A Hellion Who Outdid Hemingway : NOTHING EVER HAPPENS TO THE BRAVE The Story of Martha Gellhorn <i> By Carl Rollyson (St. Martin’s Press: $24.95; 398 pp.) </i>

With a “body like Circe,” two novels to her credit and a rebellious streak that had already led her to drop out of Bryn Mawr, move to Paris and take up with a man who was both stepson and lover of French author Colette, 28-year-old Martha Gellhorn walked into Sloppy Joe’s bar in Key West, Fla., one day in 1936. There she saw a bulky, barefooted figure clad in a “grubby T-shirt” and “odoriferous Basque shorts.” This “large, dirty” gent was, of course, Ernest Hemingway, and while it’s unclear whether Gellhorn’s appearance in the writer’s lair was a product of happenstance or calculation, there’s no doubt that her inevitable romance with, marriage to and acrimonious split from Papa hold a conspicuous place in the annals of American literary gossip.

If Gellhorn had done no more than wed Hemingway, she would merit nothing beyond the requisite mentions in those volumes that lionize and psychoanalyze her famous husband. Most assuredly, she would not deserve an exhaustive, albeit unauthorized, biography. Yet in “Nothing Ever Happens to the Brave” (the title comes from a passage in “A Farewell to Arms”), Carl Rollyson offers Gellhorn up as a major literary figure in her own right.

Alluring, intrepid, observant, passionate and independent, Gellhorn--who at 82 continues to live and write from her home in Wales--has in fact accomplished so much as a journalist, fiction writer and social activist that her involvement with Hemingway could be viewed as just another interlude in an endlessly intriguing life. But while Rollyson gives the many facets of Gellhorn’s varied existence a fair shake, he rightly does not lose sight of the fact that the woman’s relationship with Papa is the central drama here, for it was in this thrilling yet ugly folie a deux that his elusive subject came closest to revealing her true self.

The product of a progressive, turn-of-the-century upbringing in St. Louis, Mo. (her doctor father was Jewish, her suffragette mother a Christian), Gellhorn grew up believing that it was her duty to give something back to the world. Yet idealist though she was, she also was a little rascal--Rollyson paints her as a girlish Huck Finn--and once she got to college, she had scant patience for either the pieties or the social niceties of a Seven Sisters school. She wrote poetry, smoked cigarettes and fell under the spell of the book that limned the lost generation: “The Sun Also Rises.” In short, dropping out, going into journalism--first as a reporter for a Hearst paper in Albany, N.Y.--then rushing off to Europe all seemed perfectly in character.

Not long after settling in Paris, Gellhorn grew infatuated with Bertrand de Jouvenal, a writer whose obsession with European politics was eclipsed only by the sophisticated sexual appetites awakened by his stepmother, novelist Colette, who had seduced him at 17. To an adventurous American expatriate, this impossibly debauched yet intellectual swain was irresistible, and soon the two were entangled in a torrid affair. In 1933, they married and toured the continent, pursuing Jouvenal’s great cause: a rapprochement between increasingly hostile France and Germany. The next year, Gellhorn published “What Mad Pursuit,” an autobiographical first novel about a girl who abandons a bourgeois life for one of meaning.

Entranced though she was by her Parisian conquest, Gellhorn wasn’t yet ready to forsake her native land. In 1934, her marriage to Jouvenal souring, she returned home, took a job as an investigator for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) and began crisscrossing America, monitoring lives ruined by the Depression.

Thrust into the grim realities of New England tenements, North Carolina mill towns and Midwestern Hoovervilles, Gellhorn eventually grew enraged by the government’s inability to improve the lot of its huddled masses, and in the fall of 1935, she incited a group of down-and-out Idaho laborers to commit acts of violence in pursuit of economic justice. Harry Hopkins, FERA’s open-minded chief, was left with no choice but to fire his overzealous charge, a move that produced an improbable turn of events that could have occurred only during the New Deal: Gellhorn was invited to come and live at the White House.

Due to their mutual participation in such causes as the League of Women Voters, Gellhorn’s mother and Eleanor Roosevelt had become friends, and the First Lady regarded Martha as something of a protegee. Thus it was that this budding hellion found herself ensconced in Lincoln’s bedroom, writing “The Trouble I’ve Seen,” a fictionalized account of three Depression-era families. Published in 1936, the book not only received wildly positive notices but it also made its author famous. Soon Gellhorn’s pretty face adorned the cover of The Saturday Review of Literature, and shortly thereafter, she appeared in Key West at the side of the bearish great man of letters himself.

