The Face of War by Martha Gellhorn

First published: 1959

Type of work: Essays

Form and Content

The Face of War is a collection of articles about several wars Martha Gellhorn on which reported after becoming a war correspondent in Spain in 1937. The book is divided into sections on wars in Spain, Finland, Europe (World War II), Java, Vietnam, the Middle East, and Central America, plus a section called “Interim,” which is about efforts for peace. The 1988 American edition of The Face of War includes the original 1959 introduction and a revised introduction published in the 1986 British edition. Each section of the book also comes with its own introduction, usually presenting autobiographical information that explains how Gellhorn came to cover these wars as well as fascinating insights into her attitude toward war, in the course of which she reveals many other aspects of her life and her feelings about writing.

Gellhorn thinks of herself as a war correspondent first, not as a woman writer. Inevitably, however, she finds herself in a male-dominated world and must contend with prejudices against allowing women to report at first hand on combat. She explains how she resorted to various stratagems in order to cover the D-Day landing on the beaches of Normandy in World War II and the Allied campaign in Italy in the later stages of that war.

The contrast between Gellhorn’s introductions and her reportorial articles is fascinating. In the introductions she is opinionated and confidential; in the articles she is objective, almost curt, and concise. The introductions represent her lifelong effort to come to terms with war and how she has written about it. The articles plunge into the activity itself, conveying some of the thrill and the danger of being a war correspondent with no time for reflection on the nature of the activity itself. Except for a few changes of title, the articles have not been revised, for they are meant to record faithfully Gellhorn’s immediate reactions to events; thus the articles are a vivid, concrete, and almost visceral record of the face of war, making it as intimate and as shocking as it was for Gellhorn herself.

Gellhorn states in her 1959 introduction, “I took an absurd professional pride in getting where I intended to go and in sending my copy to New York on time.” She was educating herself on the run, so to speak, and observing things at ground level—an experience that the world’s leaders could benefit from, she suggests. Her collection of articles and her introductions constitute a body of “memory and imagination,” which she believes are “the great deterrents” to future wars rather than nuclear weapons. Such weapons, she argues in her 1986 introduction, have involved governments in an obscene expenditure of resources that have certainly not made the world a safer place. “I always liked Tolstoi’s crusty remark that ‘governments are a collection of men who do violence to the rest of us,’ but now I think the old Russian was a prophet.” Wars have always been repugnant to Gellhorn, though in some cases—as in the Spanish Civil War—they seem inevitable to her. Modern nuclear warfare, she says, has engendered on all sides a level of paranoia so great that the present has been poisoned, life has been destabilized, and “for the first time the human race cannot be sure it will continue.”

Context

Martha Gellhorn has become an increasingly important figure in women’s literature. Virago Press, which has specialized in reprinting important women’s fiction, has republished two of her novels, A Stricken Field (1940) and Liana (1944) and Alfred A. Knopf has published a collection of her novellas. In addition to The Face of War, Atlantic Monthly Press has published her collection of peacetime articles, The View from the Ground (1988). Her novel of World War II, The Wine of Astonishment (1948) has been reprinted in paperback under the title she originally gave it, Point of No Return.

Gellhorn has never identified herself as a feminist. Indeed, she has not wanted any special consideration as a woman. Her journalism does not explicitly present a woman’s point of view, and yet her attention to everyday domestic detail and her gripping accounts of what war does to civilian populations carry a resonance and insight not often found in the reports of her male contemporaries. A comparison, for example, between her reports on Spain and on World War II with the dispatches of Ernest Hemingway (to whom she was married between 1939 and 1945) reflects a different set of values that are arguably a woman’s.

In Gellhorn’s fiction, feminist issues are more explicit. A Stricken Field is obviously based on her own experience as a journalist. The main character is modeled after her, and the novel dramatizes what it is like for a woman to work in an all-male atmosphere. Similarly, Liana is feminist in tone, for it deals with a young, beautiful woman who is sacrificed to the interests of her two male lovers.

Bibliography

Gellhorn, Martha. “The Real Thing.” Interview by Victoria Glendinning. Vogue 178 (April, 1988): 358-359, 398. One of Gellhorn’s rare interviews, conducted by a distinguished biographer.

Kert, Bernice. The Hemingway Women. New York: W. W. Norton, 1983. Contains a long, revealing chapter on Gellhorn, based on an interview with her.

Meyers, Jeffrey. Hemingway: A Biography. New York: Harper & Row, 1985. Contains the fullest account in a Hemingway biography of Gellhorn’s years with him.

Rollyson, Carl. Nothing Ever Happens to the Brave: The Story of Martha Gellhorn. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. The only full-length biography of Gellhorn, exploring both her work and life, with extensive notes, a chronology of her writing, and an index.