Laura Thompson, Agatha Christie (2007)
Sep. 29th, 2011 06:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marinessI'm a bit – just a bit – of an Agatha Christie nut; have been ever since I read Death on the Nile at the age of nine and got the murderer entirely wrong, and shortly afterwards when I read her Autobiography and found that she had imaginary friends, just like me. I was hooked, and equally hooked on biographies.
The problem is that none of these biographies so far have been very good. Janet Morgan's official biography dripped with officialness and "really, she was awfully like her own self-description except slightly more professional," Gillian Gill's Agatha Christie: the Woman and her Mysteries, was considerably more insightful but limited in her access to documents and people who knew and remembered Christie; Jared Cade's Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days was a brutal slapdash job based largely on third hand gossip; leaving really only Charles Osborne's The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie, which is mostly and legitimately focused on the novels. It's not bad, but it leaves a lot out, which is why I was eager to read Thompson's biography which promised a new look.
So, first, let me get some major complaints out of the way, and by major complaints, I'm talking first about the typesetting, which in this case meant that the page printed after page 86 was not, as you might think, page 87, but page 391. The book then continued from page 391 to page 438 (yes, chatting about a later period in Christie's life), then abruptly mid sentence switched back to page 135. Pages 391 to 438 were later repeated in their proper order, but pages 87-134 are nowhere in the book.
This is inexcusable, and along with several other typographical errors, helps explain why this book barely made a splash in the U.S. and is difficult to find (I ordered it months ago through interlibrary loan, which surprisingly enough sent the British edition). Given that these missing pages cover the crucial period of Christie's wedding and first years with her first husband, and her first published mystery novels, it's hard not to feel that a significant section is missing. Then again, much of the rest of the book tends towards more than a bit of repetition; paragraphs reappear, Thompson reiterates the same points about and quotes from The Five Little Pigs and portions of Death on the Nile and so on. So maybe those pages had nothing that new, but I still would have liked to have read what Thompson had to say about Christie's experience in World War I – when she picked up the detailed knowledge about poisons that she would use in later books.
While I'm venting, Thompson also equally inexcusably praises the literary talents of Enid Blyton, saying that Blyton created "a world of solid artistic reality," a phrase that doubtless would have had Blyton collapsing in laughter. Look, I'm more than ready to agree that Agatha Christie remains greatly underrated by literary critics, who dismiss her skill at characterization and her very careful choices of words. But Enid Blyton? No. She was a hack and a terrible writer.
Also? Although I must agree with Thompson's qualms about the more recent Marple adaptations, David Suchet? Is doing a superb job as Poirot, thank you very much, and is considerably better and more convincing than Peter Ustinov.
Which is not to say that Thompson's book does not have its insights and its points, despite a tendency towards a diffuse style. Thompson tackles the often taut relationship between Agatha and her older, talented sister Madge, pointing out the fierce rivalries and jealousies between the sisters, separated by a large age gap. Agatha glossed over this in her autobiography, but Madge enjoyed a successful, if limited, literary career, publishing well received short stories and a play. If she never went further, it is probably because Madge lacked Agatha's drive and ambition, and also because Madge had no financial incentive to write. Her husband was wealthy; she enjoyed a marvelous social life and the admiration of peers. And she was also a more "literary" writer than the self-proclaimed low-brow Agatha.
Agatha initially wrote partly for distraction, but also for money: when she made the decision to marry Archie Christie, she also made the decision to live in what was for her class a desperate and stressful lack of money – although they always had the wealthy sister as a backup. However much she breezes this aside in her autobiography, where she takes pains to present herself as someone who just fell into writing, as it were, in real life her initial drive towards detective fiction, in particular, stemmed partly from the desperate need for money, and more of it. When the marriage spectacularly and brutally collapsed (ironically, just as the Christies had achieved a certain economic stability), Christie had no other resources. Later, income from novels allowed her to support herself and buy luxuries for her second husband, Max Mallowan. He had a successful career of his own, but academia and archaeology then as now are not lucrative, and Agatha provided the luxuries.
Thompson's analysis of Agatha's second marriage provides some of the most intriguing parts of the book. Max was considerably younger and poorer than Agatha, and neither family approved. Later in life, when Agatha's finances were a mess thanks partly to her purchases of luxury items but mostly thanks to major taxation issues in both the United States and Britain, her daughter Rosalind worked to cap Agatha's salary from the company set up for taxation purposes, mostly to ensure that Agatha would not be spending as much money on Max. It seems that Rosalind resented this. But Agatha – who could never quite forget the way that her first husband had changed from friend and lover to complete stranger, and blamed herself for not taking enough of an interest in him, and allowing herself to get drawn into her grief and career, would not make that mistake again. Spend she did. She also focused on his interests – archaeology and archaeological friends, although even there she could be shy – although at least one friend felt that both her attendance at archaeological events and her shyness there and otherwise came about in part because they were so different from events in England – and because there, no one asked her about those mysterious 11 days.
