by Sue Corbett
By then she was married to Sir John Heathcoat-Amory, 3rd Bt, a noted Devon sportsman, and proprietor of a long-established family business making lace. An earlier engagement to the Scottish golfer Major Cecil Hutchinson had been broken off. Golf was no longer such an important part of her life after her marriage in 1937, though in 1948 she and her husband reached the final of the Worplesdon mixed foursomes, a competition which she had done much to promote since 1921 and which she had won eight times before her marriage, despite being hampered by the occasional hopeless partner.
She and her husband lived at Knightshayes House, near Tiverton, an elaborate and eccentric Victorian Gothic edifice, where they built up a fine collection of pictures and a celebrated garden; Lady Heathcoat-Amory was awarded the Royal Horticultural Society’s Victoria Medal of Honour.
She continued to live at Knightshayes after her husband’s death in 1972, when the house passed into the custody of the National Trust and the best of the pictures, including works by Lancret, Poussin and Memling, were donated to museums. She retained her interest in golf, having become the first president of the English Ladies’ Golf Association in 1951. She had no children.
Joyce Wethered (Lady Heathcoat-Amory), golfer, was born on November 17, 1901. She died on November 18, 1997, aged 96
MARTHA GELLHORN
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FEARLESS AMERICAN WAR CORRESPONDENT, ADEPT AT GETTING CLOSE TO THE ACTION
FEBRUARY 18, 1998
Martha Gellhorn was famous on two counts. She was a war correspondent of high calibre, one of the first women — someone would argue the first — to enter that area of journalism. And she was the third wife of Ernest Hemingway, dedicatee of For Whom The Bell Tolls.
She was fiercely proud of her reputation as a reporter. For many years she always managed to get to where the action was, often using subterfuge or downright trickery to reach her destination: Madrid in the Spanish Civil War, the D-Day landings, Dachau, Vietnam, El Salvador.
But on the subject of Hemingway she refused to say a word as she entered old age. She began by remarking caustically that she had no intention of being a footnote to someone else’s life. But her silence on the subject gradually became obsessive.
Gellhorn who, as a journalist, had conducted interviews by the score herself began to make the stipulation that the name of Hemingway was not to be mentioned in any interview she permitted. A profile on BBC TV as she approached her 83rd birthday contained no mention of the Hemingway marriage, or any other liaison for that matter. (She was married in all three times, finally in 1954 to T. S. Matthews, whose secretary she had once been on the New Republic in Washington.)
Gellhorn saw herself as a champion of the oppressed. Wherever they were in the world she sought them out and reported on what she found in cool, crisp prose, which could be emotive through its almost laconic cadences. She remained true to her left-wing credentials.
She was brought up in St Louis, where her father was a successful gynaecologist and her mother an early suffragette. She went to Bryn Mawr, retaining something of its accent and style, but she left both further education and the family home abruptly, with $50 borrowed from the cook, to seek her fame and fortune. She arrived in Paris, favourite location for American expatriates, in 1929 and did some journalism for American magazines, including Vogue. Her first novel, What Mad Pursuit, came out in 1933.
The following year was crucial. She left her first husband — the French writer, Bertrand de Jouvenel — deciding that America in the midst of the Depression was more worthy of her attention than Europe. She became an investigator for the Emergency Relief Administration and her reports from poverty-stricken areas, especially in Massachusetts, brought her national attention and an invitation to Franklin Roosevelt’s White House.
Those reports provided the source for her first major book, The Trouble I’ve Seen. This was in the style, which Gellhorn was to perfect, of fact only lightly clad in fiction. One particular portrait of a child prostitute called “Ruby” remained in the minds of all who read it. Trouble had an introduction by H. G. Wells, who was much taken by the author’s blond beauty at a White House encounter, although Martha Gellhorn was to complain that this contribution was forced on her.
