Tea at Trianon: The Extraordinary Life of Martha Gellhorn

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, January 8, 2020

The Extraordinary Life of Martha Gellhorn

I have never been a big Hemingway fan but I found this article about Martha Gellhorn to be interesting and tragic. Women are still struggling to have it all, and many end up with nothing. From Town and Country:

“Cuba makes me understand that I am old,” Gellhorn told Fuentes before she left Havana for the last time, over slugs of rum at his brightly painted house in Cojimar. She understood that in the movie of Hemingway’s life she was “the villain, the bad girl.” I would argue that she chose the role of villain over dissembling, forced to choose by the cruel dilemma she found herself in. “Are you a war correspondent or wife in my bed?” he had cabled. And here she had been thinking she could have it all.

“Be advised, love passes,” she once wrote. “Work alone remains.” After Hemingway, she would swing from relationship to relationship, mostly with married men, tiring of love again and again, or tiring of herself in it. She strode, mostly alone, through 53 countries and described herself as feeling “permanently dislocated—un voyageur sur la terre.”

She worked until she couldn’t, went to war until her body couldn’t take the strain, wrote until blindness encroached. Like Hemingway, she chose suicide when things grew too dire. She was 89 and had been given a terminal cancer diagnosis. Only recently had she stopped swimming and snorkeling. Right up to the end she was thinking about traveling—a trip to Egypt, perhaps, to get a long look at the pyramids.

“I want a life with people that is almost explosive in its excitement,” she wrote,“fierce and hard and laughing and loud and gay as all hell let loose.” It seems to me she had that life—and that it’s one worth looking at. Even searching for. (Read more.)