Thompson quotes passages from their letters indicating that Agatha and Max most definitely enjoyed an active sex life, and continually wrote affectionate greetings to each other. Max knew his wife needed constant reassurance, particularly during their difficult and hellish wartime separation, and knew how to provide it.
And yet, later, Thompson coolly announces that the marriage only worked as it did because neither was really in love.
Which, er, what? What about the letters? The forty-six year marriage and its ability to survive World War II? Agatha had, after all, been divorced; she knew it was possible, although we can all sympathize with her desire to never go through that hell again. Still, the fact that she did not divorce again speaks volumes for the success of the marriage.
As it turns out, this statement is mostly meant as a leadup for Thompson's discussion of Max Mallowan's possible long term affair with Barbara Parker, a fellow archaeologist that Max married two years after Agatha's death. Max himself was to die shortly after this marriage,
Mutual friends felt that this marriage occurred from mutual loneliness; to repeat, Max had been married for forty-six years, the bulk of his life, and was to die shortly after the
But here, Thompson plays coy. She dismisses most of Jared Cade's allegations that Max engaged in numerous affairs with various women on archaeological digs (women actually on the archaeological digs cast doubts on this) and notes, correctly, that his allegations that
Another problem: Thompson, despite criticizing Cade's limited sources, herself uses – wait for it – limited sources. One of these is Agatha's daughter, Rosalind, who by all accounts had a problematic relationship with her mother. This relationship was not helped when Max died, leaving his house, Winterbrook, and its contents – some of which were Agatha's personal possessions – to Barbara. Compared to the millions Rosalind and her son eventually made (after sorting out the tax issues) from Agatha Christie's novels and copyrights, Winterbrook is not much, but Rosalind did have to prove to her stepfather's second wife that certain items were hers, something that apparently caused bitterness, especially given the whispers (and people did whisper) that Barbara and Max had been intimate before Agatha's death.
Thompson's conclusion, woven through her narrative (which often has a very fictional tinge to it), is that the real love of Agatha's life was her mother, followed by her first husband; Max was more of an excellent companion/friend. But if so, then why does she also focus on how desperate Agatha was to keep Max (while simultaneously feeling she would), so desperate to keep earning the money that meant she could keep a certain control over him?
Interestingly, although Thompson draws comparisons between Agatha and several of her characters from both her mysteries and the Mary Westmacott novels, for all of her insistence that Agatha kept Max in line partly through finances, she rarely looks at the multiple examples in Christie novels of older women who did just that – and paid the price. But she does look at one of Christie's unsuccessful plays, Verdict (which I have not seen or read), which pictures a man; his older, sick and ailing wife; a second woman who has been quietly and hopelessly devoted to him for years; and a young girl who kills the wife out of love for the man.
Thompson draws a comparison here, suggesting that Max and Barbara may well have been in love – even though friends did not believe it, even though the main source is a gossipy person who, as Thompson proved, could not have known any of the details of the relationship. After all, a guy in love with two women at once is not unheard of (sleeping with only one of them is a little less unheard of). I suspect, with Thompson, that this second relationship – if it existed at all, and I am doubtful – remained unconsummated, based mostly on the letters she quoted in the book, and partly on the general friendliness of Agatha and Barbara.
Agatha certainly in her novels depicted many sorts of similar love triangles, as well as successful and unsuccessful marriages between older women and younger men, but although her second marriage may have inspired some of this, much of these situations seem more inspired by her first, passionate and absolutely disastrous marriage.
Which brings me to the single most irritating part of the book: Thompson's reconstruction of the 11 days that Agatha Christie disappeared.
If for some reason you're unfamiliar with the story, the most famous incident in Christie's life, it goes something like this: Agatha Christie's car was found abandoned in more or less the middle of nowhere, and Agatha could not be found. Suspicion immediately turned to the husband, Archie, who had recently told Agatha he had fallen in love with another woman. 11 days and a lot of fuss later, Agatha was found living quietly in a Harrogate hotel. Her family announced that Agatha was suffering from amnesia. Agatha refused to discuss the story, ever; it was a sure way to lose her friendship. (It seems possible that she did not even tell Max what happened.)
