Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
A great inspiration - Gellhorn worked in a male world reporting with a ferocity for justice and she was a wonderful narrative writer. I also love the fact that to support herself she had to write pieces for womens' magazines and light fiction.
And now you’re cheating by having two books by Martha Gellhorn – Travels with Myself and Another and The View From the Ground.
Well, she’s a hero of mine, even though she was not very nice to other women. She was one of those people. I once interviewed her for The Times and I was so excited. She lived in Wales and I got buses and traipsed across fields and I finally got there and she opened the door and said; ‘I hope you’re not expecting lunch because you’re not getting any.’ Her book, The View from the Ground, a collection of her journalism over six decades, was the only book I took with me to Sarajevo and I used to read it every night in my sleeping bag. Travels With Another is about her marriage to Hemingway, but she never names him in the book. They had this terrible divorce and she scooped him on D- Day. It’s such a journalistic story. Basically, they had already separated and he was with somebody else and she had been commissioned to cover D-Day for Collier’s magazine. They were all holed up in the Dorchester, which is where the journalists were in London during the war, and Hemingway was this famous writer and could have done it for anyone, but he called Collier’s and told them he wanted to cover D-Day for them. They said; ‘Well, we’ve got this stringer there but we’d be delighted.’ And he big-footed her! But she actually scooped him because she snuck off on to a hospital ship and got the story. He was on the cover and her story ran inside, but it was her story that was ‘the’ great piece about D Day. Anyway, Travels With Another is a memoir of when they were still in love, travelling together. It’s a very glamorous book – she was thin and blonde and they travelled to China and she talks about their life together. Then she writes about her travels alone and there’s this great moment where she writes; ‘I have a sudden notion of why history is such a mess. Human beings do not live long enough. We only learn from experience and we have no time to use it in a continuous and sensible way.’
She writes like a novelist and, knowing her story, it’s just a wonderful picture of this couple who loved each other, who had this affair during the Spanish Civil War and it just…turned to ashes! There are lists and lists of the places she travelled to – Chad, Sudan, Turkey, Czechoslovakia, Malaya, Finland. It’s one thing to do it now, but in the 1940s…
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Janine di Giovanni is one of Europe's most respected and experienced war reporters. Born in the US, she began reporting by covering the first Palestinian intifada in the late 1980s and went on to report nearly every violent conflict since then. Her trademark has always been to write about the human cost of war, to attempt to give war a human face, and to work in conflict zones that the world's press has forgotten.
