 7000 women decked out in yellow parasols and sashes proclaiming ‘Votes for Women’. They lined both sides of the ‘Golden Lane’, the streets that led to the convention centre. ‘We had a tableau’, she told a reporter in 1963. Different groups of women dressed in white, grey and black (the black ones dragging chains) symbolized states that had suffrage, partial suffrage, or no suffrage for women. Seven-year-old Martha Gellhorn, in the right-hand corner of the front row, represented a future voter.
Edna’s husband George liked to accompany Edna to women’s suffrage speaking engagements and ‘nod approvingly’. A distinguished gynaecologist and obstetrician, his work seconded hers when he established free prenatal clinics and other medical services for the poor.
Born in Breslau, Germany, George Gellhorn had studied at the Gymnasium in Ohlau, received his MD from the University of Würzburg in 1894 and served as an assistant in clinics at the Universities of Berlin, Jena and Vienna. Respected as a bright young man in the German medical community, Gellhorn also had ambitions as a scientist and for a time he served as an assistant to Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen, a Nobel Prize winner (1901) noted for his research in physics and famous for his discovery of X-rays.
George Gellhorn, an anti-militarist, opposed the rise of Prussianism. Possessed of an overwhelming desire to travel and with letters of introduction to distinguished professors in the American medical establishment, Gellhorn embarked on a trip of exploration. He sailed the world for a few years, becoming a ship’s doctor, before landing in the United States in 1899.
Gellhorn did not plan to stay in St Louis, but he had a letter of introduction to Washington Fischel, who had studied at the Universities of Prague, Vienna and Berlin for two years after obtaining his medical degree from St Louis Medical College in 1871. Gellhorn and Fischel shared many of the same convictions; more important, they admired each other. Fischel urged Gellhorn to stay. St Louis needed men like him.
Martha romanticized her parents’ first meeting. Edna glided down a centre stairway, the beams from a stained-glass window showering her golden hair with highlights. Bewitched by her charm, George resolved to woo Edna. But it took him three years to win her (a telling part of the story for Martha, who always had her doubts about marriage).
Martha liked to recall that she grew up with her three brothers, George, Walter and Alfred, in a ‘loving, merry, stimulating’ home. But Martha was less fond of George and Walter, the two oldest children in the family, than of Alfred, the youngest, with whom she would sometimes travel in later years. At the dinner table they listened to distinguished guests like Herbert Hoover, who visited the Gellhorn home during World War One when Edna became prominent in the War Food Administration. Walter remembered being taken to hear Senator William Borah, Woodrow Wilson and others, who were stumping the country in favour of the League of Nations. If there were no guests for dinner, if George Gellhorn had no night calls or evening surgery, he studied and wrote at home in the evening, with his children often emulating the example of this well-read man with a command of five languages and a deep appreciation of music.
George Gellhorn ‘set icily high standards’, Martha recalled. ‘Isn’t there anything better?’ he asked her when she brought home a report card with all As. Educated in Germanic precision and politeness, he found his children a little too forward, even though he had encouraged their candour and enjoyed their informality. They enjoyed his attention. He liked to drive a car on his medical rounds while listening to Walter conjugating Latin verbs. He helped his son with his algebra, but he never scolded him about homework.
The Gellhorns were permissive parents and their children seemed to behave well without overt discipline. Edna emulated her mother’s ‘substitution plan’ for training children:
Instead of telling your child to stop what he is doing, suggest something else which he would like to do, instead. When he has picked up an article you do not want him to have, hold out to him something else which will engage his interest before you try to get him to relinquish what he holds. In this way, you will get through the day with as few ‘don’ts’ as possible.
Edna could not have been a more encouraging mother. According to Martha, she made her children feel they were ‘wonderful’.
George and Edna forbade the use of racial or ethnic epithets. They did not gossip. They did not talk about money. The children had to base their opinions on what they had observed, not on what so and so had said. Family discussions followed Robert’s Rules of Order, with George Gellhorn as Speaker. Disputes were resolved by consulting reference books.
Children of reformers often decry their parents’ fanatical devotion to causes, but Edna’s children saw the sporting quality of her civic campaigns. ‘Peels of laughter’ emanated from her meetings, her son Walter recalled. ‘She made it fun’, one of her friends said. Everyone had a part to play. Indeed, each of her children thought that ‘she or he had virtually single-handedly achieved woman’s suffrage and had founded the League of Women Voters’, Walter remembered.
