YOURS, FOR PROBABLY ALWAYS
Martha Gellhorn's Letters of Love and War, 1930-1949
edited by Janet Somerville
Loneliness, love, and a rebellious spirit are revealed through a writer’s intimate letters.
Somerville makes an impressive book debut with a life of novelist, journalist, and intrepid war correspondent Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998), told through a captivating selection of her letters to friends, family, husbands, and lovers. The volume is enriched by Somerville’s biographical narrative and her decision to include responses of many recipients and, in some cases, letters between individuals who were especially significant in Gellhorn’s life: letters, for example, between Gellhorn’s second husband, Ernest Hemingway, and her mother, Edna Gellhorn. Edna was her daughter’s polestar and champion: “I love you best of anybody,” Gellhorn wrote to her before she went off to report in Vietnam. “I’ll love you as long as I live, and admire you wholeheartedly out of the whole world.” Gellhorn loved Eleanor Roosevelt, too, whom she counted as a friend and confidante. “Dearest Mrs. R.,” Gellhorn wrote, was “an absolutely unfrightened selfless woman whose heart never went wrong.” To Gellhorn’s impassioned raging against injustice, oppression, and the horror of war, Roosevelt was unfailingly sympathetic and wise but also calmly forthright about Americans’ reluctance “to do much in the way of sacrificing to help the people who are suffering in other lands.” By the time Gellhorn married Hemingway in 1940, both were already famous, and the marriage made news. But despite playful, loving letters to her “Beloved Bug,” she came to find Hemingway moody and volatile; “a man must be a very great genius to make up for being such a loathsome human being,” she wrote to her mother when she decided to divorce him. Although she had many affairs and countless friends, she confessed that her abiding loneliness could not “be blotted out by anyone else; my loneliness is my own cherished possession and probably my only one.”
An engrossing collection that burnishes Gellhorn’s reputation as an astute observer, insightful writer, and uniquely brave woman.