Victoria Glendinning

For ever taking leave

Martha Gellhorn, an American who lost faith in America, was one of the most important war-reporters of the 20th century. She was not interested in briefings from the top brass, though she sometimes used her blonde charm to get the top brass to fly her where she needed to go. What she did, in her own words, was to ‘bear witness’ to what war did to innocent people, especially children. She found her stories on the street and in the orphanages. Her style was pared-down and succinct, powered by outrage.

She believed in the ultimate supremacy of goodness and justice until she went into Dachau. Then, seeing what she saw, she gave up hope. Caroline Moorehead makes Dachau the hinge and the determining event of her intelligent and sensitive biography. Gellhorn never gave up, but after Dachau it was pure anger, not optimism, which fuelled her.

I am not without bias. I know the author of this biography. I knew Martha Gellhorn. My own name appears in the index. This is the kind of thing that gives book-reviewing a bad name. Blame the literary editor, who decides these things.

The upside is that I can, at least, tell you whether the Martha Gellhorn whom one meets in these pages is the Martha Gellhorn whom I knew and loved. The answer is yes, absolutely. But new friends such as myself whom she made in her seductive and generous old age in London could hardly have guessed what a wretched period her fifties and sixties had been for her. She went to Vietnam at the age of 58 and wrote about what she saw with her usual effective, pent-up fury; but she despaired of her frequent inability to write, of the loss of her youthful looks and elasticity, and of her stalled relationship with her adopted son Sandy (which came good in the end).

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