The Idea of Home (4 page)

Gellhorn was twenty-eight years old when she filed her first war dispatch. She was covering the Spanish Civil War for
Collier's Weekly Magazine
. The article was headlined ‘Only the Shells Whine'. The year was 1937. The episode she described occurred just weeks before the bombing of Guernica, which would redefine the civilian cost of war. This is what she wrote:

Gellhorn's eyes are usually on the civilians, not the soldiers. The editors did not always appreciate her
focus on the ordinary human costs of war. ‘Not bad for tear jerker sort of stuff,' is scrawled across one of her pieces on the suffering of refugees from the Spanish war.

It was in Spain that she began a relationship with Ernest Hemingway, whom she married in 1940. Apparently jealous of his wife's reporting abilities, he became her competitor at
Collier's
. It was Hemingway, therefore, who was given US military credentials to travel with the troops to the D-day invasion. Gellhorn did it the hard way. She talked her way on board a hospital ship docked in England on the pretext of doing a human-interest piece on the nurses. Once aboard, she went straight to the bathroom and locked herself in until the ship was under way. It was the third hospital ship to attempt the crossing; the first two had hit mines. The report she filed was a remarkable piece of journalism. It focused on the cost of the invasion, full of vivid accounts of the wounded. Though she actually went on the beach as a stretcher-bearer, she barely mentions herself in the piece.

Hemingway's dispatch is very different.
Collier's
ran it as its cover story. The six-page spread begins with a half-page photo of Hemingway with the troops. He never went ashore, although you wouldn't know that from his dispatch, which is a self-aggrandising account of how he virtually directed the landing and saved the day. He finds the right beach for the bewildered young officer, who has lost his map overboard. Luckily, Hemingway tells us, he has memorised the complete geography of the Normandy coast.

Gellhorn's story gets just one page, buried in the back of the magazine behind a story on how to swallow a sword. The short piece, headlined ‘Over and Back', gives no sense that she left Britain, much less went ashore under fire. It was six weeks before
Collier's
finally printed the longer account of her experiences. I wondered if
Collier's
had considered a hairy-chested account of boys in battle more gripping than Gellhorn's humanistic account of suffering. Or whether the editors had been worried about upstaging Hemingway. Or if they feared angering the US military, which had arrested
Gellhorn when her ship docked back in Britain. They ordered her confined to a nurses' barracks. (She rolled out under the barbed wire, headed for a nearby airfield, hitched a ride to the Italian front and carried on reporting the war.) But the reason her story was published so late turned out to be none of the above. It was discovered only in recent years by Sandra Whipple Spanier, an academic researcher from Penn State University. She ferreted out the original cables sent by Gellhorn and Hemingway. Hemingway's piece and Gellhorn's short article were cabled from London, and stamped received on 13 June. Gellhorn's longer, substantive piece, ‘The Wounded Come Home', was not cabled, but
mailed
back to
Collier's
. When Spanier asked an ageing Gellhorn about this, Gellhorn was astonished. She recalled giving the cable to Hemingway to send and had always assumed he wired it. The marriage did not survive the war.

That Gellhorn's piece is much anthologised today points to the value of her focus on the human cost of war. And yet I must confess to some ambivalence
about the current place of women, as equals with their male colleagues in the right to cover war. As ‘embeds' in military units, reporters are cut off from the ability to cover civilian suffering, and all too often become stenographers for the military point of view. So I would like to reconsider a proposition that I, as a feminist, have for so long found self-evident: that if a barrier to women's participation in any field of endeavour exists, the breaking of that barrier should be cause for unalloyed rejoicing. My experience as a woman correspondent covering war has caused me to question this assumption.

The wars I covered were mostly in countries not noted for gender equality. So it was surprising to realise that the first right a woman generally is granted, in a society that affords her very few, is the right to fight and die as a soldier. This is true in conservative Arabian Gulf countries and in many places in Africa. I covered these stories, because they were interesting. A diffident tribal girl in Eritrea becomes a respected military commander. A veiled woman of the United Arab Emirates is admitted to Sandhurst. Covering the
latter story, I met Janis Karpinski, who was the US army officer in charge of training the Emirates' first class of women military recruits. A decade later, the Eritrean soldier has been betrayed by her movement, which, like the Algerians and many liberation movements before them, neglected gender equality once the war ended. The women of the United Arab Emirates still struggle for the most basic rights. And Janis Karpinski, demoted and disgraced, has become the only senior scapegoat for the torture at Abu Ghraib. Generals Miller and Sanchez, her male superiors, who were far more deeply implicated, continued to prosper in their careers.

