MEMBERS' ROOM
Blog
MEMBERS' LOG IN


Join Now
Forgot your password?
SEARCH
You are here: Home » Books of the Month » February 2008

February 2008

publication date: Feb 1, 2008
 | 
author/source: Polly Evans
Download
Previous | Next
 
My reviews this month are all of books written by women travellers, and I’ve chosen a wide historical span. From furthest back in the annals comes Mary Hitchcock’s Two Women in the Klondike. I read a lot of accounts of the Klondike gold rush while I was researching Mad Dogs and an Englishwoman and this is one of my real favourites: Mary and her friend Edith Van Buren were American society ladies who, in 1898, decided to ‘do’ the Klondike as a pleasure trip. Next up – and taking us back to the 20th century – is Martha Gellhorn’s Travels with Myself and Another: Five Journeys from Hell. Lastly there’s Bad Times in Buenos Aires by Miranda France, which a friend gave to me before I travelled to Argentina to research On a Hoof and a Prayer; I found it both funny and touching.
 
 
In the late 1890s, America was slouching in a severe economic depression. So when a handful of ragtag miners arrived in the ports of San Francisco and Seattle in July 1897 carrying cases of Klondike gold, the weary public went wild. An estimated hundred thousand hopefuls made their way to the goldfields to dig their fortune from the frozen ground. Most journeyed over the tortuous Chilkoot and White Pass routes; these trails took them many months to cover and, when they finally arrived at Dawson City, the town that had sprung up to house the gold rush at the point where the Yukon and Klondike Rivers join, the good claims had all been taken. Stories of hardship and near starvation abounded. It was an odd place, then, for two society ladies, Mary Hitchcock and her friend Edith Van Buren, to decide to take a holiday.
 
Mary and Edith had no intention of suffering any privations of their own. They brought with them five hundred kilograms of supplies including a portable bowling alley and a animatoscope that showed films. They also started their journey – which they made by steamer from San Francisco to St Michael and from there down the Yukon River – with a parrot, two dozen pigeons, a pair of canaries and two Great Danes named Queen and Ivan. Not all these creatures completed the course.
 
‘“I’ve got some very bad news for you, Madam,”’ Mary reports a porter as having told her during the voyage from San Francisco to St Michael.
 
‘“Not the dogs?” I cried in alarm.
 
“No Madam.”
 
“Nor the parrot?”
 
“No, Madam, but one of the canaries is dead. I did all I could for him, and left him two hours ago bright and lively, but returned to find the other mourning his mate, who was lying cold at the bottom of the cage. I’m very sorry, but as the two dozen pigeons are in perfect health, you must see that I have given great attention to your birds and animals.”’
 
Mary and Edith’s tent covered 260 square metres; people walked for miles just to stand and stare. They hired servants, of course, but were disappointed in their lack of attention to detail, and even managed to throw an eight-course dinner party whose dishes included such delicacies as mock-turtle soup, roast moose, an asparagus salad, and peach ice cream.
 
The Klondike – and the Yukon in general – has always attracted colourful characters, and Mary and Edith must have been up there with the best of them. Mary’s account of their travels is bold, funny and feisty. It’s one of the most entertaining accounts of 19th-century women’s travel that I’ve read.
 
 
Travels with Myself and Another: Five Journeys from Hell by Martha Gellhorn
 
It’s hard to write about terrible travel experiences in a way that’s funny and doesn’t irritate the reader with its whining. Martha Gellhorn, an American novelist, travel writer and war correspondent, is one of the very few who truly mastered the art in a fantastically sparse and understated way.
 
Of the five journeys in this book, my personal favourite was Gellhorn’s appalling experience of China in 1941, just because I could, in a tiny way, relate to her troubles following my own much softer journey taken during the research for Fried Eggs with Chopsticks. Along with an ‘Unwilling Companion’ (Ernest Hemingway, to whom Gellhorn was married for four years) she travels as a journalist to report on the Sino-Japanese war. The sea voyage from San Francisco to Honolulu lasted ‘roughly forever’. Having arrived in China, they are assured of an elegant hotel.
 
‘I wondered aloud about the washing arrangements: how exactly were two people to manage with one bowl of water? Did we both wash our teeth in the same water, then our faces? UC told me earnestly not to wash at all, and if I dreamed of brushing my teeth I was a nut case.’ Of accommodation later in the trip she writes, ‘The mosquitoes were competing with the flies and losing…I lay on my boards, a foot off the floor, and said in the darkness, “I wish to die”.’
 
Gellhorn finds she has an involuntary reaction to the Chinese habit of hawking up phlegm: every time she hears the sound, she retches. They are made to ride horses so tiny that, in the end, Hemingway picks his up and carries it. Yet they meet both Chiang Kai-Shek and Zhou Enlai, and Gellhorn manages to offer intriguing insights to both: Chiang Kai-shek was toothless – they later found that it was the highest of compliments to be received by the Generalissimo with his teeth out – and Zhou (of whom neither Gellhorn or Hemingway had heard) was captivating, though Gellhorn remarks he must have thought them ‘brainless boobs of the first order’.
 
Eventually, during a 25-hour train journey, they see another white face. Gellhorn bets Hemingway 20 Chinese dollars that he must come from St Louis, as she does, on the basis that, when you arrive in the worst and most remote hellholes, the people you meet always come from St Louis. Hemingway takes her up on the bet – and loses.

 

Bad Times in Buenos Aires by Miranda France
 
Here, the author’s bad time is mirrored by the troubles of the city that she temporarily calls home. In 1993, at the age of 26, France moves to Buenos Aires where she works as a journalist. She finds an elegant city whose boom days are gone. Her new friends and acquaintances are a stylish bunch – they’re obsessed by appearances, in fact – but their toned, tanned bodies and coiffed hair fail to disguise the fact that they’re deeply troubled by their own lives, the state of their country’s political and economic systems, and the psychological impact of the horrors of the political violence Argentina suffered, and perpetrated, during the 1970s.
 
France’s portrait of Buenos Aires has an Almodovaresque quality to it. City, inhabitants and author are in a perpetual state of crisis, their nerves frayed by the heat and by Argentina’s failure to perform as a first-world country despite its natural riches. It’s an atmospheric book, beautifully written, and has an almost dreamlike (or perhaps nightmarish) quality to it. But it really works because, in essence, France can’t manage to hate Buenos Aires, despite her frustrations. She becomes immersed in this city that’s at the same time fiercely proud, yet traumatized by its failures – by the fact that one must queue for hours to complete simple administrative tasks, that the phone lines don’t connect properly, by the Falklands War and the so-called Dirty War that preceded it. Her conversations and interviews range with people from the most sought-after psychoanalyst in the city to an ex-military man who, as the conversation progresses, France realizes was one of those who carried out the torture and murder of innocents less than two decades before.
 
Bad Times in Buenos Aires is a wonderful travel book; it’s funny and engaging, and draws a vivid portrait of Buenos Aires and its people. It won’t mirror most visitors’ experiences of the city, and France’s own melancholy inevitably colours the way she sees things. But it’s so well written, and the characters are so life-like, that the reader ends up, like France, falling a little bit in love with the place.
 

Comments