Hemingway and Gellhorn: a pairing of flint and steel He was a big man, about 14½st, with muscles that bulged and the weatherbeaten looks of a sportsman. His brown hair was so dark that in some lights it looked black and his brown eyes were watchful. Restless, energetic, somewhat clumsy, he enjoyed the company of men, with whom he was fiercely competitive. He liked his women to be loyal, selfless, independent, clever but not too clever. His temper could be sharp and mean. He was, James Joyce once said, a big powerful peasant, "as strong as a buffalo." Already author of A Passage to Arms, he was regarded by many as the finest writer of his age. 'A big, powerful peasant': Ernest Hemingway By the time Gellhorn left Key West, 10 days later, she and Hemingway had talked a great deal about writing. One can only imagine what Pauline must have felt. Hemingway was preparing to go to Spain to cover the civil war for the North American Newspaper Alliance, having raised money to buy ambulances for the Republican side. Fretting over a novel she was having trouble with, Gellhorn decided to join him, and accepted a commission from Collier's magazine to write articles about the war. "Me, I am going to Spain with the boys," she wrote to a friend as she left to board her ship to Europe. I don't know who the boys are, but I am going with them. In January 1937, after hitchhiking her way across Spain to Madrid, besieged and in its sixth month of war, Gellhorn caught up with Hemingway in the Hotel Florida, gathering place for the dozens of foreign journalists, come to fight for the Republic. Two weeks later, having drunk a great deal of whisky and wine together, and visited the front in Hemingway's car, they went to bed. Gellhorn would later say that, at that moment, she was not in love with him, nor did she find him attractive, but that she admired him, was grateful for his encouragement, and that as "just about the only blonde in the country," it was good to belong to someone. They called each other by nicknames. Hemingway was "Scrooby," for screwball; Gellhorn was "daughter" or Mooky. Urged by Hemingway to start writing, she produced her first piece for Collier's, about the death of a woman running across a square with her small son during a bombardment. Collier's took it, wanted more: as a reporter she had found her feet. Neither she nor Hemingway, unswerving supporters of the Republicans, had any sympathy with the idea of impartial reporting; where there was clearly only one right side "all that objectivity s---," as she famously put it, was absurd. ellhorn went to Spain four times with Hemingway. "I believe he loves me," she wrote to her mother, "and he believes he loves me, but I do not believe much in the way one's personal destiny works out." It was when the Republicans fell, and she saw him cry as he watched the International Brigades march through the streets of Barcelona in a farewell parade, that Gellhorn fell in love with Hemingway. Though he was still trying to extricate himself from his marriage to Pauline, she joined him in Cuba, where he was about to start work on A Farewell to Arms, and they moved into the Finca Vigia, a dilapidated one-storey Spanish Colonial house on a hill overlooking Havana. The swimming pool was cracked and the house smelled of drains, but there were hummingbirds and orchids, and a trellis bowed down with bougainvillea and wild vines. She envied Hemingway his utter concentration on writing, having trouble with her own. They played tennis, went snorkelling, and got "blotto drunk." The Finca Vigia, she told a friend, was a "beautiful desert island, with mod cons." But she was restless, thinking of Europe and the coming war. Leaving Hemingway to work on his novel, she agreed to write a piece for Collier's about Finland, which Russia was threatening to invade. They wrote to each other nearly every day and their nicknames had never been more fanciful: Rabby, Bongie, the Pig, Bug. Hemingway told her that he was "stinko lonely." On her return, she drafted a comic, poignant note. I, the undersigned, Mrs Martha Warp Fathouse Pig D. Bongie, Hemingstein, hereby guaranty... that I will not leave my present and future husband not for nothing, no matter what or anything... only he has to be a good boy and not love nobody but me. But he will not love nobody but me. This is an unnecessary guaranty. It was perhaps wrong to be so happy in this present world, she told Charles Colebaugh, editor of Collier's, "but my God how I love this place and how happy I am." Hemingway had been pressing Pauline for a divorce. It came through in November 1940 and he and Gellhorn decided to get married. A reporter covering the wedding, which took place in Wyoming, in the dining room of the Union Pacific Railroad at Cheyenne, called it a "pairing of flint and steel." Martha was 32, Hemingway 40. After the brief ceremony they ate moose for dinner. "Every time I see Marty," he wrote to her mother, "or hear her voice, or hear her thunder feet approaching I am so truly happy and I know how lucky we are to be happy that way." One of the funniest pieces Martha ever wrote, Mr Ma's Tigers, about the "unsurpassed and unsurpassable horror trip" they made to cover the Chinese defences against the Japanese, which Hemingway ruefully described as their honeymoon and in which he appears as UC, unwilling companion, is filled with affection and humour about their relationship. They were driving through Arizona, on their way back to Cuba, when they heard that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. Would things have turned out differently had Gellhorn been able to settle? Hemingway wanted nothing more than to stay in the Finca Vigia, writing, drinking with his cronies and arming his boat, the Pilar, with bazookas and grenades, ostensibly to hunt down Nazi submarines. But Gellhorn yearned always to be where the action was. She left for a tour of the Caribbean, for Collier's, then got herself to London and wrote about Bomber Command and the Polish forces, waiting for the invasion. While apart, she and Hemingway exchanged tender, nostalgic letters. Together, though, they were now often at war. In so much as ends have beginnings, theirs came in the summer of 1943. Hemingway was drinking heavily and she found his lack of cleanliness, his boundless egotism and his crassness increasingly offensive; he accused her of being a prude and a prima donna. There was little laughter and few jokes. One night, when he was drunk, she took over the wheel of his much loved Lincoln Continental. He slapped her; she drove it slowly and deliberately into a tree. They fought over money, over work, over his drunken cronies. He bullied, mocked and snarled at her. Then the day came when he told her that he had accepted a commission to cover the Allied invasion for Collier's - effectively demoting her, since no paper could have more than one reporter at the front. There was little more to be said. Hemingway left for London on a priority flight; Gellhorn crossed the Atlantic on a Norwegian freighter carrying dynamite. In the event, she wrote better and more interesting stories than he did about the liberation of Europe, travelling on her own, entering Belsen not long after the Allied forces. But the marriage was over. When she finally caught up with Hemingway in London, he was staying at the Dorchester, holding court in his room, having taken up with a journalist called Mary Welsh. The end was nasty; terrible things were said. To her mother, Gellhorn wrote furiously: "I simply never want to hear his name mentioned again; the past is dead and has become ugly; I shall try to forget it all entirely, and blot it out as with amnesia... A man must be a very great genius to make up for being such a loathsome human being." ad she ever really loved Hemingway? Probably not as much as he had loved her. It was Gellhorn, not him, who kept going away. But you have only to look at the photographs taken by Robert Capa at their wedding, or read their letters, or Mr Ma's Tigers, to know that, for long stretches of the eight years they were together, they made each other laugh, they talked, they were excited by each other, and they wanted it to work. It took Gellhorn a long time to stop feeling guilty about her part in the break-up. She was now 36, wondering if she should have had a child, and alone. "If God has any benevolence for me he will spare me further errors of the heart," she wrote to a friend . I wish only to be unmarried; it seems neater. Though she was not to be so spared, and not much neatness lay in the 55 years that lay ahead, she had her work. And about this, about the necessity to look, to learn, to describe the hardships and horrors faced by ordinary people both in war and in peace, as sparingly and clearly as she could, she had no doubts at all. Caroline Moorehead is the author of Gellhorn: A Twentieth - Century Life. Hemingway & Gellhorn will be shown on Sky Atlantic HD and Sky Atlantic +1 on December 22