“Hi, Martha.”
“Hi, Martha.”
The pharmacist at the CVS inside the Target where I get my endless prescriptions filled is named Martha, and every time I show up at the window we greet each other with this brief, laughing exchange — emphasis on the MARTHA — because we both know how hard it is to find another one in the wild.
To be a young Martha in the 70s was to be adrift on an elementary school sea of Jennifers and Kristins. Every kid gets subjected to their own unique form of social torture; mine was to be mocked by unimaginative boys whose only reference points for other Marthas were Washington (“How’s George doing?”) and a never-seen frumpy aunt on The Brady Bunch.
Those early years fine-tuned my awareness of my uncommon name, old-school long before any generational surge of babies named after their grandmas. Odd enough to stand out at roll call, but not so exotic as to be at all interesting, I muddled along as a vaguely resentful Martha through much of childhood – my mother may still have, somewhere, a crayon-and-construction-paper card I made when my youngest sister was born, expressing excitement that the new baby was a girl but also petulance that she had been given a “prettier” name – but once I cleared adolescence I made peace with my Marthaness. But I never lost the habit of marking, and remembering, the other Marthas that came my way.
There’s Stewart, of course, she’s unavoidable, the biggest Martha in the room – but also Plimpton, who I’ve loved since Running on Empty, and Quinn, source of some lingering teenage embarrassment. There’s Martha daughter of Lazarus, patron saint of controlling homemakers, from whom the Marthas of The Handmaid’s Tale take their name. There’s Martha Graham: equally venerated, but also a reminder of the Graham technique teacher who once whacked my belly with a stick for its sin of sticking out too far. Martha Mitchell: fascinating, messy, drunk, kind of awesome. Martha Moxley: my very own Dead Girl. Musical Marthas Reeves and Wash and of course the one with the Muffins. As I got older and more sophisticated: Nussbaum and Rosler. And of course the occasional IRL Martha who came my way, one of whom is a subscriber to this newsletter. Hi Martha!
But the Martha I truly latched on to beyond all other Marthas, once I found her, was Martha Gellhorn.
Novelist, memoirist, war correspondent, travel writer, adventurer: Martha Gellhorn was a force of nature, a woman who – to quote the blurb on the back of Caroline Moorhead’s exhilarating biography – “never met a war zone, a culture, a male ego, or an exercise routine from which she shied.”
Seemingly hell-bent on erasing the anxious shadow of the Bible’s fussy Martha from the global registry of Marthas forevermore, Martha Gellhorn charged off in 1937 to Madrid to cover the Spanish Civil War from the Loyalist front. In 1945, denied a press pass to Normandy, she stowed away on a Red Cross ship to get to Omaha Beach, the only woman to report from that horrible shore. She witnessed – and reported on – the unspeakable at Dachau, and came back with any belief in any fundamental human goodness shattered. From then on she wrote almost exclusively about refugees and other civilian casualties of war and injustice. In 1966, at 58, her career in a seemingly deadly slump, she went off to Saigon and produced six articles that lacerated the American war program with searing moral clarity.
She was for a few tumultuous years, married to Ernest Hemingway, and I’d like to think she’d approve of the fact that it took me two paragraphs to mention this, because after they divorced at the end of World War II she loathed him until her, or at least his, dying day. In ‘Mr. Ma’s Tigers,” her account of their 1941 trip to China she refers to him simply as “U.C.”, short for “Unwilling Companion,” and she never lost her fury at having her talent unwillingly attached to his.
She was friends with Eleanor Roosevelt and H.G. Wells and Robert Capa. She was opinionated and imperious and suffered from what would today be considered disordered eating, furiously determined to stay at her preferred 125 pounds well into her dotage. She traveled ceaselessly, often on her own, to Tanzania and to Bali and to the Gaza Strip; to Mexico and Malta, Morocco and Macau. She loved to swim and to sunbathe in the nude. She suffered black moods, but not fools, and refused to allow herself an ounce of self pity. In her 70s, she was attacked and raped on a beach in Kenya. She spoke of it twice and then never again.
She wrote novels that haven’t aged so well, but her nonfiction is timeless. She published her memoir, Travels With Myself and Another, when she was 70 and a collection of peacetime essays, The View From the Ground, when she was 80, and was discovered by a new generation of adventurous young people, whom she would entertain in her London flat, drinking scotch until the wee hours. As she got older her vision failed, and then the rest of her health did too. In 1998, at the age of 89, nearly blind and full of cancer, she put on a silk nightgown, lay down in her bed, and took a pill and died.
She was, in a word, remarkable, and I could go on and on and on. Moorhead’s book – which is from 2003 and is called simply Gellhorn – is so fun to read. She really puts you in the presence of this Martha, an utter original, eccentric and insecure and unpleasant at times, but just this bracing Personality. Maybe the right midcentury adjective for it would be “ripping”? She dripped with privilege, this leggy, sassy Bryn Mawr blonde from a well-to-do family, but I have always longed to be half the writer Martha Gellhorn was, or to have one-tenth her courage.