Rollyson is at his best when describing the flowering of Gellhorn’s affair with Hemingway. At first, the two were quite discreet (each, after all, was still married, Papa to second wife Pauline), but by the time they arrived in Madrid to cover the Spanish Civil War--Hemingway writing for the North American Newspaper Alliance, Gellhorn for Collier’s--they were living in the same hotel room, sharing danger and deadlines.

Though her paramour was at first inclined to regard his “Mooky” as simply a sexual object (“My beautiful girlfriend is coming. She has legs that begin at her shoulders,” he boasted to a friend), Gellhorn quickly won Hemingway’s admiration. She was a game woman, brave under fire. Moreover, she proved herself to be a terrific correspondent, turning out pieces that Rollyson asserts are superior to those produced by a Papa already too enamored of his own legend to do much legwork.

Though she surely didn’t realize it at the time, Gellhorn had found not only love but her metier. In fact, for the next half century she invariably would be present whenever opposing armies met, covering World War II, conflicts in the Middle East, the Vietnam War, even El Salvador, creating the body of work (collected in “The Face of War”) that is her crowning achievement.

There were, however, problems with Hemingway. Though the two married in 1940 and began leading an outwardly glamorous existence--a villa in Cuba, vacations in Sun Valley--their best years were behind them. The obvious culprit was Papa. For one thing, he was often drunk. For another, he already seemed to be showing signs of the dementia that would destroy him.

But as Rollyson details, Gellhorn was not equipped for domesticity either. Admirably, she refused to become a housewife if it meant relinquishing her career. Yet much of her resistance to homemaking was prompted by an icy unwillingness to hang around for the hard parts attendant to real life. (For this same reason, she would later miss her mother’s funeral and, according to Rollyson, shun an adopted child.) Though Gellhorn proved courageous during combat, human beings scared her. Not surprisingly, it did not take very long for her to return to war-torn Europe, fleeing the infinitely more threatening conflicts in her own back yard.

It is fitting that Gellhorn’s alliance with Papa, forged on the battlefields of Spain, would shatter on the battlefields of Normandy. During World War II’s early months, she had urged her husband to join her in Europe, yet he had been content to continue his Carribean idyll. Meantime, Gellhorn, once again writing for Colliers, had become a star.

Apparently unable to stand by and watch his wife eclipse him, the jealous Hemingway eventually acquiesced to her pleas, but in doing so he committed the unforgivable sin. Trading on his superior reputation, he got in touch with Colliers’ editors, and according to Rollyson, asked to be made the publication’s chief war correspondent. Papa’s wish was granted, and on D-Day, he was on a landing craft taking part in the invasion, while Gellhorn was consigned to a hospital ship.

As it turned out, Gellhorn still got the better story, as Hemingway never made it ashore while she hit the beach with a group of nurses and instantly was taking notes as a Jewish doctor tended wounded German officers.

Be that as it may, what was left of Gellhorn’s affection for Papa was now spoiled, and while she would continue to run into him during the war’s last campaigns, she grew to loathe him. As for Hemingway, he wrote her off with a disparagingly pithy remark: “She had more ambition than Napoleon and about the talent of the average high school valedictorian.”

The odd thing about Gellhorn’s divorce from Hemingway--a topic that Rollyson doesn’t sufficiently address--is how little she seemed to suffer. In fact, like some Graham Greene character, she appears to have simply drifted on to the next phase of her life.

The early 1950s found her in Mexico writing bittersweet short stories that suggest some reflection, but by the latter part of that decade, she was in London, chronicling English manners and married to a retired Time editor. The 1960s found her in Africa celebrating nature, while she spent the early 1970s in New York, divorced yet again and toiling in George McGovern’s presidential campaign.

Now an octogenarian, she is last seen back in Europe, flirting with literary historians and fending off her pesky biographer.

Unfortunately, the level of this book’s writing does not live up to the beauty of its heroine. Rollyson, a Baruch College art professor, churns out a prose that is one part academic cannon fodder and two parts People magazine schmaltz. Consequently, his words are both turgid and glib.

Still, in the final analysis “Nothing Ever Happens to the Brave” is thorough and sympathetic, a study that presents Gellhorn’s remarkable journalism and fiction as ample evidence that, her brave shell notwithstanding, something quite profound happened to her along the way.