Pretty much nobody bought the amnesia story then or later, although Janet Morgan's official biography made a valiant attempt to suggest that Agatha was suffering from some sort of fugue. Thompson chooses to fictionalize the entire incident, turning this into a short story from Agatha's viewpoint – beautifully written and quite, quite wrong – and Thompson insists that her version is the truth. Which is that Agatha simply meant to head to Harrogate, left a message for her brother in law explaining this, and did so. She gives a nice account of the car crash, and a completely fictionalized version of Agatha sitting in the Harrogate hotel reading the accounts of her disappearance and thinking how ridiculous it all was.
Thompson's account leaves much to be desired. Part of the problem is the sudden insertion of a short story into her narrative (although at other points she slips into fictional or literary mode). But the larger problem is that nobody actually knows what happened because Agatha never explained. Part of the problem is Thompson's interweaving of texts from Agatha's novels into this short story. But most of the problem is that Thompson's picture of an entirely aware Agatha who was simply caught by surprise at the publicity does not ring true, although certainly many people were caught by the surprise. And Thompson's picture of an entirely aware Agatha does not explain why, after reading the papers, she did not bother to contact family members (other than her husband) terrified by her depressed, suicidal notes. For that matter, Thompson's picture doesn't really account for the depressed, suicidal notes, although she tries hard to show Agatha as depressed.
Which is, right there, the problem: Thompson does not seem to understand clinical depression, and what it does to you. Janet Morgan, for all her need to stay with the official amnesia story, and Gillian Gill, for all her lack of access to additional sources, both understood this. Gill's explanation for Agatha's behavior is deadly simple: severe, severe clinical depression, to the point where Agatha was no longer rational, and thus, she did not act in a rational way.
It's understandable: in the space of one year, she had lost her mother and was losing her husband, and the stress of both had left her unable to write, which must have caused more devastation and panic. She firmly, firmly believed divorce was wrong, and even in the late 60s, during a second, happy marriage, regretted the divorce and noted her own mistakes in her first marriage. (She never regretted marrying Archie Christie, just the things she did later in the marriage.)
But back to Thompson. This bit takes up a significant part of the book – first Thompson's short story, then a repeat of what had happened, where Thompson joins others in blaming the police and media for overreacting (which seems a fair point). And it just feels all wrong, even with the various quotes from Agatha's book as filler.
Anyway. If you can find a copy with all of the pages, I do recommend it as a gossipy read. I just don't think we've had the definitive Christie biography yet, and I'm not sure when we ever will.
The problem is that none of these biographies so far have been very good. Janet Morgan's official biography dripped with officialness and "really, she was awfully like her own self-description except slightly more professional," Gillian Gill's Agatha Christie: the Woman and her Mysteries, was considerably more insightful but limited in her access to documents and people who knew and remembered Christie; Jared Cade's Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days was a brutal slapdash job based largely on third hand gossip; leaving really only Charles Osborne's The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie, which is mostly and legitimately focused on the novels. It's not bad, but it leaves a lot out, which is why I was eager to read Thompson's biography which promised a new look.
So, first, let me get some major complaints out of the way, and by major complaints, I'm talking first about the typesetting, which in this case meant that the page printed after page 86 was not, as you might think, page 87, but page 391. The book then continued from page 391 to page 438 (yes, chatting about a later period in Christie's life), then abruptly mid sentence switched back to page 135. Pages 391 to 438 were later repeated in their proper order, but pages 87-134 are nowhere in the book.
This is inexcusable, and along with several other typographical errors, helps explain why this book barely made a splash in the U.S. and is difficult to find (I ordered it months ago through interlibrary loan, which surprisingly enough sent the British edition). Given that these missing pages cover the crucial period of Christie's wedding and first years with her first husband, and her first published mystery novels, it's hard not to feel that a significant section is missing. Then again, much of the rest of the book tends towards more than a bit of repetition; paragraphs reappear, Thompson reiterates the same points about and quotes from The Five Little Pigs and portions of Death on the Nile and so on. So maybe those pages had nothing that new, but I still would have liked to have read what Thompson had to say about Christie's experience in World War I – when she picked up the detailed knowledge about poisons that she would use in later books.
While I'm venting, Thompson also equally inexcusably praises the literary talents of Enid Blyton, saying that Blyton created "a world of solid artistic reality," a phrase that doubtless would have had Blyton collapsing in laughter. Look, I'm more than ready to agree that Agatha Christie remains greatly underrated by literary critics, who dismiss her skill at characterization and her very careful choices of words. But Enid Blyton? No. She was a hack and a terrible writer.
