Toward the end of grad school in the late 1990s, I often fantasized about parlaying my impending journalism degree into work as a foreign correspondent. I was writing for the Prague Post at the time and wanted to keep traveling, so the prospect of doing that while learning about — and from — unfamiliar cultures while enabling others to do the same through my reporting seemed like the greatest gig imaginable. For various reasons, those starry-eyed dreams went unrealized and my restlessness morphed into regret. But all that latent journalistic wanderlust reawakened as I read “Starry and Restless,” Julia Cooke’s aptly titled biography of pioneering foreign correspondents Rebecca West, Martha Gellhorn, and Emily Hahn. While Cooke considers the trio’s entire careers, she homes in on the decades bookending the Second World War, an “era electric with both threat and possibility” when her subjects were, “quite simply, the best at what they did.”
Women were rarely taken seriously as journalists in the early 1900s, so to excel to the degree that these three did required not only tremendous reporting and writing skills, but unshakeable confidence and dogged persistence, qualities that West, Gellhorn, and Hahn possessed in abundance. Cooke addresses the tides of journalism history writ large, including the debt her trio owes to those, like so-called “stunt girl” Nellie Bly, who came before, and the ways that women influenced the editorial push and pull between literary journalism and more conventional ideals of “unbiased,” perspective-less reporting. Even without an examination of such broad themes, writing about three such fulsome lives in a single tidy volume requires numerous compromises, so Cooke’s coverage is often necessarily cursory, though it rarely feels rushed.
The pace is thrillingly breakneck in the first half of the book when Hahn is in China and Hong Kong; Gellhorn is covering the Spanish Civil War and meeting future husband Ernest Hemingway; and West is visiting and revisiting Yugoslavia, trips she will document in her doorstop of a travelogue-cum-history “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.” Things slow down considerably in the book’s second half when all three women have become mothers and settled into relative degrees of domesticity, with relative degrees of interest, longevity, and contentment. None of them ever completely stops seeking out the next adventure. West’s narrative falters the most in these later sections, with the emphasis placed on her domestic troubles with her son, Anthony, the product of a lengthy affair she had in her twenties with the much older HG Wells, instead of a deeper exploration of intriguing late career highlights such as her coverage of the Nuremberg trials and a lynching case in Greenville, South Carolina.
The British-born West and the slightly younger Americans Gellhorn and Hahn all socialized and corresponded with each other over the years, but only the latter two reported together from the field. All three started writing professionally in their late teens, leading to novels or, in Hahn’s case, a book about dating, and were quickly picked up as stringers for magazines, including the New Yorker, for which they all wrote throughout their careers. All had numerous, often notorious, lovers, which colored their reputations because of society’s misogynistic double-standards. And they all counted several famous friends, none more than Gellhorn, who was so close with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt that she briefly lived at the White House, before moving on to more storied locations such as the Finca Vigía in Cuba (which she renovated, though Hemingway got to keep it in their divorce) or the Red Cross hospital boat heading to Omaha Beach, where she locked herself inside the bathroom so that she could cover D-Day.
I knew nothing about Hahn before reading “Starry and Restless,” but came away wishing she had been the book’s sole subject. Mickey, as Hahn was known, taught geology at Hunter College while freelancing punchy, humorous travel vignettes. Inspired by West, she headed to the Belgian Congo in 1930, then six years later went on vacation to Shanghai, where she ended up staying for eight years. Pet gibbon perched on her shoulder, Hahn soaked up the city where “pleasure was paramount.” She had a polygamous marriage to a Chinese playboy poet, became an opium addict, did a stint as a sex worker, and had a child with British intelligence officer Charles Boxer, who was subsequently interned by the Japanese. And at the same time, she churned out risqué autofiction, bestselling memoirs, and some of the most remarkable wartime journalism of the age. She filed continual feature-length dispatches about Japan’s invasion of mainland China and Hong Kong and was the first journalist to interview the three American-educated Soong sisters, who had each married a prominent Chinese politician, one of whom was revolutionary leader Chiang Kai-shek. Returning stateside after the war, Hahn realized that she “cut a near-mythical figure in the American imagination.” I’m baffled she does not to this day. (Where is the Mickey Hahn biopic?)
In her starry-eyed, restless youth, West dreamed of “a future of unruly women unbound by class and expectation, craving the chaos and satisfaction of revolution, bloody red meat and rich velvet ribbons, knickknacks from faraway lands and the tang of red currants cut with sugar.” The flashes of such a world presented in “Starry and Restless” yields some of the most unforgettable journalists of the 20th century, but reading about these irrepressibly curious careers at a time when the entire journalism industry has so fundamentally changed and degraded is decidedly bittersweet. Thirty years ago, the lives of West, Gellhorn, and Hahn were still aspirational; today they can only be admired.
STARRY AND RESTLESS: Three Women Who Changed Work, Writing, and the World
By Julia Cooke
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 448 pages, $32
Cory Oldweiler is a freelance critic and writer.