A woman and her wars: ‘Love and Ruin’ focuses on Gellhorn and Hemingway
Martha Gellhorn was a trailblazer, one of the most famous female war correspondents of the 20th century, as well as a fiction writer and essayist.
At 28, she met Ernest Hemingway, eventually traveling to Spain, where she would cover the Spanish Civil War and he would gather the material for one of his most successful novels, “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” They would fall in love and eventually marry, but their relationship was as tumultuous and fraught as any of the war fronts that Gellhorn would cover — including Omaha Beach on D-Day, where she was the only female correspondent.
Paula McLain has written about Hemingway before, in her best-selling 2011 novel “The Paris Wife,” which was told from the point of view of his first wife, Hadley Hemingway. In the new “Love and Ruin,” McLain offers a mostly first-person narrative from the perspective of Martha, his third wife and the only woman of all his wives to leave him. (Hemingway never forgave her.)
This novel is important not only as historical fiction but also as a reminder of the challenges that faced careerminded women such as Gellhorn in the mid-20th century, and the risks — both professionally and personally — that were required to be a journalist during the rise of fascism and World War II.
Gellhorn has had the reputation of being rather tough, and she was (she had to be), but McLain creates a character with deep emotions for Ernest Hemingway and his sons, as well as for her calling as a journalist and a writer. McClain dramatizes how these two trajectories were impossible to reconcile, bringing to life two key figures and reinforcing many of the notions we have about them, but fleshing them out in interesting and memorable ways.
For instance, we admire Gellhorn’s independence and gumption and can empathize with her struggles to have a successful marriage with the famous and demanding Hemingway, even as we see the impossibility of them working out their substantial differences. Yes, there was love but mostly competition, conflict and ambivalence. Their passion seemed always overshadowed by problems.
McLain’s strengths as a novelist are formidable, especially her ability to evoke a strong sense of time and place, whether it be the wreckage of war-torn Spain or the festive atmosphere of Cuba, where Gellhorn and Hemingway had a home. Fast-paced and confessional, we get of glimpse of Gellhorn’s emotions and her struggles with finding her place in the maledominated world of journalism, dealing with love affairs (usually with married men, including Hemingway), her views on marriage and having children and finding her own voice as a writer while simultaneously championing Hemingway and his own writing.
McLain is also a master at ending chapters that make you want to turn the page and see what happens next — even if you are familiar with the Gellhorn-Hemingway story. She addresses the Hemingway mystique in a way that is believable but accessible. The fictional Gellhorn recalls: “He took off his wirerimmed glasses and looked at me. In the three months since we parted since Key West, all of our talk had happened over the phone or in hastily scrawled letters. All these things that could happen in his eyes, or with his moods, or what each of his smiles meant, were a mystery to me. New people were complicated, but they were also wonderful. Everything was a code not yet solved.”
Gellhorn would later break the code but also have her heart broken as she experiences his wrath in a letter rejecting her: “It was every one of his moods, all his sides on display — bitter, wheedling, threatening, guilt mongering. But all of that only very thinly covered a profound loneliness and fear.”
But as convincing as this novel is as a fictionalized autobiography of Martha Gellhorn, the best sections are the third-person italicized passages when the reader gets into the mind of Hemingway himself, wonderful imitations of Hemingway at his best, as in stories such as “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” For example, when accepting the end of his marriage, he thinks: “The trick when things got bad, he knew, was to be very still, first in his body and then in his mind … . In his head and way down at the center of him he blotted her out, now, to see if he could bear it … . She wasn’t in her hotel, sleeping curled on her side like a child, but utterly gone and finished. She wasn’t his wife, because he had no wife.”
Ironically, the novel that forces us to acknowledge Martha Gellhorn’s significant accomplishments as a female journalist also reminds us that Hemingway’s unique style and way of viewing the world overshadowed her accomplishments for a reason, even if later Gellhorn didn’t even allow his name to be uttered, not wishing to be “a footnote in someone else’s life.” “Love and Ruin” will certainly ensure that Gellhorn is not a footnote, although it does underscore the impossibility of minimizing Hemingway’s presence in her life and American letters. Their relationship stands as a cautionary tale of the high price of ambition and the toll it takes on both men and women negotiating love and work.