November 29, 2006
Martha Gellhorn's travels
Just thought I'd pass along an enjoyable review, entitled Covering Her Century, by Christopher Benfey of war correspondent Martha Gellhorn (the third wife of Ernest Hemingway).
An excerpt from this article:
Gellhorn followed Hemingway back to Cuba in February 1939, where he was writing For Whom the Bell Tolls and expected her to keep house. Instead, much to his annoyance, she flew to Helsinki to cover the Russo-Finnish conflict, which confirmed her David-and-Goliath view of war. "I promise you," she wrote to Hemingway, "that I have never yet seen the innocent and unarmed other than hunted and destroyed." She also promised him, in a half-joking document titled "Guaranty," that she would never "brutalize my present and future husband in any way whatsoever" and that she recognized "that a very fine and sensitive writer cannot be left alone for two months and sixteen days." By September 1940 she was complaining that "E wants me for himself, altogether," and that "E's book has been an agony, like having children without interruption for months and months." She married him two months later, in Cheyenne, Wyoming, with roast moose for dinner.Gellhorn and Hemingway honeymooned, if you could call it that, in Hong Kong, after Collier's hired her to cover the "Chinese army in action" -- in retreat, more accurately, from the occupying Japanese forces. The journey gave Gellhorn one of the liveliest chapters in Travels With Myself and Another, her 1978 memoir of what she called her "horror journeys." She referred to Hemingway as U.C., for "Unwilling Companion"; while he hung out in the hotel bar in Hong Kong, she explored the opium dens, the brothels, the mah-jongg parlors and sweatshops, all overrun with refugees.
I cannot recommend 
Travels with Myself and Another highly enough, with its hilarious chapter, entitled "Mr. Ma's Tigers," on the aforementioned time in Hong Kong and China. I've included in my list of Belliveau's top literary travel books.
- posted by jbelliveau at 3:01 PM in Books, Music, DVDs
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