One of my favorite reads over the past few years has been The Paris Wife so when my cousin reminded me that this author, Paula McClain, had a new book out about Ernest Hemingway’s third wife Martha Gellhorn, I was on it, immediately. This new books is:

 Love and Ruin: A Novel

I didn’t previously know much about Martha Gellhorn, but this woman was a real journalist and author in her own right without being tied to Ernest Hemingway. She was his second wife between Pauline and Mary. (The Paris Wife is about his first wife Hadley.)

Beyond a fascinating tribute to Gellhorn, this book brings to life many periods of history I have not read about in historical fiction. First, the Spanish War where the two began their romantic relationship as they were both covering it as journalists. Gellhorn is often the only woman covering the conflicts she heads straight to:

“We drove down into the valley and maneuvered the car to one side of the dusty road. From several miles off we could hear the sounds of artillery coming, the layered stutter of machine-gun fire, the sharp graduated hammering of tommy guns. Walking across sharply broken ground, we came to a lip of earth, and this was the trench. In moments, we had dropped down into it…All the men we met — or they were boys really, most of them — seemed to look at me with astonishment , as if a wedding cake had turned up, or a gazelle.. Some of them were Spanish, some American, some Canadian, some Mexican, it seemed. They had been on the line for forty-five days, one said, and expected an attack every day. Firing came at them all the time of course, but a real attack would be something else.”

After being at the Spanish front, both Hemingway and Gellhorn wanted to start novels set in that conflict but she realized she couldn’t:

“When I sat down at my desk the next morning, I realized that I had to let my own Spain idea go. If I didn’t, I would always be measuring his work against mine, and coming up short…So I moved my characters to Prague…”

And this is the heart of the novel and the theme of their love story. They had so much in common, but she often felt overshadowed by him.

The book takes a reader to several other settings: Key West, Cuba where the two lived together, Sun Valley, Nevada, the Finnish-Russian war, the Chinese-Japanese war (where the two again travel together to cover) and finally to D-Day. As someone who has stalked down Hemingway’s houses and bars in Key West and Cuba and other places in the world, I closed this book equally or more fascinated by her.

Gellhorn puts her life and relationship at risk several times to tell the story of what she sees. As she disembarks a boat that had made its way through minefields, she contemplates the experience:

“Something had happened to us all, something that might never be fully comprehensible to anyone who had not come through it. That was the thing about experience. It took distant strangers and made them a family. A family of one moment. There was no other way to see it, even as we scattered to the wind.”

Parallel to Gellhorn’s experiences is Hemingway writing his book For Whom the Bell Tolls:

“Though I’d often wondered if Ernest might be writing this book forever, the ending finally came. The bridge was blown, and he had finished off Robert Jordan, and now was as wrung out and empty as if he’d killed off a part of himself to do it. He had, really, since Jordan was in him deeper than most real people in his life would ever get.”

As good books often do, this one left me with an additional “to read” list including re-reading For Whom the Bell Tolls. Maria, is of course modeled off of Gellhorn. After reading The Paris Wife I read A Moveable Feast and loved it after having the “perspective” of a main character. I also would like to read some of Gellhorn’s works, especially some of her articles from Colliers and more by McClain.

This is a fantastic work of historical fiction; I loved every page of it.

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