Glamor Girl

A STRICKEN FIELD--Martha Gellhorn --Duell, Sloan and Pearce ($2.50).

Like her great & good friend, Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn is a novelist with a legend. Unlike his, her legend is considerably greater than her published works, of which A Stricken Field is the second.

One day in 1934 Martha Gellhorn was introduced to FERA Administrator Harry Hopkins by a St. Louis newspaperman.

He recommended her for a job as relief investigator-at-large. She was not exactly what Harry Hopkins could call the right type. Her face was too beautiful, her blonde hair too expensive looking, her long legs too distracting, her clothes too Paris-perfect. He asked about her qualifications. She was 26 years old, had investigated conditions among textile work ers in France and England, had worked on a newspaper in Albany, N. Y., for the United Press in Paris, for the New Republic -- a mere fragment of her full story.

She got the job, came out of it with nervous exhaustion and a book of four long short stories called The Trouble I've Seen. It was acclaimed by Mrs. Roosevelt, by then (1936) well established as a leading U. S. book salesman; and with Author Gellhorn's photograph and back ground, any publisher's publicity writer could do the rest. Martha was in.

St. Louis-born, restless daughter of a brilliant surgeon and one of St. Louis' leading clubwomen, sent to Bryn Mawr ("I wasn't allowed to major in English on account of I wasn't good enough and wrote rowdily. . . ."), Martha's perambulations are such that only a good detective could have kept track of her. She has bummed her way afoot over most of Europe, making many an acquaintance on the way, once wrote a novel which she lost in Lake Maggiore, married and divorced famed French Journalist Count Bertrand de Jouvenel, accompanied a French youth delegation to Berlin, returned to the U. S. to roam in Mexico, the Texas oil fields, Hollywood.

In Spain she broadcast for the Loyalists from Madrid. In Czecho-Slovakia she watched the Nazi occupation. In January she returned from the Finnish front, as only accredited female war correspondent, with sufficient news for five current articles in Collier's; then headed for San Francisco de Paula, Cuba, where Ernest Hemingway is wintering.*

A Stricken Field is laid in Prague during the first days of the Nazi invasion of Sudetenland. It is the story of Mary Douglas, a U. S. foreign correspondent, how she got involved with anti-Nazi conspirators, her big failure when she enlisted the help of a British Special Commissioner and a French general in a scheme to protect her German Communist friend Rita. (Rita, romanticized mistress of a romanticized revolutionist, is refugee heroine of Author Gellhorn's story within a story--an artificial device, justified mainly by a climax scene which adds a graphic chapter to inquisitional literature.)

Semi-autobiographical at least, Mary is described by one character thus: "She is a good woman, and she has fine legs. I think she is not politically developed." Mary takes a wry view of her own radicalism: "She knew she would always say yes, when she was asked for help, because she did not feel she had a right to her privileges: passport, job, love. She only felt she was lucky and lucky and luckier than anybody could be, and you had to pay back for that." Verdict: as a character Martha is still miles ahead of Mary.

*According to legend, the heroine of Hemingway's play, The Fifth Column, beautiful, blonde Dorothy Bridges, was inspired by Martha Gellhorn, who was in Madrid while Hemingway was writing the play there.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.