Hemingway was similarly struck shortly afterwards when Martha Gellhorn picked him out in a bar called Sloppy Joe’s in Key West, where the Gellhorn family was on holiday following the death of Martha’s father. There were other meetings in America between the dishevelled literary lion and the svelte young tigress just making a name for herself, before both made their separate ways to the Spanish Civil War. There it was perfectly clear to fellow reporters and supporters of the Republican cause that they were lovers. Martha duly emerged as Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls.
She was already determined not to be that “footnote” to the history of a more famous writer. Her work for Collier’s magazine had established her as a first-rate war correspondent, adept at getting to the front line and apparently impervious to the dangers once she was there. She went to Czechoslovakia when it was occupied by the Germans in March 1939 and covered the Russo-Finnish War of 1939-40. The Prague visit inspired one of her best books, A Stricken Field (1939), in which — under the disguise of “Mary Douglas” — she shows a cool outrage at a people living in fear and fury towards the passivity of those countries which let it happen.
When Hemingway’s divorce from his second wife, Pauline, came through in 1940 he married Martha Gellhorn in Wyoming. The marriage was to last five years and was to be stormy. The divorce, when it came, was predictably acrimonious.
When they were together, as they were at Finca Vigia, the house Hemingway bought in Cuba outside Havana, the loud clash of egos could be heard. Gellhorn, as usual, continued to do her own thing, including smuggling herself aboard a hospital ship to cover the D-Day landings in Europe. She was with the Allied forces when Dachau was liberated and her report was one of the first to reveal the dark secret of the Holocaust — and one of the most harrowing.
With the end of the Second World War it looked as though Martha Gellhorn might be short of causes to espouse and battlefronts to describe. Vietnam altered all that and, she remarked bitterly, for the first time she found herself on the wrong side, the American one. She also found difficulty at times in getting where she wanted to be. By now she was too well known to open doors with disingenuous excuses along the lines that she was “just there for the woman’s angle”. Even the dimmest bureaucrats were not going to fall for that. She railed against paying her American taxes to support a war she believed to be evil.
Other conflicts attracted Gellhorn’s attention, notably those in Lebanon and El Salvador. But as she moved through her sixties she became more content to roam quieter and remoter parts of the world and write about what she saw. Fiction, she said, was so much harder than reportage and she wrote less of it. But there was a revival of interest in her early work and especially in Ruby, almost certainly her best piece of fiction, when the short novels were reprinted in 1991.
Even in her eighties, before her eyesight started giving her trouble, she betrayed little sign of old age. The considered phrases would still roll out through a curtain of cigarette smoke — initially at her home in Wales and latterly at her flat in Eaton Square. The old poise was still there and so were the old dislikes: “I am profoundly unliterary. Literary stuff? I hate it.”
Not that this stopped her being inordinately proud of the fact that some of her last writing appeared in Granta — though she also rallied to the defence of Bill and Hillary Clinton in the columns of the New Republic during their first term in the White House. The only thing that no one seems to have dared to ask her is why she had settled for living the last part of her life in Britain, which she had once described as “that accursed island”.
Martha Gellhorn’s three husbands predeceased her. She and her third husband, T. S. Matthews, adopted a son.
Martha Gellhorn, war correspondent and novelist, was born on November 8, 1908. S
he died on February 15, 1998, aged 89
DAME IRIS MURDOCH
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WRITER AND PHILOSOPHER WHO USED FICTION TO CHART THE PROGRESS OF A METAPHYSICAL BATTLE BETWEEN EVIL AND GOOD
FEBRUARY 9, 1999
“It had been his fate not to be interested in anything except everything,” Iris Murdoch once wrote of one of her characters. In many ways this was her own fate, too. As a lecturer in philosophy and Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford, she shied away from the narrower analytical studies which interested such contemporaries as A. J. Ayer, and turned her attention instead to the expansive, though unfashionable, discipline of metaphysics.
Lecturing and publishing in the field of moral philosophy, she engaged with the Post-Modernist Jacques Derrida and his flanking armies of deconstructionists, arguing that fact could not be separated from value. She sought to place moral inquiry back at the heart of philosophy, embarking with Casaubon-like fervour on her extensive study Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992) which was greeted by some critics as a ramshackle collection of essays and by others as a grand philosophical synthesis.
