by Lauren Elkin
But it was Hemingway who inspired her to go to Spain. Along with John Dos Passos, Lillian Hellman and Archibald MacLeish, he was setting up a company called Contemporary History, which would exist in order to drum up funding to make a documentary about the war in Spain, to be directed by Joris Ivens. Spain was the front line in the fight against fascism and totalitarianism, and it was, Gellhorn increasingly believed, the ‘Balkans of 1912’, the next troubled zone that was about to erupt into global war. She was squarely on the side of the Republican forces attempting to put down Franco’s reactionary uprising.
For most of her life she had been against war, and would not have been interested in seeing one fought. In The Face of War, her 1959 essay collection of war writing, she talks about meeting some young Nazis in Berlin in 1934, and speaking with them, trying to understand them as Socialists, empathising with the German position, as she says all right-thinking people did at that time. ‘I was a pacifist,’ she wrote, ‘and it interfered with my principles to use my eyes.’10 She was blinded by the idea of maintaining peace at all costs. But a mere two years later, her eyes were back in working order, and she set out for Spain. ‘I am going to war with the boys,’ she wrote in a letter to a friend. In New York an editor at Collier’s gave Gellhorn a letter identifying her as a special correspondent for the magazine. She did not, however, see herself as a foreign correspondent; rather, she was a novelist (the author of a novel that later embarrassed her, What Mad Pursuit – 1934), who had done some work as a journalist. She travelled from France and turned up in Spain with a backpack and fifty dollars in her pocket.
When she arrived in Madrid, in March 1937, it was ‘cold, enormous and pitch-black, and the streets were silent and perilous with shell-holes’; it was very clear she had arrived in the middle of a war, but a war fought on the streets of the city. Shelling rained down several times a day from the rebel forces, who were camped in the hills on three sides of the city. ‘It was a feeling I cannot describe; a whole city was a battlefield, waiting in the dark. There was certainly fear in that feeling, and courage. It made you walk carefully and listen hard.’11 As if to highlight the surreal juxtaposition of daily life and carnage, she observed that you could take a tram to the front line, near the university. She followed the male correspondents around (respectful of these ‘experienced men who had serious work to do’), and used their transportation passes to get around. She learned ‘a little Spanish and a little about war’, and spent time with the wounded. Those first few weeks, she was also rather busy beginning an affair with Hemingway, and befriending another American war correspondent, Virginia Cowles, with whom she would later write a romp of a war play, Love Goes to Press (1946).
But soon a ‘journalist friend’ (Hemingway) suggested she use her writing to contribute to the war effort (the causa). Her talent seems very obvious to us, her readers, in retrospect, but in spite of her youthful bravado, Gellhorn didn’t see herself as being an expert at anything – not journalism, not novel-writing, and certainly not Spanish politics, especially as she lacked the credentials to get in to meet with the key players. ‘[H]ow could I write about war,’ she asks, looking back years later, ‘what did I know, and for whom would I write? What made a story, to begin with? Didn’t something gigantic and conclusive have to happen before one could write an article?’ But her journalist friend said she could write about Madrid. ‘Why would that interest anyone? I asked. It was daily life. He pointed out that it was not everybody’s daily life.’12
She did not expect that Collier’s would accept the first piece she sent them, but they did. It begins as a portrait of a city under siege, with observations on shopping, theatres in wartime, the opera, hotels that were now hospitals. Then she turns her gaze to describing the way the houses looked after the bombings, the children in the hospitals, mutilated and starving, the smell of the trenches, the precise sound of a shell as it left a gun and whizzed towards you, the feeling of waiting for the shell to hit alone in a room that ‘got dustier and dustier as the powdered cobblestones of the street floated into it’.13 As the street came inside, she had to get outside into the street, ‘practising on the way how to breathe. You couldn’t help breathing strangely, just taking the air into your throat and not being able to inhale it.’ In this strange version of a city, the street, in the form of its pulverised cobblestones, entered the lungs.
