Emily Hahn — No Hurry to Get Home with Julia Cooke

Transcripts are autogenerated and may contain errors Episode 318: Emily Hahn – No Hurry to Get Home with Julia Cooke KIM ASKEW: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I'm KIM Askew here with my co-host, AMY Helmes AMY HELMES: Today's lost lady, Emily Hahn, or Mickey to most everyone she knew, never let the grass grow under her feet. Always restless and looking for adventure, she managed to find it in some of the farthest flung places on the globe, much to her Midwestern family's doubts and consternation KIM: Yes, her mother may have been worried sick, but American readers were utterly captivated by Hahn's colorful accounts of her 12 months in the Belgian Congo and her years partying in glittering 1930s Shanghai, where she smoked opium and took a Chinese lover. She toughed out much of World War II in Hong Kong, facing danger and deprivation rather than retreating to US safety AMY Hahn's fascinating encounters, together with her pithy observations and charming reflections, proved tantalizing fodder for The New Yorker magazine, to which she contributed 181 over the course of 60 years. She was eventually made a staff writer, not surprisingly. KIM: Yeah, one would hope. In addition, Han wrote over 50 books, including her best-selling memoir, "China to Me," and an acclaimed 1941 biography of the politically influential Soong sisters. She also wrote biographies on Fanny Burney and Mabel Dodge Luhan, two lost ladies of lit you could say AMY: her literary output is really pretty astonishing, and in keeping with her peripatetic lifestyle, she was willing to explore so many different topics and genres. Did we mention she also accidentally became the first woman at her college to earn a degree in mining engineering? KIM: Wow. I mean, I'm kind of choking on my own inadequacy here, AMY. But anyway, I'm excited to learn more about Mickey Hahn, but we're gonna need an expert to help us keep track of all her exploits AMY: Well, we've got one who happens to have written a new book showcasing Hahn's life and work. So let's raid the stacks and get started. Our guest today, Julia Cooke, is a writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Condé Nast Traveler, Salon, Smithsonian, Tin House, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. Her 2021 book Come Fly the World recounts the stories of Pan Am stewardesses who balanced the jet set with political intrigue from the Cold War to the conflict in Vietnam. That book was a Goodreads Choice Awards finalist and was selected as a pick for Malala Yousafzai's book club KIM: Julia's latest book is "Starry and Restless: Three Women Who Changed Work, Writing, and the World," and it's a joint biography of three important 20th century journalists, Rebecca West, Martha Gellhorn, and Emily Hahn. Julia, congratulations on your new book and welcome to the show. We are so glad to have you here JULIA: Thank you so much. I'm so glad to be here AMY: I really didn't know very much about Emily Hahn prior to reading your book, Julia. I sort of randomly knew that she owned a pet monkey, and I was aware of her funny dating book called The Principles and Practices of Seduction: A Beginner's Handbook. They were tidbits that had come up in previous episodes that we've done for the podcast, but wow, now that I know more, those were really just throwaway items relative to everything else she did in her life. It's kind of bonkers that most people today don't know her. JULIA: One of the principal reasons why I wrote Starry and Restless is because of the with which she had, kind of been erased from a grander public A there are a lot of readers of the old New Yorker, who do remember her, but She's never really been put into context within a group, of women writers of whom she really was a part KIM: So for this episode, we got to read Hahn's 1970 memoir, "No Hurry to Get Home," it's basically a compilation of some of her best autobiographical "New Yorker" pieces, AMY: So let's start at the beginning. She was born in 1905, and it was clear from early on that this was a little girl who was going to forge her own path in life. She literally made newspaper headlines at the age of 15 for scandalizing the good citizens of her hometown, St. Louis. Julia, why don't you tell our listeners that story? JULIA: Totally. Mickey had a really kind of razor-sharp intuition, and ability to talk right back to double standards, especially sexism. Um, she saw that her brother was allowed to wear knickers, and that that was so much more practical and more comfortable, and she said to her mom, you know, " Why can't I?" Um, and her mother said, "Yeah, okay. All right. Go for it. I'll, I'll, I'll sew some for you." Um, so she got to school on her bike, um, in a pair of knickers that her mother sewed for her. Her mother was an activist for the suffrage movement. Um, and her dad was a free thinker also. So you know, she grew up in a very, um, thoughtful and questioning family environment. KIM: That's so great. AMY: so what wore the knickers that to be in the paper? JULIA: It just so scandalous in that era that a woman would be, out in public