THE VIEW FROM THE GROUND
by Martha Gellhorn
Granta, #8.99
MARTHA GELLHORN was one of the endangered species of journalism: a woman who imbued her writing with a simple eloquence, biting intelligence, and deep humanity.
Despite her status as one of the greats alongside the late James Cameron and her friend John Pilger, Gellhorn was largely sidelined until her death at the age of 90 earlier this year. The one positive outcome was the speedy re-printing of her collected works including this, her peacetime dispatches.
From the thirties through to the eighties Gellhorn turns her naturally inquisitive eye towards the world. Pushing us straight into the eye of the storm, the collection opens with a disturbing account of the journalist's first-hand witnessing of a lynching in Southern America of the thirties. After tightening the noose and setting the accused man on fire, the perpetrators apologise for keeping Gellhorn and her vomiting colleague waiting.
Time after time, she stumbles upon tiny unplanned incidents that blow up like a grenade to the world's political firespots. Gellhorn emerges as a one-woman magnate for trouble and strife.
It may be officially peacetime but for Gellhorn, the personal wars are still being fought: from the canvassing of optimistic young Poles operating under a brutal communist government to the uncrushable Spanish mulling over Franco's death, right up to a portrait of Cuba revisited after 41 years.
Her's was a talent that could switch from the broad strokes of history to the hidden minutiae of the personal in a matter of sentences. Yet never demean or inappropriately elevate a subject. The facts are there in black and white, the prose is terse but powerful, the essays are among the most compulsive put to print. This is a slice of twentieth century history that no-one but Martha Gellhorn could have told. And it is in our interests to read and learn.
There is a quote by a former justice of the US Supreme Court that serves as a fitting explanation for the driving force behind Gellhorn's life: ''It is required of man that he should share the passion and action of his time, at peril of being judged not to have lived.'' This collection of essays is testament to that passion and action as lived and distilled by a very fine journalist.
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