After her first few articles, Collier’s added her name to their masthead. In a series of reports, Gellhorn described her daily walks, detailing the everyday impact of war on the city and the people who lived there. She wrote about how strange it was to find a war just down the road, how to pass the time they ‘went visiting at the nearest fronts (ten blocks from the hotel, fifteen blocks, a good brisk walk in the rain, something to circulate your blood)’, and ‘strolled to University City and Usera, to the Parque del Oeste, to those trenches that are a part of the city and that we knew so well’, amazed that ‘[n]o matter how often you do it, it is surprising just to walk to war, easily, from your own bedroom where you have been reading a detective story or a life of Byron, or listening to the phonograph, or chatting with your friends’.14
She described the people as simply waiting, for the next shelling, or for something else to happen. People ‘standing in doorways and around the square, just standing there patiently, and then suddenly a shell landed, and there was a fountain of granite cobblestones flying up in the air, and the silver lyddite smoke floated off softly’.15 One man can’t bear waiting in a doorway, in a group, and says he thinks it’s over, but in any case he must go. ‘“I have work to do. I am a serious man. I cannot spend my time waiting for shells. Salud,” he said, and walked out calmly into the street, and calmly crossed it.’ His decision to move inspires all the other people to move along as well, navigating the bombed-out square, ‘pock-marked with great round holes, and littered with broken cobblestones and glass. An old woman with a market basket on her arm hurried down a side street. And two boys came around the corner, arm in arm, singing.’ Here she addresses the reader or herself or the Madrileños, all together in the second person: ‘You couldn’t wait forever; you couldn’t be careful all day.’16 They – return to the third-person plural, return to detached, yet empathic, description – had to get on ‘with the routine of their lives, as if they had been interrupted by a heavy rainstorm but nothing more’. She walks around the city, noticing who’s where, what disruptions have there been to people’s lives, how are they reacting to the ongoing shelling. Three men are killed in a café in the morning, while they are reading the paper and having coffee, but by afternoon the clientele has returned. The bars in Madrid’s version of no-man’s-land are still crowded at the end of the day, even if there are dead animals on the pavement, and ‘crisscrossing trails of human blood’.17 Women brave the shelling to get groceries for dinner. And inside a shoe shop, as explosions go off outside, a clerk calmly suggests to some girls trying on sandals that perhaps they should move to the back of the shop, in case the front windows should break.
Then there is the passage that must truly have brought home the tragedy of the conflict to Gellhorn’s readers.
An old woman, with a shawl over her shoulders, holding a terrified thin little boy by the hand, runs out into the square. You know what she is thinking: she is thinking she must get the child home, you are always safer in your own place, with the things you know. Somehow you do not believe you can get killed when you are sitting in your own parlor, you never think that. She is in the middle of the square when the next one comes.
A small piece of twisted steel, hot and very sharp, sprays off from the shell; it takes the little boy in the throat. The old woman stands there, holding the hand of the dead child, looking at him stupidly, not saying anything, and men run out towards her to carry the child. At their left, at the side of the square, is a huge brilliant sign which says: Get out of Madrid.18
The passage is proof of Gellhorn’s deep empathy, her willingness and even her obligation to look, and
to record. But from this awful observation comes, perhaps, an important truth about war. You can be killed at home as easily as anywhere else – you are not safer at home with your things around you than you are out in the unfamiliar world, though – to paraphrase her first husband – it is pretty to think so. We take a certain amount of solace in the idea of home. But a home can be used against you.