wearing pants KIM: Yeah. And of course, it ends up not being the first time that Mickey would inadvertently or not maybe cause a scene. While she was attending the University of Wisconsin, she had absolutely zero interest in becoming an engineer until her trademark stubbornness hijacked her own plans. This became a case of sticking to her guns to her own detriment, right, Julia? JULIA: Yep. She took a geology class, um, because she was always really interested in the natural world. And then, um, she was faced with a professor who just said straight up to her that the female mind is incapable of higher reasoning. um, she said, "Oh, okay, and signed right up to become a mining engineer, and surprised everyone including herself. by following through with it, and then she wound up even getting a job mining engineering, immediately after college. It was the only year of her life that she was regularly employed at a desk job, and she said that every day at 3:00 PM she would fight off a quote, " "swamping instinct to just scream." AMY: Well, yeah, because even when she signed up for the first engineering class in school, I mean, it was just basically stubborn pride, right? JULIA: Completely " AMY: And, she had to keep up the ruse KIM: They called her bluff. it JULIA: is absolutely characteristic of Mickey that, you know, she knew she could do it. and, you know, faced with that kind of resistance, she was like, " "Yeah, no, I'm, I'm doing this." AMY: There is no way in hell I'd do four years of engineering school just to prove a point to somebody. But it seems like books, reading, writing, that was like really something that she was on from an early age, that you're like, "Really, I think it's gonna go in this direction for you." JULIA: Totally. Her mom used to limit the amount that she would permit Mickey to read because she was afraid that Mickey would become indolent from reading too much. She insisted that Mickey and her sisters get out into nature and do more, um, and be more active AMY: Be JULIA: Exactly. AMY has got gumption galore, which we see again when she and a gal pal decided on a lark at the age of 19 to motor their way 2,400 miles across the country in a Model T, camping out along the way. So I don't know how many parents would even allow this today, let alone back then in this jalopy Model T that's breaking down all the time. After that, Mickey finally admits to herself that a career as a mining engineer, that's not really her dream, so she chucked her job, and she goes to New Mexico to work as a tour guide for the Fred Harvey company. Patreon listeners, you know about this because I did a recent bonus episode that talked about the Fred Harvey company. But anyway, she's off kinda being a tour guide. She is writing letters home to her family about her day-to-day life in the American Southwest, and this really becomes a spark that ultimately ignites her writing career, right, Julia? JULIA: Absolutely. Yeah, she writes these letters to her family, and she's writing about cowboys, and she's depicting drunken escapades in the streets of Santa Fe, and she's really so vivid about them. Um, and eventually, her brother-in-law, who was really keyed in with Chicago's literary scene, he lopped off the sign-off, and sent one of her letters to "The New Yorker," which had just opened up shop, uh, in 1928. um, they were looking for new contributors. and while Harold Ross wrote back and said, "The subject of these letters fall too far west of the Hudson," do keep me apprised of what this woman ends up doing, because clearly she's got talent." and you know, once Mickey moved to New York, after Santa Fe, she started writing letters home about overheard cafe conversations among, you know, interesting women in the city. The brother-in-law tried again, and, and that time, yes, that worked, and she began her relationship that would last for the rest of her life with "The New Yorker." AMY: We know from our, um, episode that we did on Katherine White, the New Yorker editor, that around this time they are very aware of the value of both their women readers and women writers, and they're like, "This is something we could really lean into." sense JULIA: Totally. Yep KIM: Yeah. Do you wanna talk a little bit about how she ended up in London? JULIA: Yes. While she was living in New York, she worked as an assistant for a writer who was doing a book on Robert Browning. so he invited her to go with him to …She became friends this that would eventually become known as the Bright Young Things in London. and got to know, um, Rebecca West there eventually, uh, and a lot of people who would really influential figures in her life. Um, and then wound up going back to New York, and continuing to write KIM: So after her time in London where she, as you said, she meets Rebecca West, who ends up becoming a lifelong friend, Hahn eventually lands way farther afield. in the Belgian Congo, which is a place she'd actually been dreaming of exploring AMY: Yeah, but just like Marlow in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, what Hahn discovers in the Congo when she gets there is pretty disturbing. Julia, why don't you