Since then, reports have emerged of US servicewomen's role in the interrogation of Muslim prisoners, where they have been required to violate the prisoners' sense of sexual propriety and religious taboo by engaging in lewd behaviours, such as straddling them suggestively or smearing them with fake menstrual blood. These are not aberrant behaviours by a few out-of-control sadists on a night shift: these are sanctioned tactics, reviewed at the
highest level. The US military has sunk to pimping its female personnel.

In war, women may have won the right to be in the firing line, but I believe it is a right that women should approach with a pair of tongs and a Hazmat suit. If the point is courage, or proving love of country, or providing useful service, I believe it can be done in many other places, the barricades of domestic protest not the least of them. Most wars end at the negotiating table, not on the battlefield. Yet the tedious work of negotiation is not aggrandised, nor are diplomats lionised like military heroes. And some of the bravest people in the war zones I covered as a journalist were the unarmed, underpaid aid workers. Stuart Cameron, a Brisbane man of forty-five years, was one of them. Mr Cameron was a regional manager for Care and was implementing a winter survival plan designed to deliver heating fuel and food rations to destitute Kurds in the aftermath of the first Gulf war. In 1993, an ambush left him dead with seventeen bullet wounds. It was part of a terror campaign aiming to drive foreign aid groups out of Kurdish-
controlled areas of Iraq. Mr Cameron had been loved and respected by the people he helped. When the car carrying his body pulled out of the hospital on the first leg of its long journey home, thousands of Kurds lined the footpaths and rooftops. Some had brought their weapons, and shouldered them in a military salute. Others just stood in silent farewell. On a few walls, hastily lettered posters in fractured English struggled to express their feelings. The one I remember best read simply: Kurds Will Not Forget Stuart.

In almost every conflict I covered as a reporter, I ran into Australians, many of them women, working to make things a bit better for the suffering civilians. They were irreverent, unsanctimonious, unself-aggrandising and largely unsung. But their competence and dedication has won Australia many friends in the tattered corners of the world. Like journalists, aid workers travel on the tides of disaster. We come and we go, unsure if we leave any permanent trace behind us. Near the end of her life, Martha Gellhorn reflected on this as she addressed a gathering of young journalists:

Some of us — Greg Shackleton, my
Wall Street Journal
colleague Daniel Pearl — will die making that effort. The least we can do is pay attention. It is too easy, for most of us, to ignore injustices in far away countries, to push them to the back shelves of our conscience like unread books. But in this interconnected world, that behaviour becomes increasingly perilous. Because the membrane that divides the prosperous and peaceful world from the poor and war-ravaged one is weakening. We see it in the woes of the global economy, which have spread like a blastoma, penetrating into even the healthiest tissues and causing dysfunction.

What's coming environmentally will be much worse. And no flags, no borders, can protect us.

When my father died, an Australian flag draped the coffin at his funeral. My immigrant father loved that flag. As for me, I prefer to imagine the possibility of a future when we won't require national flags at all. I glimpsed it for a moment, that night at the Sydney Olympics: that moment when we only needed one flag, bedecked with doves of light.

A
few years ago, on a crisp autumn day in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I attended a lecture entitled ‘Singularities in Algebraic Plane Curves'. For reasons that I will not go into, it was necessary that I attend. I slumped into the room, armed with a doodle pad. My plan was to sit politely and let the talk sail over my head. I would use the hour for meditative reverie; perhaps, if I positioned myself wisely, a discreet little nap might be possible.

On the pad I carried that day, I have a few fragments of the sentences the mathematician used:

This is like poetry, I thought, and I leaned forward to hear more. The mathematician was eloquent. She was passionate. And when I set aside my firm belief that I could not comprehend her, something strange happened. It wasn't that I understood her work, but I understood her vision. I realised I had lived, until that moment, in an airlock, and that she was prising open the heavy door, just a crack. In the sudden brief shaft of light, I glimpsed a sliver of the world beyond, the world in which she lived. When she looked at the old maple beyond the lecture room window, at the great swoop of bough arcing out from massive trunk, her consciousness overlaid a pattern on that branch that was elegant and sensual. I could imagine, for a moment, what it was to see with her eyes, to feel with her heart, to inhabit a space in which the language was not
particular and national, but infinite and universal, a world in which every object sang to her with its own particular music, chiming out in delicate arpeggios and thundering chords.

I know now that it is a beautiful world, but I also know that I can't live there. If she has lungs, I have gills. I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life. I
am
sure though that our work, the mathematician's and mine, is essentially the same. In her exploration of the singularity in every plane curve, she seeks a way to more perfectly describe that arcing branch, or a soaring bridge, the squiggle in the iron lace of a terrace house, the quivering S bend of a squirrel's upraised tail. She pushes her way deeper and deeper into the full truth of the world. This, also, is what I must do.

In
The Idea of Home
, I have examined various concepts of home: a source of inspiration, a native habitat. If home is also a destination or goal, then I
have found my home in fiction, where my destination and my goal is to pursue this truth, as best I can.

