On a bright, windy afternoon earlier this month, in London, a few dozen people came together outside 72 Cadogan Square, a tall, red-brick town house not far from Sloane Square. By craning one’s neck, or stepping into the road, it was possible to see the windows of the top floor and attic apartment, which belonged to Martha Gellhorn, the war reporter and writer, for the last twenty-eight years of her life. The crowd consisted mostly of publishers and writers, whom Gellhorn had befriended in London in the nineteen-eighties and called her “young chaps.” They were there for the unveiling of a blue plaque in Gellhorn’s memory. Blue plaques have been attached to the former homes of celebrated Londoners since 1866. Gellhorn’s was No. 948. A small velvet curtain had been pinned to the bricks of the building. Gellhorn died in her apartment in 1998, having reported on wars around the world for fifty years. As a small stage and a microphone were being set up for the ceremony, the loudspeakers popped loudly and suddenly. People in the crowd ducked on reflex. “Not now, Martha,” the biographer Victoria Glendinning said. She became close to Gellhorn after they stayed up until 2 A.M. at a dinner party in Kentish Town, talking and smoking, when Gellhorn was pushing eighty years old.
Gellhorn was born in St. Louis, in 1908. She moved to Paris when she was twenty-one, to write novels, and found her journalist’s voice during the Depression, while reporting on the lives of textile workers for the Federal Emergency Relief Association. She became friends with Eleanor Roosevelt, who invited her to live at the White House for a while. Her first war was the Spanish Civil War, which she went to cover in 1937. “I was always afraid,” she wrote, “that I would forget the exact sound, smell, words, gestures which were special to this moment and this place.” Gellhorn’s writing was percussive and intimate. She was an exceptional witness. In an early piece, for The New Yorker, a convoy of tanks in the dark outside Madrid looked “as if six boats, with only their harbor lights showing, were tied together, riding a gentle sea.” She married Ernest Hemingway, in 1940; they divorced five years later. On D Day, Gellhorn stowed away on a hospital ship and reported from the beaches in a nurse’s uniform. Her stories of war were populated by anonymous stretcher bearers, exhausted truck drivers, German prisoners of war, Vietnamese mothers, female prisoners in El Salvador. “I always liked Tolstoi’s crusty remark that ‘governments are a collection of men who do violence to the rest of us,’ ” Gellhorn wrote in the 1986 introduction to “The Face of War,” a collection of her reporting. “But now I think the old Russian was a prophet.”
Gellhorn bought the flat in Cadogan Square in 1970. Her mother, Edna, whom she called “the true north of her life,” died that fall. Her second marriage was over, and writing was difficult. She had been denied a visa to report in Vietnam. “I grow more and more solitary,” she wrote to a friend the following year. “The truth is: there is no one to see.” Gellhorn volunteered at Kew Gardens, where she picked up trash. She travelled and swam. Toward the end of the decade, however, Gellhorn was “re-discovered,” in her phrase, by a collection of London-based writers and editors, decades younger, who could not believe their luck. Among the speakers at the ceremony was John Pilger, an Australian documentary-maker and antiwar activist. Gellhorn sent him a postcard after he was criticized on a BBC show for his forthright coverage of the war in Vietnam. “DO NOT EVER LET THE BASTARDS GET YOU DOWN,” she wrote. “Let’s meet and have a drink,” Pilger replied. “There followed many memorable evenings here, putting the world to rights over a bottle of Famous Grouse whiskey, with me promising never to talk about Ernest Hemingway. But we often did, of course.”
For all Gellhorn’s professional fierceness, most of the speakers at the plaque unveiling reminisced about her gift for friendship, her tidy attic, and her unusual company.
Twenty years after her death, Gellhorn’s young chaps remain protective of her achievements. Since 1999, the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism has been awarded for work that exposes what Gellhorn called “official drivel.” Pilger said that she would often call him, early in the morning, after hearing of a military operation or a surgical air strike somewhere and say, “ ‘I smell a rat.’ ” In the spring of 1990, when Gellhorn was eighty-one, she went door to door in Chorrillo, a slum of Panama City, reporting on civilian casualties resulting from the U.S. invasion, a few months earlier. “It was a journalism that seems now almost extinct,” Pilger said. “There was never another Martha Gellhorn.”
