Arts and Letters

The dead possess their lives, silently. We memorialists—talk. But I doubt we have them at a disadvantage. Their life-works, their very lives, extend toward the comments to come. All Emily Hahn's life was as open to the public as she preferred to make it. The formal obits on this girl from Missouri who became one of the world's leading correspondents on the life of her time are frank, wise, perhaps guided by her own pen. The New York Times calls her "Chronicler of Her Own Exploits"—which is accurate. The Guardian notes: "Her father, Isaac Newton Hahn, was an atheist who read passages from the Bible to his children so that he could point out inconsistencies." And reminds us that she would cause a furor as the first woman to enroll in the faculty of mining engineering at the University of Wisconsin—shifting from English Literature when a professor told her that "women were incapable of grasping mechanics or higher mathematics."

On graduation she worked as an oil geologist, a horse-back guide in the New Mexico wilderness, and took a trip across country in a Model T Ford, an account of which, in 1929, began her long association with The New Yorker. In 1931 she went to the Belgian Congo, where she spent two years at a Red Cross medical outpost working among pygmies. Both her travel book, Congo Solo, and her novel, With Naked Foot, were critical of European exploitation of Africa and its population, but as The Guardian says, "Both books were ahead of their time … The same was true of her 1935 novel, The Affair, which dealt with alienated youth … and abortion."

I came from another quarter, as one of those scores of persons here and abroad to whom "Mickey," as she was known to family and friends, constantly reported in anecdote. Though she and I met in the 1950s, we would see each other only intermittently, in Britain, or here in the U.S. The many personae in her mixed worlds would then be reported on, and in turn, no doubt to each other. We would join each other in her world, and sometimes later, read about it. I was never to meet the lively intimate who'd opened the first launderette in postwar London, but always asked, and was told, how she fared. Nor was I present when Emily, overhearing two Africans comment pointedly on Hahn—joined in, in Swahili. But I knew that one of them had turned out to be Nkrumah. Though I had only read about her tiger-hunt with a Maharajah, I seemed to know him well. When she returned, I got to know him better. "He wants me to send him a fountain that works on champagne, and an aphrodisiac called yohimbe. By any chance, know where to get them?"

"Hammacher Schlemmer for the one," I told her. "Not for the other."

We were in her office. She dragged me down the aisle to where The New Yorker's checkers worked. "I want to look up an aphrodisiac called yohimbe." What seemed to me twenty or so identical brown male pates swiveled. Perhaps it was only their expressions that made them seem like replicas of one another.

Sometimes, after two of her unending circle had actually met, she introducing, she would reflect. On John Gunther, say—who, as a young man visiting the Hahn sisters, couldn't decide which of the sisters he liked best, so stayed later each night—until Mickey's father came to the head of the stairs and called down, "Take any one of them you want, John. Just leave me the old lady."

Emily seemed to me to sail the world in anecdote. So, in memoriam, I give you mine. And hear her comment: "So—you're stuck with me. We won't apologize."

We met when Bernice Baumgarten, our respected agent—and wife of James Gould Cozzens—sent me to her, I en route to London on a fellowship. "Never introduce clients to one another, but this time I will." I already knew the extraordinary memoir, China to Me, in which as a correspondent in the war against the Japanese and during the revolution, Hahn had known Mao, Chou En-lai, the Soong sisters, and had lived with the man she called "my Chinese husband," the poet and intellectual who had been her cultural guide. Later she would marry Major Charles Boxer, head of British intelligence in Hong Kong, by whom she had previously had a daughter. When he was imprisoned by the Japanese, she would stay on for eighteen months to bring him food (though she never saw him)—but finally for the baby's sake, would return here in 1943.

In my mind, Hahn was already allied with that long line of adventurers, once called adventuresses, which Lesley Blanch had once categorized—British, many of them. But Mickey was an American, and that may have obscured her very specialized and poignant accomplishment. In England she wasn't quite of this "native" tradition; here we hadn't it recognizably, though we had women of that ilk.

The Boxers and I met on the train down to Dorset, for a weekend at Conygar, Charles' family home. On that trip I was initiated as onlooker to that cross-ocean union, founded in a prison history always present to them, and conducted in a chaff both enjoyed. When Charles, the prototype gentleman, didn't help toss our bags in the upper rack, she said in an aside: "He can't, you know, because of the hand"—a relic of camp torture, and encased in a glove. Entering Conygar, when he said: "Would you like to see the house," Emily said, "That means: Want the bathroom?" All her life she would interpret nationals to each other. Much later, she would send me an African politico named Mzena, whom my husband and I showed around New York, dawn to dusk, Mzena lamenting that all Americans knew of his country was Kilimanjaro—meanwhile refusing all offers of a meal until dinner hour, when, chattering an assignation on the phone in his own language, he left, not including us, who out of politeness had fasted with him. Emily laughed, when later told. "He did the same to me in Africa, when showing me around. Saying when I finally asked for nourishment, 'Oh, so sorry. You see, I came from a cannibal heritage. We only eat once a day.'" I said, "I did ask him—was he a vegetarian. He said, 'No.’” When with Emily, one spent a lot of time laughing.—And Mzena with us.

