The Ageless Agatha Christie

by Bernthal, J. C. ;

  In The Hollow, Christie splits the dialogue on professional obsession at odds with overpowering love and desire between the male doctor’s scientific research and the woman artist’s sculpting. John Christow’s research, the focus of his professional life, was threatened by his youthful romantic obsession with the actress Veronica Cray, who egotistically expected him to sacrifice his work to devote himself to her. This is depicted as selfish and egotistical. Instead, the woman artist’s need for both sex and companionship, kept at a distance from her artistic obsession, is solved with Henrietta’s adulterous relationship with Christow. This relationship is allowed a much more positive frame than Jane Harding’s, since Henrietta is strong enough to refuse to sacrifice her art to love. Henrietta achieves the necessary balance of love and sexual pleasure alongside devotion to her art precisely because she does not live with John and is not engrossed by domesticities, which allows her to compartmentalize her competing desires. This Gerda-John-Henrietta love triangle, it should be noted, exactly mirrors the final view we are given of Minta and Paul’s system in the modern section of To the Lighthouse, with Paul married to Minta but finding sex and a meeting of minds with his mistress. Lily’s thesis that “far from breaking up the marriage, that alliance had righted it” is borne out in detail. John is able to have a conventional family with two children and a wife who sentimentalizes her subservience, and a satisfying sexual relationship with Henrietta, whose “unswerving rectitude” and genuine interest supports his research into Ridgeway’s disease.36 When he is stuck, he flees to Henrietta, seeking escape through sex, but she gently steers him towards uncovering the clinical solution. His loss of self, pacing, as his mind races, and then the exhaustion of peace when he solves the problem, directly echoes Henrietta’s experiences as she wrestled with sculpting Nausicca, two chapters previously. Both characters share this obsession with bringing something new to the world. The only thing that John sacrifices is an overpowering, all-consuming love of a sort he finds unattractive in his maturity, when he refuses to “risk” (that Christie word) either his family or his relationship with Henrietta.

  Henrietta too has love and sexual desire and her need for equal intellectual companionship satisfied through her love for John, while the unconventional role of mistress allows her the space to focus on her sculpture. What she “sacrifices,” as a woman artist, is marriage and family, but it is clear she is not interested in these (as she refuses Edward’s third proposal), and since she does not want to break up the marriage, she also proves no threat to Gerda’s lifestyle. In supplying John with the intelligent conversation Gerda’s character cannot (she is fashioned as Sebastian’s “someone quite negligible—someone whose personality won’t interfere”), Henrietta does “right” the marriage for John and serves as Gerda’s protector after his murder. The Hollow therefore takes up the ending of To the Lighthouse’s 1920s meditation on sexual desire and artistic obsession, “swerves” to make it the focus of the precursor novel and proceeds to complete it with a claim for clear-sighted “tough-mindedness” that is open about female sexual desire, “misreading” the original text in order to create the space needed for Christie’s own composition that argues the co-existence of healthy sexuality alongside the driven need to create, in the very different context of the mid-1940s.

  In this novel Christie explores, through John and Henrietta’s relationship, John’s entrenched conventional view alongside his appreciation of the independent equality he shares with her, and here retracts the further gendered expectations the woman artist faces. Henrietta is aware that “after a while—I got between John and what he was thinking of. I affected him as a woman. He couldn’t concentrate as he wanted to concentrate—because of me.”37 Poirot thinks that Henrietta prioritizes her love for John in refusing to claim a status for their relationship beyond their extramarital affair, but in fact she is content with the status quo while it is John who wants more. Still, John’s jealousy of her sculpture is always punctuated with textual signals (“he knew he was unfair”) as he acknowledges that “it was only on very rare occasions that her absorption with some inner vision spoiled the completeness of her interest in him. But it always roused his furious anger.”38 The word Christie uses to signify Henrietta’s distance from obsessive love is “detachment” and Henrietta acknowledges that part of her will always belong to her art. The text allows her to voice her sense of the artist’s burden: “‘But I,’ she thought, ‘am not a whole person. I belong not to myself, but to something outside of me.’”39 Henrietta does not subordinate her work to loving him, just as Christie has John refuse to subsume his work in loving Veronica Cray. With John’s unreasonable demands of Henrietta, the text quietly notes the unequal expectation men level against women in the same situation, and hence the strength that professional women artists need to resist social convention.

