The Ageless Agatha Christie

by Bernthal, J. C. ;

  This volume started life as a conference at the University of Exeter. Then as now, two things struck me: the huge scope of interest and the genuine enthusiasm of participants. Something about that sheer joy in study and in writing has produced a set of essays that is diverse but also quite definitely distinctive. When Charlotte Beyer calls her primary texts “complicated and fascinating,” and when Meg Boulton inserts “a confessional moment” about growing up watching Agatha Christie’s Poirot on the television, each is strengthening their unique analysis of the Agatha Christie phenomenon. It is an international, multimedia phenomenon, made up of many voices.

  This volume does not answer the question that most vexes Christie scholars: why is she still so successful? Nor does it simply raise further questions about Christie’s popular status, and the value of genre texts in academic discourse. Instead, it indicates the richness and diversity of discussion surrounding her remarkable body of work. The contributions to this volume serve as an introduction to an emerging plethora of scholarship and discourse. This volume is, then, a celebration of that writer Light called “the Queen of the ‘middlebrows’”11: a phenomenally successful novelist whose work and legacy warrant an almost boundless range of interdisciplinary scrutiny. This volume offers some solutions but encourages further investigations into the mysteries and legacies of Agatha Christie.

  Perhaps Christie deserves the final word. In her autobiography, she responded to various questions about the long run of “The Mousetrap.” In an international, interdisciplinary academic context, we may apply her words to her entire oeuvre: “I suppose … that there is a bit of something in it for almost everybody.”12

  Notes

  1. Robert Barnard, A Talent to Deceive: An Appreciation of Agatha Christie (London: Collins, 1980), p. 11.

  2. Ibid., p. 7.

  3. H. R. F. Keating (ed.), Agatha Christie: First Lady of Crime (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1979).

  4. Odette l’henry Evans, “Croquet and Serial Killers: Feminism and Agatha Christie” in Gina Whisker (ed.), It’s My Party: Reading Twentieth Century Women’s Writing (London: Pluto Press, 1994), pp. 174–180 (p. 175). See Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991).

  5. Marty S. Knepper, “Reading Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple Series: The Thirteen Problems” in Mary Jean DeMarr (ed.), In the Beginning: First Novels in Mystery Series (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1995), pp. 33–58 (p. 34).

  6. Virginia Woolf, “Middlebrow” in Collected Essays, vol. 2 (London: Hogarth Press, 1966), pp. 196–202 (p. 198).

  7. Sarah Street, “Heritage Crime: The Case of Agatha Christie” in Robert Shail (ed.), Seventies British Cinema (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 105–116; Pierre Bayard, Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? The Murderer Who Eluded Hercule Poirot and Deceived Agatha Christie (London: Fourth Estate, 1999); Marc Alexander, “Rhetorical Structure and Reader Manipulation in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express,” Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies (2009), pp. 13–27; Merja Makinen, Agatha Christie: Investigating Femininity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Linden Peach, Masquerade, Crime, and Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Marjolijn Storm, “A Corpus-Driven Analysis of Translations of Agatha Christie’s Detective Novels into Dutch and into German” (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Birmingham, 2012); J. C. Bernthal, “‘Every Healthy Englishman Longed to Kick Him’: Masculinity and Nationalism in Agatha Christie’s Cards on the Table,” Clues: A Journal of Detection 32.2 (2014), pp. 103–114.

  8. Susan Rowland, From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell: British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001); R. A. York, Agatha Christie: Power and Illusion (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Mark Aldridge, “Love, Crime and Agatha Christie” in Karen A. Ritzenhoff and Karen Randell (eds.), Screening the Dark Side of Love: From Euro-Horror to American Cinema (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 83–94.

  9. Agatha Christie, Elephants Can Remember (London: HarperCollins, 2002), p. 18. The words refer to Christie’s fictional alter-ego, the crime writer Ariadne Oliver.