It is my great good luck that the words I use are English words, which means I live in a very old nation of open borders; a rich, deep, multi-layered, promiscuous universe, infused with Latin, German, French, Greek, Arabic and countless other tongues. I would not be able to swim so far, dive so deep, in a linguistically isolated language such as Hungarian, or even a protectively elitist one such as French. When I write a word in English, a simple one, such as, say,
chief
, I have unwittingly ushered a querulous horde into the room. The Roman legionary is there, shaking his
cap
, or head, and Andy Capp is there, slouching in his signature working man's headgear. The toque-wearing cook is there, too, reminding me that English had
chef
, from the French (who had changed the Romans' ‘k' sound to ‘sh', and the ‘p' sound to ‘eff'), before it had
captain
, from the Latin, which is why the word chief now sounds more like the younger word than its elder. So is the English root of chief properly described as French, from which English
first borrowed it, or Latin, from which it originated? I don't know what a linguistics expert or a lexicographer would say. But as a novelist I do know I am glad to have this immense cast of captains and chefs standing behind my chief, telling me that whoever she is in my novel, she trails a vast raft of history and association behind her, subtly framing her in my readers' minds before I have let her utter a single word.

 

Henry David Thoreau wrote that:

Well, it did not go that way for me. I started out hoping for the woodshed — a nice, tight serviceable structure that would serve a useful purpose. I would be a newspaper reporter in the city of my birth. I
would try to write stories that helped people; perhaps, every so often, an article might right a local wrong or even shift policy a few degrees in a more progressive direction. But generally my stories would be useful simply by offering an informative, entertaining read. Then they'd end up lining the floor of the budgie cage.

In my twenties, unexpected doors opened for me, and my ambition enlarged a bit. I started thinking that building a temple might not be out of the question. As a foreign correspondent bearing witness in the dark and troubled places of the Earth, I began to entertain a hope that my words might have an impact on the councils of the powerful. I hoped that at the least they would be a true and valuable reflection of the history unfolding before my eyes — that ‘first rough draft' that historians and analysts would turn to as they shaped a better understanding of our times.

Now, as a fiction writer, my ambition has slipped all reasonable bounds. Now, in middle age, I aspire to build that bridge to the moon. Like the mathematician, I am after nothing less than eternal truths: what is
this world, how can we more perfectly describe it? Who are we, who have we been?

Of course, it is one thing to have the ambition, another thing to have the means. But I know I have to do the best I can with the materials I have to hand; materials and tools that I started assembling from the time I became literate, and have continued to amass throughout my career in journalism and on into fiction. By now, the toolbox has grown quite heavy, and some of the implements I acquired first continue to be the most useful of my craft.

At Sydney University, I studied government and fine arts. A freshly minted BA (Hons), I came to the newsroom of the
Sydney Morning Herald
tremendously well informed about the use of tempera in Quattrocento frescos and classical political theory from Plato to Hobbes.

So they sent me to the sports department to cover the races.

Actually, that's putting it grandly. I didn't really get to ‘cover' the races, if that conveys writing delightful Runyonesque colour pieces about characters at the
track. My job was to amass and record the ‘details' — the plethora of facts on which the senior reporters relied for their reporting. I had to take note of how the odds fluctuated in the run-up to the start, note the condition of the track, record where each horse was at each turn and at the finish, list the weights and the handicaps and reams of other data that I do not now remember. I had to do it at speed, for each horse in each race at every race meeting.

Who would have thought the old town had so many race meetings in her? On Saturday night, having covered the trots the night before and the gallops during the day, I made my way to the greyhound track and did a different set of details for that last redoubt of the desperate punter, the dogs. Late at night, I had to return to the old
Herald
building on Broadway and check the first edition of the paper ‘on the stone' before the presses rolled for the early edition. This was the most nerve-racking moment of a very long week, for two reasons. One was a matter of union demarcation. As a member of the journalists' union, I was not to handle anything that pertained to the work of the
printers' union members. If I inadvertently touched a piece of hot type, the father of the chapel might call a stop work. The second reason was that if I failed to see a misprint, country bookmakers who paid out on the results in the
Herald
's first edition might lose money, and they would be … unhappy. In consequence, I would lose my job. At the very least.

As much as I disliked that work, I acquired some useful and durable tools from it. Above all, I learned a respect for factual details, which is essential to fiction. That might seem odd; why should a novelist need facts? Isn't fiction fact's antonym? In this, I am advised by Georges-Louis LeClerc, Comte de Buffon, a distinguished eighteenth-century naturalist. ‘Let us gather facts,' he said, ‘in order to have ideas.' For me, facts are first inspiration, the idea or set of ideas from which my imaginative edifice will grow.