Gellhorn had left her family behind in the US in pursuit of the freedom to come and go as she chose, and found herself hooked by a husband who tried to reel her in like one of his marlins. They bought a house in Cuba, and the responsibility of it drove her to despair. ‘I got very gloomy,’ she wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt, ‘thinking now I am caught, now at last I have possessions (and I have feared and fled them all my life), and what in God’s name shall I do with this palace now that I have it. So I felt that the world was at an end, I had a house and would never write again but would spend the remainder of my life telling the servants to scrub the bathroom floors and buy fresh paper for the shelves.’19
And then the pleasures of the house would sneak in on her, the ‘sun streaking over the tiled floors, and the house itself, wide and bare and clean and empty, lying quiet all around me’, and she would feel ‘very serene and safe again’.20 That word, ‘safe’, could mean so many different things to her – it could mean what it usually does, or it could contain all the guilt and self-loathing she could summon at being home and safe when others were not.21
* * *
Gellhorn had no patience for what she liked to refer to as ‘all that objectivity shit’ – the idea that a responsible journalist has to be neutral and report her subject from all sides.22 Objectivity was boring, not to mention unattainable. She was more interested in capturing the feel of a time and place. ‘How is it going to be possible ever to explain what this is really like?’ she asked in an essay for Collier’s. ‘All you can say is, “This happened; that happened; he did this; she did that.” But this does not tell how the land looks on the way to the Guadarrama, the smooth brown land, with olive trees and scrub oak growing beside the dry steam beds, and the handsome mountains curving against the sky.’23 Capa told Gellhorn that ‘in a war […] you must have a position or you cannot stand what goes on’.24 Gellhorn didn’t have just one position; her orientation was always adapting, as she ranged around Madrid. ‘Disaster,’ she wrote, ‘had swung like a compass needle, aimlessly, all over the city.’25 She described the world in geographical terms, but any objective sense of direction had become impossible. She met an architect who was carrying his ‘day’s ration of bread’ in a newspaper. ‘He was very careful all morning, climbing through ruins, jumping flooded gutters, not to drop the bread; he had to take it home – there were two small children there, and come death and destruction and anything else, the bread mattered.’26 This is a kind of micro-reporting, telling the world not what happened at a meeting between generals, but how much a loaf of bread mattered to an architect and his children.
* * *
I saw the Capa photograph of Gellhorn at Paestum at the International Center for Photography in New York, in a show about his colour photography. Although Capa is best known for his work in black and white, he started experimenting with colour in 1941. It was an eccentric medium at the time. Colour film was expensive and took a long time to develop, making it impractical for war reporting, so editors rarely wanted it, and Capa’s colleagues turned their noses up at it. ‘Photography in colour? It is something indigestible, the negation of all photography’s three-dimensional values,’ said Henri Cartier-Bresson. After the war, however, magazines no longer wanted dour images of destruction and suffering wrought in many shades of grey; they wanted loud popping colour, and Capa did all he could to keep up with the demand, travelling to Israel, Norway, Budapest, Moscow, Morocco, France, as well as Italy, to shoot spreads of magical places most people would never visit, places that imagined a world untouched by war. Some of the images in the ICP show had been published in magazines like Holiday and Life in the 1950s, but many had never been seen before. These colour pictures weren’t of the subjects he was known for and therefore, as the exhibition notes said, were considered irrelevant to Capa’s ‘canon’. I think that fiction was Gellhorn’s colour photography. Not in the sense that it presented a world in Technicolor, like the brilliance of the Oz portion of Victor Fleming’s musical (released on 15 August 1939, two weeks before the war began), but in the sense that it filled in what readers had been left to imagine: she could not only narrate the slice of the architect’s life during the war, but create a story for him.
Although she downplayed her abilities before the literary god she had married, she still needed to funnel the real world into an invented one, which nevertheless bore its likeness. She wrote self-deprecatingly to Hemingway in 1943 that journalism was bad for him, but good for her. ‘It gives me many things for my eyes and mind to feed on, and they need to feed on actual sights rather than reading, simply because they are not first-rate, but that is their best food. It gives me a chance to meet people I would never otherwise meet, and I want to know them … Besides, deviously, everything I have ever written has come through journalism first, every book I mean; since I am not Jane Austen or the Brontë sisters and I have to see before I can imagine, and this is the only way I have of seeing.’27 What novelist wouldn’t feel hemmed in, married to Hemingway? I’m not Austen or the Brontës – or Hemingway, she might have added; I am no threat to you. But still: she insists on imagining. Journalism was a way towards fiction, a necessary step in between life and fictional life. And maybe, though it might not incite ‘direct action’ on the part of her readers, she hoped ‘it makes a sort of climate, that it makes a little more receptivity in people who read it’.28 But fiction held pride of place.