  10. Agatha Christie, A Murder Is Announced (New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007), p. 127.

  11. Light, Forever England, p. 75.

  12. Agatha Christie, An Autobiography (London: Harper, 2010), p. 510.

  Bibliography

  Aldridge, Mark. “Love, Crime and Agatha Christie” in Karen A. Ritzenhoff and Karen Randell (eds.), Screening the Dark Side of Love: From Euro-Horror to American Cinema. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 83–94.

  Alexander, Marc. “Rhetorical Structure and Reader Manipulation in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express.” Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies (2009), pp. 13–27.

  Barnard, Robert. A Talent to Deceive: An Appreciation of Agatha Christie. London: Collins, 1980.

  Bayard, Pierre. Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? The Murderer Who Eluded Hercule Poirot and Deceived Agatha Christie. London: Fourth Estate, 1999.

  Bernthal, J. C. “‘Every Healthy Englishman Longed to Kick Him’: Masculinity and Nationalism in Agatha Christie’s Cards on the Table.” Clues: A Journal of Detection 32.2 (2014), pp. 103–14.

  Christie, Agatha. An Autobiography (1977). London: Harper, 2011.

  _____. Elephants Can Remember (1971). London: HarperCollins, 2002.

  _____. A Murder Is Announced (1950). New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.

  Evans, Odette l’henry. “Croquet and Serial Killers: Feminism and Agatha Christie” in Gina Whisker (ed.), It’s My Party: Reading Twentieth Century Women’s Writing. London: Pluto Press, 1994, pp. 174–180.

  Light, Alison. Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars. Abingdon: Routledge, 1991.

  Rowland, Susan. From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell: British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.

  Storm, Marjolijn. “A Corpus-Driven Analysis of Translations of Agatha Christie’s Detective Novels into Dutch and into German.” Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Birmingham, 2012.

  Street, Sarah. “Heritage Crime: The Case of Agatha Christie” in Robert Shail (ed.), Seventies British Cinema. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, pp. 105–116.

  Woolf, Virginia. “Middlebrow” in Collected Essays, vol. 2. London: Hogarth Press, 1966, pp. 196–202.

  York, R. A. Agatha Christie: Power and Illusion. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

  Agatha Christie in Dialogue with To the Lighthouse

  The Modernist Artist

  Merja Makinen

  In his Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom argues that “criticism teaches … a language in which poetry is already written, the language of influence, of the dialectic that governs the relations of poets as poets,”1 that later poets are always writing in a complex and denied hidden dialogue with the writers that they position as their great precursors. Although this theory was devised in the 1970s, Terry Eagleton has recently argued that it is still the most insightful of Bloom’s work.2 Bloom’s “antithetical criticism” enables us not only to read a poet through their repressed influences but also to re-read the precursor through the later poet. If we shift the analysis from poetry to the novel, then this is the examination in process here, since the echoes of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) reverberate through Christie’s The Hollow (1946), as both explore the role of the modernist female artist—Lily Briscoe on holiday with the Ramsays, and Henrietta Savernake on holiday with the Angkatells. A re-reading of the Woolf text through the lens of Christie’s work allows a different perspective on both authors, but also raises questions about literary influence and the implicit rivalry between what has been termed “highbrow” and “middlebrow” writing.

  Critics have consistently discussed the modernist focus of Christie’s popular writing since Alison Light’s chap
ter in Forever England and Gillian Gill has noted frequent references to T. S. Eliot in her work.3 Although Virginia Woolf and Agatha Christie are two names not usually placed alongside each other, given Christie’s interest in modernism, it should not seem surprising that Woolf’s major semi-autobiographical novel, published one year after Christie embraced the role of a professional writer as a divorced single mother needing to provide an upkeep for her household, should have proved of interest. Woolf is surprisingly absent in the discussions about Christie, a woman writer known to be influenced by modernism, evoking Bloom’s thesis that the influenced writer disavows their anxieties through denial and elision of the influencer. Christie was happy to speak of other modernist novelists who influenced her writing, such as D.H. Lawrence and May Sinclair, in the Autobiography,4 but Woolf is markedly absent except, perhaps, by contradiction. Why, for example, was Christie so often keen to stress that she could write anywhere, in any corner of a room, that all she needed was a table for her typewriter, if she was not implicitly rebuffing Woolf’s 1929 A Room of One’s Own which argued a woman needed her own room to be able to write? Christie’s Autobiography, which describes the distractions created by her daughter’s nurse, who was instructed not to disturb her when working—“maddened I would rise from my chair … and jerk open the door”—implicitly confirms Woolf’s need for seclusion.5 But the later Christie insisted she did not need a room, just a table, and was photographed working alongside her second husband, each at their own desk, in their Devon home Greenway.