explain? JULIA: Yeah. So Mickey had met someone who she called In New York at a party. He was like a, a very well-off young man who, um, had gone to the Belgian Congo to do some anthropological research, and kind of fallen in love with a young woman and, All he wanted to do was get back to the Congo and his beloved, and Mickey found this whole story really appealing and, and she'd always dreamed of going to the Congo as well. Um, and so she started to really push and save up all of her money and get to Africa, which she did on her own. Um, and she got there and found Stuart, and, uh, the whole scene was very from what her imagination had kind of taken from what he had said. He had a polygamous household, where not only the woman that he mentioned to Mickey lived, but also there were other women, who lived in his kind of harem. as the months went on, it um, evident that not only did he have these multiple women that he was living with, and Mickey, Mickey always tended toward the, like, don't interrogate someone else's sex life ethos, um, She wrote that she thought that it was a little icky and not quite nice for the women, um, but that it was not really her business. Then she, um, saw that he was beating one of the women, and that then quickly rolled into implication that, might, untoward to her. The understanding very quickly that there was something much more at work really sent her away. And so she packed up all of her stuff left, which is an incredible thing to do in the early 1930s as a woman traveling alone. AMY: So she is literally in the heart of the jungle, and she's like, "I gotta get away from this guy. And this is, um, the first section that I will go ahead and read from one of her stories. She's got a team of porters and a Pygmy guide. She begins a trek through the jungle to the other side of the country, which is where she's gonna have to get to, in order to get out of the Congo. There are no roads, so they are following the route of elephant tracks that have been carved into the jungle so they at least sorta know which way to go. she writes, " in the haunts of the elephant, we were too deep down under the trees to see any real light at all. There were flies, too. To keep my spirits up, I had to depend on the men singing. In the afternoon, we came to the deepest, darkest place of all. There had been a lot of stamping and general wallowing, and small trees lay trampled and rotting in a black pool. This is where the elephants dance,' said the Pygmy, beaming. on the other side we will soon come to higher ground.' did, but we hadn't reached a village by nightfall, and that meant we would have to camp out. In a village, I would have borrowed a house to spend the night in. I had no tent, but the men made me a little lean-to out of branches and built their fire nearby where they talked and cooked their food and talked and talked and talked. After my meal of chicken grilled on a stick and boiled rice, I lay on the bamboo bed and wondered how far we had managed to walk. I had planned a minimum of 10 miles every day, but I doubted if we'd done that much. Still, what difference did it make? I was beholden to no one. I fell asleep." KIM: I mean, you can just picture her there, like, under the, this lean-to, like, in the middle of nowhere, and you can see what freedom means to her there. AMY: yeah a little misleading because it almost sounds like these guides are sort of taking care of her but it was grueling, I mean, she was having to do a lot of hard, dangerous stuff on this foot journey KIM: Very unusual, experience Yeah. AMY: She was exhilarated JULIA: Exhilaration is absolutely part it, for sure KIM: Um, Julia, can you talk a little bit about what made "The New Yorker" editors basically say, " Girl, send us everything you've got"? JULIA: So as a person, Mickey was relentlessly curious. She treated everything that she saw like something to learn more about. and she loved knowing people, places, habits, customs, everything. That interest was really genuine. That threads through almost all of her writing. She's not a terribly emotional writer. She didn't like looking at big emotions kind of head-on in her writing, she felt them. And that comes through in a lot of her writing. Like, for example, she felt really bad when she left the Congo about, um, leaving the other women that were staying behind, she wasn't gonna, like, foment a rebellion among the women of the household and get everyone out of there. She knew that she was in control of herself, and that if she was going to take her own safety into her own hands, she would have to do it on her own. But there were feelings there and you know, similarly, I think in a lot of, um, Congo Solo, there are kind of slightly like not racist terms, but definitely turns of phrase that feel a little gross now, which were part and parcel of the era. But it's worth noting that, the critics at the and in various Black media of the era really lauded her style because she depicted Africans that she met as people, not as caricatures. Um, they were whole humans with rich inner lives and, you know, she was unwilling to really fall into this notion pretending