It is wonderful to have this first publication of Martha Gellhorn’s letters. Gellhorn reported many of the last century’s important wars: The Spanish Civil War, World War II, and Vietnam were brought to vivid life in her lucid and precise prose. Married to Ernest Hemingway (and the only one of his four wives who left him), she has always caught the attention of biographers — much to her dismay. The “Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn” (Henry Holt, 532 pages, $32.50) exposes close friendships with Eleanor Roosevelt, Leonard Bernstein, H.G. Wells, and a host of other important literary and cultural figures.

One of Gellhorn’s correspondents thought her letters constituted her greatest achievement. Certainly they are as striking as her journalism, more engaging than much of her fiction, and full of the energy that led her to visit and write about something like half the countries of the world. She was always avid to be off somewhere, since nowhere ever quite fulfilled her idea of paradise — not Italy, Mexico, or Africa, to mention just a few of the dozen or so homes she established in the course of her peregrinations. She was, as I implied in the title of my biography of her, a “beautiful exile” in search of a beautiful exile.

Gellhorn lived in a nearly perpetual state of dissatisfaction, which sometimes made her a bore, but often made her attractive precisely because she was so demanding. She also could be very, very funny about her naïve search for the perfect world. “Travels With Myself and Another,” for example, is a comic masterpiece, one of the truly great travel books of our time.

But just how wonderful are these letters? And perhaps more to the point: How can we trust them? Gellhorn was writing about real people, events, and places. So unless her correspondence is regarded as fiction masquerading as fact, inevitably the nature of her perceptions has to be explored and analyzed.

The trouble is that the editor of this volume, Caroline Moorehead, is ill-equipped to render this sort of service. As in her authorized biography of Gellhorn, Ms. Moorehead simply gives her subject her head. If Gellhorn denies she had an affair with H.G. Wells, Ms. Moorehead drops the subject. That Gellhorn wrote the sort of ingratiating letters to Wells that have prompted the suspicion of more than one Hemingway biographer; that Wells himse lf wrote quite directly about his affair with Gellhorn, means nothing whatever to Ms. Moorehead.

How much the editor of Gellhorn’s letters ought to say about them is debatable. An editor who is constantly correcting or augmenting her subject’s text might very well annoy some readers. But in this case, both Gellhorn’s own skewed accounts and the provenance of these letters are cause for concern.

What Ms. Moorehead’s reticence and the letters themse lves disclose is Gellhorn’s fierce desire to define history solely on her terms. She adopted an attitude toward biography and history that essentially eviscerates both forms of writing. She believed exclusively in eyewitness history. If you weren’t there with her at the Spanish Civil War, if you were not a friend of Dorothy Parker, then how could you possibly know anything? Thus Gellhorn writes as follows to the esteemed Parker biographer Marion Meade, who had sent a letter inquiring about Gellhorn’s friendship with Parker:

Dear Miss Meade; Have a heart. I could talk to you about Dottie for hours, I knew her well … but I can’t write a whole chapter for you. I haven’t time to live let alone write letters.

Of course, Miss Meade was not asking Gellhorn to write a chapter for her (I know, I checked with Miss Meade), and besides, Gellhorn loved writing several letters a day.The real point of the letter was to put Miss Meade in her place. Gellhorn was forever writing such letters to biographers.

In a letter to Alan Grover, one of Gellhorn’s lovers, she enunciated her lifelong distaste for biography: “I think it is barbarous, and the mark of microscopic minds, to confuse the man and his work; as long as the man, in his own life, is not the enemy of the commonwealth …” This letter, written in Cuba sometime in 1940, when Gellhorn was living with Hemingway, conveys the dread she felt in anticipating the public attention that would inevitably follow her marriage to one of the kings of American literature.

But Gellhorn was a part of history and had no trouble, when it suited her, promoting and writing about herself — as she did in “The Face of War” and “The View From the Ground.” She squirreled away her letters in the special collections department of Boston University’s Mugar Memorial Library, presided over by the late Howard Gotlieb, who aggressively sought the papers of celebrities and literary figures. Gotlieb was quite willing to make his devil’s bargain — in this case, promising Gellhorn that her papers would not be available to anyone until 25 years after her death (she died in 1998).

But if Gellhorn wanted no biography, why not destroy the papers? Why leave an estate free to hire an authorized biographer? Why allow Ms. Moorehead to edit the letters now? Why let her make a selection that no other scholar-biographer can check, because the Gellhorn collection is still closed to other researchers? Ms. Moorehead mentions, for example, that she chose a few pages from a 40-plus-page letter that Gellhorn wrote to her lover David Gurewitsch. Perhaps those are the best pages of that letter, but what is the principle of selection? What are we really reading when only parts of letters appear?

Gotlieb justified his deals by saying that in order to preserve history, he had to accept the terms he was offered. He also suggested that Gellhorn was trying to prevent the kind of “pop biography” that would appear before there could be any perspective on the events in which she participated. But Gellhorn said she did not believe in perspective, and the perspective argument is fallacious, since history and biography occur all the time.To be sure, there is perspective, but there is also the immediacy of biographies written on the spot, so to speak. As the historian John Lukacs points out in “The Hitler of History,” one of the best biographies of Hitler was published in 1935.

So by all means, enjoy Gellhorn’s letters, but caveat emptor! What to make of a writer who thought the Spanish Civil War had been the only just war fought during her lifetime? Or what about this passage on Alger Hiss, written on April 11, 1982:

The man is 77 now, and with hurt eyes, still trying to restore his good name. And though he doesn’t understand why Whittaker Chambers and Richard Nixon were out to kill him, I do; he was the very embodiment of everything they were not and could not be, the educated upper class American, an American gentleman; they hated him. It had nothing to do with Communism; it was like a private vendetta.

This passage can be easily turned on its head: Whittaker Chambers is dead now, and the old lefties cannot let go of vilifying him. I know why: He was fat and conservative and worked for Time magazine and had none of Hiss’s elegance and education. How could someone so well-spoken and with the right opinions possibly be a traitor?

Reducing history to such psychology and ideology is repugnant. There may be a grain of truth in it, but to let such explanations dominate, as Gellhorn does, makes her a very unreliable correspondent.Why didn’t Ms. Moorehead include an introduction that explored the nature of Gellhorn’s prejudices and blind spots? She mentions Gellhorn’s Jewish background, yet makes no connection with Gellhorn’s staunch support of Israel and how she related to Jews. Gellhorn made a Jew discovering the horror of Dachau the main character in her novel “Point of No Return,” yet she never commented on how that character’s sudden awakening to his Jewishness reflected her own obsession with protecting Israel.

Or did she? Since we only have a selection of letters and have to wait nearly another two decades to see how Ms. Moorehead made her selections, we cannot know for certain. This halfbaked collection of letters is certainly better than not having a loaf at all, but what will arise from a complete and uncompromising study of the letters remains to be seen.

crollyson@nysun.com