Vol. 6 No. 22 · 6 December 1984
pages 13-14 | 3536 words
At the Hydropathic
T.J. Binyon
- Agatha Christie by Janet Morgan
Collins, 393 pp, £12.95, September 1984, ISBN 0 00 216330 6
At first sight Janet Morgan does not seem the obvious person to choose as the official biographer of Agatha Christie. She describes herself on the jacket of the book as a ‘writer and consultant’, who now ‘advises governments, companies and other organisations on long-range strategic planning, new technology and different approaches to whatever they find themselves doing’. She has written on politics and broadcasting and was, of course, the editor of the four-volume edition of Crossman’s diaries. All this is a world away from M. Poirot or Miss Marple, and internal evidence suggests, too, that she has no particular knowledge of, or liking for, the detective story. But on the whole this is a solid and sensible life – if sometimes annoyingly vague on detail and dates – which complements and expands Agatha Christie’s posthumously published autobiography. It is also annoying that it should not contain a chronological list of her work: that one is available elsewhere is no excuse for the omission. But the biography certainly fulfils what was presumably the family’s main aim: it lays, once and for all, the malicious rumours and vulgar gossip put about by other writers on the subject of Agatha Christie’s ten days’ disappearance in 1926, providing an authoritative, as well as authorised, explanation for the event.
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Letters
Vol. 7 No. 2 · 7 February 1985
From J.V. Stevenson
SIR: Now that the exact facts about Agatha Christie’s celebrated disappearance have been made clear in Janet Morgan’s biography (LRB, Vol. 6, No 22/23), the spurious mystery surrounding their explanation, which has eluded all the book’s reviewers, your own included, appears more tiresome than ever. The desire to maintain it seems nothing more than a feeble conceit of the ‘mystery of a mystery writer’ kind. And it is clear, from the crass ingenuousness T.J. Binyon derides in Miss Morgan, that we shall gain scant illumination from that source. Agatha Christie was a classic victim of unresolved loss. Her father died when she was 11 – notoriously the worst age for a child to lose a parent. Her mother’s morbid preservation of, so to speak, the memento mori (down even to the last piece of soap used by her husband) suggests how little she came to terms with the loss, let alone provided the necessary reassurance for her children. A quarter of a century passes and what happens in the year of the bizarre disappearance? First the mother dies, thus reactivating the mood of the unresolved loss. Then, scarcely has Agatha emerged from the dismal business of clearing out the family house with all its memories than husband Archie comes out with the news that he’s fallen in love with another woman! Loss, reactivated loss, and now compounded by the threat of yet another loss. Flesh and blood may not be the principal qualities we associate with Agatha Christie’s characters, but they certainly existed for their author, who was after all only human: and this was more than they could bear. Flight was essential. It is only astonishing that it did not include suicide – though perhaps the accident with the car was a halfhearted attempt at it.
Clearly, then, this was the crisis point; and she negotiated it, if only just. But that the underlying sense of loss remained unexorcised is equally evident from everything that followed: she went on trying to make up the loss she had sustained so early in life. Why does death feature so crucially – obsessively – in her work? Why does the mystery surrounding it always have to be explained? Why does she allow of no ambiguity, insisting that every detail be worked out? Why, above all, does she feel the need to write, in another guise, romantic novels divorced, not just from real life (all her books are that), but even from the reality born of that morbid fascination with death that made of so guileless a personality the adored Queen of Crime?
J.V. Stevenson
London SE17