that people in other countries are exclusively there to serve the, projections of the tourist who wants to go a place and see the picturesque African or later in China, the caricature of the Chinaman. She was unwilling to give into that, kind of temptation to caricature, and I think that is a huge part of the appeal of her If you want to read about this African adventure, she put her recollections from this into her 1933 book, "Congo Solo: Misadventures Two Degrees North." She also wrote a novel which drew on her time there, but the book that really puts her on the map comes about a decade later, "China to Me," which is a huge bestseller. So let's jump ahead to her time in China, which again, in true Mickey Han fashion, starts off almost by accident. KIM: It was just supposed to be a holiday trip with her sister, but Emily wound up staying, to her mother's dismay. So it seems like she was able to access China in a way that other correspondents couldn't. Julia, tell us first about her Shanghai years. JULIA: Yeah. Her older sister, Helen, had never traveled outside the country really, and really wanted to go to Shanghai. Shanghai was the place back then in the late '30s. ' It was really kind of louche, interesting and glamorous and everyone wanted to go. So she got to Shanghai, and it was almost as, like, you set foot in a place and you think, "I am never leaving." That's basically what happened. It doesn't hurt that their first point of contact was the really legendary woman, Bernadine Sold Fritz, who organized a salon there and was a socialite, who pulled together this incredibly, fascinating group of, the literati and socialites and artists. And this was an era when, um, for the first time really, Chinese people were socializing with expats, there was a really new, interesting, scene happening in Shanghai, and Mickey slipped right into it seamlessly. No problem. Um, she became really well-known there, she kept a pet gibbon, and she would show up at the expat hangout with the gibbon on her shoulder, and the gibbon would kind of snap at any men who got a little too handsy with her. KIM: This is so cinematic. JULIA: whole li- it, it's incredible. AMY: and I loved reading in your book, um, you really describe this whole scene in Shanghai so well, like how lively and happening it is, and the only thing I had really known before this is at the very beginning of the film, Indiana KIM: Anna Jones. Yeah. AMY: of Doom. KIM: Yes AMY: in Shanghai, and his love interest is singing Anything Goes, you KIM: Yeah, I was totally picturing it, AMY. JULIA: Totally AMY: I mean, of course Emily gets here and is like, " JULIA: I mean, when I tell you that I fell into a rabbit hole of research on Shanghai in the '30s, It was a fascinating KIM: sounds like the place to be at that time JULIA: totally. AMY: yeah, and tell us also there is one other very, very important person that she meets in Shanghai JULIA: There is, yes. Via Bernadine, she met a man named Xunmei, who was a poet playboy. Um, he was notorious in Shanghai. He read some magazines, and they fell for each other very quickly, which ruffled a lot of feathers in the international community because white girls did not date Chinese men. Which Mickey did not listen to, of course. She and Shen May began a long-term, really loving relationship; they were together for years. They started a magazine together, a bilingual magazine, they had a really interesting creative partnership that was, you know, obviously both sexual and intellectual. Uh, and, she wound up writing about him. She called him Mr. Pan, um, and wrote pieces about him in The New Yorker, and Americans loved Mr. Pan. Xunmei was married. It had been an arranged marriage, and they had children, um, and his wife really liked Mickey and was perfectly happy to invite her into their family context. AMY: I was intrigued by this enough that I went and got a copy of of the Mr. Pan stories in one collection you can, you can read. And I can absolutely see why the New Yorker readers loved these stories. They're very funny. Um, it kept making me think of, like, Chinese “Arrested Development,” that TV show, it's this family of just completely crazy characters that kind of hate each other but love each other, and all these just absurd things that wind up happening. JULIA: And it's all seen with this kind of dry, witty perspective where she's like, "Of course this is happening." AMY: She's kinda like the Jason Bateman character. JULIA: For sure. AMY: Like, who are all these people? so really funny, but also poignant. You know, there's kind of a sadness to Mr. Pan that she taps into. And I think The New Yorker readers are, you know, seeing her byline and thinking "Oh, I'm gonna get this, like, quirky, funny story." But when she does write something that's, much more serious or dark, it makes you pay that much more attention to it JULIA: Yeah, well, her style really shifted, with the Japanese invasion in Shanghai. Her sense of the absurd and her sense of humor had kind of taken the foreground in her writing sensibility. And then the war happened, people she loved were impacted, and she was living in and around