Quote of the Day (Martha Gellhorn, on the Power of Public Opinion)

“Public opinion, though slow as lava, in the end forces governments towards more sanity, more justice. My heroes and heroines are all private citizens.” — American journalist and novelist Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998), The View From the Ground (1988)

Quote of the Day (Martha Gellhorn, on November)

“In November you begin to know how long the winter will be.”—American journalist and novelist Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998), "November Afternoon," The Heart of Another (1941)

I took the image that accompanies this post a couple of days ago in Pondside Park in Harrington Park, a few towns away from me in Bergen County, NJ. I was coming back from a trip into Rockland County, NY when I saw this park on the side of the road, and pulled over for a walk.

I have increasingly felt that autumn is all too short a season in my part of the country, with warmer temperatures encroaching on the traditional point marking fall. The past several days, however, the temperatures have dropped and the winds have whipped up. I had to pull my scarf around me a little more tightly the other day as I circled this pond.

Leaf-changing—heck, leaf disappearance—can occur so rapidly these days. The magnificent profusion of colors seen on trees just a couple of weeks ago is all gone. The many leaves crunching beneath my feet were all brown, as were those that remained on trees for now.

So, to take up the question posed by Gellhorn so long ago, how long will winter be? I might have worried more about global warming if we continued to have balmy temperatures at this point. For now—fingers crossed—Earth is back into its usual rhythms, I hope.

Quote of the Day (Martha Gellhorn, on ‘The Taste of Lies’)

“Gradually I came to realize that people will more readily swallow lies than truth, as if the taste of lies was homey, appetizing: a habit.”— American war correspondent, novelist and travel writer Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998), The Face of War (1959)

We are about to see how many Americans will continue to fall for “the taste of lives,” as they have done since 2016. A quarter century since Ms. Gellhorn's death, lies in this country have not only become appetizing but addictive.

Gellhorn, who covered the Spanish Civil War and World War II—two military conflicts resulting from the lies of Fascism—also implicitly revealed why so many people fall under the sway of this hideous approach to government when she wrote, “Citizenship is a tough occupation which obliges the citizen to make his own informed opinion and stand by it.”

Quote of the Day (Martha Gellhorn, on a New Year’s Resolution for World Leaders)

“On the night of New Year’s Day, I thought of a wonderful New Year’s resolution for the men who run the world: get to know the people who only live in it.”—American war correspondent, novelist and travel writer Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998), The Face of War (1959)

Quote of the Day (Martha Gellhorn, on How She Knew Her Marriage to Hemingway Was Over)

"I'd known him four years when I realized he was a liar. It was shocking. Mr. Josie, who'd run the bar in Key West, came to see him in Havana. He saw Ernest only once because Ernest was writing and then Josie got so drunk he was arrested and put in a straitjacket and he died. Ernest said: 'I couldn't see him because Marty wanted to spend the day on the boat.' It was a lie. I never wanted to go on the boat. Anything uncomfortable he off-loaded with a lie. He lied about everything.”--Martha Gellhorn on ex-husband Ernest Hemingway, quoted in Nicholas Shakespeare, “Martha Gellhorn,” Granta, Summer 1998

It’s hard to say what annoyed her more about Ernest Hemingway—his lying or the fact that his literary career left her own very solid and honorable one dimmed by comparison. 

After the end of her marriage, when she correctly predicted that the Nobel Prize laureate’s behavior had become so extreme that he would commit suicide, Martha Gellhorn probably could not imagine that she would share a similar fate.

But on this date in 1998, nearly totally blind, her body cancer-ridden, the longtime war correspondent—having braved traveling in combat zones, even surviving rape nearly 10 years before—found that, like her ex-husband, she could no longer go on living, and killed herself.

The ending of her life deserved better, as well as her reputation. 

She was best remembered for her war reports, from the Spanish Civil War to Vietnam, while her fiction and the play she tried (Love Goes to Press, with friend and fellow reporter Virginia Cowles) has been regarded as largely an interesting curiosity. It was the exact reverse of the husband whose name she could hardly dare to say in later years.

But, like him, she was larger than life—and, in her combination of tomboy and glamor queen, she might have matched him as a larger-than-life figure. 

I don’t think she would have taken kindly to the order of the billing of the HBO film that came out last year—Hemingway and Gellhorn—but she would have certainly enjoyed the fact that the formidable male actor playing her ex (Clive Owen) was exceeded in star wattage by the actress playing herself (Nicole Kidman).

Quote of the Day (Martha Gellhorn, on Ernest Hemingway)

"When you're daydreaming as a child you're Joan of Arc or Richard Coeur de Lion: that's the one pleasure of childhood. But it's supposed to change. Ernest always cast himself in a bigger light. He didn't mythomane down, only up. He had an accurate memory of things you don't mythomane about: scenery, places, names. That worked very well. The scenery was exact and correct, but the hero striding through it was larger than life. Finally, in The Old Man and the Sea, he was a mixture of himself and Christ."-- Martha Gellhorn on ex-husband Ernest Hemingway, quoted in Nicholas Shakespeare, “Martha Gellhorn,” Granta, Summer 1998

I don’t have HBO, so no, I haven’t seen its movie Hemingway and Gellhorn, starring Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman. But it’ll be high on my list when it comes out on DVD. I’m dying to see what they did with the story of the closest thing the 20^th century had to a Byronic hero and the only one of his four wives fully a match for him in writing and adventuring. Maybe that competitive factor also made this the shortest of Papa's marriages.

