Halfway through “Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life”

[breakinglight11]

Apparently Agatha Christie was an avid surfer? Wow. Cowabunga, old bean.

I’m reading a biography of Agatha Christie right now, by Laura Thompson. I enjoy it, but it’s strangely written. How to describe it? The language is on the flowery side, and it talks about her and the relevant people in her life like they’re literary characters, being narrated about like every statement needs to be a profound and poetic insight on their inner nature. It’s actually quite enjoyable to read… but it makes me wonder if it’s possible to really know such things about real people with such certainty.

I honestly mostly picked it up because I always wanted to know what the deal was with her strange breakdown when her first husband left her. I can’t wait to get to that.

Also I’m curious what it will make of her idiosyncratic midcentury racism and misogyny— there’s been no acknowledgement of it yet, which troubles me. It’s taking a lighter touch to her than I would prefer. It mentions her not “seeing round the class question the way she would later do, although probably never to the satisfaction of modern readers.” Uh, come on. While she is hardly the worst offender, she is QUITE classist, and she only depicts admirable lower class people when they are modest and know their place.

Also, “She also threw out the odd, casually xenophobic remark,” with some defensiveness about how this is a product of her time. I think this is specifically referring to her letters from a period of world travel early in her marriage… but again, COME. ON. In her work she is even more racist than she is classist. She clearly is only really comfortable with English people, and anyone else is either a weirdo, untrustworthy, or a savage. This is a constant throughout her stories— from Mr. Paravicini being suspicious for literally no other reason than because he is Italian in THE MOUSETRAP, to even her celebrated hero Hercule Poirot being kind of a weirdo because, y’know. Foreign.

I really like Christie’s work. But it’s so ridiculous to try and pretend these things aren’t problems throughout it.

I wish there was more analysis on Christie’s development as a writer. It feels kind of like she just skips from dabbler to slick and commercially popular professional without much elucidation of how she grows. But there’s a lot of overall assessment of how perfect the structure of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is without many specifics about what makes it perfect, or about what developed in Christie’s work. I would hope, should I ever be important enough that somebody so analyze mine, my biographer would do more to pin down my developmental throughline.

There is an interesting device throughout of using An Unfinished Portrait, a fictional work of Christie’s acknowledged to be an autobiographical novel, as a sort of Rosetta Stone for how she felt about the events of her life. It’s interesting and evocative, but as a writer myself I wonder how true a comparison that is. I mean… writers create. Fiction is made up, even when it’s inspired by reality. Maybe it’s because personally that I tend to shy very deliberately away from autobiography, but I’m inclined to wonder if it’s an oversimplification. Still, as a creative device, this occasional referring back is effective.

Archie Christie has left her. Good riddance; I never liked the dude, as I never like any dude who fears a baby will mean his wife has less attention for him. The breakdown I came for is at hand.

Thompson approaches it VERY novelistically. She basically describes Agatha’s movements and experiences in the wake of her husband leaving like she were a fictional character, which… sorry, no, there’s no way you know that. These details are famously not known. The whole thing about this disappearance is that people know basically nothing about what she did during it. She never said, and most people seemed to accept when she said her memory was blank. I can believe a skilled researcher and detective could piece some things together, but this is way beyond the pale. Again, compelling to read, but in the interest of understanding a person I feel like it’s pure fantasy. I guess she could be drawing this from some later writing of Christie’s, as she does in other places where she believes the writing autobiographical? But I don’t know what writing that is supposed to be that would supply SO MANY specifics. I believe Christie herself left this breakdown out of her own memoir entirely. This has to be a fabrication.

And it goes on for A LONG TIME. HOW CAN SHE PRETEND SHE KNOWS ALL THIS?

Thompson does depict what I figure is the most likely explanation of her time during her disappearance— that she did what we all wish we were rich enough to do during a breakup, fucked off to a nice expensive hotel to eat well, shop, and let other people take care of her while she moped. But there’s also this undercurrent running through that she was trying to get her husband to figure out where she was and come after her, which he never did. While an understandable impulse for a bereft person, here it gives her a kind of unreasonable, petty, almost passive-aggressive quality that I’m not sure is fair. Like it was part of a manipulation rather than just somebody feeling bad and trying to take care of herself a little. Honestly she probably just wanted to chill somewhere while she was sad, rather than engineer circumstances to make her husband so worried about her he came running back into her arms.

I’m a writer of intrigue too. That’s for making good stories. I’m not going to plot my way out of my very real emotional devastation.

Also. HOW DO YOU KNOW ANY OF THIS?

Okay, after this EXTENDED FORAY INTO SPECULATIVE FICTION, she does go into the historical record. Her suspicions for the broad strokes are mostly justified by publicly known details. But I can’t help but think the supposed overtures toward Archie finding her are a bridge too far. And again— she novelized the entire time she was away with very immediate experiences. I don’t like that in biography. WRITE A DAMN HISTORICAL FICTION if that’s what you want.