  Bloom argues that the influenced writer creates their work in a dialectic, “a wrestling with the precursor” that involves “misreading” the original text in order to create the space they need for their own composition, and (ignoring his arcane terminology),6 that British writers tend to “swerve” from the original in a “creative revisionism” of misinterpretation,7 while the American writers try to “complete” the precursor, since they “deceive themselves into believing they are more tough-minded than their predecessors.”8 While I would challenge the male-focus of Bloom’s discussion and the Freudian family romance invoked in this oedipal son/father dialectic of influence, his theorization of a necessary misreading, of swerving and of a willfully distorted completing of the original prove fruitful in the comparison of my two texts. But rather than the model of an oedipal father/son or even mother/daughter struggle of composition, I want to evoke a different familial battle—that of sibling rivalry. The influence of To the Lighthouse is more direct and contemporary than at first appears, because there is an interim text that needs to enter the equation: the literary novel Giant’s Bread, published under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott, follows a similar trajectory to The Hollow, and was published in 1930, just three years after Woolf’s novel first appeared. So the hypothesis of an anxiety of influence becomes an immediate and direct response to the precursor, later rethought and refined after another sixteen years. (Woolf died in 1941, five years before The Hollow was published.) It is well known that Agatha started writing stories because her elder sister had successfully published one and challenged her to do the same, so the trajectory of sibling rivalry in relation to composition has some purchase.

  The precursor, Woolf, viewed through the lens of the later two Christie novels in the spirit of Bloom’s antithetical criticism, re-creates a dialectic and literary dialogue that both copies and swerves from and, more importantly for the central Christie theme of the balancing of love, desire and marriage with the artist’s need to create, attempts to re-write the Woolf in order to “complete” it, by correcting its resolution. Christie’s direct revision in a similarly literary novel proved ineffective; it takes the slimmed-down popular genre format to clarify the “completion.” In tackling the thematic referencing, however, The Hollow is a more literary text than usual. Poirot only arrives halfway through and Christie is on record as saying she felt his entrance spoilt the novel (indeed, his character was removed from the later transition into a successful play in 1951). But it could be argued that the rivalries between the literary and the popular, the “highbrow” modernism and the “lowbrow” crime, prove to be fruitful tensions for the composition of The Hollow, which is often cited as a favorite among twenty-first century feminist readers.

  Reading To the Lighthouse (1927) through the lens of Christie’s two texts delivers a thinned-down version of the themes in Woolf’s novel, but also an interestingly differing one. Indeed, it is only through re-reading the Woolf for this project that I noticed that the holiday home is described as “in a hollow, on an island.”9 The novel is set on a Scottish island, where the affluent Ramsay family and invited guests holiday. Critics note that Woolf draws on childhood memories of her parents and family holidays in Cornwall. The text is set across two days, one before the war, when the family contemplates a boat trip to the lighthouse in the bay and Lily starts a painting, and one after the war, when they finally take the boat trip and Lily completes her painting. The two days become two parts, separated by a further short middle part, “Time Passes,” in which seemingly off-hand parentheses frame the deaths of a number of characters as well as World War I. Separated by the war, the first part, “The Window,” encapsulates the Edwardian era and Mrs. Ramsay’s desire to arrange all women into wives. The third part, “The Lighthouse,” negotiates a more modern era and alternative, less self-denying roles for women, as Lily embraces spinsterhood and completes her painting. Christie’s first riposte to Woolf, Giant’s Bread (1930), has the modernist composer, Vernon Deyre, rejecting the wife and hereditary house to live with his mistress and create the modernist masterwork in a place of license, Russia. This novel’s structure is also divided by World War I, in a plot similar to Rebecca West’s Return of the Soldier (1918). Vernon is reported killed in action, but returns—the shock of discovering his wife’s remarriage makes Vernon lose his memory in a psychic “fugue.”