Also? Although I must agree with Thompson's qualms about the more recent Marple adaptations, David Suchet? Is doing a superb job as Poirot, thank you very much, and is considerably better and more convincing than Peter Ustinov.
Which is not to say that Thompson's book does not have its insights and its points, despite a tendency towards a diffuse style. Thompson tackles the often taut relationship between Agatha and her older, talented sister Madge, pointing out the fierce rivalries and jealousies between the sisters, separated by a large age gap. Agatha glossed over this in her autobiography, but Madge enjoyed a successful, if limited, literary career, publishing well received short stories and a play. If she never went further, it is probably because Madge lacked Agatha's drive and ambition, and also because Madge had no financial incentive to write. Her husband was wealthy; she enjoyed a marvelous social life and the admiration of peers. And she was also a more "literary" writer than the self-proclaimed low-brow Agatha.
Agatha initially wrote partly for distraction, but also for money: when she made the decision to marry Archie Christie, she also made the decision to live in what was for her class a desperate and stressful lack of money – although they always had the wealthy sister as a backup. However much she breezes this aside in her autobiography, where she takes pains to present herself as someone who just fell into writing, as it were, in real life her initial drive towards detective fiction, in particular, stemmed partly from the desperate need for money, and more of it. When the marriage spectacularly and brutally collapsed (ironically, just as the Christies had achieved a certain economic stability), Christie had no other resources. Later, income from novels allowed her to support herself and buy luxuries for her second husband, Max Mallowan. He had a successful career of his own, but academia and archaeology then as now are not lucrative, and Agatha provided the luxuries.
Thompson's analysis of Agatha's second marriage provides some of the most intriguing parts of the book. Max was considerably younger and poorer than Agatha, and neither family approved. Later in life, when Agatha's finances were a mess thanks partly to her purchases of luxury items but mostly thanks to major taxation issues in both the United States and Britain, her daughter Rosalind worked to cap Agatha's salary from the company set up for taxation purposes, mostly to ensure that Agatha would not be spending as much money on Max. It seems that Rosalind resented this. But Agatha – who could never quite forget the way that her first husband had changed from friend and lover to complete stranger, and blamed herself for not taking enough of an interest in him, and allowing herself to get drawn into her grief and career, would not make that mistake again. Spend she did. She also focused on his interests – archaeology and archaeological friends, although even there she could be shy – although at least one friend felt that both her attendance at archaeological events and her shyness there and otherwise came about in part because they were so different from events in England – and because there, no one asked her about those mysterious 11 days.
Thompson quotes passages from their letters indicating that Agatha and Max most definitely enjoyed an active sex life, and continually wrote affectionate greetings to each other. Max knew his wife needed constant reassurance, particularly during their difficult and hellish wartime separation, and knew how to provide it.
And yet, later, Thompson coolly announces that the marriage only worked as it did because neither was really in love.
Which, er, what? What about the letters? The forty-six year marriage and its ability to survive World War II? Agatha had, after all, been divorced; she knew it was possible, although we can all sympathize with her desire to never go through that hell again. Still, the fact that she did not divorce again speaks volumes for the success of the marriage.
As it turns out, this statement is mostly meant as a leadup for Thompson's discussion of Max Mallowan's possible long term affair with Barbara Parker, a fellow archaeologist that Max married two years after Agatha's death. Max himself was to die shortly after this marriage,
Mutual friends felt that this marriage occurred from mutual loneliness; to repeat, Max had been married for forty-six years, the bulk of his life, and was to die shortly after the
But here, Thompson plays coy. She dismisses most of Jared Cade's allegations that Max engaged in numerous affairs with various women on archaeological digs (women actually on the archaeological digs cast doubts on this) and notes, correctly, that his allegations that
Another problem: Thompson, despite criticizing Cade's limited sources, herself uses – wait for it – limited sources. One of these is Agatha's daughter, Rosalind, who by all accounts had a problematic relationship with her mother. This relationship was not helped when Max died, leaving his house, Winterbrook, and its contents – some of which were Agatha's personal possessions – to Barbara. Compared to the millions Rosalind and her son eventually made (after sorting out the tax issues) from Agatha Christie's novels and copyrights, Winterbrook is not much, but Rosalind did have to prove to her stepfather's second wife that certain items were hers, something that apparently caused bitterness, especially given the whispers (and people did whisper) that Barbara and Max had been intimate before Agatha's death.
Thompson's conclusion, woven through her narrative (which often has a very fictional tinge to it), is that the real love of Agatha's life was her mother, followed by her first husband; Max was more of an excellent companion/friend. But if so, then why does she also focus on how desperate Agatha was to keep Max (while simultaneously feeling she would), so desperate to keep earning the money that meant she could keep a certain control over him?
