Another visitor was Leonard Bernstein, who turned up unannounced one day in Cuernavaca, proposing to move in and stay with her, and bringing with him a grand piano.....Martha moved him smartly into a house up the road, with a large pool, in easy walking distance. He wanted to play Scrabble, which she resisted, hating all games except for gin rummy, but one night, after he had been told by local musicians he met that marijuana made the music flow faster, they got ahold of four joints and prepared to experiment.
Since they were both terrified of what might happen, they decided to boost their courage by having a few martinis first, generously poured into water tumblers. After a while, beginning to feel ill, Martha crawled toward the spare bedroom. As she reached the bed, she heard Bernstein fall heavily in the sitting room and lie still. She was sick all night; when she fell asleep, her nightmares were appalling. Next morning, she crept home, leaving Bernstein still unconscious on the sitting room floor.
Too bad about the martinis.
Nicole Kidman, who played Gellhorn in the film, recently appeared in a biopic of Tokin' Woman Gertrude Bell but it hasn't been released, except in Germany. As Gellhorn she has some strong scenes, but in others she's a basket case who needed Hem to help her out. The script was co-written by a woman and a man, I think I know which scenes were written by whom.
Bernstein is depicted snorting coke and drinking heavily in the excellent 2023 film Maestro, with Bradley Cooper playing the title role. Bernstein is said to have described Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique as “the first psychedelic symphony in history, the first ever musical description of a trip.”
Gellhorn Hits the Hippie Trail
Much of the following biographical material is straight from Wikipedia or Britannica.com (I hope to read more source material about this amazing woman):
Martha Gellhorn reported on virtually every major world conflict that took place during her 60-year career. The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism is named after her, and the 2011 documentary film No Job for a Woman: The Women Who Fought to Report WWII features her and how she changed war reporting. Peripatetic by nature, Gellhorn reckoned that in a 40-year span of her life, she created homes in 19 locales.
Gellhorn famously said, "People often say, with pride, 'I'm not interested in politics.' They might as well say, 'I'm not interested in my standard of living, my health, my job, my rights, my freedoms, my future or any future.' ... If we mean to keep any control over our world and lives, we must be interested in politics."
She started young. At age 7, Gellhorn participated in "The Golden Lane," a rally for women's suffrage at the Democratic Party's 1916 national convention in St. Louis, standing in front the line to represent future voters. In 1926, she graduated from John Burroughs School in St. Louis, and enrolled in Bryn Mawr College. The following year, she left without having graduated to pursue a career as a journalist. Her first published articles appeared in The New Republic.
In 1930, determined to become a foreign correspondent, she went to France for two years, where she worked at the United Press bureau in Paris, but was fired after she reported sexual harassment by a man connected with the agency. She spent years traveling Europe, writing for newspapers in Paris and St. Louis and covering fashion for Vogue. She became active in the pacifist movement, and wrote about her experiences in her 1934 book What Mad Pursuit.
Writing about Gellhorn's book based on her FERA work, The Trouble I've Seen (1936), Eleanor wrote, “Martha Gellhorn has an understanding of many people and many situations and she can make them live for us. Let us be thankful she can, for we badly need her interpretation to help understand each other.” Gellhorn wrote the introduction to a collection of The First Lady's "My Day" columns.
In 1937 she accepted her first war assignment, covering the Spanish Civil War for Collier’s Weekly, and it was during this time that she began an affair with Hemingway. He dedicated For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) to her, and they married in 1940 (divorced 1946).
In 1944, Gellhorn impersonated a stretcher bearer to witness the D-Day landings during World War II. In the 1960s and 70s, she worked for the Atlantic Monthly covering the Vietnam War and the Arab-Israel conflicts. She passed her 70th birthday in 1979 but continued working in the following decade, covering the civil wars in Central America. As she approached 80, Gellhorn began to slow down physically, although she still managed to cover the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989.
Margaret Mitchell, touched by the "far away, faintly sad sound I wanted" of Dowson's line, chose it as the title of her epic Civil War novel. In the 1962 movie Days of Wine and Roses, Jack Lemmon leads Lee Remick into alcoholism (by giving her a crème de cocao-containing Brandy Alexander after she says she likes chocolate).
Symons, a Baudelaire scholar who is said to have had a psychotic breakdown in 1909, was an influence on Yeats and a member, along with Dowson and Yeats, of the bohemian Rhymers' Club, whose members reportedly used hashish. In 1918 he wrote a piece for Vanity Fair titled, "The Gateway to an Artificial Paradise: The Effects of Hashish and Opium Compared," in which he says hashish "has the divinity of a sorceress, the charm of a dangerous and insidious mistress."
The book Arthur Symons by John M. Munro says, “The years between the publication of Days and Nights (1889) and London Nights (1895) may properly be referred to as Symons’ Decadent period…..he experimented, cautiously, with hashish…. The footnote reads: “On one occasion, John Addington Symonds, Ernest Dowson, and some of [Arthur] Symons’ lady friends from the ballet all tried hashish during an afternoon tea given by Symons in his rooms at Fountain Court." Symons described the event:
No word about the effect on the ballerinas, except perhaps for their laughter.