As a novelist, Iris Murdoch was similarly broad in her outlook, taking the “dramas of the human heart” as her subject. Fiction, she said, was a “hall of reflection” which can encompass every form of tragedy and comedy. She used it to chart the progress of a metaphysical battle between evil and good, usually played out within the confines of a leisured upper-middle-class society.
Distrusting the constricted focus of much modern fiction, she created large casts of characters so that her novels, at their worst, spun like an emotional merry-go-round, while at their best they were persuasive and amusing commentaries on the contemporary world and the intricacies of human relationships.
She was energetically prolific, and her output seemed as much a show of stamina as of inspiration. Novels such as her 1978 Booker prizewinner The Sea, the Sea, or Nuns and Soldiers (1981), or The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983), expanded to more than 500 pages, as she painstakingly knitted their protracted and typically mysterious plots, slowly chewing over unfashionably long descriptions and quasi-philosophical themes. Yet, although some critics suggested that adroit editorial excision would have increased the impact of her work, there were others who acclaimed her as the most accomplished novelist in post-war Britain.
Murdoch’s personal beliefs were as expansive and accommodating as her fiction. She did not believe in a personal God, she said, which is why she found Buddhism especially appealing. But the religious dimension was essential to her and she bewailed the lack of faith in the modern world.
Iris Murdoch: “a persuasive commentator on the contemporary world”
A woman of immense practical kindness, she was soft-voiced and courteous, with a warm, open manner and a large capacity for sympathetic listening, which in many ways she preferred to talking. She seemed rarely to be bored by anything, taking advantage of every encounter to find out as much as possible. “There is never a moment,” one of her friends once said, “when she would think it inappropriate to ask: ‘Do you believe in God?’ ”
Murdoch was a familiar figure on the literary scene, youthfully pink-cheeked and with a softly enigmatic smile, dressed in her donnish clothes: woolly jerseys and tweedy A-line skirts. Although there was a natural authority and decisiveness to her conversation, her language was oddly peppered with old-fashioned schoolgirl jargon: “Hello, old thing” and “cheerio”.
Jean Iris Murdoch was very much a product of her benign and cultivated background. She was born in Dublin after the end of the First World War, during which her father had served as a cavalry officer. But he was a bookish, intellectual man who, on demobilisation, joined the Civil Service. Her mother was also a cultured woman, who had trained as an opera singer before her early marriage. Iris was the only child, brought up as part of what she famously described as a “perfect trinity of love”.
From the age of nine she was brought up in suburban London, but she always felt herself to be at least partly Irish, and throughout her childhood the family would spend their summer holidays there. She was educated at the Froebel Educational Institute in London, and, from the age of 13, at a vaguely progressive school, Badminton, where she was a contemporary of Indira Gandhi.
Iris Murdoch began writing at an early age, partly, she believed, as compensation for having no siblings to play with. “I’m the only child in search of the imaginary brother or sister. That is probably why I like to invent characters,” she once said. Her first published work appeared in a school magazine in 1933. A comic poem about a girl with “bluebottle eyes and a sense of vocation” whose chief interest is fishing for stars in the Milky Way, it shows the vein of humour mixed with the philosophical solemnity which was to characterise her work.
In 1938 Murdoch won the Harriet Needham Exhibition to Somerville College, Oxford, where she read Mods and Greats. There she found herself mixing with such stimulating figures as Raymond Williams, Philip Larkin, Edward Heath, Denis Healey and Roy Jenkins. Politically she was, at that time, on the far Left, and when Roy Jenkins wrote her a modest letter on some matter of party business, she penned him an impassioned reply, addressing him as “Comrade Jenkins”. Her political preferences thereafter followed a well-trodden path. She moved to Gaitskellism in the 1950s, through the muddled attitudes of the Sixties, to moderate Conservatism in the 1970s and then to Thatcherism in the 1980s.
