Hemingway and Gellhorn Page 7

  Really? What was Martha if not an on-again, off-again mistress?

  “You haven’t got a clarity of vision because you don’t want to have it,” Bertrand continued in his letter. And Martha? She felt like an animal sneaking away to get well, as she described herself. “Don’t come to see me,” she wrote. Why would she be jealous of a man who threatened to have mistresses, the same man she told to have some affairs when they were separated in California? Bertrand may have been lovesick, but Martha was just being Martha again. Bertrand loved his Martha, but she and his love for her were driving him to the brink of madness.

  Martha knew exactly who she was. “I know there are two people in me,” she wrote. “But the least strong, the least demanding, is the one that attaches itself to another human being…Since I was a child people have wanted to possess me. And because our life is so badly managed, I turn upon you, with resentment and bitterness, because you bring it into neither order nor tranquility, because you do not make the best of it, either materially or morally, because your discontent is ever present, like a restless dog wandering through the room.”

  Bertrand responded to that vitriolic broadside by traveling south to be with her. And he gave her badly needed money to help her pay her bills and pursue her dream of writing until her ear infection cleared and she could return to…to wherever suited her fancy next. Her fancy took her to Paris where she found a job as a general factotum for Vogue—ironically enough, the former employer of Ernest’s second wife, whom Martha would eventually displace. She hoped to parlay that meager job into a bona fide assignment as a journalist. She had packed on a few extra pounds in the South of France and dyed her hair an even lighter shade of blonde, giving her the appearance of the madchen she had seen in Germany.

  In Paris she grew friendly with kindred spirits on the left, young socialists, communists, and anti-fascist radicals who attended political salons affiliated with Leon Blum’s Front Populaire Francaise. Gellhorn also met Colette, her lover’s aging seductress, who gave her unwanted advice on writing and her personal appearance. Colette told Martha to paint her face with antimony sulfide or kohl, as Colette was fond of doing. Martha obeyed until a friend informed her that Colette had turned her into a freak, probably to render her unattractive to Colette’s favorite little leopard, her now middle-aged great whippet of a boy.

  * * *

  Martha found herself pregnant once again, with no more intention to give birth to this one than she did the first. She paid for her own abortion this time with money she earned at Vogue, a situation she found wildly amusing. After recovering from her second abortion, she traveled with Bertrand to Germany again, where she got a close look at Hitler, his evil but mesmerizing rhetoric, and the horrifying hordes of goose-stepping Hitler Youth, which already boasted more than a hundred thousand members. Sick to her stomach with fear and loathing, she and Bertrand returned to Paris more convinced than ever that any hope of rapprochement with the growing Nazi menace was little more than a naïve pipedream.

  Bertrand, surprisingly, was on the political fence at first. Hitler terrified him, but he did speak up ostensibly for the underdogs in society. And Bertrand had “such a feeling for underdogs,” as Martha wrote, “that he managed to be in every movement while it was a failure and to leave it the minute it looked as if it were succeeding.” Timing is everything in politics, it seemed, both then and now.

  France hardly offered a viable alternative to the surging Nazi menace. On February 6, 1934, the new Prime Minister, Edouard Dedalier, rose to address the French Chamber of Deputies only to be greeted with shouts, insults, and fistfights breaking out among the deputies. Across the Seine, ragtag hordes of extremists reflecting every political stripe formed an unlikely coalition. For a brief spell they put their disagreements with one another aside and united against the police and other representatives of civil authority. They threw paving stones, bricks, anything of substance they could pry loose, forcing the gendarmes to cower behind their vans. Paris, if not all of France it seemed, was on the threshold of a new revolution.