At Conygar, settling me in for the night, she gave me Anthony West's autobiography, saying: "Rebecca's furious. Why, do you suppose?"

On the way down to breakfast, next morning, having read the book, I was full of it. "I don't think it's so much what he said; it's deeper. I think every writer sets up as the family chronicler, the only one. He defied that."

She gave me a long look. She was that already. At breakfast we three served ourselves mutely from the sideboard, burying ourselves in newspapers. No conversation. When the mail was brought in some time later, she broke our three-sided silence, smiling at me. "You passed the test."

The mail included Charles' new book. As a Brit said to me haughtily: “After the marital scandal, he simply turned around and became the world authority on Portuguese naval history. A soldier-scholar. You Americans haven't them."

"Charles' books are published in editions of eight," Emily said. They both grinned. Later, taking me to the basement to show me pipes brashly new, she said: "The British never really understand central heating." Years later, the two of us sweating in a newly heated London establishment, when I said without preamble—“They still don't—" she picked it up at once, chortling—she never forgot anything said. We agreed that if the churches were ever heated, British culture would come to an end, arguing happily on which would do it first. She would also be the one to quote me the ditty that followed the Iron Lady for years after her down-grading of school lunches: "Maggie Thatcher, milk-snatcher."

She was a feminist born, not needing to hate men or get eczema from pornography, or to refuse to judge women and men equally. Always politically aware, she would never be politically correct.

One image recurring is that of Emily dancing to a Victrola record with her younger daughter, Amanda, then four. In her later years we would see her with her elder daughter Carola, her niece Hilary and husband Charles Schlessiger, nephew Greg Dawson—all over here. She was powerfully devoted to family, living surrounded by their beloved circle no matter where she happened to be. This is what the obits could not know. It was the part of her life that went without saying. Did she progress with the decades, or remain so much her brisk self that she seemed part of each—along with a good bit of 1920s-style mischief? Discussing marriage—I was trying to decide whether to—she said to me, "Oh do—so much easier in hotels." The Guardian calls her "this wonderfully unsuburban woman."

She had also a notable devotion to unsuburban animals—the ape family particularly. When she returned from Hong Kong, a young MD, John Prutting—called in on the plea, "My baby is sick," found himself treating not Carola but a gibbon. "They get pneumonia just like us. I was afraid to say." Years later, after her traumatic return to Japan, my husband and I agreed to meet Emily and Charles at an inn near their new home in Hertfordshire—we, on a barge-canal trip taking all day to negotiate the eight miles of locks. Charles, driven over in as many minutes, greeted me on the towpath, saying "Miss Calisher, I presume. Mickey's in the bar. She has photos to show you." The men lingered at the barge. In the bar she said to me: "In Japan some zoos dress the chimps and use them for service tasks." The pics were charming, and heartbreaking. ''Aren't they—" Mickey said. She put them away. Shortly, a stiff country gentleman seized on us, and could not be shook. Finally I said, "My friend has some pictures she would like to show you." He gleamed. The shot she chose showed Emily touching noses—or kissing, had jaws been equal, a chimp dressed in frilly bonnet and housemaid uniform. When we looked again, our man had melted away.

Some years later, checking a dolphin scientist's data, she jumped in the pool to join his subjects, wearing—what else?—a pink bathing suit.

These are small stories, from a large life. She wrote steely sentences that at the same time charmed. Intelligence vibrates in her books; pick up any of the fifty or more that are cherished as informative entertainment but cannot be dismissed as such. The book on zoos, Animal Gardens, is full of non-academic zoological lore. In Africa to Me, which begins in the mud hut in the Congo, she will embark on that study of "colorization"—i.e., skin-color, which is still pertinent thirty-five years on. Our copy of the book, On the Side of the Apes, is inscribed "To Curtis and Hortense with love from Emily Hahn—the first chimp who ever read a book." She saw apes as human, humans as primates. Never mean, generous but just, she is an anthropologist of the world, offering us the examined life—hers and ours, with a breadth that leaves us grateful—and amazed.