#gellhorn

[blackswaneuroparedux]

I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother.

- Martha Gellhorn, Selected Letters

Martha Gellhorn was a novelist, travel writer, journalist, and a pioneering war correspondent who covered most of the major conflicts of the 20th century. She was the third wife of author Ernest Hemingway.

Martha met Ernest in Key West, Florida, in December of 1936 at the bar, Sloppy Joe’s. She was 28 years old; he was 39, and she had admired Hemingway since her college days.

The following year, Martha and Ernest both traveled to Spain to report on the Spanish Civil War and began an affair that would last for years. She wrote for Collier’s, while he was reporting for the North American Newspaper Alliance.

On November 4, 1940, after fifteen years together, Hemingway divorced Pauline. Seventeen days later he and Martha were married in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

After they were married, the couple moved to Havana and Martha rented a 19th-century estate twelve miles outside the city, called Finca Vigia - Spanish for “Lookout Farm.” Hemingway would eventually buy the property and it would be his home for the next twenty years.

By the summer of 1943, the tide of war in Europe had begun to turn and Martha was intent on covering the Allied advance. In September, she left for England without Hemingway, to report for Collier’s. He begged her to return to Cuba; she urged him to join her in London, instead. In early 1944, Martha returned to Cuba, hoping somehow to reassure her husband and rebuild their marriage. It did not work. Finally, Martha told him she “was going back to London whether he came or not.”

Eventually, Ernest agreed to go. He signed on with Collier’s, thus ensuring that Gellhorn would be overshadowed at the magazine for which she wrote regularly. He also arranged to travel separately from her, arriving in London eleven days before she did. During that time he would meet the woman he would eventually leave Martha for: a correspondent named Mary Welsh.

When Martha arrived in London it was clear their relationship was over. She walked out after an argument at London's Dorchester Hotel, the only one of Ernest’s wives to leave him.

She continued to report on the war. On D-Day, June 6, 1944, she stowed away on a hospital ship, the only woman to land at Normandy. And she was there when the Allies liberated Dachau.

The following year, on March 1, 1945, Martha and Ernest officially divorced.

After the war, Gellhorn continued to travel, write, and cover conflicts around the globe. In a career that spanned more than six decades, she authored numerous novels — including a memoir and a collection of her war journalism — and several well-reviewed novellas.

In her last years, Martha was in poor health, suffering from ovarian cancer and failing eyesight. She committed suicide at her home in London on 15 February  1998, at the age of 89.

[facts-i-just-made-up]

what’s the plot of the great gatsby? I need to write an essay on it

I forgot it so I looked it up and everyone is named like Baker and Gatsby and Caraway and Myrtle and they live in Eggs and I'm guessing this is more of a cookbook or cocktail thing than a novel.

Also for some reason this is on my phone:

[quotefeeling]

She is something so rare that there’s no name for it, an absolutely unfrightened woman whose heart never went wrong. And her hunger to give love, her intensity and inner magnetism – it’s all there. And she cannot help any of it.

Martha Gellhorn, Selected Letters

[asoftepiloguemylove]

on childhood and growing up

Noah Kahan The View Between Villages / Taylor Swift Never Grow Up / Kim Addonizio The Women; Wild Nights: New and Selected Poems / @/twinnedpeaks (on tumblr) / Taylor Swift You're On Your Own Kid / リリイ・シュシュのすべて All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001) dir. 岩井 俊二 Shunji Iwai / Martha Gellhorn in a letter to Hortenese Flexner and Wyncie King; Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn / Richard Siken Birds Hover the Trampled Field; War of the Foxes / The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2013) dir. Stephen Chbosky / Katie Maria The Memory of a Memory / Lorde Secrets From a Girl (Who's Seen it All) / Keaton St. James A List for Nightdreamers

[coochiequeens]

"She lied to a military police officer down by a hospital ship, said she was going to interview nurses about the 'woman’s angle,' and they let her on, because, as she said, no one gave a hoot about the woman’s angle. It served as the perfect forged passport for her," said Somerville. She resorted to those measures because her husband, Ernest Hemingway, tried to take over her journalist career.

This Saturday, June 6, will be the 76th anniversary of D-Day, the battle that would come to represent the beginning of the end of World War II. 

There was just one woman, a war correspondent, on the beaches at Normandy that day the allied forces liberated Western Europe from Nazi Germany: the singular Martha Gellhorn. Author Janet Somerville traces Gellhorn’s extraordinary life in her book Yours, For Probably Always: Martha Gellhorn’s Letters of Love and War.

