The Kitchen of Life

Martha Gellhorn hated shopping, opening mail, hiring tradesmen: all the business of running a household. While she relished long bouts of intense reporting and writing, and loved heavy physical labor, she scorned paperwork and housework. She called it the “damned kitchen of life” or the “kitchen of death.”

She resented it as work men foisted off on women. Though she never identified as a feminist, Gellhorn gave herself the same career-first prerogatives as her male colleagues. Throughout her 20s, she traveled to report, and borrowed houses for extended periods of writing, never setting up a home of her own.

Her first experiment in house-holding came in 1939 at the Finca Figía with Ernest Hemingway. He promised a writing life of mutual support but was content to live in squalor, so all the work fell to her. Gellhorn guarded Hemingway’s solitude and daily routines as he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls, but when it was finished, he commenced a yearlong binge and let her fend for herself. Plus, the Finca was hard work. An old house in the tropics, it suffered leaks and infestations, and they entertained quite a bit, holding Sunday open houses for years. He talked and poured drinks, and left the rest to her.

For most of her life, Gellhorn paid other people to cook, clean, and do laundry, but resented having to hire, train, and manage them, half from contempt and half from guilt. So great was her despair over finding suitable help when setting up a townhouse in London in 1954 with her wealthy new husband Tom Matthews, she brought two women from Spain, Dolores (Lola) Ruiz and Rosario Moreno, to run it.  They became family to her, even accompanying Gellhorn to Mombasa in 1964 when she left Matthews, and she supported them long after they left her employ. Given the tricky mutual dependencies, she preferred hotel living to any other kind, and loved nothing better than writing in a cheap, clean pensione by a hot beach.

But Gellhorn’s resentment of the kitchen of life went well beyond problematic class and gender roles. While reporting the last year of World War II in Europe, she witnessed a great deal of suffering, violence, and death, and grew tetchy with people who did not keep the ultimate price in front of their eyes. Life was too short and valuable to waste on trivialities. Hunting down a derelict contractor seemed absurd after seeing Dachau. She said she was driven not by fear of death, but fear of not being alive.

But Gellhorn’s ire at the “kitchen of death” goes even beyond this impatience with the mundane. Her long time at war left her with the after-effects of trauma. Her executive function, the part of the brain that organizes and sequences tasks, and oversees planning, problem solving, and decision making, may well have been disrupted. She experienced intrusive memories and anger, and had trouble with sleep, drugs, alcohol, and relationships. Self-employed and for many years a single mother, Gellhorn was overwhelmed by the array of tasks before her, and once triggered, rage would make it even more difficult. Fulminating about the evils of cheating tradesmen and faceless bureaucracies provided cover for her cognitive difficulties. Since a secure, ordered home was crucial to her stability, such struggles became even more burdened.

Given her fame and accomplishments, Gellhorn hated to show vulnerability. In the mid-1960s, in order to find the solitude she needed to regulate herself, she built a house on the side of a volcano in the Great Rift Valley of Kenya, 15 miles from the nearest neighbor. She had to bring in potable water by jerry can.  She learned to service propane tanks and burners, and coaxed forth a garden in windswept, alkaline soil. This monumental challenge of homesteading pleased and soothed her, as the work served her basic needs, and did not require complex logistical planning. It gave her a sense of accomplishment, and tired her out enough that she could sleep at night. Her serenity was blighted by workers who left the gas taps open after the cooking was done and watered the garden at the wrong time of day, but on balance the building and running of her Naivasha house was therapeutic. It gave her long, solitary, peaceful days in remarkable natural beauty. When she sold it after about ten years, she bought a cottage in South Wales, saying it was a lot easier to get there from London, and tended a large garden each summer, drinking wine by the box.

While we might find Gellhorn’s resistance to mundane tasks feminist or classist, it’s also darker and more poignant, and a measure of how her struggles have been misunderstood. It’s one cost of her long service to journalism and democracy.