[In "Liana"] Miss Gellhorn, who is a sober and skillful rather than a powerful novelist, challenged herself to bring to life the most worn materials of cheap fiction: a beautiful native girl in a lush tropical setting, a brutal white man to whom she is tied, a beautiful and sensitive white man who is hired to teach her and who is promptly gripped by the conflict of love and honor. In 1944, the beautiful and sensitive white man is, of course, sensitive to fascism; specifically, this one is a Fr...

Martha Gellhorn is a gentleperson. For 42 pages in ["Travels with Myself and Another"] she writes about an Unwilling Companion on her trip into China's interior in 1941, always referring to him as U. C. and never mentioning that he was in fact her husband, Ernest Hemingway. This—at a time when to have been Hemingway's wife … seems excuse enough to publish every possible remembrance of the great man—entitles Miss Gellhorn to a medal, at least. But her excellen...

[Martha Gellhorn's Travels with Myself and Another] is written with a piquant wit and a fervent compassion for human folly and suffering. Yet, whether by accident or choice, Travels with Myself and Another is a depressing travelogue of disasters and exasperating hardships somewhat savagely narrated in an almost continuous account of frustrations, crises and even horrors. With the termination of each trip the reader will find it difficult to feel any glowing sensation of vicarious satisfaction; contra...

["Liana"] is for me reminiscent of … "Tropic Moon" by the French writer Simenon, not only because both novels are triangular love stories of the French tropics and share a sophisticated concern for the way colored people are treated in the colonies, but because they both manage to achieve an emotional, almost a literary, effect quite beyond their literary merits. Possibly this is the result of their non-intellectuality—or rather, of their perfect blending of intelle...

[Martha Gellhorn's His Own Man,] an elegant entertainment which is also a morality tale, is felicitously conceived and executed with wit, gaiety, toughness of mind, and perfect control. The story is a topical variation on the theme of the American abroad. Its hero—or, rather, antihero [Ben]—belongs to a new class which is the contemporary counterpart of the intellectuals of an earlier era who lived abroad on small private incomes. (p. 101) Ben is a thoroughly convincing, if unusual, ama...

Martha Gellhorn is curiously dated and sentimental [in The Weather in Africa]. The three stories are set in Kenya before and just after Independence…. In all three stories, Africa changes the lives of people; but somehow, the resolutions are achieved in spite of the characters' interactions which remain on the most basic level, and in their recounting seem to me to retain the crudest of racial assumptions. Love scenes are either stilted, if between whites … or torrid, if between black a...

One accepts [the characters in "His Own Man"] as artificial, polished and pleasantly unreal; their problems are not real problems, but those of a novelist experienced enough to know that all's well that ends badly…. "His Own Man" is sensibly restricted to less than 200 pages, and is written with such verve, such an effervescence of wit, that it is like taking a bubble bath, with a well-iced absinthe on the side. One emerges refreshed—and a little groggy.