"Since 1937, Martha had been a war correspondent for Collier’s magazine. She knew about the Allied invasion, that there was a plan to cover the Allied invasion of Normandy, and she was determined to cover that," Somerville said. 

The problem was, her very famous husband at the time, Ernest Hemingway, pulled the rug out from under her professionally.

"Hemingway had gone to New York, introduced himself to her editor at Collier’s and said ‘I’ll be your war correspondent.’ And he took her accreditation papers. Which was a bit of a problem," said Somerville.

Each publication could send just one correspondent. But Gellhorn was resourceful and clever. She found herself passage on a munitions ship from New York that would get her to Europe. She was the only woman and the only civilian aboard that ship, which landed in Liverpool. Then, she just needed to get to Normandy.

"She lied to a military police officer down by a hospital ship, said she was going to interview nurses about the 'woman’s angle,' and they let her on, because, as she said, no one gave a hoot about the woman’s angle. It served as the perfect forged passport for her," said Somerville.

Once on board the hospital ship, Gellhorn locked herself into a bathroom until they sailed. When the ship docked in Normandy, she waded ashore through waist-deep water with some of the medical officers.

"She became the only woman and the only war correspondent to be actually on the beaches at Normandy, evacuating the wounded."

Though she was there as a journalist to write about the event, she couldn’t help but tend to the wounded soldiers. She had an uncanny ability, Somerville says, to focus on what needed to be done. So when she saw that the wounded were hungry and thirsty, she set to work.

"She just took it in her stride and found somebody who could bring teapots to tip into their mouths,if they couldn't hold a glass. She just took charge and made sure that they got something," Somerville said.

She also managed to be one of many correspondents who wrote about D Day.

"The incredible thing about D-Day is that accredited correspondents produced 700,000 words of text, just about D-Day," Somerville said. "Martha was one of them. She had a piece called 'Over and Back' that Collier’s published."

Gellhorn went on to report into her old age, from all corners of the globe. She filed her last piece, about the murdered street children of Salvador, Brazil, more than 50 years after D-Day, when she was 87 years old.

Yours, For Probably Always: Martha Gellhorn’s Letters of Love and War, 1930-1949 by Janet Somerville is available at the link above, or wherever you buy your books.

[thoughtkick]

I wait every year for summer, and it is usually good, but it is never as good as that summer I am always waiting for.

Martha Gellhorn, Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn; in a letter to Hortense Flexner and Wyncie King

[bnmxfld]

And take care of yourself, and be happy, but don’t forget how big the world is.

Martha Gellhorn

[quotemadness]

She is something so rare that there’s no name for it, an absolutely unfrightened woman whose heart never went wrong. And her hunger to give love, her intensity and inner magnetism – it’s all there. And she cannot help any of it.

Martha Gellhorn

[oldwinesoul]

“And this urge to run away from what I love is a sort of sadism I no longer pretend to understand.”

// Martha Gellhorn, a letter to Stanley Pennell

[perfectfeelings]

I wait every year for summer, and it is usually good, but it is never as good as that summer I am always waiting for.

Martha Gellhorn, Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn; in a letter to Hortense Flexner and Wyncie King

[surqrised]

She is something so rare that there’s no name for it, an absolutely unfrightened woman whose heart never went wrong. And her hunger to give love, her intensity and inner magnetism – it’s all there. And she cannot help any of it.

Martha Gellhorn, Selected Letters

[lillyli-74]

I am frightened and doubtful, and everyone who touches me must suffer.

~Martha Gellhorn

[quotefeeling]

I wait every year for summer, and it is usually good, but it is never as good as that summer I am always waiting for.

Martha Gellhorn, Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn; in a letter to Hortense Flexner and Wyncie King

[asoftepiloguemylove]

Hi, can you do a web weave on the loss of a lover who you grieve for everyday for your life and wishes to seek their love everyday?

Thank you so much and I love you blog!!

i hope you're doing okay <33

L. Frank Baum The Wonderful Wizard of Oz / Ocean Vuong in an interview by Tonya Mosley / Martha Gellhorn from a letter to Hortense Flexner and Wyncie King Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn / pinterest / Rebecca Makkai The Great Believers / Anne Carson Glass, Irony and God / One Day (2011) dir. Lone Scherfig / pinterest

[theglasschild]

“I love you. Have a hell of a good time. I don’t really know what else is worth having.” ― Martha Gellhorn, Selected Letters

[thoughtkick]

She is something so rare that there’s no name for it, an absolutely unfrightened woman whose heart never went wrong. And her hunger to give love, her intensity and inner magnetism – it’s all there. And she cannot help any of it.

Martha Gellhorn, Selected Letters