Vol. 1, Number 4	Winter 1998 issue

 

Save $8.98 at Amazon.com!

When Emily Hahn died in 1997 at the age of 92, her obituary in The New Yorker, for which she had written since 1929, stated, "She was, in truth, something rare: a woman deeply, almost domestically, at home in the world. Driven by curiosity and energy, she went there and did that, and then wrote about it without fuss."

And yet, Hahn's own writing is not this simple; when she gets bogged down, she flips back to tell a story or ahead to give away what happens next. It is casual and witty, but also hard to follow, and in this way it mimics her life, here and there without a fuss.

Emily Hahn, born in 1905, transferred into a college of engineering in which women had never before enrolled. She did it mostly out of stubbornness; she wanted to spite a dean who had told her that "the female mind is incapable of grasping mechanics or higher mathematics or any of the fundamentals of mining."

Hahn got her degree and several job offers, but her interest in engineering waned. As Hahn discovered her talent for writing, she became fascinated by the idea of travel. Santa Fe and London both tempted her before she decided to visit a missionary friend in the Belgian Congo. At twenty-five, having scraped together enough money for one third-class steamer ticket, she left the security of Georgian England for exotic Africa.

On her return to America two years later, she published a journal of her stay in a tiny jungle village. After some publicity and a failed love affair, she decided to return to the Congo by way of China. She stayed in Shanghai for seven years before moving to Hong Kong to escape both an unfortunate affair with a Chinese poet and an opium addiction, telling her friends only that she needed to research another book. She was still in Hong Kong when World War II broke out, and she survived the Japanese invasion only to fall in love with an imprisioned, married British officer. After bearing his child, she returned to the United States in an exchange of journalists in 1943.

Her articles had appeared in The New Yorker since 1929; now she settled down to a desk job at the magazine. Until her health gave way in 1997, she continued to work there.

Hahn's adventures, almost unthinkable for a woman of her era, make it difficult to grasp her character. Many of her whimisical decisions to travel halfway around the world, arose from bouts of depression and feelings of uselessness—hard to imagine in such a remarkable woman, and unfortunately even harder to grasp on reading Ken Cuthbertson's new biography, No One Said Not to Go. Though worth reading for the well-researched account of her life's fascinating events, Cuthbertson's attempt to capture Hahn's character quickly degenerates into a morass of clichés. Frustratingly, he uses commonplace metaphors and stock phrases to describe the most arresting moments in Hahn's career.

His flat style may be an effort to draw her extraordinary life into the realm of the familiar, to make it more accessible to the reader, but the dullness of his writing only makes it more obvious that her character was anything but familiar. Avid readers of Hahn's work may constantly feel one step behind the mind of this exceptional writer; readers of Cuthbertson's will always feel one step ahead.