Late in her life, Martha Gellhorn (1908– 1998) produced a masterpiece of travel writing. Travels with Myself and Another (1978) belongs in company with the classics of the genre: Peter Fleming’s Brazilian Adventure, Robert Byron’s Road to Oxiana, Eric Newby’s Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, and Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia—as a rule, the work of self-deprecating young Englishmen. Gellhorn’s recountings of horror journeys in China, the Caribbean, Russia, and Africa are full of caustic humor, and the author comes through as a strong-willed, difficult, and thoroughly irresistable woman.
Travels was a departure as Gellhorn’s reputation was from earnest journalism. It’s ironic tone, though, had always been the dominant note of her private correspondence. She was also one of the last truly prolific letter writers, at every turn of her life finding outrage and pleasure to relate to her friends. The letters have just been collected and establish her as one of the last century’s best correspondents.[1]
Cannot tell you how I loathe lecturing, the listening faces—I want people to talk back—the awful “celebrity” angle which I have never met before and makes me sick—the flattery “Miss Gellhorn you are an inspiration,” Good God, I have been a not always admirable character but nothing to justify being called an inspiration—and the horror of those frightened, lost, uninformed, grateful, faintly slobbering people.
The collection is five hundred pages of literary gossip: “time is running out if I wish to state