She was ahead of her time in every way, but one in particular resonates today. From her early days in Spain until the bitter end, she categorically rejected the idea of journalistic objectivity. “All that objectivity shit,” she called it. Good journalists needed to pick a side, the side of truth, and deploy the tools of their trade – research, language, storytelling – to defend it against power and propaganda. Some version of this belief was central to all her work, even though she struggled at times to practice what she preached, as when, on that trip to China, where they had been invited by the government, neither she nor her U.C. reported honestly on the brutality of Chiang Kai-shek’s regime.
She was at times deeply frustrated by her failure to live up to her own principles:
“You cannot write the straight truth because people resent it, and are conditioned (by the shit) not to believe it,” she wrote to a friend after returning from China. “So, finally, you write a certain amount of evasion yourself, carefully shirking the definitely dung features of journalism … You have to be very young, very cynical and very ignorant to enjoy writing journalism these days.”
Questions of what it means to be “objective” in journalism and how, if, or when to draw a line between witness and activist are not, in other words, new. But you may have noticed an uptick of such questions in the discourse these days, in the conversation around the New York Times’s coverage of transgender issues, for instance. I’m not a NYT contributor, but I signed onto the letter initiated by staff reporters and regular freelancers calling for accountability, balance, and just plain better journalism on the part of the paper of record. The Times, in response, brushed off the signatories – their own writers – as “activists” and then promptly published, the next day, a defense of JK Rowling by Pamela Paul, professional peddler of moral panic. So, who’s the activist here? Which party is obfuscating to push an agenda, exactly? Is it the group lobbying for fair-minded coverage of gender-affirming medical care for minors – even as those children are subject to harassment, assault, and state-sponsored terror, and at high risk for self-harm and suicide – or the group signing off on a loosely sourced defense of a billionaire?
I’ve been thinking lately about my own haphazard career in journalist, and the ways in which over the years I have taken shortcuts or waffled rather than take a solid stand. It’s one of the reasons I’m not working in that field any more, honestly. In the past, if I was interested in a story, it was often because there’s someone or something to it that I admired and wanted to champion, but in the process of reporting it out I found myself hamstrung by the protocols of the profession, stranded awkwardly on the fence between advocate and observer, and unhappy with my performance as either. Which Martha am I? The artist, the witness, the whistleblower, the entertainer?
Other writers are better at working in this uncomfortable space and have developed skills I never did, like the brilliant Lewis Raven Wallace, whose book The View From Somewhere – its title in conversation with Gellhorn – I’ve also turned to again of late. In the book Wallace makes an urgent case for the necessity of journalistic subjectivity, asking questions that echo those of Martha G. during the wars. “What will our facts be in service of in the future?,” he writes. “Fascism or democracy? Capitalism or collectivity? Anti-racism or white supremacy?” And, a bit later: “I believe journalists can seek the truth without engaging in a battle against the subjective or the activist. And battles against subjectivity and activism have too often amounted to being battles against the marginalized and oppressed. That is because the center is always shifting and ‘objectivity’ is a false ideal that upholds the status quo.”
Meanwhile, here in Chicago, you may have heard, we had an election this week and, in a strange turn of events, I’ve been asked to write something about it. But, how? I am neither young, cynical, nor ignorant and I haven’t taken a swing at this kind of punditry in a long while. As I try to hammer out an outline, one that will hopefully inform as well as entertain, I kind of just want to throw the whole thing out and scream DON’T VOTE FOR THE CREEPY WHITE GUY!*
I am subjective about the candidates for mayor, in other words. I’m a Chicagoan and a voter and what happens April 4 will affect me, and if I can try and marshal the tools at my disposal to advance the case that Paul Vallas — whose “anti-crime” platform is one longass racist dog whistle — would be a disaster for the city, I think that is a righteous cause. It may never get me a job at the Times, but I hope it might at least make another Martha smile.
This essay took a turn, I know. Thank you for reading; I enjoyed writing about all the Marthas and not writing about stupid cancer this week. If you enjoyed reading it, and have the means, I would love it if you would become a paid subscriber. I’ll have another interview up soon for those who are, with my friend Gina Frangello: seven-year breast cancer survivor, teacher, mother, lover, liver of her LARGEST life, and oh yeah bestselling author of the breathtaking memoir Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason. On Wednesday I am off to AWP in Seattle, where I will go to a bunch of overcrowded readings with bad wine, probably buy too many books, and maybe learn a little something more about writing in the process. I’ll also get to see my family and I’m pretty excited about that. And somewhere in there I’ll be writing about the election and why #BrandonisBetter. More soon!
*NOTE: This post has been edited to remove reference to a rumor.
You are the only Martha we need in Chicago. Keep kicking!
This rocks so hard.