Martha’s best friend, Emily Lewis Norcross, understood early on that Edna was an outstanding, powerful person, a ‘doing woman’. Martha seemed to be on her own much of the time. ‘Marty’s mother was away an awful lot,’ Emily recalled. ‘So Marty was very independent as a child.’ She did not have the ‘governed’ home life Emily and her friends enjoyed. ‘We all grew up in this little protected community, going to our debutante parties, having our fun, and Martha was not about to do that’, said Mary Taussig Hall, a schoolmate and friend Gellhorn would continue to visit years after she left St Louis. Martha Love Symington, another schoolmate and lifelong friend, remembered that ‘Martha went along with her brothers, doing anything they did.’ By the age of eleven or twelve, ‘she knew the whole city. And we weren’t allowed to put our feet in buses – unless we were going to school and back.’ Already a strong personality, and a ‘hell of a lot of fun’, the well-read Martha had an impressive vocabulary and ambitions to be a writer. Emily realized that by this time Martha was ‘turning terribly against St Louis’.
‘Marty’s family was half-Jewish,’ Emily said pointedly, ‘but they were accepted in St Louis as gentiles.’ Delia Mares, who came to St Louis in the mid-1930s and began to work closely with Edna Gellhorn, remembered that people were conscious of the family’s Jewish background. Martha’s oldest friends agreed with Emily Norcross’s delicately phrased comment that being Jewish was regarded ‘with a little more feeling in those days’:
For instance, our Jewish girlfriends did not go to our dancing classes. They had their own thing. We had a couple of friends who were intimate pals, whom we were devoted to, and Marty would often talk to me about how ‘isn’t it sad that because they’re Jewish …’ I knew that Marty was part Jewish —
[Rollyson]: She never talked about it?
[Norcross]: Never!
[Rollyson]: Never?
[Norcross]: Never! This was a very telling thing.
Martha Love Symington also noticed this troubling element in Martha’s background.
George Gellhorn could not square his scientific research with religious belief. But he had no hostility towards believers. On the contrary, his children often found themselves in the company of a great-aunt, Sister Miriam, a former Episcopal nun notorious for her fierce, narrow-minded piety. Born Susan Mary Ellis, Sister Miriam (Martha Ellis’s sister) had done missionary work in Baden, ‘instituting Sunday School classes for children of laundresses at the school’ and establishing a ‘Peace Mission’ in St Louis. She had a rugged dedication the community admired: ‘I have encountered her far from home at all seasons of the year, all hours of the night. Dark alleys, miserable hovels, lonely county roads, river front jungles, held no terrors for her. She was never afraid’, a doctor said of her. Frequently at the Gellhorn home for Sunday dinner, present through the courtesy of some member of the family who had driven far out into the country to get her, this zealot remained devoted to the Gellhorns, as they were to her. She once admitted to Walter that his parents led such sainted lives that it was a pity they were not Christians.
Walter and Martha did attend an Ethical Society Sunday School for a few years and their brother George quickly gained his parents’ permission to join his friends at the Episcopal Sunday School. Neither Walter nor Martha seemed especially interested in ethical instruction; sometimes they would play hookey and buy candy with the donations they were supposed to make to the Ethical Society.
Martha sensed how peculiar her parents were in comparison to their contemporaries. Her mother had not only gone to college – unusual in itself for a woman in her era – she was a Bryn Mawr graduate. She had been east and that alone provoked gossip. Martha’s nonconformist father refused to join a country club, which he considered undemocratic. Martha claimed the Gellhorns were the only important family in St Louis not to join.
Of course, the Gellhorns were upper class, Martha admitted, but they were singular. At classical concerts in his native Germany, George Gellhorn relished the food available at intermission. A pastry fortified the concert-goer and enhanced the pleasure of the remainder of the programme, he contended. Alas, St Louis concerts did not provide such nourishment, a deficiency he rectified by bringing his own provisions. This deviation from community norms embarassed Martha, but it was a family principle ‘not to do something because everyone else did it and not to condemn something because no one else did it’.
In their early teens Emily and Martha whipped around to ‘gassy little Friday night dancing classes’, but they were not popular girls, Emily recalls: ‘Marty was overpowering to those little boys.’ She did not make a debut the way most girls did, since her family ‘were really sort of above that, and didn’t want it, but she missed it. Really. She missed it’, Emily insisted. Martha’s parents were distinguished citizens of St Louis, but they certainly were not in the social mainstream.
Martha attended Mr Mahler’s dancing classes once a week in the winter season. William Julius Polk, one of her companions, could not vouch for her attitude then, except that he suspected that she viewed places like the Fortnightly Club askance:
It was an exercise in deportment and ballroom behaviour. Everyone in the sense of being everyone one knew went to Mr Mahler’s dancing school. I think it’s in Alexis de Tocqueville’s study of the United States – when he comes to St Louis, he says that in order to understand St Louis you have to take into consideration the influence of the religion of the sacred heart and M. Sarpi’s dancing academy.
‘Nice girls’ dreamed of pretty social affairs in Mahler’s ballroom. ‘Every girl wants to have a ball, and many of them will have their desires granted’, a social column observed. This kind of niceness did not have appeal for Martha, ‘slightly rebellious and slightly nonconformist.… When we were growing up we felt that St Louis was somewhat Midwestern and provincial. And she thought it would be more interesting to belong to the big world’, Polk concludes.