Graduating with a first in Greats, she left Oxford to work during the war years in the Treasury under the formidable Evelyn Sharp. From there she was seconded to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and was sent first to Belgium and then to Austria, where, in her job in a camp for displaced people, she proved most adaptable, whether operating the switchboard or negotiating narrow roads behind the wheel of a heavy lorry.
In all this time she scarcely read a book, exhausted by the strenuous work. But passing through Brussels on the way out she had got what she described as a heady whiff of philosophy. She had met Sartre and, although previously she had considered archaeology or art history as her calling, she became fascinated by Existentialism. In Brussels she came across a bookshop owner who had pressed L’Être et le néant into her hands. “It was wonderful,” Murdoch said. “People were liberated by that book after the war, it made people happy, it was like the Gospel. Having been chained up for years, you were suddenly free and could be yourself.”
On her return to England she decided that she wanted to return to academic life and applied for and won a scholarship to pursue her studies in the United States. But as a former member of the Communist Party — which she had briefly joined under the influence of a boyfriend, Frank Thompson, who was later killed in Bulgaria — she was refused a visa. The next year, 1947, she was awarded the Sarah Smithson Studentship in philosophy at Newnham College, Cambridge, and she studied there for a year before returning to Oxford as a tutor in philosophy and fellow of St Anne’s. She was to hold this post for the next 15 years.
Her first book, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953), reflected her youthful passion for Existentialism, though intellectually she was always to remain at a distance from Sartre, and he was later to become the subject of some of her most acute criticism. She found his view of lonely, self-determining man quite inaccurate, and her collection of essays The Sovereignty of Good (1970) showed a widening of her work into a general attack on analytic philosophy. Plato, however — about whom she wrote in The Fire and the Sun (1977) — was to remain her abiding interest, as she probed for a wider metaphysical system from which to answer the questions of philosophy.
However, as she was the first to admit — and her detractors were quick to point out — she was not a philosopher of true originality. “Unless one is a genius, philosophy is a mug’s game,” one of her fictional characters says. Only a genius, Murdoch maintained, could ever make a real contribution to the subject. At the age of 35 she turned her hand to writing novels.
In her first novel, Und
er the Net (1954) — which was actually her fourth, since she discarded two and another did not find a publisher — she harked back to Existential themes as she traced the journey of a posse of rootless individuals traipsing round London in search of their identities. But unlike Sartre’s, her novels were not simply the lumbering vehicles for philosophical ideas. “I might put in things about philosophy because I happen to know about philosophy,” she said. “If I knew about sailing ships I would put in sailing ships.”
Once she had begun to write, Murdoch scarcely seemed to pause, producing a new novel every year or so, with perhaps a break of half-an-hour between ending one and beginning the next. She began each with a period of “hard reflection” at the end of which every chapter would have been delineated and the characters moulded and given their names — usually improbable ones. At the end of the process, hefty shopping bags of manuscript would be presented to her publishers, Chatto & Windus, where the boast was that never a word was changed. She professed herself impervious to reviews. “A bad review,” she used to say, “is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.”
Those who reproached her with publishing too much were perhaps missing the point: her project was one of imperfection, or imperfectibility even, as if the perfect — like the good, about which she meditated so deeply — was fundamentally beyond human achievement. If for her every novel was a fresh attempt to attain her ideal, she found each time that her ideal had moved on. She was always alert to the dangers of complacency. “I’m in the second league,” she said, “not among the gods like Jane Austen and Henry James and Tolstoy.”
Critics mostly felt that she was at the height of her powers in the 1960s and early 1970s, with works such as A Severed Head (1961), The Italian Girl (1964), A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970), The Black Prince (1973) and The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974). Several of these were made into plays and films. The Severed Head, for instance, ran for nearly three years at the Criterion Theatre, and was made into a film starring Richard Attenborough. In 1978 she also published a collection of poems, A Year of Birds.
