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PACK PADKOS WHEN INVITED FOR DINNER AT 1600 PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE
Years ago, in the mid-1990s, I was fortunate enough to meet (in a B&B in Melville, Johannesburg, of all places) Martha Gellhorn, one of the 20th century’s greatest war correspondents. I’d long been an admirer of her books; in particular View From the Ground, The Face of War (both Granta) and The Trouble I’ve Seen (Eland Publishing). All highly recommended.
Gellhorn was then old and frail, and I was warned not to ask about Ernest Hemingway, which seemed absurd. She may have been his third wife, but her own accomplishments were legion; having covered every major conflict from the Spanish Civil War through to the wars in Central America in the mid-1980s, it perhaps would have been more apposite to ask Hemingway about her.
Gellhorn and Hemingway are just two of the myriad characters that pop up in food historian Laura Shapiro’s fascinating What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories (Fourth Estate).
The pair had been invited to the Franklin D Roosevelt’s White House for dinner in 1937. It was a first for Hemingway, and he was greatly surprised Gellhorn wolfed down three sandwiches on the way there. “When you’re invited to a meal at the White House,” she told him, “eat before you go.”
Sage advice. Contemporary presidential menus were horrific. Hemingway complained of “rainwater soup” and a “cake some admirer had sent in. An enthusiastic but unskilled admirer.”
The Roosevelts didn’t have to tolerate such fare. But Eleanor Roosevelt perversely insisted on employing one Henrietta Nesbitt, an exceptionally untalented cook and housekeeper whose reign of terror at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue included mayonnaise dyed green. Why? It was how she got back at her philandering husband. Revenge was served up to three times a day, hot or cold, and tasteless. It does all seem Raold Dahl-ish, doesn’t it?
The other women in Shapiro’s book are Eva Braun, Helen Gurley Brown, Rosa Lewis, Dorothy Wordsworth and Barbara Pym. What’s the link between them all? Absolutely nothing.
The first ever words, incidentally, uttered by Braun to Adolf Hitler were apparently: “Guten appetit!” She had just served Bavarian sausage to a vegetarian.
CRASH COURSE
Most of us want to die in our beds at home, surrounded by loved ones and creature comforts. Instead, most of us will die in hospitals. Cheery stuff, I know. But nothing is more certain than death, or more bewildering and strange. In recent years, there’s been heaps of books by writers who’ve scrutinised their final days: Oliver Sacks, Christopher Hitchens, Jenny Diski and Atul Gawande, among others.
Yet two new books – From Here to Eternity: Travelling the World to Find the Good Death (W&N) by Caitlin Doughty, and With the End in Mind: Dying, Death and Wisdom in an Age of Denial (William Collins) by Kathryn Mannix – seem to make the point that, although it’s easier to live longer these days, it is becoming more difficult to die well.
Mannix is a palliative doctor, or “deathwife”, as she refers to herself. She spends her days with the terminally ill and their families. To her, death is something that visits families slowly, over months and years, and while much of her work is medical and diagnostic, she also crucially helps those who are dying and their loved ones to find ways of dealing with the final, great event.
Once you’re gone, well, that’s when Doughty takes over. A rather boisterous American mortician, she earned a reputation for telling it like it is with her first book, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. (Crematorium work, obviously.)
Her From Here to Eternity is an oddly cheerful travel book, and she relishes those rituals from various cultures around the word – from Mexico’s Day of the Dead to the breaking of bodies in Tibet so they may be more easily consumed by vultures – that openly acknowledge death’s enormity.
IN PASSING
Rest in peace, then, Peter Mayle, who died last week at 78. The retired advertising executive whose 1989 bestseller, A Year in Provence, started a major trend in memoir and travel writing. Mayle, who started his writing career in his 30s with sex-education books for children, had moved to France in 1987 with the aim of renovating an 18th-century farmhouse and writing a novel. Hassles with the former interfered with the latter, and so his agent convinced him to drop the novel and write about the distractions instead.
THE BOTTOM LINE
“I want to be the last girl in the world with a story like mine.” – The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State by Nadia Murad (Tim Duggan Books)
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- View From the Ground by Martha Gellhorn
EAN: 9781862071490
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- The Face of War by Martha Gellhorn
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- The Trouble I’ve Seen: Four stories from the Great Depression by Martha Gellhorn
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- What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories by Laura Shapiro
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- From Here to Eternity: Travelling the World to Find the Good Death by Caitlin Doughty
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- With the End in Mind: Dying, Death, and Wisdom in an Age of Denial by Kathryn Mannix
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- Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty
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- A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle
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- The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State by Nadia Murad
EAN: 9781524760434
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