  The title of Giant’s Bread refers to the lovers sacrificed to create Vernon’s music (the great modernist atonal opera is called “The Giant”) and the novel raises the question of whether the driven artist can have the conventional marriage. Christie’s initial artistic endeavor was to be a professional concert pianist, but her shyness prevented the requisite public performative persona. Whole sections of Giant’s Bread, such as Vernon’s lonely childhood invention of friends, his lifelong nightmare of “the Beast,” the fugue and its psychiatric treatment, draw on Christie’s childhood and early adult memories, informing Christie’s figuring of the role of the modern artist. Christie’s later return to this idea in The Hollow shifts the debate again, coiling back on the various themes in the Woolf’s work even more directly. Poirot is invited to lunch at a country house of the Angkatells where family and guests are spending a long weekend holiday in the country. Dr. Christow appears to be shot by his wife Gerda, as revenge for a fling with an old flame; Gerda is protected by the doctor’s newer mistress, the modernist sculptor Henrietta. The opening chapters shift between the main protagonists in long, semi-stream-of-consciousness developments of the characters’ present and their pasts (two are located round the minutes it takes for a mutton lunch to slowly congeal). These shifts evoke the more experimental style of the later Westmacott novels. The first half of The Hollow dwells on the characters’ relationships in depth, until the tighter generic format develops with Poirot’s arrival at the murder scene. In The Hollow, the artist is restored to being a woman, giving it a stronger analogy than Giant’s Bread to Woolf’s writing, despite being further away from To the Lighthouse chronologically.

  An antithetical critical analysis of the two Christie novels in relation to the Woolf text reveals six major tropes at play in each of the three works (and indeed in the case of the final one, has no intrinsic structural function apart from its reference to the precursor):

  1. A setting that is an escape from the every-day demands; a place of license and holiday.

  2. The obsession of the (woman) artist with creating new and modernist art.

>   3. Familial/generational expectations of normative gender roles and conventional marriage.

  4. The balancing of love, desire and marriage with the artist’s drive to create.

  5. Grief for those who die enabling artistic creation.

  6. Middle class complacency with regard to money and leisure.

  These six themes reappear in different combinations across each of the three texts, like a re-shaken kaleidoscope where the same pieces of colored glass create different patterns and shapes.

  A Setting as a Place of License

  As the earlier description of each novel indicates, each has a setting that is an escape from the everyday demands, a place of license and holiday. In To the Lighthouse, this is a holiday home on a Scottish island, where all the furniture is cast-off and the children’s cricket ball can smash the greenhouse without complaint. The sense of space, ease and informality on holiday beside the sea allows characters to wander off and arrive late for meals, focused on their own interests away from the demands of mundane work and social expectation. Giant’s Bread has no such holiday setting, but instead, Vernon and his mistress Jane are forced to leave the cultural demands and expectations of England (to prevent his wife’s bigamy being made public) and flee to Moscow where the revolutionary license allows them to live together unmarried without opprobrium and allows him to write his different music. The bohemian setting of the Russian capital, their place of permissiveness and escape, is so distanced from the English setting that it is never represented directly, but only shown via letters and reminiscences. But it is the setting that nurtures Vernon’s creation of his opera. The Hollow, Lucy and Henry Angkatell’s home, is the site for the other characters’ weekends away and the early pages describe each character’s delighted anticipation of the relaxation and escape afforded by the expansiveness of the countryside in fall. While this setting is not the site for Henrietta’s artistic creation, since she has a studio in London, it is the scene for what Poirot calls her artistic obfuscation of the evidence.