War correspondent Martha Gellhorn and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt met when Gellhorn reported on the effects of the Depression to Harold Hopkins, a senior advisor of the New Deal. Roosevelt, a college friend of Gellhorn’s mother, invited Gellhorn to stay at the White House while she completed her book on the Depression. Gellhorn had wanted to call her book Point of No Return, after the phrase used by pilots to describe the moment a plane must descend before running out of fuel. Her editor at Scribner’s, Max Perkins, thought the title too bleak. Gellhorn reluctantly took up the title of The Wine of Astonishment, which was published in 1948.
South Carolina, [May?] 1946
Dearest Mrs. R;
Mother and I are off on a grand wild outing. We have her car which is seven years old, a small Plymouth. We both love it because it is like a steady old horse, and neither of us has any idea what goes on inside a car, what its hopes and fears might be. In this charming antique, we are driving to Mexico. Every once in a while we look at the Atlas and add up the mileage and having now discovered that it is farther than crossing the Atlantic we are very impressed. At the same time, we are not especially go-getting about driving, and have a tendency to settle down as soon as we can see a nice place. This is apt to happen every three days, for after three days at the wheel (and it’s an enormous day if we do 300 miles) we feel we have already crossed the country in a covered wagon.
At present, we are taking up the squatters life at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and adoring it. There’s a huge white sand beach, and a huge grey-to-blue sea and we found a hotel which seems to us divine, being clean comfortable quiet and cheap. So here we camp: I have been writing an article, Mother has been reading, in between times we walk along the beach collecting shells for grandchildren, attend the local movies, and gossip together. We have a portable travelling cocktail shaker, and every night sit cheerfully on Mother’s bed and have our evening drinks, and launch forth to dinner giggling like a pair of Peter Arno charladies. it is a very good life and I will be astounded if we get to Mexico before June.
…In a moment of madness, I seem to have bitten off the most godawful assignment for next winter and I am already dreading it. I told Collier’s I wanted to go from Finland to Greece—Poland, Czecho, Jugoslavia, as way stations—and report on how people really live behind what the press is pleased to call ‘the fringes of the iron curtain.’ As I am thoroughly and heartily sick of the idea that people necessarily eat babies just because they don’t operate on a basis of free enterprise. Maybe they do eat babies, but I want to see it for myself before I’ll believe it. And it occurred to me that all we ever hear is the solemn badinage of statesmen and I want to know what ordinary humans are saying and feeling, shop clerks and college professors and plumbers and truck drivers and farmers. Not that I believe such as they, the majority of the earth, control the policies that make war and peace. But for my own hope and sanity, I prefer to keep in touch with them, for on the whole I have found them good. It always beats me that there is such a difference between life and politics, and between people and those who represent them. On the other hand, the thought of plowing through snow up to my neck, all winter long, gives me the horrors: and also, unluckily, I never really believe that my reporting does the slightest good or informs or educates anyone. So in a way, I am not sure why I do this: there are easier ways to make the necessary money. However, there it is, and that’s the next plan.
And I’ve got a novel, written once but badly, which has to be done over and finished this summer. This is the only work I really care about, so I’m delighted. I’ve been panic-stricken about it several times, and decided to abandon it, because whereas men apparently have no nerves in writing about women (from Madame Bovary to Kitty Foyle), the reverse is rare, and I found myself launched on writing about men as if I were one. Suddenly I said to myself, come, come, you might as well admit you aren’t; and then the panics set in. But Max Perkins, of Scribner’s, who seems to have a sort of literary divining rod, tells me I better do it, that it’s okay, and as the highest compliment ‘I wouldn’t have thought a woman had written it.’ Now why that should please a female writer, I don’t know: in a way, it shocks me that I am pleased, for it’s so unrealistic. Perhaps it’s because I’ve never lived in a proper woman’s world, nor had a proper woman’s life, and so—feeling myself personally to be floating uncertainly somewhere between the sexes—I opt for what seems to me the more interesting of the two. Or is that right? Women are just as interesting as men, often more so: but their lives seem to me either too hard, with an unendurable daily exhausting drab hardness, or too soft and whipped cream. The home, in short, does not look as jolly as the great wide world. Anyhow, I am going to try to get the novel right, and if I don’t there are always matches available wherever one is, and a manuscript burns very nicely.
I was astounded by New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, as we drove through them, with everything bursting into flower and the little towns so clean and sound and gentle; and I thought, if this is what they mean by the American Way of Life, they have something to talk about. (Then of course we hit the coastal part of the Carolinas, a garbage country if there ever was one, and doubt set in.) I love you enormously as you know, and think you are an absolute blooming wonder, as you also know.
Always,
Marty
FURTHER READING
Martha Gellhorn published an article for Collier’s about her experiences visiting Dachau a few days behind the liberating American troops.