  Christie seems to have directly lifted Woolf’s triangle and developed it to allow emotional and sexual satisfaction for the female artist, rejecting Lily’s fear of sex as victimizing the woman and damaging her profession, while appearing to agree the impossibility of the conventional Edwardian marriage. Hence the focus on female self-sacrifice and subservience and the necessary resistances to it. Both Jane Harding and Henrietta Savernake are constructed, in their vitality, irony and clear-eyed honesty in making choices, to refute victimhood to male sexual appetite as they fulfill their own desires. Jane does sacrifice her voice to the better (male) artist but Henrietta, just after World War II, can inhabit a bohemian lifestyle that requires much less sacrifice of the self, as she continues to sculpt her modernist pieces. And, Christie’s text argues, her support for both the husband and the wife situates her as the most attractive of the characters, allowing the adulterous mistress the moral high-ground, a view Poirot endorses at the close: “I have admired you, always, very much.”40

  Grief for Those Who Die Enabling Artistic Creation

  Fascinatingly, each text closes with artistic accomplishment linked to a sense of loss and grief. In the first section of To the Lighthouse, Lily questions whether her modernist representation of Mrs. Ramsay with James, the mother and child composition, is indeed “a tribute,” since she is solely concerned with shape and color.41 Its completion in the final section is accompanied by her memories; her grief: “‘Mrs. Ramsay! Mrs. Ramsay!’ she cried, feeling the old horror come back—to want and want and not to have. Could she inflict that still?”42 But Mrs. Ramsay’s spirit takes up the necessary position in her chair, to allow a shadow to fall across the step that enables Lily to complete the painting: “with a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished.”43

  The improbable conclusion of Giant’s Bread finds all corners of Vernon’s love triangle aboard the sinking Titanic, and Vernon, having a split second to save only one of the two women as they slide past him into the waves, chooses the wrong woman, Nell. This gives him the final grief-stricken focus to compose the “Giant.” Finally realizing, now that he has lost her, his true love for Jane, he pours his grief into the music and in creating becomes happy: torn between “agony and wild exultation,” the closing lines echo the ruthless cruelty of art, using peoples as victims to its inception.44 Where Lily’s art allows for a resolution to her grief, and an acknowledgement of Mrs. Ramsay’s kindness in her complex memory of her, Vernon’s art is both a more simplistic and a more divisively bitter and guilt-stricken rendition. Grief is not resolved but overwhelmed in the artistic endeavor. Despite the determined modernism of his music, it is a very romantic construction of the artist.

  The Hollow also ends with the artist’s grief for a dead person inspiring a composition. Where Lily’s grief allows her to complete a painting, Christie’s artists’ grief proves the inspiration for new work in both novels. Henrietta, finally able to give in to her grief for John, is horrified as in her paroxysm she begins to envisage a cowled, elongated figure epitomizing her sorrow; “She thought…. I cannot love—
I cannot mourn—not with the whole of me.”45 Henrietta differs from Vernon in that she is guiltless of John’s death. This is reinforced by her encouragement to John’s patient to get well for his sake, as a testament to his scientific cure for Ridgeway’s Disease, his vision. Directly after, she is inspired by her a new vision which becomes “exhibit no. 58. ‘Grief.’ Alabaster. Miss Henrietta Savernake.”46 In The Hollow, however, there are no human victims sacrificed for the art work. It is a purely internalized conflict and pain, and the art no longer demands the whole person but just a part of them, allowing a more attractive, less selfish characterization. All three novels end with grief enabling artistic creation, but only Christie explores how this links to the love of a sexual partner, and the artist riven between their devotion to their art and to their lover, since Lily has eschewed any sexual complications.

