I came into the Evergreen newsroom today to do some of the reporting I still feel a little obligated to do as long as I have newroom keys and a desk with crap on it. Instead I got distracted by library books I still have out about Martha Gellhorn. I think I was mostly into that before I started this blog, so maybe I haven’t written about her yet. She was a war reporter, married to Ernest Hemingway for a while, by most accounts had such a great love and compassion for humanity as a whole that she pretty much ignored her son, and had a tendency to just leave for another war when personal life got difficult or dull. So I see her as both a role model and a cautionary tale.

Anyway, this is from a letter she wrote to Hemingway in December 1943, talking about why she does journalism:

“… if such as me did not write, far worse people would do so. I can only guarantee the truth of what I write, not ever saying that I write the whole truth, because I never know the whole truth and if I did no one would publish it. But I know I am conscientious and serious, and fake nothing, and I think really that I do a sort of negatively useful thing, in employing the space and paper that would otherwise go to someone far worse.”

I quote that part because on bad days that is the reason I keep doing journalism, at least for now. It’s an awful reason, sort of. But she had other good things to say, so I put the whole portion of that letter below.

“I’d like to explain to you about journalism but don’t know whether I can and am maybe too sleepy. I see perfectly that it is bad for you; as it is not really a good enough trade for you and it has also a faintly or permanently non-grown-up thing about it. But it is good for me. It gives me many things for my eyes and mind to feed on, and they need to feed on actual sights rather than reading, simply because they are not first-rate; but that is their best food. It gives me a chance to meet people I would never otherwise meet, and I want to know them. It has been wonderful knowing the bomber boys, the plastic surgeon and those men out there, the slum kids of London. Really wonderful. I would not miss it; I like them and I am fascinated by them. Besides, deviously, everything I have ever written has come through journalism first, every book I mean; since I am not Jane Austen nor the Bronte sisters and I have to see before I can imagine, and that is the only way I have of seeing.

Then there are two other things, less personal and perhaps not tenable, and I am not always sure I believe them. One is that is there is anything to public opinion, there is surely a place for this sort of writing. I do not mean that anything I write produces direct action of any kind; but I like to think that it makes a sort of climate, that it makes a little more receptivity in people who read it. The other is negative; if such as me did not write, far worse people would do so. I can only guarantee the truth of what I write, not ever saying that I write the whole truth, because I never know the whole truth and if I did no one would publish it. But I know I am conscientious and serious, and fake nothing, and I think really that I do a sort of negatively useful thing, in employing the space and paper that would otherwise go to someone far worse.

I know it does not harm me to do this work. On the contrary. It tires me physically but as I do not take myself to be a prophet or a power. I feel and act like a hardworking stenographer and I feel kind of happy about it in a grubby hardworking way. I do not think you need ever worry about me turning into a walking dead: on occasion, when with shits, I try very hard to throw weight around since that is all they are impressed by, but am never very successful at it. And I’m not a walking dead because it is a great big world and I love to walk about it and look at it; and if you consider it, dearest Bug, I am very lucky as a woman to be able to do this because most women can walk nowhere and see nothing, and they become mittens characters and their husbands get bored and then where are they.

I do not suggest this is either good or necessarily desirable for you. But I do think you would wish very much to have seen, the other afternoon, the tiny little silver balloons like elephants floating against a pink red sky, over the city that is now so shabby and still quite lovely. I think you would have liked the black Lancs going off into the black night. I think you would like the cold long train rides, listening to the people talk. I think it is not disgusting to look at the world and at the war; because someone must see, and after all we have trained ourselves to see. It is an honorable profession. You are a very great writer and what you see gets pressed down and compact and one day it becomes a book. I am not a very great writer and function more like colonic irrigation, with things coming in and out at top speed. But I am on occasion very mildly pleased with my articles and even when not pleased with what I write, I am immensely pleased with what I have understood.”

I love that last sentence. I’ve tried before to explain to my many good journalist friends who are also male why, as a woman journalist, I can read great literature and great journalism from the past and still feel the need to seek out a woman’s writing. I think maybe that line explains it, because it sounds like me and my voice, and we all want to recognize ourselves in something that was once proved successful long ago.