Well, that’s one reason why it didn’t last. Another was Ernest Hemingway’s talents as a fabulist—one, as I discussed in a prior post, that he shared with Mad Men’s similarly troubled macho man, Don Draper. You would expect that Martha Gellhorn—for whom a prize was named which celebrates “journalism that challenges secrecy and mendacity in public affairs”—would have a difficult time accepting that in private life, and she did.

It rubbed Gellhorn every kind of wrong way that she was remembered largely as an appendage to her husband, even though she stands in the front rank of reporters of all time. In the contest of egos between herself and the novelist, that stung, and you have to read everything she wrote or said about him with that in mind.

And yet, there’s rough justice in what she told Nicholas Shakespeare about her ex. At the Ernest Hemingway Museum in his native Oak Park, Ill., a surviving piece of his father’s stationery shows makeshift sketches by 2 1/2 –year-old Ernie Hemingway of a giraffe, a sailor, two guns, Noah's ark, a tree, a pipe, and a man on the moon—all testifying to his future love of adventure. He could not accumulate the material for his books without that love. Gellhorn, a woman lied to—and emotionally abused—by this psychologically frail man, had little understanding of her ex’s need.

Still, despite her annoyance, she could not help but admit that there were some things he got right: “scenery, places, names”—an unconscious echo of one of the most famous passages in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (“Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments, and the dates”).

Gellhorn also puts her finger on the problem of Hemingway studies: his corroding ability to sustain a piece of fiction after For Whom the Bell Tolls. The progressive battering taken by his mind and body were key to that deterioration, of course, but just as problematic was his growing capacity for myth-making. True, identifying himself with the protagonists of his fiction allowed him to enter fully into their lives. But there was something disturbing in the way that Hemingway not only identified with Santiago, the simple fisherman hero of The Old Man and the Sea, in his recent lack of good fortune (Santiago has not caught anything much in far too long, while Hemingway’s Over the River and Into the Trees was widely scorned by critics), but also with Christ.

Hemingway’s life, if nothing else, will keep people returning to his books. With the release of the Owen-and-Kidman literary epic, along with an upcoming Mint Theater Co. revival of her 1946 play co-written by Virginia Cowles, Love Goes to Press, we might, at last, also be having a season for Gellhorn. Sometimes truth does work to one’s advantage, after all.

(The photo of Hemingway with Carlos Gutierrez, first mate of his beloved boat Pilar, is from the Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.)

Quote of the Day (Martha Gellhorn, on Writing and Lying)

"What you and I see as a lie, in a writer is called imagination."—Journalist/novelist Martha Gellhorn (and third wife to “liar” Ernest Hemingway) to Eleanor Roosevelt, quoted in Nicholas Shakespeare, "Martha Gellhorn," Granta, Summer 1998

This Day in Germany History (Nazi Thuggery Unleashed in “Kristallnacht”)

November 9, 1938—Egged on by the government of Adolf Hitler, mobs rampaged throughout Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland for two nights in shocking anti-Semitic fury. No sphere of public or private life was safe or sacred—the street, the home, the business, the synagogue.

The event came to be nicknamed Kristallnacht, or “Night of the Broken Glass”—taking its cue image from the broken windows of Jewish storefronts. One’s tendency at first is to think of this an old-fashioned pogrom, except that now we know that it was a Nazi experiment in mob psychosis whose “success” (if you want to use the term ironically) warmed the heart of Nazi progaganda chief Dr. Josef Goebbels.

The damage looked like this when all was said and done:

* At least 96 Jews killed
* Hundreds more wounded
* Hundreds of synagogues put to the torch
* Almost 7,500 Jewish businesses destroyed
* Approximately 30,000 Jews arrested and sent to concentration camps

Let’s just mention briefly here two other forms of damage: to the Nazis’ crumbling international image and to ordinary Germans’ idea of what their regime was truly about.

Only about a month after the Munich treaty, no European government could be in any doubt that they had concluded peace with a thugocracy. In America, Franklin D. Roosevelt had accepted it as an article of faith from the beginning of his administration that Hitler was mad, but the events of these nights shocked him in a way he never expected, leading him to recall the American ambassador to Germany. "I myself can scarcely believe that such things could occur in a 20th century civilization," he admitted at a press conference.

My post yesterday on Martha Gellhorn mentioned her dispatch on Dachau. Another of her articles, collected in Reporting World War II, poured scorn on the claim already being peddled by the average German that he or she didn’t have a clue what its government was doing. But even before the war, Kristallnacht was an unmistakable warning. As historian Ian Kershaw has noted: "The German public was confronted directly on a nationwide scale with the full savagery of the attack on the Jews."