For all Gellhorn’s professional fierceness, most of the speakers reminisced about her gift for friendship, her tidy attic, and her unusual company. Pilger recalled being thrown out of the department store Selfridges with Gellhorn because she had lit a cigarette, and her habit of loudly criticizing the trailers at the movies. John Hatt, a travel writer and publisher, told a story about travelling in the sixties with Gellhorn to Cuba, where a senior Communist official talked at length about the country’s impressive billboards. “Martha looked a bit irritated,” Hatt said. “When he stopped, she gave him a bollocking about Cuban food.” After another trip, to Turkey, Hatt asked Gellhorn if she had taken the time to learn any of the language. “I learned the Turkish for ‘Fuck off, I’m old enough to be your grandmother,’ ” Gellhorn replied. John Simpson, the BBC’s world-affairs editor, became friends with Gellhorn in the nineties, when her eyesight was failing, after he reported on the first Gulf War. Gellhorn told him about attending John F. Kennedy’s Inauguration ball. Gellhorn was alone and feeling out of place when she sensed the President and his entourage moving in her direction. “There was Kennedy himself coming towards her with all the hangers-on and the freaks and the creeps,” Simpson said. “And, as he walks up to her, and she said, ‘Oh, fuck. He’s gonna make me Secretary of State.’ ” It wasn’t that. Kennedy had heard that Gellhorn used to live in the White House and might know of a way to sneak out from time to time. “ ‘Darling’—she called him ‘Darling’—‘That’s easy,’ ” Simpson continued, in a broad American accent. Gellhorn told the President about a small gate at the back of the property. “There’s only one guy in charge of it,” she said. “Roosevelt used to just give him money all the time.”
“She was very mysterious, I think, socially,” Glendinning said. “There were hinterlands beyond her hinterlands.” At various points in her life, Gellhorn was close to H. G. Wells, Leonard Bernstein, and Lady Diana Cooper, a London society beauty of the twenties. She preferred to see friends alone, wrote letters constantly, cooked rarely, and didn’t care about clothes. “One of our favorite phrases was, ‘I hate the kitchen of life,’ ” Glendinning said. “We didn’t usually eat in the flat, I have to say. But, when we did, her signature dish was opening two tins, one of tuna and one sweet corn, and mixing them both together. And it was peculiarly disgusting.” Over whiskey and cigarettes, Gellhorn’s young chaps found themselves telling her things that they hadn’t told anybody else. “It was partly because she didn’t overreact—she just listened,” Glendinning said. “And she was very free with opinion and advice. And some of the advice was quite startling. Some of the advice was quite shocking. But, if you followed what she said, it generally turned out to have been correct.”
Gellhorn swallowed a cyanide pill when she was eighty-nine. Her eyesight was failing and she was suffering from liver and ovarian cancer. Glendinning and her husband found Gellhorn in the apartment, late on the night of Valentine’s Day. “We got up, came around here, stood where we are standing now, in the dark square looking up at the dark building,” she recalled. “All the windows were wide open, and all the lights were blazing. And she did it impeccably and considerately.” Glendinning chose to remember the Gellhorn of a few years earlier, at a book festival in Toronto. She was fragile and on edge. She had lost an earring on the floor of her hotel bedroom, and she and Glendinning had scrabbled around on their knees. But, onstage, Gellhorn was transformed. She spoke without notes, in full command, about the scale of the global arms trade. “So she was a trouper and a pro,” Glendinning said. “Martha was certainly no plaster saint. She really was not. But I think that she was the moral true north for quite a lot of us.”
When the speeches were over, the young chaps posed for pictures and Simpson pulled a cord on the velvet curtain to reveal Gellhorn’s plaque. It went off without a hitch. “Martha Gellhorn 1908-1998 War Correspondent and Writer lived and worked in a flat here.”
