Relearning Old Lessons: What a Forgotten Novel Can Teach Us About Immigration in 2020

Martha Gellhorn’s 1940 novel A Stricken Field was a book destined to be neglected. It has had at least three strikes against it: 1) The book tells a story people didn’t (and don’t) want to hear, exposing some of the darkest corners of our past. 2) The novel was a victim to changing literary tastes, particularly the turn against emotion or “sentiment” (nearly always associated with books written by women). 3) Its author has been unduly overshadowed by the imposing figure of Ernest Hemingway (she was his third wife). 

When I taught A Stricken Field this fall in my American literature course on “Forgotten Books,” we discussed how its neglect mirrors that of other important works. Many told stories that readers weren’t ready for or evoke strong emotions in their readers. And many of the female authors were unfairly compared to more famous male authors. Nonetheless, of all the books we read, we felt that Gellhorn’s novel most deserves, and needs, to be remembered. It is a gut-punch of a novel that powerfully illustrates how Western societies fail in their duty to protect the most vulnerable among us: stateless and homeless refugees. 

When it was first published in 1940, A Stricken Field—set during the 1938 refugee crisis in Czechoslovakia after the Munich Pact handed the country over to Nazi Germany—was a powerful warning about the scale of the war’s humanitarian crisis, which countries like Britain, France, and the U.S. had proven they were unwilling to ameliorate. Even before the Munich Pact in September 1938, at the Evian Conference in July, all but one of the 32 countries present refused to raise their insufficient refugee quotas, helping to set the stage for the Holocaust. Today, Gellhorn’s novel is still a vital read given the refugee crises in Europe and along the southern U.S. border; even as the number of refugees worldwide is at its highest point since World War II, the U.S., under our current administration, has reduced its refugee ceiling to 18,000, down from 85,000 in 2016.

Gellhorn wrote the novel in her new home with Ernest Hemingway in Cuba in 1939. While she wrote, he was typing away in another part of the house on For Whom the Bell Tolls. The two had met in Spain and although Gellhorn was forever changed by what she witnessed during the civil war there, she said she felt “too raw” to write about it. (Of course, not wanting to compete too directly to Hemingway may also have had something to do with it.) And although A Stricken Field is dedicated to Hemingway, and the terse prose is at times reminiscent of his famous style, that is all that needs to be said about his influence on the book, for the powerful effect it has on its readers is all Gellhorn.

Reading the novel now, we may feel as helpless as Mary did then. In the end, all she can do is tell the refugees’ stories, which she literally smuggles out of Prague.

The book’s story of journalist Mary Douglas in Czechoslovakia mirrors Gellhorn’s own. She traveled there twice in 1938 to report on the situation, producing two articles for Collier’s. Yet she felt they had not fully captured the human crisis she had witnessed. As Gellhorn knew well, it’s much easier for people to close their doors (and their hearts) when displaced persons remain abstract numbers or, worse, stereotyped undesirables. Only fiction had the power to make real the plights of approximately 10,000 political and Jewish refugees who had fled Nazi Germany and Austria and were now being sent back to suffer the fates they could no longer escape. 

As Gellhorn puts it, “Statistics were only black marks on a paper for [Mary], and if she learned that an unpronounceable Czech manufacturing town had become German it meant nothing, until she thought of the people who worked in the factories and where they would go now: you would see them on the roads, with bulging sacks over their shoulders, walking from place to place, looking for jobs that had disappeared forever behind an unreasonable line of barbed wire: the expanding Nazi frontier.” Gellhorn shows us, up close, the faces of those wanderers—husbands who’ve had to leave their wives behind, lovers who must part, children who’ve been separated from their mothers. In these faces she also shows us the despair that overwhelms them and the panic that too often leads to suicide.

We see these faces through Mary’s eyes until the novel takes an unusual—and powerful—turn, shifting its point of view to one particular refugee whom Mary has come to know. Mary follows Rita on a nightmarish tour of factories housing the refugees, visits her home and meets her lover, Peter, and then returns to the comfort of her hotel as we stay behind and become immersed in Rita’s world. This shift makes A Stricken Field a rather experimental book, somewhat reminiscent of the dual perspectives of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. 

Gellhorn clearly thought it would be inadequate to tell the story only from an outsider’s perspective (as Hemingway does in For Whom the Bell Tolls). Mary is our entree into this world, but the real story is what it’s like to be one of those people known to the rest of the world only as a number. This double perspective allows the reader to access the distress of the hunted as well the frustration of the American reporter who knows there is little she can do to change Rita’s or the others’ fates. Rita wants her to help “shape public opinion” by reporting on the horrors she’s seen, but Mary thinks, “what good did it do? It was immensely easy to make people hate but it was almost impossible to make them help.”

Gellhorn tugs at our heart-strings, but never superfluously. We only see what Mary sees or feel what Rita feels and recognize the yearning for peace and a home as our own deepest need. In one scene, Mary sees refugees “all gathered around in a corner, kneeling and squatting on the mattresses, bowed together” over a map. They look like they could be planning a holiday, but really they are looking for a country—any country—that might take them in. When Mary visits Rita and Peter’s makeshift “home,” we see a tiny apartment with scant furnishings but filled with their love for each other. This glimpse of their life, before it is taken away from them, gives Mary hope enough to say, “We will win in the end,” because “no one has yet discovered how to corrupt good hearts, or turn love into a silly slogan.” She still has faith that love will ultimately conquer hate. Call that sentiment if you will, and Mary may be a bit of a romantic, but she also expresses a will to love, beyond the mere will to survive, which certainly contributed then to fascism’s demise. 

Some of the novel’s initial reviews were positive—Gellhorn’s friend Eleanor Roosevelt called it “a masterpiece”—but others, like Time magazine’s “Glamor Girl,” had more to say about Gellhorn’s relationship with Hemingway than her novel. A Stricken Field soon faded from view as Americans refused to abandon their isolationist stance or accept any responsibility for the refugee crisis in Europe. 

Gellhorn herself felt numb after writing the book, as if she had “dropped my work, the hard months of my life, into a well, and there they were, muffled and lost.”

In the wake of Gellhorn’s belated literary recognition in the late 1970s with the success of Travels with Myself and Another, Virago in the UK republished A Stricken Field in 1985. It too went out of print until the 2011 publication of a new edition from the University of Chicago Press. A critic for the Chicago Tribune greeted the reissue as a “second crack for Gellhorn,” but still the author and war journalist remains best known for her brief marriage to Hemingway. Recent roundups of refugee literature also fail to mention A Stricken Field, despite a 2017 New York Times article calling it “essential reading for today.” 

Reading the novel now, we may feel as helpless as Mary did then. In the end, all she can do is tell the refugees’ stories, which she literally smuggles out of Prague. But that is a great deal. She thinks of those who risked their lives to get their stories to her: “They are lost and buried, and they will not give up; each one has faith enough still to believe in the power of two or three typewritten pages that tell the truth.” While Mary feels like her small act is insignificant, it remains true today that authoritarian regimes tremble at the power of the written word. 

Gellhorn herself felt numb after writing the book, as if she had “dropped my work, the hard months of my life, into a well, and there they were, muffled and lost.” It was only 45 years later, as she wrote in her afterword to the Virago edition, that she read the book for the first time since it was published. She was glad that she wrote it, but still noted, “Novels don’t decide the course of history or change it, but they can show what history is like for people who have no choice except to live through it or die from it. I remembered for them.”