Seductress (24 page)

By the war’s end her marriage to Ernest had tanked. Martha filed for divorce and paired up with a war hero, General James Gavin, of the Eighty-second Airborne, while Ernest went off the deep end. Having never been dumped before, he stalked and harassed her throughout Europe, once hysterically breaking into her hotel room with a bucket on his head.

During the postwar years Martha took a sabbatical from “writ[ing] and tell[ing] what she saw.” She retired to a village in Mexico, where she raised an Italian boy she’d adopted, and freelanced stories and articles. As always, there were men, notably Dr. David Gurewitsch, a thinking woman’s Casanova, who fell deeply in love with her and pleaded with her to move with him to New York City.

But in 1952 she broke it off, moved to England, and found another beau to her taste, Tom Matthews, a handsome, debonair ex-editor of
Time.
They married in 1954, and for the first few years chemistry and good times held Martha’s wanderlust in check.

Eventually, though, she shoved off and divorced him too. A “female flying Dutchman,” she required movement, change, and novelty—new events to chronicle. With her portable typewriter in hand, she lived on the wing, setting up a base of operations in Kenya and investigating Poland, Israel, Germany, and seven other countries.

While fact finding, she wrote two story collections and a novel that brutally dissected sexual love. With methodical ruthlessness she laid bare the dynamics of eros and showed where the old arrangements led: to stasis, suffocation, and mutual destruction. Traditional “soft and helpless women” either cannibalize their lovers or disgust them with their stupidity, sometimes both. Another breed of woman, however, held out hope for a new and improved erotic order in her fiction. These swanky sexpots—replicas of herself—devour men “like ice cream” and win them with a charm that comes from “deft lechery” and from “talking, moving, seeing, [and] being wide awake.”

Through middle to old age, Martha ferreted out humanitarian causes to champion and roamed the hot spots of the world like a recording angel of the apocalypse, covering Vietnam, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and, at eighty-one, the U.S. invasion of Panama. Increasingly anti-American, she expatriated to Britain, where she commuted between a cottage in Wales and a London apartment, bearing a “gaggle of young chaps” in her wake. She remained a pistol to the end, full of piss and vinegar, bravado, blazing energy, and sex appeal. After she died in 1998, a longtime inamorato slipped a dozen roses into the Thames with her ashes.

Not everyone loved Martha Gellhorn. Hemingway’s cronies thought her a “mercenary bitch,” and feminists, peeved by her glamour girl edginess, cut her from the honor roll. There was plenty to hate: her barbed tongue, swelled head, and lousy marks as a mother. But she undoubtedly pushed the frontier. More “ambitious than Napoleon,” she smashed gender norms, succeeded by dint of grit and hard work, and stepped out boldly—into the line of fire. With the goddess’s writing stylus, she wrote “what she saw and how it was,” leaving a merciless document of our times. As the deity’s modern reincarnation she also acted her appropriate sexual part, the restless, man-collecting empress of seduction, “the one who is joy.” She once said, “I’m overprivileged. I’ve had a wonderful life.” By the goddess’s reckoning, not “over,” simply a woman’s just deserts.

 

When it came to learning, the love goddess Inanna demanded the whole enchilada. Truth: nothing less. Like the mythic creatrix, the light of all intelligence, she possessed ultimate knowledge, the wisdom of eternity. Despite male claims to the philosophic domain, woman was the “original seeress, the lady of wisdom.” She was also, with no contradiction involved, the cosmic queen of lust. Hence the sexual charge (as one amorist put it) of a “brilliant philosophic performance” and the plethora of philosopher-sirens throughout history.

In ancient Greece, for example, the elite courtesans, the hetaerae, included the study of metaphysics in their armamentarium. One of them, Aspasia, took it further and achieved such fame as a philosopher that she became the female Socrates of fifth-century Athens. The only historical woman to be included in Plato’s dialogues, she taught Socrates, lectured publicly, and formulated a revolutionary philosophic system, the Aspasian Path. With perfect consistency, she ran a profitable “house of joy” at the same time, instructing her charges in the finer points of love artistry. She was not an
erotodidaskalos,
erotic master teacher, for nothing. She reached the heights of the profession, conquered the top statesmen, and won the lifelong adoration of the peerless Pericles.