Interestingly, although Thompson draws comparisons between Agatha and several of her characters from both her mysteries and the Mary Westmacott novels, for all of her insistence that Agatha kept Max in line partly through finances, she rarely looks at the multiple examples in Christie novels of older women who did just that – and paid the price. But she does look at one of Christie's unsuccessful plays, Verdict (which I have not seen or read), which pictures a man; his older, sick and ailing wife; a second woman who has been quietly and hopelessly devoted to him for years; and a young girl who kills the wife out of love for the man.
Thompson draws a comparison here, suggesting that Max and Barbara may well have been in love – even though friends did not believe it, even though the main source is a gossipy person who, as Thompson proved, could not have known any of the details of the relationship. After all, a guy in love with two women at once is not unheard of (sleeping with only one of them is a little less unheard of). I suspect, with Thompson, that this second relationship – if it existed at all, and I am doubtful – remained unconsummated, based mostly on the letters she quoted in the book, and partly on the general friendliness of Agatha and Barbara.
Agatha certainly in her novels depicted many sorts of similar love triangles, as well as successful and unsuccessful marriages between older women and younger men, but although her second marriage may have inspired some of this, much of these situations seem more inspired by her first, passionate and absolutely disastrous marriage.
Which brings me to the single most irritating part of the book: Thompson's reconstruction of the 11 days that Agatha Christie disappeared.
If for some reason you're unfamiliar with the story, the most famous incident in Christie's life, it goes something like this: Agatha Christie's car was found abandoned in more or less the middle of nowhere, and Agatha could not be found. Suspicion immediately turned to the husband, Archie, who had recently told Agatha he had fallen in love with another woman. 11 days and a lot of fuss later, Agatha was found living quietly in a Harrogate hotel. Her family announced that Agatha was suffering from amnesia. Agatha refused to discuss the story, ever; it was a sure way to lose her friendship. (It seems possible that she did not even tell Max what happened.)
Pretty much nobody bought the amnesia story then or later, although Janet Morgan's official biography made a valiant attempt to suggest that Agatha was suffering from some sort of fugue. Thompson chooses to fictionalize the entire incident, turning this into a short story from Agatha's viewpoint – beautifully written and quite, quite wrong – and Thompson insists that her version is the truth. Which is that Agatha simply meant to head to Harrogate, left a message for her brother in law explaining this, and did so. She gives a nice account of the car crash, and a completely fictionalized version of Agatha sitting in the Harrogate hotel reading the accounts of her disappearance and thinking how ridiculous it all was.
Thompson's account leaves much to be desired. Part of the problem is the sudden insertion of a short story into her narrative (although at other points she slips into fictional or literary mode). But the larger problem is that nobody actually knows what happened because Agatha never explained. Part of the problem is Thompson's interweaving of texts from Agatha's novels into this short story. But most of the problem is that Thompson's picture of an entirely aware Agatha who was simply caught by surprise at the publicity does not ring true, although certainly many people were caught by the surprise. And Thompson's picture of an entirely aware Agatha does not explain why, after reading the papers, she did not bother to contact family members (other than her husband) terrified by her depressed, suicidal notes. For that matter, Thompson's picture doesn't really account for the depressed, suicidal notes, although she tries hard to show Agatha as depressed.
Which is, right there, the problem: Thompson does not seem to understand clinical depression, and what it does to you. Janet Morgan, for all her need to stay with the official amnesia story, and Gillian Gill, for all her lack of access to additional sources, both understood this. Gill's explanation for Agatha's behavior is deadly simple: severe, severe clinical depression, to the point where Agatha was no longer rational, and thus, she did not act in a rational way.
It's understandable: in the space of one year, she had lost her mother and was losing her husband, and the stress of both had left her unable to write, which must have caused more devastation and panic. She firmly, firmly believed divorce was wrong, and even in the late 60s, during a second, happy marriage, regretted the divorce and noted her own mistakes in her first marriage. (She never regretted marrying Archie Christie, just the things she did later in the marriage.)
But back to Thompson. This bit takes up a significant part of the book – first Thompson's short story, then a repeat of what had happened, where Thompson joins others in blaming the police and media for overreacting (which seems a fair point). And it just feels all wrong, even with the various quotes from Agatha's book as filler.
Anyway. If you can find a copy with all of the pages, I do recommend it as a gossipy read. I just don't think we've had the definitive Christie biography yet, and I'm not sure when we ever will.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-29 11:19 pm (UTC)