  But it quickly fizzled, like most popular insurgencies. It is one thing to talk of anarchy in cafes and throw rocks when halfdrunk on wine and absinthe, and quite another to risk everything in pursuit of an ideal. So they, along with Bertrand and Martha, started a new magazine instead, La Lutte des Jeunes, to campaign for greater freedoms for students—hardly a movement designed to prod the middle class to take up arms against the government. This venture, too, came to naught when one of their colleagues quite seriously advocated joining with the Nazis in a temporary struggle to bring capitalism to its knees. After that goal was attained, the left would then wrest power from their so-called allies on the right. Bertrand was more amenable to the concept than Martha was. She had developed a good bullshit-detector by now, as Ernest had advised everyone to do when he was a struggling writer living in Paris with wife number one. Martha kept her distance, contributing articles to Vogue by day while writing incendiary pieces for the political magazine by night.

  But she was growing bored. Bored with all the dead-end rhetoric and bored once more with Bertrand. She was bored as well with the radicals whom she increasingly found to be “ugly—and mostly so bloody stupid.” They were the kind of people “who go mad, or drift into gutters or suicide, from broken hearts.” She longed for a place outside the city in the countryside, where one could feel the “wind on one’s face.” Bertrand, too, was interested in getting away from Paris, largely because his wife and family were there impatiently waiting for him to come home. But Martha was not quite sure she wanted Bertrand to get away from Paris, at least not with her this time. For one thing, she found sex with him to be less than inspiring.

  “Physically, for me, it was nothing, ever.” What a cruel assessment to lay on a Frenchman! At the same time she felt guilty about not being able to give him “complete joy in sexual love.” Many years later, Martha would say much the same about Ernest, prompting his critics to say that he was more adept with a fishing rod than he was with the one he was born with. But the critics were far off the mark. They either overlooked or deliberately ignored Martha’s own comments on the subject. By her admission she “practiced” sex but never totally enjoyed it. “I accompanied men and was accompanied in action,” she wrote. “That seemed to be their delight and all I got was a pleasure of being wanted, I suppose, and the tenderness (not nearly enough) that a man gives when he is satisfied. I daresay I was the worst bed partner in five continents.”

  She even consulted a series of doctors about her low libido and the pain she experienced from repeated intercourse.

  Bertrand got even though. True Frenchman that he was, he had an affair with somebody else, a woman named Suzanne whom he also got pregnant.

  Chapter Eleven

  Martha finished her novel, which she would entitle What Mad Pursuit. Four publishers turned it down at first on the grounds—you can’t escape the irony—that it contained too much explicit sex. She slashed, rewrote, and slashed some more. I’ve been busy “slashing out sex right and left,” she said, obliterating abortion scenes and tossing “syphilis into the wastepaper basket.” Soon, the publishers would be able to “use it as a text in Sunday schools.”

  She made her final revisions, and her publisher Frederick A. Stokes brought the book out early in 1934. The book was met with tepid reviews, with most critics unimpressed by her story of three college girls searching for something to believe in as they drank too much and exposed themselves to venereal disease and unwanted pregnancies. The Buffalo Evening News called the novel “hectic,” and the New York Times said it was “crude…It would be more likable if Miss Gellhorn were not so enamored of her own heroine, and if she did not dabble so ineffectually with questions of social justice.” Martha’s hometown newspaper, the St. Louis PostDispatch, referred to her as one of the city’s outstanding local women—along with actress Betty Grable, not the best company from Martha’s point of view. She would have preferred a literary allu
sion. Martha herself was later embarrassed by her novel and refused to bring it back into print after it disappeared from view shortly after it was published.

  In June 1934, Martha’s mother Edna came to France for a visit, the first time mother and daughter had seen each other in more than a year. They vacationed together in the Midi, along the coast in the South of France north of the Spanish border. While they were in the Midi, repairing their old bond, enjoying the sunshine and the breaking surf, Bertrand sulked in Paris. Finally he came to his senses. No longer able to put up with Martha’s ambivalence without completely losing his mind, he decided that a final break was in order. “My beloved, you do not love me,” he wrote her. “You told me once that I was standing in your sun, keeping its light from you. I remove myself from it, dear love. The world is limited with me, so wide open, so limitless if you’re alone. Take this chance, my little one. Escape.” Return to America with your mother, he advised her. Just go and find other hearts to break, he seemed to be saying. You’ve left mine in pieces.