In her only extant portrait, a mortuary herm, Aspasia looks more like an irate soccer mom than a sultry vamp. Heavy-featured and matronly, she wears a kerchief and scowls from her pedestal with hollow, implacable eyes. As a result, academics have long assumed that she was probably “quite ordinary in appearance.” But even if the bust were authentic (an unlikely possibility), Aspasia could not, under any circumstances, have been “ordinary in appearance.”

Extraordinariness was the hetaerae’s trademark. When they strolled the agora and swept into symposium parties, they made a drama of themselves and outflaunted one another in flash and originality. At the very least Aspasia whitened her face with ceruse, rouged her cheeks, blackened her eyes, and dressed in see-through tunics of “gaudy colors, with much gilt work.”

Beyond that, she would have fashioned a signature look, perhaps with rows of sausage curls drawn up in a “melon coiffure” or with eye-stopping jewelry: chandelier earrings festooned with bells and swans, gold finger ornaments of jasper and chalcedony, and necklaces hung with scent-filled vial pendants.

When Aspasia arrived in Athens at twenty, she was already a virtuoso of self-presentation, a polished professional, and an adept in love and knowledge. She’d trained first with her father at her home near Miletus in philosophy and classical learning, then later with the great Thargelia, a
ravisseuse
of powerful men. Added to these accomplishments, she had a lively “animated” spirit. Plutarch says that within months she’d “entangled with her love the chieftest rulers and governors” of the time. Attracted, according to report, by her “rare” “wisdom,” Pericles at last swam into her orbit.

Pericles, nicknamed the Olympian, was then the biggest potentate in the Mediterranean, a brilliant empire builder of Apollonian dimensions, who erected the Parthenon and ushered in the Athenian golden age of prosperity, peace, and artistic supremacy. He became so “absolutely besotted” with Aspasia that he divorced his wife and lived with her for thirteen years. His passion for her exceeded all the acceptable limits of
philia.
He kissed her, an unprecedented intimacy, when he returned home each day from the agora and underwrote and supported her philosophic ambitions. Without his encouragement, she might never have developed as she did into a “key figure in the intellectual history” of Greece.

Like Socrates, Aspasia left no formal, written account of her thought. Contemporary philosophers, however, recorded her teachings, which she elucidated at salon-type gatherings in her home. Socrates, one of her students, sent a disciple there for further instruction, insisting that Aspasia could “enlighten [him] more fully than [he] could.” She excelled in rhetoric. So impressive were her powers of persuasion and oratory that Plato included her speech in his
Menexenus.
A canny performance, this eulogy to the war dead both redefines the Athenian state and insinuates the primacy of the maternal principle.

Marshaling the same argumentative dexterity, Aspasia methodically mapped out a philosophy that put a whole new spin on Greek love. Her idea, in contrast to pie-in-the-sky Platonic idealism, was an associated eros: equality between the sexes and a union of mind and body, virtue and sex, self and community. With revolutionary pragmatism, she proposed a
techne
for passionate, happy relationships, prescribing continuous self-culture and complementary sex roles. She also spelled out a strategy for seduction. The seducer, she explained, must arm him- or herself with a protean personality, “charming language,” honest praise, an “element of enchantment,” and customized charisma.

This was volatile stuff, especially in the hands of a woman who held the illustrious Pericles love hostage and freely disseminated the Aspasian Path among her hetaerae, who “learn’t so much from her that their names were uttered with awe.”

It was only a matter of time until the patriarchs girded for action. They hauled her into court, accused her of heresy, and sentenced her to death. Only a grandstand effort by Pericles, who burst into tears in her defense, saved her life.

It didn’t stop the character assassination. Playwrights assailed her as a “cock-sucking slut” and ball buster, and historians blamed her for the war with Samos. But the case-hardened Aspasia went on about the goddess’s business unfazed. After Pericles died, she married a wealthy sheep dealer, bore another child (she’d had one with Pericles), and turned her new husband into a prominent politician.

PC scholars condemn the “sexualization of Aspasia’s intellect” and believe she should be reevaluated on her cerebral merits. Judy Chicago accordingly honored Aspasia as a “woman of achievement” rather than a “courtesan” in her 1978 installation
The Dinner Party.
But the sexpot-sage division is passé and false; Aspasia’s name in Greek means “welcoming.” And she comes as a welcome presence to the postfeminist table, as an envoy of Inanna, goddess of “allure”
and
“Truth.”