her there were bombs. But her writing also really responds to the way that people had to live wartime, there are still, you know, people still have desires and cravings and needs and exist as full human beings, amid the many months and years of hardship. One of the best aspects of her writing is the way that she can this sadness or tragedy with a lighter touch that doesn't dismiss the sadness or tragedy, but that just kind of picks up on different, elements of she was reminding me a lot too, as I was reading No Hurry to Get Home, Auntie Mame because she just wants to live, right? And she wants to experience everything. She has that “when in Rome” mentality of immersing herself in whatever culture she's in. So in China, she immerses herself in the habit of smoking opium, and I was frankly amazed to read about that in your book, like, how she was able to survive, let alone write while she was smoking, as you say, up to 12 pipes of opium per day. It's insane. Yeah, I have no idea. She was a bit of a hedonist. She wanted to do the things, and she led a very sexually free life. Um, she really didn't understand why a woman shouldn't do exactly what a man does. and she didn't see many men around her being terribly, monogamous or, or single-minded about, dutiful family lives. And so she was like, "All right, that's out for me then, too." KIM: She just lived at level 11 JULIA: Totally. Completely KIM: So World War II is raging on. Shanghai falls to Japan, and then Emily finds herself on the move again. She moved to Hong Kong with a new lover, a major in the British military named Charles Boxer, and that's when things get pretty harrowing for Hahn at this stage, right? JULIA: Definitely, yeah. So initially she had gone to Hong Kong to research the Soong , the three women who had married three of the most powerful men in China. It was well known in the US that they would be a real get if anyone could write a book about them and get them to talk. but refused interviews for the most part. and Mickey really understood that, like, this would be the subject for her. Um, she came from a family with sisters. She understood that dynamic. Um, she spoke Chinese. And also Shen May's aunt, his favorite aunt, was with one of the sisters. So she and Xunmei went to Hong Kong together to try to, um, get her in a room with the Soong sisters. Um, and they succeeded, and the sisters agreed to talk to her. So Mickey understood that this was going to be, like, the book that would make her literary career, if she could write it. So she quit opium, and quickly she and Shen May broke up after that. Um, she went to Kong, to spend more time with the Soong sisters. And then while she was in Hong Kong, she wound up falling in with Charles Boxer, who was the head of British intelligence for the Far East, who was a brilliant, brilliant man. He and Mickey were meant to be. Uh, and she wound up falling pregnant. She had the baby, and immediately Pearl Harbor happened, and the Japanese invaded Hong Kong, and everything fell apart really quickly. Imagine Mickey with a six-week-old baby. while her baby daddy is an officer in the armed services in this drumbeat to war. and so in the invasion of Hong Kong, he got injured, uh, and she wanted to stay in Hong Kong. It was a remarkable decision to make. Eventually, you know, she had an option to be repatriated at some point, and decided not to, even though Carola at that time was getting older and older and more stable. Um, she decided not to leave Hong Kong because at that point, Charles was a prisoner of war, and many of the prisoners in the camp that he was in relied on people outside of the camp bringing them food, to keep them alive essentially. And so she had, uh, her baby and her baby daddy completely relying on her, and decided to stay KIM: Wow. I mean, another cinematic story. JULIA: I KIM: I can't just... JULIA: cinema AMY: And I mean, picture her family back in the States like, KIM: Yeah AMY: the last plane out." Like, "What are you doing?" get And she's like, "I can't. KIM: And with such a small baby. Oh my God, I can't even imagine. JULIA: Totally. Well, and, she did not know that her sister back home was liaising with the State Department and really trying to pull any strings she could to get Mickey back home, and Mickey was like, "No, I can't. Like, I-- You're asking me to make a horrible KIM: Wow JULIA: Um, and eventually the stakes got higher and higher, she and agreed that, you know, Carola at that point was a year and a half old, and Charles understood that, you know, he would not be able to live with himself if they stayed, and that Mickey and Carola should and they did not know whether they'd ever see each other again. Mickey came to New York, of course she arrives in New York, in the interval of the year and a half that she's been in occupied Hong Kong, her agent and her publisher have published the collected "Mr. Pan." They've really capitalized on, " the popularity of "The New Yorker" series and to put it totally cynically, the buyer's interest in the Far East and in Mickey's voice there, in light of the Pacific front of World War II. so they have published "Mr. Pan," and