  But Martha was never one to do as she was told. She reacted to his entreaty by telling a friend, “He is so weak, that it is like having cancer; it is an incurable and killing sickness.”

  Martha hung around France by herself for a while after Edna departed for home, and then returned to the country of her birth in her own sweet time, Martha time, in the fall of the year. Bertrand had hoped that his letter offering to free her of him would reverberate to his own advantage, make her see that she truly loved him after all. But his strategy backfired. After sorting out her own feelings, Martha left for America in October 1934. “Great God!” she wrote. “What an eagerness and energy I have to live; how much living I can stand and must have.” She was not Bertrand’s rabbit any longer; she was a bird flying free of its cage.

  * * *

  Her life was her own now. She was free to live and do as she pleased. After debarking from the Normandie in New York City, she contacted a well-known journalist named Marquis Childs who covered the Roosevelt administration for the St. Louis PostDispatch. Martha told him she wanted to get involved in the president’s programs to repair the economic ills afflicting the nation. Childs introduced Martha to Harry Hopkins, FDR’s point man in the New Deal. Within weeks of landing in the States, she had a new job, traveling the country for Hopkins and other New Deal

  administrators to observe first-hand the horrific human toll the economic collapse had taken on America’s working class.

  Martha was horrified by what she observed out there in the nation’s heartland, in rural America as well as in its smelly, overcrowded cities. The spirit of the nation was broken, with steel mills shut down, coal mines idle, women garment workers earning five cents an hour in sweatshops, banks shuttered in the vast majority of states, hordes of unsupervised children roaming through the streets fighting over whatever scraps they could find in garbage bins, KKK racists lynching black people with impunity, seventeen million laborers without any purpose in their lives, and well over twenty-five percent of the entire population without any work whatsoever. Martha was shaken to the core. Her entire sense of justice and wellbeing had been turned upside down. She came to despise her boss Henry Hopkins, whom she regarded as an arrogant, disheveled young man who smoked too many cigarettes and drank too much coffee.

  Martha found a writing voice of her own on the road, a uniquely political voice that was more socially engaged and more ideological than that of her idol Hemingway. As she traveled by train through the South and Midwest, subsisting on her vouchers allowing her five dollars a day for food and hotels, Martha wrote of the dispossessed, the victims of stupidity and brutality, the hungry and homeless, the hollow-eyed vagrants in slums, and other human wreckage strewn across the towns, villages, and cities of America like flotsam on the beach. It was a theme that would distinguish her writing for the rest of her life. She thought she had been radicalized before, but now she was not just intellectually committed; she was passionately engaged in a calling that took root in her soul and characterized everything she wrote from that point onward.

  When she returned to Washington, D.C., she burst into Hopkins’ office uninvited and delivered a diatribe about the ineffectiveness of FERA and Hopkins’ shortcomings as the head of the agency. She threatened to resign and write exposes about what she had seen during her travels. The young man was unruffled, unflappable as ever. He studied her clinically, as though she were another problem that needed to be dealt with dispassionately. His detachment infuriated Martha even more. She regarded him as a lifeless bureaucrat, a cold technocrat with a brain but no heart, no warm blood coursing through his veins.

  “I’ve sent your reports to Mrs. Roosevelt,” he said. “Why don’t you discuss it all with her?”