Facts are also the indispensable form work into which imagination can be poured. Sometimes, the texture of the forms will still be there, in the finished text, part of the aesthetic of the work, meant to be seen. I will do it this way to give the work a sense
of authenticity, to ensnare my readers and convince them of the truth of the world I have imagined. But most of it will be taken down and carried away, leaving no trace, because the imagined thing will have fully occupied the factual spaces and become strong enough to stand alone. Always, the better the form work, the better and more complete the factual basis of my novel, the more daring the design of the fiction can be. But the fiction must dictate the design. The story must tell me what it is I need to know. So I do my research as I write, and when I come to a place where I need to know something, only then do I go looking for it.

I enjoy running down these facts. It's a bit like a quest, sometimes, or a vast puzzle. How can I find out if it is plausible to place Avicenna's medical texts in the library of a rural English minister in the mid seventeenth century? What word would a mid-seventeenth-century midwife have used for ‘foetus'? What did Thoreau do when he wasn't contemplating the wilderness or spending the night in jail to protest slavery? In the case of the Avicenna text, I tracked
down an academic who had just written a paper on the contents of rural rectory libraries. For the right mid-seventeenth-century word, I consulted the
Oxford Historical Thesaurus of the English Language
to find that the word my character would have used for foetus was ‘shapling'. And I was amused and astonished to find out that the great New England wilderness sage earned his bread in the family pencil-making business, and had used much of his time at Harvard to glean the secrets of variable-hardness pencils.

So the tools acquired by the cadet in charge of researching the racing details at the
Herald
all those years ago get a good workout these days, as do many other tools picked up here and there in my career as a journalist. I was a news reporter for sixteen years, seven of them a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. Perhaps the most useful equipment I acquired in that time is a lack of preciousness about the act of writing. A reporter must write. There must be a story. The
mot juste
unarriving? Tell that to your desk. Your editor will not wait for you to get your aura on straight.
File, or fail. As a result of that discipline, I no more believe in writer's block than in panel beater's block or hairdresser's block. Writing may aspire to art, but it begins as craft. Words are stones, and the book is a wall. You choose each stone with consideration; you place it with effort. Sometimes, you find just the right stone — the right shape and heft — for that difficult niche, and the effect is beautiful and satisfying. Your wall has gone up straight and true. Other days, you pick up one stone and then another, and none of them is right. You try it, it will not fit. Frustrated, you jam it in anyhow. The effect is unsightly, the balance precarious. You come back the next day and you cannot bear to look at it. You bring in the backhoe and knock it over.

The important thing is the effort. There can be no day without lifting stones. And after enough days, if you have sweated enough, scraped enough skin off your hands, been patient and diligent with your craft, unsparing in use of the backhoe, you will, in the end, have a wall. And it may even be a beautiful wall that will last for a hundred years.

I learned to write fiction in stages. From daily newspaper reporting, I wrote a reporter's book.
Nine Parts of Desire
was a journalist's attempt to stand back from what I had learned in six years living among the women of Islam, to take all the shards of experience written up in haste, the stories walked away from under deadline pressure, and go back, with time to reinvestigate and reconsider. I had a one-year leave of absence from my reporting job, and I wasted the first six months of that leave trying to figure out how to write something longer than a 3000-word news feature. For weeks, months, the stones lay scattered, resisting all attempts to gather them into a serviceable wall. By trial and error, I eventually came up with a narrative strong enough to bind together disparate experiences gathered over many years in several different countries.

My second book,
Foreign Correspondence
, was much more quirky and personal. It began as a memoir cum travel adventure about my childhood penfriends and my adult quest to find them. But because it was written in the shadow of my father's
death, it became a different book. As I wrote it, I learned that my real quest would be to make sense of my father, and of my relationship to that difficult, damaged, beloved man.

 

I can pinpoint the day I became a novelist; I can recall the moment with perfect clarity. But at the time, I did not know it had happened. It took me ten years to find out. It was a rare, beautiful English summer day and I was taking a brief break from reporting in the Middle East. As a respite from the hot and dusty places of my beat, my husband, Tony, and I were rambling in England's Peak District. We came across a finger post pointing to Eyam, and underneath it said ‘Plague Village'. Intrigued, we went there, and in the parish church was a small exhibit that gave an account of how bubonic plague had struck the town in 1665 and the villagers, alone among all other infected communities, had elected to quarantine themselves and prevent the spread of the disease into the surrounding population. The
account described how, at the height of the plague, the surviving villagers had closed the church and met for services in a field, where the worshippers could stand apart from each other. We went to that field, and in the play of the light through the leaves, I could see them: standing alone, worshipping together, somehow still willing to talk to a God who had asked so much of them and yet offered no respite. The pale faces lifted towards the weak English sunlight were haggard, weary, grief-racked. Yet hopeful, because they yet lived, and so many others had died.