Mickey's bank account is bigger than it's ever been in her life. And so she comes back home to a completely flush bank account and literary renown, ba- she's feted by Pen America, and she's just totally shell-shocked. KIM: Wow. JULIA: Carola speaks nothing but Chinese at this point and is, um, deeply traumatized. AMY: And that's her baby. That's the little girl. JULIA: Yes, the baby. Yep, exactly. And Mickey for that year and a half, after she comes back, she goes down to Washington, D.C. every so often to try to get news on Charles, who remains a prisoner of war in Japan. and she hears rumors one turn and then, you know, he's dead, they've all been murdered, and you know, then at the next turn, no, someone's heard from him here and, um, it's just, it's awful. and eventually the war ends and she wonders when she'll hear from him and, eventually she does hear from him. and all of this gets covered in the papers, too because she's famous. Given her success with "The Soong Sisters" and Mr. Pan's wild success, her agent says let's get these memoirs out, lady. She sits down and it becomes kind of part of her healing process, writing what eventually became " "China to Me." it was published to enormous and also a vitriol on the part of both the left and the right in the US. Uh, Mickey was never one to kowtow to any political, um, dogma or position. and so people on the right really had an issue with her because of her lack of quote unquote morals. And then people on the left had a really hard time with the fact that she did not go in for the Chinese communists. She was not a fan of their movement. Um, and, uh, people on the left really had a hard time with that. So on the one hand the book sold incredibly well, and it did. In the first nine months on the shelves, it sold 700,000 copies, and it got her on talk shows. She became a regular on Danny Kaye's show. So she was in this, like, really wild duality of fear and worry about Charles, and total fame and literary acclaim. So her relationship with him eventually became a feature of her fame, and once the war ended, he came to find her, and it was all traced out in the papers, him proposing to her telegram um, her accepting. And, um, there were newspapers on the ground when his plane landed in New KIM: Oh my gosh. That's an amazing story, another amazing story. Um, so would you read a little bit from "China" to me? Because we heard an excerpt from the time in the Congo, but I'd love to hear some from "China" to me also. JULIA: Yeah. Well, so I, I'm gonna read something from before all of this, from right when the Japanese are starting to, push toward Shanghai. Um, so this is before Charles, before, the stakes kept getting higher and higher, but when she's kind of starting to see that things are not entirely safe. This story appeared in "The New Yorker" in, " September of 1937, just before the Japanese bombed Shanghai, and it's called "Round Trip to Nanking," and it was published as a reporter-at-large piece. So it's important to remember that was couched as reporting in "The New Yorker," that's part of the argument that my book makes, um, beneath all of the picturesque and cinematic lives that these women led, is that they really shifted what came to reporting was and the stylistic, you know, what could be classified as reporting. " Nobody " said not to go. The man at the airline office, a friend of mine, did sound a little surprised when I called him on the phone and said not to bother about getting our plane tickets to Nanking after all, that we were going by train This was Wednesday, I explained, and we'd just go on up by train the next morning and get back to Shanghai Sunday night. The school where I teach English to Chinese youths was to start its fall term on Monday, so I would be back in plenty of time. The young man said, 'Oh?' in a cold, funny little voice. But I thought that was because he's English and had probably gone to a lot of bother over the tickets, and perhaps he was peeved. I was sorry, but in a hurry, I said goodbye and hung up. Even now, it doesn't seem such a damn fool thing to have done. All summer, waiting for war, Mary and I hadn't gone anywhere, and Mary is new to China and did very much want to get out of Shanghai just for a little. We live in a small house very quietly, and it had been dull for us both. We felt we must go somewhere after giving up our long holiday. We had to go, we agreed. To Putu or to Tianmu Shan or to Nanking. All of these are just short. It was I who decided on Nanking. were young men, dinner parties, and dancing in Nanking, I pointed out. We wired two of the young men that we were coming, and we left Shanghai on the o'clock express Thursday morning. That, it happened, was the very last train to get through. But we had no way of knowing. Nobody said not to go. AMY: And it devolves from there KIM: Yeah. AMY: Right? JULIA: Totally. AMY: It gets really dicey. KIM: Mm-hmm, JULIA: it is a horror journey on an epic scale of these two young women caught in the crosshairs the geopolitical tumult of War II in the Pacific front. AMY: With a duck KIM: Yeah. JULIA: a duck. AMY: Yes. It's such a good story. It