American writer and war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, center, talks to Native American soldiers on the 5th Army on the Cassino Front in Italy, March 1944 during World War II.The Associated Press
Is there a book you return to again and again, a work that would make life on a desert island bearable? Each weekend, between Canada Day and Labour Day, Globe and Mail writers share their go-to tomes – be it novel, poetry collection, cookbook – and why the world is just a little better for them.
There is a scene, in the first story collected in Travels with Myself and Another, in which the author, intrepid war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, and a companion are making the trip to the front of the Sino-Japanese war in 1941. They have travelled for weeks on a journey so grim that it is a respite when their boat stops at a village flying the black flag of a cholera epidemic. To make the last part of the trip, the Chinese army supplies them with tiny, vicious horses that do not prove up to the task of ferrying Gellhorn and her companion, a fellow American who happens to be exceedingly tall. Eventually, this happens:
Before the day was over, my notes state: "U.C.'s horse fell on him." U.C. stretched his arm over the saddle and under the horse's belly and picked it up, muttering about cruelty to animals, and started to walk with it. I said sharply, 'Put that horse down.'
He said, "I will not, poor bloody horse."
I said, "You're insulting the Chinese. Put it down!"
He said, "My first loyalty is to this horse."
I said, "You must drop that horse! Please!"
Whenever I meet someone who has not yet discovered this book, I attempt to describe why it's so marvellous, and I try to tell the story of this scene, and I eventually trail off in paroxysms of helpless laughter. It's marvellous on its own; it's doubly delicious when you know the secret, that U.C. stands for Unwilling Companion, Gellhorn's then-husband who did not wish to go to China in the first place, one Ernest Hemingway. He is never mentioned by name, indeed Gellhorn rarely spoke his name after their spectacularly acrimonious divorce and the (in truth, fairly affectionate) portrait of him in this story is about her only public accounting of him.
I feel disloyal even mentioning U.C., for Gellhorn loathed that she was forever being linked to him, although she and many others consider her by far the better journalist. (Did you know that Hemingway got to D-Day only because he stole Gellhorn's credentials? Or that she made it to Normandy that day anyway, by sneaking onto a Red Cross ship and hiding in a closet – and that her account of the day is vastly richer?)
The book was published in 1978, and it's the closest thing Gellhorn ever produced to a memoir. It chronicles journeys over decades that took her back and forth around the globe, to Soviet-era Moscow; in a "dinghy" through a chain of Caribbean islands; across the African equator. Gellhorn herself said, "I rarely read travel books. I prefer to travel." This is the only travel book I've ever read; the genre otherwise bores me silly. But this book I endlessly reread.
Gellhorn's fiction tends to be purple and has not stood up to time (the dreaded ex-husband has her there), while her war reporting and journalism on suffering and marginalized peoples bear the weight of her efforts to stir her reader to the outrage that she felt and believed you must as well. This book, though, it's just her voice, and love of a tale, the more dire, the better. "Nothing is better for self-esteem than survival," she says.
I suppose I love it in part because, although my life is lived on a scale that is comparatively tiny and pallid, I have had some travel adventures that are Gellhornesque. I have emerged from the swamps of South Sudan minus my toenails, and fended off a lecherous mullah who tried to weave his pudgy hands into my chador in his Tehran courtroom and in my head I have heard Gellhorn's voice and how she would tell this story later over gin.
There are aspects of the book that are unattractive, read today: Gellhorn was an unapologetic bigot, who disparaged entire races of people with offhand remarks. Her treatment of people she encounters in her Africa travels makes me flinch. She was homophobic; she was a trailblazing woman in a job that remains male-dominated even today, but she had no sympathy with feminists and made clear she preferred the company of men, always.
It puzzles me, her casual racism or misogyny, because empathy is the defining feature of her journalism – her ability to seek out and tell the story of the most marginalized people. When they were the subject of her journalism, she esteemed them; when they were the people whose cooking smells wafted into her hotel room, she loathed them.
In my favourite story, she sets out to travel across East Africa; she hires a car and a Kenyan driver, Joshua. He comes to meet her at her Nairobi hotel, where everyone is wearing some variation on sun-bleached safari khaki. Joshua, she writes, "arrived in black imitation Italian silk pipestem trousers, white shirt, black pointed shoes, black sunglasses in ornate red frames, holding a cardboard suitcase."
Says Gellhorn, looking back, "Instinct, which I regularly ignore, told me Joshua was not the right man for the job." Joshua, it turns out, not only makes inappropriate wardrobe choices, he is unable to do the one thing he's hired for: He cannot drive. He is another unwilling companion, who, the journey survived, makes for delicious reading.