Martha Gellhorn, the war reporter and writer who feared nothing on earth so much as boredom, and hated the 'kitchen of life', was enamoured of a different drudgery - life's cardboard boxes. She moved house obsessively from continent to continent, America to Europe, the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, back and forth: I daren't venture an exact number of proper residences, but it's more than a dozen, in almost as many countries. She was willing to spend weeks on the road, reporting on earth-shaking events or just drifting. But while she wanted to see and know and denounce everything, terrified at being left behind 'while the world hums at a great distance', the pull was dwarfed by the push: the need to get out of whatever it was. In 1931, when she had already dropped out of Bryn Mawr, resigned from the Albany Times Union, and seduced and momentarily abandoned her first married man, she wrote to another disconsolate suitor: 'This urge to run away from what I love is a sort of sadism I no longer pretend to understand.'

LRB 2 September 2004 | PDF Download