A beggar had his patch outside her local supermarket, in King's Road, Chelsea She had no problem with that. But it enraged her that, once he had collected enough money, he went inside the same supermarket to shop. Didn't he know it was one of the most expensive food stores in town? Why didn't he walk to a cheaper chain, and buy his groceries there instead?It was a typical Gellhorn exchange: first, the rejection of anything that sniffed of feminism ("Feminists nark me," she wrote); second, despite her passionate defence of the underclass, her inability to like its members personally. Rollyson says she "could not overcome her repugnance at the reeking Africans she met". "She loved humanity but hated people," he writes.Yet this complex character is reduced to a simple silhouette in this biography We find Martha born full throttle.
There is no voyaging towards the journalist and novelist we all grew to love and hate. At high school in St Louis, she was writing poems about slum housing. Aged 20, she was a delegate to the Model Assembly of the League of Nations.The following year she moved to Paris, with just $75 and one suitcase, expecting to get a job as a correspondent. These Athena-like beginnings rob the biography of any plot, as the feisty and irreverent pensioner of the final chapter seems little changed from the feisty and irreverent pre-teen of chapter one, despite several wars and encounters across the world.Nor does Gellhorn's voice, as loud and distinctive as it was, have much of a say in these pages. Rollyson paraphrases her work at length, from a story-by-story account of the fictional The Trouble I've Seen to a rewriting of her first dispatch from the Spanish Civil War. He has considerable sympathy with the men whom Gellhorn clearly used and abused, labelling her a manipulator.
He stacks up ammunition against her: The Trouble I've Seen only found a British publisher through her affair with HG Wells Ernest Hemingway was the injured party in their marriage. When Gellhorn abandoned him in Cuba, going off to report on the Second World War in Italy, her husband cabled: "ARE YOU A WAR CORRESPONDENT OR WIFE IN MY BED?"Gellhorn, although dismissing Rollyson's first biography, in 1990, may well have secretly enjoyed this more thorough attempt She was no sycophant. She was often abrupt and needlessly brutal in telling people what she thought of them. (She called Sybille Bedford a bore to her face, cutting dead a 30-year friendship.) Now Rollyson has told us exactly what he thinks of Gellhorn. It may be an unkind portrait, but the manner in which it is delivered is entirely fitting In Rollyson, Gellhorn has met her match.. Today's annual meeting promises to be another interesting milestone on the road to a sensible solution to the tangled affairs of Equitable Life, the mutual society whose viability and raison d'?e were so effortlessly called into question last summer by a bizarre diktat from the House of Lords.
