Haaaaappy Wednesday to you too.

So I am on a bit of a Hemingway kick, due to reading a crucifying article about him (by Lillian Ross) in one class, and rereading “For Whom the Bell Tolls” in another.  I say “reread” because I read that book years ago for a 9th grade English class.  At the time, I thought Robert Jordan was cute and sweet, his relationship with Maria very romantic, and that Pilar was super cool.

Rereading it now, I still think Pilar is a badass, but I’m not so sure about those other things.  The death theme is sort of a buzz kill.

At any rate, I got interested in Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway’s third wife, after learning that she is sometimes said to be the woman on whom Maria was based.  (Interesting that Hemingway took a strong American journalist and turned her into a submissive Spanish housewife-type.)  Gellhorn and Hemingway covered the Spanish Civil War together, spent Christmas in Barcelona in 1937, and married in 1940.  However, Hemingway got pretty tired of his wife’s career.  When she left for Havana in 1943 to report on the Italian Front, he wrote her a letter with the line, “Are you a war correspondent, or a wife in my bed?”  They were divorced by 1945.

Unlike Hemingway or his Maria, Gellhorn does not seem to have been the romantic type.  She was more interested in having a strong male companion than in sex.  In 1972 she wrote:

“If I practised sex, out of moral conviction, that was one thing; but to enjoy it … seemed a defeat. I accompanied men and was accompanied in action, in the extrovert part of life; I plunged into that … but not sex; that seemed to be their delight and all I got was a pleasure of being wanted, I suppose, and the tenderness (not nearly enough) that a man gives when he is satisfied. I daresay I was the worst bed partner in five continents.”

War correspondence was her specialty, and damn did Gellhorn do a lot of it.  Throughout her life she covered among other things: the Spanish Civil War, WWII,  the Vietnam War, the Six-Day War in the Middle East and the civil wars in Central America.  At age 81, she went to Panama to write about the U.S. invasion.

But it’s not quite all roses with Gellhorn.  Though staunchly liberal throughout her life as her contemporaries gradually went conservative, she was also a huge pro-Israel supporter, and could not tolerate having Palestinians mentioned in her presence.  However, after all she saw in WWII, an extreme opinion on this subject is perhaps unavoidable.  She said that for her, Dachau “changed everything.”

She was not one to let journalism hide her opinions.  She thought the “objectivity” practiced by other journalists was nonsense, and very deliberately let her journalism reflect her politics.