Travels with Myself and Another: A Memoir by Martha Gellhorn (Penguin)

Martha Gellhorn was an indefatigable writer, producing five novels, fourteen novellas, two collections of short stories, and a lifetime of reportage which has been reprinted in The Face of War and The View from the Ground. Although her life was full of glamour and adventure, Gellhorn rarely wrote about herself, except in a book that has redefined travel writing, Travels with Myself and Another. Even though Paul Theroux outdoes her in output, Gellhorn would dismiss him as one of “the great travelers who have every impressive qualification for the job but lack jokes.”

Many things infuriated Gellhorn--injustice, cruelty, stupidity--but on a personal level, nothing made her more incensed than having her name linked with that of the man she was married for less than five of her almost ninety years, Ernest Hemingway. Although Travels with Myself and Another is subtitled as a memoir, the most famous of her three husbands appears in just one essay under the initials of U.C. (Unwilling Companion), probably only because he provides extensive comic relief for a writer “who cherishes...disasters” and is immensely fond of black humor.

Gellhorn relishes mishaps in her journeys because that is where the story lies--and since her journeys are invariably far off the map, mishaps are always there, waiting for her acerbic descriptions. 

Of all the travels that she has chosen to relive, her journey to China in 1941 is easily the most hair-raising and hysterically funny. Gellhorn is determined to witness the Sino-Japanese War first-hand shortly after Japan joins Italy and Germany in the Axis. “All I had to do is get to China,” she says blithely, and as part of her preparations for this odyssey she persuades U.C. to go with her. Embarking from San Francisco to Honolulu by ship, a voyage that “lasted roughly forever,” Gellhorn and U.C. then fly from Hawaii to Hong Kong, “all day in roomy comfort”, landing at an island where passengers spend the night before arriving in Hong Kong. “Air travel,” she says, “was not always disgusting.”

Not a woman who prefers to wallow in luxury, Gellhorn is soon flying out of Hong Kong into China “at 4:30 am in a high wind in a DC2,” part of China National Aviation Company’s fleet, which Gellhorn describes as “flying beetles.” “Cold to frozen,” she returns three nights later to the comfort of the hotel where U.C. holds court. Gellhorn spends her days exploring Hong Kong’s “cruel poverty, the worst I had ever seen,” visiting opium dens, brothels, child-labor sweat shops, and meeting Emily Hahn (“with cigar and highly savvy on the Orient”) and Madame Sun Yat Sen (“tiny and adorable and admirable”).

As a war correspondent for Collier’s, Gellhorn insists upon getting as close to the war as she can. Traveling by plane, truck, boat, and “awful little horses”, she and U.C. find the troops of the Chinese Army and their hard-drinking generals (who almost vanquish U.C. in their alcoholic prowess), Chiang Kai-shek and Madame Chiang  (“who,” Gellhorn fumes, “ was charming to U.C. and civil to me”), and, through a cloak-and-dagger encounter in a Chungking market, Chou Enlai (“this entrancing man,” Gellhorn confesses, “the one really good man we’d met in China”).

Although she and U.C. barely escape cholera, hypothermia, food poisoning, and the hazards of drinking snake wine, by the end of their journey Gellhorn contracts a vicious case of “China Rot,” an ailment resembling athlete’s foot that’s highly contagious. U.C.’s commiseration is heartwarming: “Honest to God, M., you brought this on yourself. I told you not to wash.”

On their last night, hot and steaming in the humidity of Rangoon, Gellhorn is overwhelmed with gratitude that U.C. has stuck with her through “a season in hell.” She reaches out, touches his shoulder, and murmurs her thanks, “while he wrenched away, shouting “Take your filthy dirty hands off me!” “We looked at each other, laughing in our separate pools of sweat.”

“The real life of the East is agony to watch and horror to share,” Gellhorn wrote somewhat melodramatically to her mother. Years later, she concludes “I was right about one thing; in the Orient a world ended.” From Gellhorn’s sharp-eyed and sharp-tongued point of view, that ending was nothing to mourn.~Janet Brown