"Then somebody suggested I should write about the war, and I said I didn't know anything about the war. I did not understand anything about it. I didn't see how I could write it"
About this Quote
There is a kind of daring in Gellhorn admitting ignorance at the exact moment history demands commentary. War reporting is usually sold as the triumph of proximity: get close enough to the front and truth will volunteer itself. Gellhorn punctures that fantasy. She frames war not as a subject you simply "know" by witnessing explosions, but as a moral and political machine whose logic resists easy narration. The repetition of "didn't" and "anything" reads like a refusal to perform expertise on command, an early inoculation against the swaggering correspondent persona.
The subtext is also strategic. For a woman pushing into a field that romanticized male bravado, claiming she "did not understand" can sound like humility, but it works as a critique: if the war is legible, why does it keep happening, and why do the people directing it speak in abstractions? Her skepticism targets the expectation that writers turn catastrophe into clean arcs - heroes, villains, lessons - when the lived reality is confusion, compromise, boredom, terror, paperwork. "I didn't see how I could write it" is less writer's block than ethical friction: how do you translate mass suffering without making it consumable?
Context matters: Gellhorn became one of the 20th century's defining war correspondents precisely because she kept faith with this discomfort. The line captures the engine of her work - not omniscience, but the insistence that if war can't be easily understood, it must be described anyway, from the human wreckage outward, not from the grand strategy down.
The subtext is also strategic. For a woman pushing into a field that romanticized male bravado, claiming she "did not understand" can sound like humility, but it works as a critique: if the war is legible, why does it keep happening, and why do the people directing it speak in abstractions? Her skepticism targets the expectation that writers turn catastrophe into clean arcs - heroes, villains, lessons - when the lived reality is confusion, compromise, boredom, terror, paperwork. "I didn't see how I could write it" is less writer's block than ethical friction: how do you translate mass suffering without making it consumable?
Context matters: Gellhorn became one of the 20th century's defining war correspondents precisely because she kept faith with this discomfort. The line captures the engine of her work - not omniscience, but the insistence that if war can't be easily understood, it must be described anyway, from the human wreckage outward, not from the grand strategy down.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
|---|
More Quotes by Martha
Add to List