is KIM: Yep. Uh-huh AMY: story. And yeah, that's the one I was thinking of when I was like, when she does start to write about harrowing things, it really moves you. Yeah JULIA: It does because she has this touch her unwillingness to caricature people also applies to situations. So, you know, a harrowing train ride amid an invasion it doesn't lose its, like, ridiculous and picturesque tiny little detail that doesn't to fit in with a harrowing train ride in the middle of war AMY: Yeah. Like the duck, yeah. JULIA: Exactly. the hatbox, no AMY yeah. I'll just let listeners read it because it's really gripping, we kinda talked about her interest in politics. she pretended or claimed that she wasn't at all interested in politics, but that doesn't seem like it could possibly be true given everything she lived through, JULIA: Yeah, she had a really hard time with the idea of group affiliation, and I think that applied politics, and I think that applied to feminism also. Um, one thing that I found really interesting a-as I was researching this book was, um, the degree to which the feminist movement did not take a back seat in the and ' early 60s, the way that it is often portrayed in mass culture as having taken a back seat. You know, I feel like when we think about the '50s, we think a lot about post-war roles and June Cleaver and The Feminine Mystique. While that's true for a certain demographic of person, that's also really untrue for the culture at large. There were women making huge leaps and women pushing activism forward in a lot of different ways. And so I think she really was skeptical of this notion of, um, letting a group definition or group affiliation start to overtake the reality of the small actions that are taken, to move things forward, if that makes sense. I know that's a really abstract way of phrasing it, but she lived feminism. She didn't like feminists KIM: Mm-hmm. Yeah. JULIA: And so I think that was also true with politics as well. Like, she, had certain political and, and thoughts and feelings, and a lot of it was really predicated on individual freedom, um, and individual choice not buying into anyone else's definition of, your political perspective. KIM: Yeah, exactly. Like her whole thing was being independent and having that freedom. She doesn't want anyone telling her what to do, JULIA: Completely. And she- doesn't wanna tell anyone else what to do either. She could not give two shits what anyone else did KIM: In that way, I think, you know, certain movements can almost feel like a religion. You have to buy into everything to be a part of it almost sometimes, or the perception is that, JULIA: Totally. KIM: And that doesn't really work for people like her. JULIA: Yeah, like the different textures of the purity test. Emily would not have put up with that at all. KIM: Exactly. So, um, as your book details, Emily Hahn's life intersected with that of Martha Gellhorn and also Rebecca West at various points across the decades. And you write about the concept of new journalism and how these three women don't actually get the credit they deserve for helping spawn this whole movement. JULIA: Totally, yeah. It's a huge thread of the book. Starry and Restless has these competing impulses. On the one hand, um, they're really just about these women's lives, because I find them fascinating, and I felt really upset that I had not known about them before. but then the why I hadn't known about them before ties into the argument, thread of book, , I learned in graduate school and in about, the new journalists, right? These people who had redefined journalism in the '60s and ' and how they were really first people to inject voice in such a dramatic and, style-driven way of r-reporting, right? that you didn't have to fudge on the facts or the reporting or rigor of, examination, or you didn't have to give up on style, right? And that I was that that didn't become terribly popularized until the ' '60s. And when I started reading about Mickey and Martha and Rebecca, and some other people too, it wasn't just them, I understood how incredibly wrong that was, and that women in particular in the ' and 40s had been doing this incredibly voice-driven reporting, all along. And even looking further back, you can look at the stunt girls, you can look at Nellie Bly, you can look at a lot of different writers who were employing the narrative techniques that, the new journalists really took credit for, which, you know, if we're oversimplifying it, it's writing fact as if it were fiction, using the narrative techniques that we're used to seeing in novels, but while doing reporting. of people had been doing it. Many of them were women, largely because women had to justify their presence, at these various places and, and the reasons they had to make their writing more compelling to get it into the pages. And they didn't have the same access, so when you don't have access, you have to get creative. So you're gonna be like, " I'll put myself in this story JULIA: Exactly. And when you don't have access, the vantage point then becomes more important. So on some level, voice-driven reporting is kind of