More from Gellhorn bio

Already, at twenty-four, she minded intensely about weather, hating and fearing the wet and the cold, her spirits continually altered by the presence or lack of sunshine. “On the whole,” she wrote on one of her more tolerant days, “I think the weather in Britain is a national catastrophe borne bravely by the inhabitants.”

 To go to Spain was to be present at the birth of a new and better social order. The burning of books by the Nazis in 1933, and the exodus of writers from Germany and Italy, only confirmed to them that art could not flourish in a reactionary atmosphere, a feeling expressed by many of the writers canvased in ]1937 by Nancy Cunard for a symposium on the Spanish civil war in the Left Review. As Hemingway would soon tell the Congress of American Writers in New York, “There is only one form of government that cannot produce good writing, and that system is fascism.”

 “I thought I knew everything about the war,” Martha told Hemingway, “but what I didn’t know was that your friends got killed.”

 Making love with Hemingway had never been much pleasure for Martha, who still found sexual relations less a matter of happiness than an awkward obligation. She told a friend many years later that she had been astonished to discover, talking to Tillie Arnold during one of her visits to Sun Valley, that making love was actually something women could enjoy.