DOOMED from the START
Novel explores intense relationship between two writers, Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway
Novelist Paula McLain is learning once again that when you write about Ernest Hemingway, you spark a backlash.
Seven years ago, she decided to explore the life of Hadley Richardson, Hemingway’s forgotten first wife and an early victim of his betrayals. That novel, The Paris Wife, climbed high on the bestseller lists but it also provoked hostile reactions.
Hemingway aficionados with a proprietary interest in their literary hero were indignant at any suggestion that the Nobel Prize-winning writer was anything less than a god. On the other hand, feminists were outraged that McLain would even choose to write about a man of such overwhelming macho ego.
Now it’s happening again, thanks to the arrival of McLain’s latest novel, Love And Ruin, which returns to Hemingway country, this time focusing on Martha Gellhorn, the legendary war reporter who became Hemingway’s third wife and would eventually move from under his shadow to become a formidable figure in her own right.
“There are still a lot of people who remain angry about Hemingway,” McLain says. “The reaction I’m getting this time is almost exactly the same.”
Furthermore, the portrait that emerges of Hemingway — a man with no inhibitions about living like a pig and eating like a pig — is even less flattering in the new novel than it was in its predecessor. “All women secretly pine for cavemen,” he smugly informs Martha when she objects to his unhygienic lifestyle.
“He called her Miss Dutch Cleanser,” McLain says. “They really were foils to each other because he was so slovenly and she was a neat freak.”
Back in 2011, McLain had figured she was done with Hemingway. “He had already over-gripped my imagination,” she writes in a note to readers. “It was time to move on while I still could.” But that was before Gellhorn nudged her way into her consciousness. The resulting novel is panoramic in scope, moving from the carnage of the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s to the beaches of Normandy in 1944. But it also provides insight into an intense relationship that was probably doomed from the beginning. In pursuing their love for each other, they were “about to collide disastrously.”
When McLain began researching a life that was remarkable in its own right, reading Gellhorn’s letters and dispatches from the front, she fell under the spell of a woman who would struggle to be the wife of a famous, self-absorbed icon without sacrificing her own identity and feelings of self-worth.
“She’s extraordinary, she really is.” McLain says from her Cleveland home, still jet-lagged after a publicity tour overseas. “Yes, she’s difficult, but I think she felt this tension of being this impossible man’s wife while struggling against him to do what she was meant to do. She really did change the face of journalism.”
In the novel, Gellhorn is able to achieve this only by securing her autonomy from a man who was once her mentor, a father figure who has encouraged her writing during a period when he could be secure in his belief that he would always be the alpha partner in the relationship.
But their aura of wedded bliss starts going sour. Martha’s determination to claw out her own space, both personal and professional, parallels fissures in Hemingway’s own world. After publication of For Whom The Bell Tolls, the creative flame is flickering, replaced by more booze, an obsession with cats and self-deceiving contributions to the war effort in the form of ludicrous searches for German submarines in Caribbean waters. In the face of his wife’s growing stature as a journalist, insecurities and paranoia increasingly take hold.
It’s Hemingway’s own professional jealousy that causes him to sabotage Gellhorn’s application for press accreditation to cover the D - Day landings in 1944. And it’s characteristic of Gellhorn’s gutsiness that she makes it to the beaches of Normandy anyway.
“She still made it to the battle of Normandy by stowing away on a hospital ship and locking herself in the john!” McLain is now laughing about an incident that was to become part of the Gellhorn legend. “It’s fun for me to see how she operates on pure nerves. She wasn’t trying to scoop Hemingway, although he may have thought otherwise. She simply needed to be where she thought she should be, come hell or high water.”
McLain admits she has less liking for the Hemingway of this new novel than the Hemingway of her earlier novel. Equally, she has no doubt of a magnetism that included a strong sexual component.
“Reading of other people’s experiences with him,” she says, “it seems clear that when you were in his orbit, there was an intensity that made you feel you were being deeply seen and understood.”
There’s a striking passage in the novel in which Martha confesses her need for Hemingway but also sees the hazards. “I want him, but he’s such a force of nature,” Gellhorn says. “He pulls everything into his orbit and seals off the corners and any route of escape. He does it all without trying and with very little self-awareness.”
McLain surveys Hemingway’s four marriages and sees a conflicted man “who was addicted to falling in love and the feelings of falling in love” but had trouble sustaining a relationship beyond that point. And he demanded constant reassurance that he was still top dog.
“I don’t think Hemingway could tolerate Martha getting stronger and needing him less,” McLain says. “He could be incredibly destructive — self-destructive of course but also wildly destructive toward others. I think of a howling child full of rage for not being able to get his needs met.”
In 1961, in near-constant pain from two earlier near-fatal plane crashes and no longer able to face the world, Hemingway shot himself and died at his home in Ketchum, Idaho. Martha Gellhorn lived to be 89. But in 1998, almost blind, fighting cancer and no longer able to work, she also took her own life.