In early nineteenth-century Switzerland, a noted German poet returned in a state of erotic euphoria from the “Shrine of St. Aspasia.” The lady, he rhapsodized, “worked miracles for the salvation” of men. Salvation or damnation, depending on the source. For most of her lovers Germaine de Staël resembled a she-devil, a “veritable female roué” and “serpent.” This opera queen version of Aspasia sowed heartbreak and ecstasy through every corner of Europe. “A dictionary of the great men of her time,” writes her biographer, “would serve as a list of her worshippers.”

Intellectually Germaine de Staël created just as big a stir. She molded public opinion in politics, history, literature, and gender relations and was “consulted like the Bible” on every issue of moment. Heavyweights from Goethe to Byron were provoked by her ideas, artists painted her as “Apollo’s priestess,” and a generation of Romantics took their inspiration and themes from her work.

Germaine’s appearance was ludicrously at variance with her achievements, amorous and otherwise. Broad-beamed and stout, with fat legs and a chambermaid’s gait, she lacked any semblance of beauty or intellectual ethereality. Her face looked like a photograph taken with a fisheye lens: Gallic nose, protuberant eyes, and buckteeth. She only worsened the effect with her eccentric, unbecoming dress, a confection of oriental robes and striped turbans crested with huge feathers. As she talked, she fidgeted, compulsively rolling and unrolling small strips of paper.

Yet all was forgotten—looks, dress, and nervous tics—under the spell of her conversation. She suddenly metamorphosed, said one admirer, from an “unpleasing” apparition into someone “irresistibly seductive.” Her huge black eyes flashed with intelligence, and her musical voice wove a siren song as she spun from subject to subject with the speed of a “shuttlecock.” “Beautiful? Ugly?” said one after hearing her. “I do not know.” Another sighed. “If I were a queen, I would order Mme. de Staël to talk to me always.”

Germaine learned to combine brains and seductiveness at her mother’s breast. The only child of an ambitious French
salonnière,
Germaine was taught to please through intellectual achievement. She was force-fed learning like a Strasbourg goose, denied dolls, friends, and frivolity, and compelled to perform for the admiration of guests. At five, already joining mind and eros, she asked an astonished marquise her opinion of love. For the young Germaine, mental brilliance procured not only public applause but also her father’s. In classic oedipal fashion, she competed with and detested her mother, courting her father, financier Jacques Necker, with displays of precocity and treaties on law and history. “Of all the men in the world,” she wrote in her adolescent diary, “it is he I would have wished for a lover.”

Lovers, alas, didn’t besiege the dumpy, bookish teenager, so at last the Neckers rustled up an impoverished aristocrat, Baron de Staël, the Swedish ambassador, to marry her. But Germaine, like so many sirens, turned a lackluster first marriage into a springboard for seduction. With her father’s fortune at her disposal, she opened a glittering salon that she used to attract the gratin and showcase her charms.

“No one could escape [her] fascination” when she wheeled into action. “The most brilliant talker of her time,” she deployed conversation like a four-front offensive. She homed in on her listeners’ interests and spoke, accompanied by balletic arm movements, on a dazzling array of topics, from gossip to constitutional law. She flattered, teased, declaimed, harangued, and bandied aperçus, fizzing with vitality and bringing out the “best in everyone.”

Within two years she’d snaffled the prize diplomats of Paris: Talleyrand, Mathieu de Montmorency, and, above all, Viscount Louis de Narbonne. Her five-year affair with Narbonne, during which they had two sons, was a classic Staëlian grand amour. A disciple of the roiling boil school of love maintenance, she subjected this handsome lady-killer to a perpetual
crise
of death threats, panegyrics, recriminations, and fourth-act scenes. When he fled to England after the French Revolution, she bombarded him with tragic letters, while simultaneously cultivating two other suitors who’d “fallen madly in love with her.” The upshot was a concurrent liaison with all three.

Throughout these operatic affairs Germaine’s intellectual labors proceeded uninterrupted. During the Terror she moved to Coppet on the shores of Lake Geneva, where she held forth to a “Circean menagerie” of distinguished men. She customarily received in her bedroom and discussed metaphysics or politics deshabille, once interviewing a male pundit with her bare leg suspended in the air for a pedicure. Always with a green morocco folding desk under her arm, she wrote on the fly and on the sly, even at breakfast, and generated an impressive output: a novel, books of philosophy, and literary criticism.