  Middle-Class Complacency in Relation to Money and Leisure

  There is little structural reason for this theme in The Hollow, but some in Giant’s Bread, apart from each text being complexly in dialogue with To the Lighthouse. Charles Tansley in the Woolf novel, the impoverished doctoral student supporting his sister’s education while denigrating Lily’s painting, is allowed to comment on the Ramsay’s complacent affluence and class solipsism. However, this is portrayed negatively as the chip on the shoulder of a disagreeable guest. He is portrayed as harping on about smoking cheap tobacco, has an unattractive lack of social ease and rejects polite conversation as “talking nonsense.” These, alongside his cruel sexist comments on Lily’s painting, leave him little space to mount a serious critique of the very present leisured affluent solipsism. But he needs to be registered since his function is echoed in The Hollow. Giant’s Bread has a number of characters who challenge English middle-class solipsism, none more so than Sebastian Levine, a Jewish millionaire (this character allows Christie to examine British anti–Semitism). In relation to poverty, there is also Nell’s annoyance at Vernon’s sentimental view that poverty is unimportant if they have love, and her resentment of his total ignorance. However, in Giant’s Bread poverty is really a decline from affluence to lower-middle-class drudgery, this time from the woman’s viewpoint—the drudgery of trying to keep up appearances without the income for pretty new clothes. Nell, like Charles Tansley, is an unsympathetic character and so the critique again lacks power. While the issue of poverty, and the ignorance exhibited by the affluent over what it means, are present, there is not enough focus to consider poverty a theme. There is also an absence of awareness concerning the actual nature of poverty.

  In The Hollow, the young David Angkatell effectively takes the Tansley role of disdaining the socialite frivolity of the party. However, since he will inherit Ainswick if Edward does not breed a legitimate heir, he clearly cannot speak for the poor. Midge, the impoverished cousin who has to make her living as an assistant in an up-market fashion shop is a positive, central character who serves this function, irritated into speech at Edward Angkatell’s comfortable incomprehension of the ugliness of life. “She thought with rancor: ‘they don’t know anything!’”47 Once again the conception of poverty is a middle-class rendition of the hardship of being bullied and patronized as a shop-assistant (and includes a highly problematic representation of the Jewish owner). The text does refer to the working class hardship of Mrs. Crabtree and Mrs. Pearstock (as To the Lighthouse has its Mrs. McNab), but insists with a complaisant solipsism all of its own that the “Poor with a capital P” are all the same, “under the skin.”48 In both Christie novels, this representation of a resentment of upper-middle class ignorance around the hardship of poverty has only minimum correspondence to the main themes of the artist’s need to create the new, in conflict with the desire for companionship and sex. The real explanation for their presence comes in the fact that it is also a vestigial non sequitur in the precursor text.

  Harold Bloom’s theorization of the anxiety of influence allows a reading of Christie’s dialogue with To the Lighthouse that has her “swerving” to explore the driven compulsion to create something new and modernist and the effect this has on the artist’s personal and emotional needs. Both Christie texts examined challenge Woolf’s thesis of virginal dedication but acknowledge that conventional marriage may be incompatible, particularly for the woman artist. However, Christie always assumes that men and women have equally healthy sexual appetites and the solution seems to be long-term commitment outside of and alongside of marriage. In The Hollow, Christie takes Woolf’s representation of the modern flawed marriage and crafts it into a workable ménage a trois, as a direct resolution to Lily’s abstemiousness. While Bloom’s theory reveals a tension between the Mary Westmacott persona, experimenting with form in ambitious “middlebrow” literary novels and the popular Christie detective fiction, it also demonstrates that both genres are deemed viable to contradict the modernist vision of Virginia Woolf. Both formats engage in a creative contextual struggle of denial and restitution with the contemporary writer, revealed by their secret intertextuality of theme and sub-theme. However, the reasons for why these two Christie novels create dialogues with the Woolf must necessarily remain a hypothesis for the reader’s fictional creation of Christie (as Foucault illustrates all biographical creations of the author are), whether Christie imagined herself as the conflicted artist, in relation to emotional commitments; justified her choice of the “workaday middlebrow” crime fiction in contrast to the tortured status of the modernist, in order to live a more comfortable emotional life with commercial success; or simply saw the dislocation and tensions as interesting fictional puzzles, is open to an array of interpretations. What can be argued with more certainty is that Harold Bloom’s antithetical criticism is one way of allowing a serious engagement with “middlebrow” novels, granting them equal status in literary terms with modernist dialogues on artistic production, gender and desire. And while not wishing to claim that The Hollow is as substantial a novel as To the Lighthouse, it also raises questions about such implicitly discriminatory designations as “highbrow” and “middlebrow.”

