Martha Gellhorn Remembered

"My dear William. Note: That's William. Not Bill. You must change your name. No one will ever take you seriously. Bill Buford? No, it just won't do. And your hair. You've got to do something with your hair. And that beard--shave it. You look like Allen Ginsberg." I'm quoting Martha Gellhorn, the novelist and war reporter who died last Monday, and whose work I had the privilege of publishing for much of her last decade, her ninth.

"I forgot to add, William. You must buy new trousers that don't look like what the well-dressed young elephants are wearing this year. How else can you win the Iranian's love?" The Iranian in question was a particularly elusive girlfriend. Martha tutored me on matters of the heart, and on drinking (you could never drink enough), on my appearance (a disaster) and on my manners--especially my manners: My manners, in Martha's eyes, were catastrophic. "I'll be in London for a few days later this month," she wrote me after we had a little row arising from another one of my behavioral misdemeanors, and the exchange must have become so rude and abusive that--and I infer this from the correspondence that I'm rereading for the first time--I sunk into a sulk. "If you don't return my call, I'll sadly take it that you wish to sever relations forever. A pity. But think about it, William. I may be the only old person you know, and elders and betters are necessary, as I know with despair, now that all of mine are dead."

The elementary facts of her life. Born nearly 90 years ago. Bossy, straight-talking, cigarette-smoking. The boozy reporter of wars and of the plight of the down-and-out. Also a writer of short stories, novellas and novels. And a travel writer. She was married to Ernest Hemingway, and she hated the fact that, whenever her work was written about in the press, his name was invariably mentioned as well, just as I'm mentioning it.

But it's hard to avoid: The two of them met when the world was at its most dramatic. They fell in love at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and divorced once World War II had ended, and in between were Cuba and big-game hunting and trips to China and battlefields in Finland and Barcelona and the beaches of Normandy. Could there be any two people more romantic? He was Papa Hemingway by then and she was--what? Blond and thin and sassy, a starlet of the highest order, a young Lauren Bacall, except that she was prettier and sexier and a whole lot brainier than a young Lauren Bacall. There was a glamour about Martha Gellhorn, the glamour of black-and-white movies. It was in her manner and her way with the ways of the world. She was a dame.