Martha Gellhorn – She Scorped

Martha Gellhorn, the brilliant war correspondent, identified with her Scorpio Sun sign and mentioned it frequently – in conversation, letters and her diaries. Take this, for example, from the excellent Caroline Moorehead biography – Gellhorn: A 20th Century Life

“The capriciousness of luck she tended to disregard, particularly at her tougher moments, allowing only – and, improbably, an odd concession in someone so rational – an intervention by the stars. Scorpios, she wrote, referring to herself, were with geniuses or miserable or both, well-known to be very spiky characters…for whom life is not lined with smiling faces.’

Lucky people, she maintained, had lucky natures; either way good behaviour was immutable, as was strength of character and purpose. Only the weak ‘sat on their arses.’ The people she liked ‘got out and there and fought.'”

Leaving aside the tedium of astrological awareness dismissed as ‘irrational,’ Gellhorn was correct about her scorpionic temperament but it’s sad she didn’t also reference it in relation to her courage and cultural impact. She was a transformer in that her electrifying reportage altered the consciousness of readers and innovated journalism itself.

The only woman to land at Normandy on D-Day in 1944 and one of the first journalists to report on the concentration camps after they were liberated, she was not only a Scorpio but a woman of Pluto.

Her Scorpio Sun trined Neptune, reflecting her vision and glamor yet Gellhorn’s Mercury in Libra  – arguably the key point for a writer – was exactly trine Pluto and her North Node in Gemini, the sign of the scribe.

So she was drawn to plutonic topics – power, evolutionary developments, sex, danger, secrets, revolution and the psyche. It’s s pity that she is so often mentioned in connection with one of her relationships – her marriage to Ernest Hemmingway – especially as it was evidently incredibly difficult for her. You can read an epic take on this here.

Defending her against a particularly skeevy biography, one of her friends said

“Martha was passionate and political, glamorous and exciting. She loved to drink and gossip and smoke and flirt. She was hugely entertaining and motivated by a deep-hearted, deep-seated concern for justice; the friend of the dispossessed, the oppressed, the neglected. And she was a good writer.”

She shunned cloying relationships and took up with lovers more in the way that male writers of her generation picked up and discarded their women. She’d go the second things went wrong and was devoted to her beauty and grooming. One of her partners, said that she had only two speeds: “running away or asleep.

“Nothing is better for self-esteem than survival,” she said. She found relationships cloying and that men wanted her in bed rather than on the battlefield or even questioning their political views. Her most enduring love turned out to be words and ideas – the thrill of breaking stories.

“Scorpios,” she told her fellow Scorpio James Fox (the author of White Mischief) belong in turbulent times.”