  Notes

  1. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 25.

  2. Terry Eagleton, Figures of Dissent: Critical Essays on Fish, Spivak, Zizek and Others (London: Verso, 2005), p. 168.

  3. Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 73. Gillian Gill, Agatha Christie: The Woman and Her Mysteries (London: Robson, 1990), pp. 157, 158, 170.

  4. Agatha Christie, An Autobiography (London: Fontana, 1977), pp. 198, 203–204.

  5. Ibid., p. 232.

  6. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 5.

  7. Ibid., p. 42.

  8. Ibid., p. 69.

  9. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (London: Hogarth Press, 1960), p. 156.

  10. Ibid., p. 78.

  11. Ibid., p. 245.

  12. Ibid., p. 86.

  13. Ibid., p. 264.

  14. Ibid., p. 320.

  15. Agatha Christie, Giant’s Bread in Absent in Spring and Other Novels, written as Mary Westmacott (New York: St Martin’s Minotaur, 2001), pp. 163–468 (p. 169).

  16. Ibid., p. 252.

  17. Ibid., p. 455.

  18. Ibid., p. 305.

  19. Agatha Christie, The Hollow (London: HarperCollins, 2002), p. 23.

  20. Christie, The Hollow, p. 13.

  21. Woolf, To the Lighthouse, p. 80.

  22. Christie, Giant’s Bread, p. 149.

  23. See Rowland for a useful critique of the implicit Edwardian Imperialism.

  24. Woolf, To the Lighthouse, p. 159.

  25. Ibid.

  26. Ibid.

  27. Ibid., p. 160.

  28. Ibid., p. 159.

  29. Ibid., p. 269.

  30. Ibid., p. 265.

  31. Ibid., p. 269.

  32. Christie, Giant’s Bread, p. 306.

  33. Ibid., pp. 315, 316.

  34. Ibid., p. 3
17.

  35. Agatha Christie, The Rose and the Yew Tree in Absent in Spring and Other Novels, written as Mary Westmacott (New York: St Martin’s Minotaur, 2001) pp. 469–644.

  36. Christie, The Hollow, p. 37.

  37. Ibid., p. 240.

  38. Ibid., pp. 69–70.

  39. Ibid., p. 384.

  40. Ibid., p. 375.

  41. Woolf, To the Lighthouse, p. 85.

  42. Ibid., p. 310.

  43. Ibid., p. 319.

  44. Christie, Giant’s Bread, p. 466.

  45. Christie, The Hollow, p. 383.

  46. Ibid.

  47. Ibid., p. 194.

  48. Ibid., pp. 42–43.

  Bibliography

  Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.

  Eagleton, Terry. Figures of Dissent: Critical Essays on Fish, Spivak, Zizek and Others. London: Verso, 2005.

  Christie, Agatha. An Autobiography (1977), London: Fontana, 1978.

  _____. Giant’s Bread (1930). Absent in Spring and Other Novels, written as Mary Westmacott. New York: St Martin’s Minotaur, 2001, pp. 163–468.

  _____. The Hollow (1946). London: HarperCollins, 2002.

  _____. The Rose and the Yew Tree (1948). Absent in the Spring and Other Novels, written as Mary Westmacott. New York: St Martin’s Minotaur, 2001, pp. 469–644.

  Gill, Gillian, Agatha Christie: The Woman and Her Mysteries. London: Robson, 1990.

  Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” in D. F. Bouchard (ed.), Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977, pp. 113–138.

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