  Edna Gellhorn had become friends with Eleanor Roosevelt at Bryn Mawr and arranged a dinner invitation for Martha at the White House. Martha found a new heroine there, a role model to emulate. The president’s wife was an ungainly fifty-year-old woman with protruding eyes, no chin, and boundless reserves of energy. Martha and Eleanor bonded instantly and would remain lifelong friends. But her first moments in the presence of FDR and Eleanor were awkward at best. Martha was offended by the opulence on display, the gold-and-white porcelain china, the crystal goblets, the fine wine and generous portions of food. Eleanor was hard of hearing, which forced Martha to raise her voice to an embarrassing decibel level to make herself understood. The president sat at the far end of the long dining-room table taking everything in with a measure of amusement. Martha described in intense detail what she had witnessed in her travels. Finally, Eleanor turned her head and all but screamed at her husband, as though he were the one who was halfdeaf.

  “Franklin, talk to this girl! She says all the unemployed have pellagra and syphilis!”

  Martha thought she had been caught up in a bad dream. Eleanor’s comment was met with a long heavy silence by the president, who tried not to smile at his wife’s clumsiness. Martha filled the void by describing to FDR what she had already explained in great detail to his wife—an explanation that he had undoubtedly heard loud and clear the first time. FDR listened attentively, and when she was finished he asked her to come back and tell him more at a later time. Both FDR and Eleanor encouraged Martha to keep her job despite her misgivings about FERA’s ineffectiveness.

  “You can do far more for the unemployed by staying there,” Eleanor told Martha as she left after dinner. She later said to a friend, “She must learn patience and not have a critical attitude toward what others do. She must remember that to them it is just as important as her dreams are to her.”

  Eleanor “gave off light,” Martha wrote years later. “I cannot explain it better.”

  * * *

  Another writer who visited the White House at this time was the well-known novelist H.G. Wells, who described it as a comfortable private house transformed by the Roosevelts from a “queer, ramshackle place like a nest of waiting rooms with hat stands everywhere.”

  Wells was already an old man of sixty-eight at this stage of his life. Along with Jules Verne he had been dubbed one of the “Fathers of Science Fiction,” the author of genre classics such as The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine. He was an outspoken socialist and pacifist who wrote about other things, including history and social problems, which resonated with Martha far more than his science fiction did. Wells was also a notorious womanizer with an eye that never ceased to wander. While married first to his cousin, then later to one of his former students, he conducted a series of affairs with many well-known women. They included birth-control activist Margaret Sanger and novelist Rebecca West, who was twenty-six years younger than him and bore him a son out of wedlock—Anthony West, who would go on to become a famous writer in his own right. In the White House, Wells’ eyes fastened on the youthful Martha and liked what they observed.

  How could they not? The man was an aging lecher, but his libido remained intact. Martha’s youth, her intelligence and physical allur
e were the perfect aphrodisiac for an old man approaching the seventh century of his life.

  Chapter Twelve

  Martha’s friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt deepened. They enjoyed taking long walks together to discuss pressing issues of the day, although Martha was terrified of Eleanor’s ill-tempered dogs. They snarled and lunged at everyone they passed, especially children, and barely tolerated Martha who was not overly fond of dogs in the first place. But Eleanor refused to give them up until they drew blood from the legs of a diplomat and a high-ranking U.S. senator. At that point she reluctantly agreed to part with them—after a bit of prodding from her husband who was eager to keep his political relationships on firm footing, so to speak. Eleanor trusted Martha well enough to confide in her, revealing intimate details about her life with the president with whom she had not shared a bedroom for more than twenty years, ever since FDR had begun an affair with his wife’s social secretary.

  “I have the memory of an elephant,” Eleanor said. “I can forgive but I can never forget.”

  Martha was anxious to begin a new book about the Great Depression, and she needed a quiet place to work free from daily pressures. She moved into a vacation home in Hartford, Connecticut, owned by China expert W.F. Field. Martha decided to present the book as a novel, as fiction, although the line between Martha’s nonfiction and fiction often blurred to the point of obscurity. Later on she received a lot of criticism for that from reviewers, but she was in good company since Ernest, the master himself, admitted that his nonfiction books could be read as either fiction or nonfiction. He was incapable of writing raw truth without embellishing it, and Martha was no different in that regard.