Letter to Martha

Dear Martha,

I wanted to write to ask you about how you viewed your book Travels with Myself and Another as you got older and perhaps matured some more. I don't know if that's a fair description of things, the maturation, but I wanted to know if your views changed at all. You were really unfavorable and kind of insulting of some places and I wondered why you kept things that way. You were particularly harsh with your account of traveling through China, and I wanted to know if you felt the same way as you did later. I thought personally that you criticized it perhaps unfairly harshly, but that might just be my opinion from reading it so much later than when you wrote it and with a much different cultural context for it than when you had written it. I know part of what made the journey so interesting is that it was so much of a challenge and that the conditions were so poor, especially with that infection which you got towards the end, but I thought that perhaps you could have focused onto some better parts of the journey. It seemed like it was unfairly overshadowed by all the negative things which happened, which isn't a bad thing, the negative should have a place in the story, but they shouldn't be the only part of the story. At least that's my thoughts on the matter.

I thought that you did a much more balanced accounting of things when you were in Africa and appreciated your style much more at that point than otherwise. You covered the things that were bad, the weather and bugs and how you came in woefully underprepared, but you also highlighted the moments which were better. I really appreciated how you described meeting the sultan or whatever his proper title was out in the bush. I thought it was much more keenly observant and looked at him and his culture in a more complete and sensitive way than when you wrote about your experiences in China and in the Caribbean islands during World War II.

I also wanted to mention your travel to Russia. What was it like? It seemed hard for me to get a sense of the actual place from your writing. You focused it more onto the interactions that you had with your friend there, which I found strange because nowhere else did you drive the story with people. What caused you to make that choice? Because it seemed like a conscious decision, you mentioned going sightseeing, but you said you could hardly recall what Red Square looked like. Was it because the reason you went to Russia was specifically to visit Mrs. M, or was there something else behind the choice of centering your account onto her?