Our book today is an essential classic: Our Hearts Were Young and Gay by Cornelia Otis Skinner and Emily Kimbrough (we’ve met Emily before here at Stevereads), their 1942 bestseller about the madcap European tour they took as fresh-faced Bryn Mawr graduates back in the comparatively innocent days of the 1920s. They strike a mischievously tongue-in-cheek tone of heroic stoicism about the sacrifices they endured in order to save up for the trip (“going without sodas”), offhandedly note that their parents provided them with letters of credit (“enough to permit us to live for three months abroad if not in the lap of luxury, at least on the knees of comfort”), pack their bags, and embark on their steamship.

Not exactly the most original of premises, but oh, how to describe to the newcomer the droll, hilarious wonders Skinner & Kimbrough fashion out of their familiar travelogue setup! They hardly require half a dozen pages to begin weaving a sharply smart and funny and seriously silly narrative that burbles along on a stream of hapless incredulity and out-of-their-depth bumbling. In incident after incident, we see the girls striving to be worldly and sophisticated and failing hilariously every time:

We bathed, changed from our curious traveling attire into our best crepe marocain dresses and went to the Ritz, where Emily’s friends blew us to a lavish feast. We each put on an act for the benefit of the other, trying to behave as if quail and champagne at the Ritz were merely the equivalent of a banana-split and hot chocolate with marshmallow whip at the Bryn Mawr Cottage Tea Room. I’m afraid we didn’t get away with it. The champagne gave us away. I had lived in Paris for a year but had never drunk anything more giddy than vin ordinaire thinned with Evian. Champagne was as unknown to me as marijuana, but I tried to be casual about it as an old Deauville rip. Emily, who was descended from a long line of Indiana teetotlers, took her first sip of demon alcohol with the bravura of Eve biting into the apple. This was when she discovered that champagne makes her slightly deaf. Its effect upon me was to make me look distant and sad and I hoped everyone would think I had had an unhappy love affair.

For chapter after chapter, we watch these two wreak havoc wherever they go, and thanks to their effervescent writing style, the book feels simultaneously period-piece and contemporary. The vanished world of pre-modern travel – steamships, travel trunks, washing basins – lives vibrantly in these pages, right alongside a clueless American sense of entitlement that’s felt completely contemporary to me every time I’ve re-read this book over the decades. In my latest re-reading, I found myself enjoying especially the delectable little wasp-sting comments they make about many of the people they encounter (watch for the parentheses in all cases):

Through some colorful flight of fancy we had made arrangements to take over the rooms of a former Bryn Mawr student who had spent the previous winter working for a Ph.D at the University of London. She was one of those brilliant scholars far too intellectual to be concerned with creature comforts, and after we saw the way she lived we came to the conclusion we weren’t intellectual types after all. She had written to us that she was leaving for a “hiking” trip (that fine outdoor term implicit in any number of splendid things in the way of blisters, fish and chips and a brave avoidance of baths). However, she assured us that the landlady was fully cognizant of our arrival, and would be waiting for us with welcome at I forget what number Tavisock Square. As a cheery afterthought she added she hoped we’d be happy in her “digs,” a word which slightly startled us and made us wonder if we were to lodge in some sort of cellar.

My hardcover copy of Our Hearts Were Young and Gay is delightfully illustrated by Constantin Alajalov, and the book is extra-light in the hand, since it’s printed on cheap wartime-rationed paper, but even so, it’s held up much better than the much-later mass market paperback I used to have. I keep thinking I ought to upgrade my battered old hardcover to a spiffy New York Review of Books reprint or a slim, beautiful Penguin Classic edition, or maybe, if I’m feeling generous, a pricey-but-beautiful Franklin Mint slipcased hardcover … except that none of those things exist. Instead, this glittering little book that brought so much joy to so many is currently languishing out of print. So I guess I’ll hold onto my battered old hardcover.