Mama Martha

Martha Gellhorn travels light. Although in her 84 years she has been almost everywhere and known almost everybody, she seems to have picked up no souvenirs along the way.

The small cottage in Wales where she has lived for the past 11 years contains precious little. "1 don't often let people visit me here," she says in her raspy, chain-smoker's voice. "Partly because it means I have to paint my face, but also because there isn't room. ' ' Most surprising of all, in the house of a prolific writer, is the near absence of books—only two small bookcases, with fewer than 100 volumes between them. As soon as she finishes a book, she gives it away.

She is a voracious reader, particularly of political thrillers. "Many thrillers are better than so-called serious fiction, where the author's personality keeps intruding," she observes. "I don't give a damn about the personality of the writer. " Does she reread her own work? "Why would I want to?"

Well, others do. Her novella collections—from The Trouble I've Seen (1936) to The Weather in Africa (1978)— are being issued in one volume this month by Knopf, and by Picador in the U.K. Read together, they confirm her distaste for fiction in which the author's voice drowns out those of the characters. Gellhorn's prose, unlike Gellhorn herself, has no strong stylistic flavor: it would be hard to guess that her tough and passionate stories from the Depression were written by the same hand that composed the cool, gloomy scenes from Africa 40 years later. All that connects them is the globe-straddling itinerary of Gellhorn's own life.

And what a life. It infuriates Martha Gellhorn that some people still think of her as the woman who was, between 1940 and 1945, the third Mrs. Ernest Hemingway. She was a writer before she met him, she has pointed out, and she has been a writer ever since. "Why should 1 be a footnote to someone else's life?" Her own biography is quite rich enough without the interlude. As a journalist she covered the Spanish Civil War, the D-day invasion, the liberation of Dachau, and the Vietnam War. Between forays into war zones she published five novels, 14 novellas, and two collections of short stories.

Now in her 85th year, Gellhorn says that she may "lack the energy" to write another book. It is hard to believe her— especially when, in the next breath, she casually mentions that "I'm going to spend January snorkeling off Hawaii with Paul Theroux." Some energy shortage.

FRANCIS WHEEN