She Came, She Saw, She Took Notes : THE NOVELLAS OF MARTHA GELLHORN, <i> (Alfred A. Knopf: $27.50; 625 pp.)</i>

Martha Gellhorn, now 85 and a resident of Wales, has lived her life as the definitive person of action, and this complete collection of her novellas (which were originally published from 1936 through 1978) reveals her distaste for the confinement and inertia of other people’s existence.

Born in St. Louis, Gellhorn roamed rural America reporting on the effects of the Great Depression. She became a noted war correspondent, covering the civil wars in Spain and China alongside Ernest Hemingway, whom she married in 1940 and divorced in 1945. One of the more intrepid journalists of World War II, she cut loose from Hemingway to hitchhike the front lines, stowed away on a ship to land at Normandy, and entered Dachau at its liberation. In later decades, she covered conflicts in Vietnam, Nicaragua and Panama. More peaceful excursions include an illegal day trip to the city then called Leningrad, and recent adventures in Belize.

Gellhorn’s novellas are all portraiture, full of characters examined from far outside. Sometimes the narrative distance makes her men and women seem like lab rats trapped in mazes of others’ devices. Disasters shape them--the Depression, or a post-World War II malaise that pervades even the 1970s novellas--but they are also the victims of their own unattainable, often ridiculous fantasies. In the novella “Jim,” an unemployed high school dropout, browsing in a junk shop, sees himself as “the great surgeon Dr. James Barr who is also a talented performer on the accordion.” At another time, or at the hands of another author, Jim might make it in music or medicine, if not both, but with the Depression in full slump, Gellhorn’s Jim ends up a thief instead.

In “A Promising Career,” the married mistress of the headmaster of a minor British boys’ school visualizes herself “at Cambridge in the Master’s Lodgings, giving tea to besotted undergraduates, worshiped by older, discreet dons, bathed in the flashing light of various skillful minds.” But instead of propelling the headmaster toward Cambridge, she ruins his chances.

The collection’s centerpiece is a novella called “Till Death Do Us Part.” It immediately appealed to me, an old Southeast Asia hand, with its opening lines about a corpse arriving “on an ammo truck in Batavia” (the city later renamed Jakarta). From the death of a photojournalist in the Javanese insurgency of the late 1940s, the novella unfolds like one of those Chinese fans with a line of poetry on each fold. Characters describe other characters, all of them having in common an acquaintance with Tim Bara, a famous war photographer obviously modeled on Robert Capa. Speaking in Hemingway-parody Middle European English, Bara comes back to life in reminiscence as he is mourned. His American girlfriend, who learned of his death from the newspaper, had felt jealousy “like malaria” while Bara wandered war zones; his photo-business partner, who describes himself as “a pudding in human form” in contrast to the dashing Bara, dwells on the romance of Bara and another stateless photographer, Suzy, in Paris and Spain.

Published in 1958, “Til Death Do Us Part” presages the years of posthumous analysis of Hemingway’s relationships as well as the 1963 Vietnam land-mine death of Robert Capa himself. And it contains a genuine Gellhorn self-portrait, the American journalist Bara nicknames “Marushka.” Bara and Marushka are perhaps the only characters in the entire collection who live freely, act on their best impulses, and don’t feel trapped by anything. They are, however, deeply scarred by war experiences--Suzy’s death in Spain; visits to Dachau, Buchenwald, Belsen.

Bara and Marushka would argue constantly about how to respond to the surrounding devastation: “The difference was that Bara thought in the end nothing would change, and Marushka lived in hope of the future. Marushka had only to say the word ‘future’ for them to start a fight.” Bara had considered humankind irredeemably cruel, but he managed individual kindness to war’s victims. Marushka, on the other hand, raged against injustice and acted “as if here and now it had to be stopped.”

The Martha Gellhorn we know (mostly from combing the indices of Hemingway biographies) is very much the Marushka described in “Til Death Do Us Part”: “She traveled over the earth, she looked, she questioned, she read, she wrote articles on the miseries that afflicted mankind, and she would not accept what she had learned. She wanted to change things for the better, she demanded action and salvation.”

Nearly everyone featured in these stories, whether in a Southern shanty town, a London townhouse or the wide-open spaces of West Africa, leads a narrow, bitter life. They dwell in various traps: tenements, hotel rooms, a dank Italian castle. They worry that they have built prisons, not only for themselves but for those they love. A British farmer in Kenya (“In the Highlands”) who had spent World War II in a German POW camp adopts a little African girl, but realizes that by isolating her from the local children, “with love and best intentions, he had put his child into a sort of prison.” When the girl goes happily off to boarding school, he writes to her every day to assure her she can come home; he fears he has sent her to another form of imprisonment.

The only real plot developments here are intricate schemes hatched by several characters to obtain divorces. The stories are full of wives from hell, nasty-piece-of-work mistresses and cold, selfish husbands. They connive their way from one bad marriage to the next using false letters, gossip and miserable affairs. Their children, no matter how beloved, are inevitably pawns in the divorce game. In “On the Mountain,” a British botanist in Kenya devises a way to divorce his wife back home, marry the woman he loves and get his two sons shipped out to join them on Mt. Kilimanjaro, a process which leaves him feeling “crafty and unclean.”

Martha Gellhorn is nothing if not scathing; her travel pieces make Paul Theroux seem like the Pollyanna of Polynesia, and in her political writing she has perfected the art of indictment. Her post-Depression novellas are often very entertaining reading simply because of her evil wit. “The club looked even nastier decorated with holly and mistletoe,” she sneers in a novella that rips a Colonial paradise to shreds. One expatriate’s wife greets another, marvelously, with “Your hat’s even worse than mine, I’m pleased to see.” And a child of the whites is described as “done up like a chocolate box . . . stuffed with toffees and put through tricks like a poodle.”

The earlier novellas, from a best-selling book called “The Trouble I’ve Seen,” are less gleefully mean-spirited. Their characters are equally self-destructive, but their circumstances at least elicit sympathy. The novellas ring true enough these days, with characters’ preoccupation with (and resentment of) Relief easily translated into our shelter, food-stamp, government-cheese reality.

I read the 1936 novella “Ruby” at the height of media coverage about the kidnaping of Katie Beers, the Long Island 10-year-old who had been sent home from school because of head lice and called “Roach Girl” by other children. It was hard not to project Katie’s missing-poster face onto Gellhorn’s description of Ruby, a tough yet innocent child of the same age. Ruby ends up preyed upon as a child prostitute, spending her meager earnings on toothpaste and candy. Gellhorn’s Depression people--jobless, frustrated, living on bread-and-syrup or bread-in-soup--curse winter and long for spring. These stories are not shocking now, unfortunately, but they are well told.

Gellhorn, so driven, activist, mobile, has nonetheless been curiously, morbidly fascinated with rather ordinary people stuck in their traps and cages. Their unhappy, narrow lives are exposed in these 14 finely crafted novellas, and Gellhorn contrasts them with something unconfined only in the tale that unwinds around Tim Bara’s corpse.