Like Capa’s colour photographs, fiction took too long to develop to be ‘newsworthy’; the reporting she had done came to serve as a sort of fieldwork for the characters and situations she would create in her fiction, where she would develop the psychological impact of history. The Trouble I’ve Seen (1936) is a collection of linked short stories drawing on her work with Roosevelt’s Federal Emergency Relief Association during the Great Depression. As Rachel Arons wrote in the New Yorker, ‘though it predated, by several decades, the literary reportage of Ryszard Kapuściński or the New Journalism of the nineteen-sixties that brought creative-writing techniques into the realm of nonfiction, The Trouble I’ve Seen foreshadowed those journalistic movements: it read like a novel but gained power from that journalistic advantage Tom Wolfe called “the simple fact that the reader knows all this actually happened”.’29 For Capa and for Gellhorn, colour may have been closer to life not only because most of us live in a world of colours, not shades of black and white, but because it was also, with its brilliant, Kodachrome colours, more spectacularly artificial. There is no sharper truth than that of fiction.
In those early days she sometimes went too far and blurred the lines between fiction and lies. In 1936, she published an article about witnessing a lynching. This event turned out to be something she had heard about, but not actually seen, the conflation (she told Eleanor Roosevelt) of two different accounts she had heard while travelling in the American South with her lover, Bertrand de Jouvenal (Colette’s stepson and former lover, but that is another story). She did not let on for many years that she had not been in attendance that day when ‘a group of men, shoving and pushing, got Hyacinth’s limp, thin body up to them. He half lay, half squatted on the car roof.’ There is no doubt that Gellhorn places herself at the scene; she notes that everyone was so still ‘you could hear the mosquitoes whining’ as they threw the rope up and over the tree. ‘I went away and was sick,’ she writes.30 Gellhorn was ashamed not of having pretended to have been there, but of not having spoken up, when the article was picked up and reprinted and earned her an invitation to testify before a Senate committee as they drafted an anti-lynching bill, though she declined.31 She would not give false testimony before the law. And sh
e would spend the rest of her life trying to really be there.
The ethics of it are tricky to parse. We rely on journalists to be at least truthful, even if pure objectivity is impossible. But a first-hand account is always going to be more titillating for readers than something invented; we love the thrill of something that really happened, we prefer our fictions to be based on a true story. Had she written a short story about a lynching, she would likely still have been praised for her daring. But writing about the event as though she had witnessed it first-hand shifts the focus almost imperceptibly from what happened to her own presence. In that sense Gellhorn’s work – not only this piece of writing, but all the rest as well, true or false or a blurred combination of the two – points up an uncomfortable truth about reportage as testimony. The drive to speak for those who can’t speak for themselves is, on some level, a drive to let your own voice be heard. She did not imagine, she wrote, that she would go on to become a professional in the field, ‘an unscathed tourist of wars’.32 There is a fraught politics at work here, something cutting in the notion that war has its tourists, who can come and go as they please, that there is a class of ‘professionals’ of the field of war, who make money and fame off the suffering of others. But Gellhorn also shows us that self-interest can be a form of empathy, as she plunged herself again and again into other people’s hearts and minds, even to the point of making things up when she should have drawn a clearer boundary.
It was the Second World War that forced her to confront the fact that the act of witnessing would not leave her unscathed, that getting to see events first-hand exacted a price. Gellhorn would write three novels about that war: A Stricken Field (1940), a novel set in Prague under the Nazi occupation in 1938, which was inspired by her time in that city, and features an American female journalist reporting on the demise of Czechoslovakia as Europe turned their backs; Liana (1945), set in the Caribbean, about a mixed-race girl, the French husband who exploits her, and the exiled French tutor she loves and whom she thinks will save her; and Point of No Return (1948), a novel that, as Heather McRobie wrote for the TLS, ‘allows American optimism to disintegrate inexorably in the face of European darkness’.33