https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/considering-martha-gellhorn
In 1959, Martha Gellhorn wrote that her first marriage, to Ernest Hemingway, which lasted from 1940 until 1945, was “a distant dream, not very true, and curiously embarrassing.” More than 60 years later, you would think that she deserves more than to be cast as Hemingway’s third wife. But that is exactly what the Ken Burns/Lynn Novick documentary Hemingway does.
Born in St. Louis in 1908, Martha bore witness to most of the wars of the 20th century, with her insights captured in 21 books. She believed that writing was in the service of fighting injustice, and her work demonstrated bracing honesty, unfathomable courage, and a strict code of right and wrong. Yet her old-fashioned virtues make her difficult to approach. Add this to her fierce, late-in-life defense of Israel and the fact that she killed herself in 1998 rather than lose her eyesight, and she becomes, as my students would say, less relatable. Never mind that she continued to travel and file stories into her 80s, defying the common wisdom that war correspondent is a job reserved for young people. Or that her lean, arresting style can make you weep. Too often written off as adjunct to Hemingway, she once said that she wanted her journalism to “eliminate the sound of me screaming.”
Meanwhile, Burns and Novick’s Hemingway is the queer victim of toxic masculinity (he liked to dress as a woman in bed with his fourth wife). B & N are too smart to paint Gellhorn as the “bitch” that some of Papa’s friends viewed her as, but they do introduce her as a writer who “had a crush” on him; Meryl Streep reads her letters in mid-Atlantic tones. Their Gellhorn, while sympathetic, shows too little of the brave, charming, bullying, vain, daring, mythmaking female writer and too much of a #MeToo heroine chafing at her husband’s tyranny.
Unlike Hemingway, Gellhorn loved her mother, Edna, a beautiful suffragist who married George Gellhorn, a gynecologist. Both were half Jewish. Martha, their third child, grew up assimilated. In her largely excellent biography, Carolyn Moorhead only reports one incident of antisemitism in Gellhorn’s childhood, when her friend, Johnny Stix, was not invited to a dance because she was Jewish and Gellhorn also refused to go in solidarity.
If the Gellhorns—especially the impressive George—worshipped anything in the Jewish tradition, it was education. After Gellhorn came home from school with female genitalia missing from the drawings in her biology textbook, her parents started their own progressive school. Gellhorn attended, and there she began to cultivate friendships with men and women she admired. It was this need that may have resulted in her marriage to Hemingway, which the documentary series does not explore. She needed heroes to model herself after, and she understood early on that there would be a cost. As she later wrote, she needed “my desperate faith in the human spirit … revived and rewarded.” She did not find that at Bryn Mawr, where she went in 1926 and where she read Knut Hamsun and edited the college newspaper.