One thing I’ve been much remiss in doing is highlighting the work of other bloggers with interesting posts about events that I’m covering for the day, too. This weekend—with anniversaries of two events that represented important signposts to the rise of the Nazi menace—provides an excellent opportunity to rectify this situation.

Yesterday was the 85th anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s “Beer Hall “Putsch” in Munich—something that, to most observers at the time, seemed almost like a comic opera, but which looks in retrospect only slightly premature in signaling Hitler’s deeply anti-democratic tendencies. This Beer Hall Putsch site offers a chilling photographic study of a site that should send chills up and down the spine of any German alive today.

For Kristallnacht, I direct your attention to “Kristallnacht: Murder by Euphemism,” by Rabbi Benjamin Blech, on the “Yonkers Tribune” blog. For shorthand purposes, I referred to this sickening event by its traditional name. But Rabbi Blech details how continued acceptance of this name accomplishes what the Nazis intended: the short-pedaling of mass murder. We need to think of another name that will convey the magnitude of this event's horror.

Quote of the Day (Martha Gellhorn, on Dachau)

“We are not entirely guiltless, we the Allies, because it took us twelve years to open the gates of Dachau. We were blind and unbelieving and slow, and that we can never be again. We must know now that there can never be peace if there is cruelty like this in the world.

And if ever again we tolerate such cruelty we have no right to peace.”—Martha Gellhorn, “Dachau,” in Reporting World War II: Part Two: American Journalism, 1944-1946 (Library of America, 1995)

(Elsewhere in her dispatch on the American troops’ discovery of the worst of the concentration camp Dachau, Gellhorn offered up a descriptive gem of a death-camp survivor that, in its spare but evocative detail, could have been written by her husband, Ernest Hemingway:

“What had been a man dragged himself into the doctor’s office; he was a Pole and he was about six feet tall and he weighed less than a hundred pounds and he wore a striped prison shirts, a pair of unlaced boots and a blanket which he tried to hold between his legs. His eyes were large and strange and stood out from his face, and his jawbone seemed to be cutting through his skin. He had come to Dachau from Buchenwald on the last death transport.”

Of course, Gellhorn would have hated the comparison I made between her and Hemingway—not only as a reminder of a man she was now trying to erase from her life but also as a negation of the very real achievement demonstrated in this passage. In justice, I would have to admit the justice of any annoyance she would feel toward myself or anyone else on this score.

Today’s quote is not only meant as a celebration of Gellhorn—the centennial of whose birth today passed without notice, to my knowledge, on the blogosphere—but as a good opportunity to review the choices we face if, like Gellhorn, we resolve never to permit genocide again.

Let’s start with the celebration first. Hemingway’s marriage to Gellhorn was the shortest of his four—much to the chagrin of his sons, who welcomed this fun-loving woman to the family as their stepmother with great enthusiasm. The union might have been misbegotten because the two were so alike in so many ways: driven, athletic, politically impassioned, glamorous, and competitive in their literary pursuits. They also both eventually committed suicide.

I have not read Gellhorn’s fiction, though I hope to read eventually my copy of her A Stricken Field, which was inspired by her experiences as a foreign correspondent in Czechoslovakia at the time it fell under the Nazi shadow. After reading the selections by her in Reporting World War II, however, I’m fully prepared to believe that she was Hemingway's superior as a journalist—someone who put her subject rather than herself at the center.

Now, about the resolve of “Never again” when it comes to permitting another Holocaust:

In one sense, of course, that ship has sailed. Even after the Holocaust, the twentieth century presented what former Secretary of State Warren Christopher called “a problem from hell”: the prevalence of mass, ethnic-center mass murder. Everybody of good will is against genocide, of course, but the question is, “What are you going to do about it?”

Do we try sanctions—even if they hurt the poor the hardest without really touching the rulers?

Do we engage in multinational military missions—even if that is for purposes, or using methods, with which this nation disagrees?

And what if one or only a couple of powerful nations—Russia or China, say—blocks action in international forums such as the U.N.? What do we do then? How many tens—or even hundreds of thousands—do we permit to die before we take action?

Bill Clinton has expressed regret that he did not act against Rwanda, even when his wife advised intervention. Yet rulers the world over have moved not only against their own dissidents but against ethnic minorities within their countries, as Saddam Hussein did against the Kurds. Which rulers will we act against? How? Under what circumstances? For how long?

Though the Obama camp sounds like it blanched when Joe Biden said Obama would be tested not long after taking office, our VP-to-be was, in another sense, just stating the obvious. The challenge that Martha Gellhorn posed at the end of her searing dispatch on Dachau remains more relevant than ever. The moral handwringing in which we’ve engaged since then seems less justifiable than ever.

We as a country had better discuss—and soon—what we’re going to do about this. Because you can rest assured that, in a world of scarcer resources and rising ethnic and religious tensions, genocide will appear on the world’s radar screen again.)