Despite Symons saying hashish (or the more beautifully spelled haschisch) had been Dowson's favorite form of intoxication in college, Kilmer downplays the effect it might have had on Dowson's work, calling it "incongruous and unconvincing....He was an accomplished artist in words, a delicate, sensitive and graceful genius, but he was no more fitted to be a pagan than to be a policeman."
The moralistic Roman Catholic poet who wrote, "I think that I shall never see /A poem as lovely as a tree," Kilmer writes in his essay on Dowson, "There are, and there have always been since sin first came into the world, genuine decadents. That is, there have been writers who have devoted all their energies and talents to the cause of evil, who have consistently and sincerely opposed Christian morality, and zealously endeavored to make the worst appear the better cause. But every poet who lays a lyric wreath at a heathen shrine, who sings the delights of immorality, or hashish, or suicide, or mayhem, is not a decadent : often he is merely weak-minded. The true decadent, to paraphrase a famous saying, wears his vices lightly, like a flower. He really succeeds in making vice seem picturesque and amusing and even attractive."
Gellhorn's books include a collection of articles on war, The Face of War (1959); The Lowest Trees Have Tops (1967), a novel about McCarthyism; and a collection of her peacetime journalism, The View from the Ground (1988).
Hemingway and Gellhorn is based in part on Gellhorn's book Travels with Myself and Another (1978) an account of her travels (including one trip with Hemingway). In the book, writing from Hong Kong, she describes coolies who "smoked opium at ten cents for three tiny pills, because opium was cheaper than food, took away the appetite, and rested the strained and tired muscles."
Writing from Israel in 1971, Gellhorn interviews a group of hash-smoking hippies as though she were Margaret Mead in Samoa. Hash was a "commodity traded by the Bedouins" that "soothed the gnawing ennui and induced giggling or dreaminess. They talked of little else. Like their bourgeois elders, who swap names of restaurants, they told each other where the hash was good."
She wrote that in such company, "Someone who smokes nicotine [her] not hash was like a teetotaler in a saloon." Apparently describing her cross-fade experience with Bernstein, she writes, "I explained that I had tried pot once, before they were born or anyway lapping up baby food, and once was enough. For twelve hours I lay like a stone statue on a tomb, while a few flies circled around, as large and terrifying as bombers." Declaring herself "allergic to pot," she asserted that, "Mount Carmel wine did for me what joints did for them."
Ernest Dowson and The Days of Weed and Roses
Going further back, a Joyce Kilmer essay, “Absinthe At the Cheshire Cheese,” published in his 1921 book The Circus: And Other Essays and Fugitive Pieces, states, "When Dowson took hashish during his student days, Mr. Arthur Symons tells us, it was before a large and festive company of friends.” He is speaking of poet Ernest Dowson, whose famous turns of phrase include “gone with the wind” and “the days of wine and roses.”Margaret Mitchell, touched by the "far away, faintly sad sound I wanted" of Dowson's line, chose it as the title of her epic Civil War novel. In the 1962 movie Days of Wine and Roses, Jack Lemmon leads Lee Remick into alcoholism (by giving her a crème de cocao-containing Brandy Alexander after she says she likes chocolate).
Symons, a Baudelaire scholar who is said to have had a psychotic breakdown in 1909, was an influence on Yeats and a member, along with Dowson and Yeats, of the bohemian Rhymers' Club, whose members reportedly used hashish. In 1918 he wrote a piece for Vanity Fair titled, "The Gateway to an Artificial Paradise: The Effects of Hashish and Opium Compared," in which he says hashish "has the divinity of a sorceress, the charm of a dangerous and insidious mistress."
The book Arthur Symons by John M. Munro says, “The years between the publication of Days and Nights (1889) and London Nights (1895) may properly be referred to as Symons’ Decadent period…..he experimented, cautiously, with hashish…. The footnote reads: “On one occasion, John Addington Symonds, Ernest Dowson, and some of [Arthur] Symons’ lady friends from the ballet all tried hashish during an afternoon tea given by Symons in his rooms at Fountain Court." Symons described the event:
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| "Dancers" by Edgar Degas, c. 1878 |
Despite Symons saying hashish (or the more beautifully spelled haschisch) had been Dowson's favorite form of intoxication in college, Kilmer downplays the effect it might have had on Dowson's work, calling it "incongruous and unconvincing....He was an accomplished artist in words, a delicate, sensitive and graceful genius, but he was no more fitted to be a pagan than to be a policeman."
The moralistic Roman Catholic poet who wrote, "I think that I shall never see /A poem as lovely as a tree," Kilmer writes in his essay on Dowson, "There are, and there have always been since sin first came into the world, genuine decadents. That is, there have been writers who have devoted all their energies and talents to the cause of evil, who have consistently and sincerely opposed Christian morality, and zealously endeavored to make the worst appear the better cause. But every poet who lays a lyric wreath at a heathen shrine, who sings the delights of immorality, or hashish, or suicide, or mayhem, is not a decadent : often he is merely weak-minded. The true decadent, to paraphrase a famous saying, wears his vices lightly, like a flower. He really succeeds in making vice seem picturesque and amusing and even attractive."