necessarily done by people who are not white men in the beginning of the 20th century because they had to prove and they had to justify their presence there. KIM: It also seems like there's a connection with when you mentioned Nellie Bly um, like danger is a component of it too. JULIA: Totally. And on some level it's like titillating, but it's also important KIM: Yeah. Um, and so at one point in her 20s as a "New Yorker" writer, Hahn had the opportunity to sit at the Algonquin Round Table, but it seems like, you know, the life of Dorothy Parker maybe would've kind of bored her. Do you think that's true? JULIA: Yeah, I think it would've bored her, and I think also, she just is not interested in dwelling on or pulling people for lack of a better term. Um, I think overly critical perspectives kind of struck her as a little pointless, because from her perspective, there's so much that's incredible and magical and, confounding and weird and, and just about the world about people. Why would you waste time just criticizing other people? KIM: Yeah, and she has the wit and the razor-sharp brain. It's just like, how do you want to use that superpower almost? Yeah, yeah. JULIA: Totally. Yes, that's exactly it KIM: So like we said, we don't have time to talk about all the amazing narrow escapes that Mickey Hahn had, all the incredible adventures, all the fascinating people she met, the wild time she lived there, so much. Um, but you need to read Julia's book so you can get all these juicy details. It is a wild ride. So great, uh, the entire book. And of course, there's all of Emily Hahn's writing to explore too, so we're gonna keep you busy there. AMY: Yeah, and we've talked predominantly today about her memoirs, and then we've mentioned that she also wrote biographies. But she also wrote plenty of fiction, and I haven't read any of her novels. Julia, are there any in particular that really stand out to you? JULIA: I love I Affair is one of the great novels, of like youth and young womanhood, in It's about a woman who gets pregnant in Depression-era New York and gets an abortion. and the way that she depicts, being young and single in the city and living with roommates, it's timeless. So I really like that one. I don't love a lot of her other novels. I really think that her reporting is much more vivid, she tries to go into, um, omniscient third person, it of starts to flatten a little bit. She really requires the crispness and of her own vantage point, to do her best writing. AMY: It's really crazy to me that she did and wrote so much, and that most people living today don't know a thing about her. The edition of No Hurry Home that I read, I can't remember who it was, but it was a, a coworker at The New Yorker wrote the introduction to a reissue of that book, and talked about, yeah, I knew Mickey Hahn as my coworker. She had the office by the elevator in The New Yorker office." And, like, in her later years, it's almost like this new staff came through, and it was just like, "Oh, yeah, that's just Mickey." No, do you realize what she’s gone through? KIM: You should be sitting at her feet. Yeah. AMY: Exactly. I just wish more people revered all that she did, I guess. JULIA: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I found it tremendously freeing to understand that these women had claimed lives of this kind of magnitude, in that era. And far more women than I was ever told. You know, I, I kinda grew up with the, "You can do anything, you kinda can't," ethos of the, like, ' and ' 90s. And I think perspective on that would've been different had I really understood That women have been crazy awesome shit for centuries, and, and that we have a robust history. You don't have to be totally exceptional to do these incredible things, you just have to be wildly determined. And you know, it is worth noting that all of the women in my book came from some degree of privilege, which does make it a whole lot easier to claim a life, right? As Martha Gellhorn said, that amazing quote of hers "I was a born Wandervogel, but that is easy " enough when you can wire home for money." KIM: Good point. Yep JULIA: you know, there's a degree of, financial security that really can't be written KIM: Yeah JULIA: But the roles are not as rigidly as we might think they are. KIM: Yeah. So Mickey Hahn is such an inspiring woman, as you can all tell. She was fearless. Her work remains so readable, uh, so interesting. We just wanna thank you so much, Julia, for bringing her to our attention. This has been such a fun discussion. so excited for listeners to get to hear it. JULIA: Thank you so much having me AMY: So that's all for today's episode. If you liked what you heard, consider giving us a rating and review. Wherever you listen. It helps new listeners find us. We'll be back in two weeks with a fresh episode. But if that's too long to wait, consider signing up for our twice monthly bonus episodes where I talk more about books and history relating to lost ladies of literature. Go to lost ladies of lit.com and click Become a Patron to Learn More, our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by AMY Helmes and KIM Askew.