Agahta Christie: An autobiography

by Agatha Christie

  My mother then suggested, rather hesitantly, that I might ask Eden Philpotts if he could give me help or advice. Eden Philpotts was then at the height of his fame. His novels of Dartmoor were celebrated. As it happened, he was a neighbour of ours, and a personal friend of the family. I was shy about it, but in the end agreed. Eden Philpotts was an odd-looking man, with a face more like a faun’s than an ordinary human being’s: an interesting face, with its long eyes turned up at the corners. He suffered terribly from gout, and often when we went to see him was sitting with his leg bound up with masses of bandages on a stool. He hated social functions and hardly ever went out; in fact he disliked seeing people. His wife, on the other hand, was extremely sociable–a handsome and charming woman, who had many friends. Eden Philpotts had been very fond of my father, and was also fond of my mother, who seldom bothered him with social invitations but used to admire his garden and his many rare plants and shrubs. He said that of course he would read Agatha’s literary attempt.

  I can hardly express the gratitude I feel to him. He could so easily have uttered a few careless words of well-justified criticism, and possibly discouraged me for life. As it was, he set out to help. He realised perfectly how shy I was and how difficult it was for me to speak of things. The letter he wrote contained very good advice.‘Some of these things that you have written,’ he said, ‘are capital. You have a great feeling for dialogue. You should stick to gay natural dialogue. Try and cut all moralisations out of your novels; you are much too fond of them, and nothing is more boring to read. Try and leave your characters alone, so that they can speak for themselves, instead of always rushing in to tell them what they ought to say, or to explain to the reader what they mean by what they are saying. That is for the reader to judge for himself. You have two plots here, rather than one, but that is a beginner’s fault; you soon won’t want to waste plots in such a spendfree way. I am sending you a letter to my own literary agent, Hughes Massie. He will criticise this for you and tell you what chances it has of being accepted. I am afraid it is not easy to get a first novel accepted, so you mustn’t be disappointed. I should like to recommend you a course of reading which I think you will find helpful. Read De Quincey’s Confessions of an Opium Eater–this will increase your vocabulary enormously–he used some very interesting words. Read The Story of my Life by Jefferys, for descriptions and a feeling for nature.’

  I forget now what the other books were: a collection of short stories, I remember, one of which was called The Pirrie Pride, and was written round a teapot. There was also a volume of Ruskin, to which I took a violent dislike, and one or two others. Whether they did me good or not, I don’t know. I certainly enjoyed De Quincey and also the short stories.

  I then went and had an interview in London with Hughes Massie. The original Hughes Massie was alive at that time, and it was he whom I saw. He was a large, swarthy man, and he terrified me. ‘Ah,’ he said, looking at the cover of the manuscript, ‘Snow Upon the Desert. Mm, a very suggestive title, suggestive of banked fires.’

  I looked even more nervous, feeling that was far from descriptive of what I had written. I don’t know quite why I had chosen that title, beyond the fact that I had presumably been reading Omar Khayyam. I think I meant it to be that, like snow upon the desert’s dusty face, all the events that happen in life are in themselves superficial and pass without leaving any memory. Actually I don’t think the book was at all like that when finished, but that had been my idea of what it was going to be.

  Hughes Massie kept the manuscript to read, but returned it some months later, saying that he felt it unlikely that he could place it. The best thing for me to do, he said, was to stop thinking about it any more, and to start to write another book.

  I have never been an ambitious person by nature, and I resigned myself to making no further struggle. I still wrote a few poems, and enjoyed them, and I think I wrote one or two more short stories. I sent them to magazines, but expected them to come back, and come back they usually did.

  I was no longer studying music seriously. I practised the piano a few hours a day, and kept it up as well as I could to my former standard, but I took no more lessons. I still studied singing when we were in London for any length of time. Francis Korbay, the Hungarian composer, gave me singing lessons, and taught me some charming Hungarian songs of his own composition. He was a good teacher and an interesting man. I also studied English ballad singing with another teacher, a woman who lived near that part of the Regent Canal which they call Little Venice and which always fascinates me. I sang quite often at local concerts and, as was the fashion of the time, ‘took my music’ when I was asked out to dinner. There was, of course, no ‘tinned’ music in those days: no broadcasting, no tape-recorders, no stereophonic gramophones. For music you relied on the private performer, who might be good, moderately good, bloody awful. I was quite a good accompanist, and could read by sight, so I often had to play accompaniments for other singers.

  I had one wonderful experience when there were performances of Wagner’s Ring in London with Richter conducting. My sister Madge had suddenly become very interested in Wagnerian music. She arranged for a party of four to go to The Ring, and paid for me. I shall always be grateful to her and remember that experience. Van Rooy sang Wotan. Gertrude Kappel sang the principal Wagnerian soprano roles. She was a big, heavy woman with a turned-up nose–no actress, but she had a powerful, golden voice. An American called Saltzman Stevens sang Sieglinde, Isolde, and Elizabeth. Saltzman Stevens I shall always find it hard to forget. She was a most beautiful actress in her motions and gestures, and had long graceful arms that came out of the shapeless white draperies Wagnerian heroines always wore. She made a glorious Isolde. I suppose her voice could not have been equal to that of Gertrude Kappel, but her acting was so superb that it carried one away. Her fury and despair in the first act of Tristan, the lyrical beauty of her voice in the second, and then–most unforgettable, to my mind–that great moment in the third act: that long music of Kurwenal, the anguish and the waiting, with Tristan and Kurwenal together, the looking for the ship on the sea. Finally that great soprano cry that comes from off-stage: ‘Tristan!’

  Saltzman Stevens was Isolde. Rushing–yes, rushing one could feel–up the cliff and up on to the stage, running with those white arms outstretched to catch Tristan within their grasp. And then, a sad, almost bird-like stricken cry.

  She sang the Liebestod entirely as a woman, not a goddess; sang it kneeling by Tristan’s body, looking down at his face, seeing him with the force of her will and imagination come alive; and finally, bending, bending lower and lower, the last three words of the opera, ‘with a kiss’, came as she bent to touch his lips with hers, and then to fall suddenly across his body.

  Being me, every night before I dropped off to sleep I used to turn over and over in my mind the dream that one day I might be singing Isolde on a real stage. It did no harm, I told myself–at any rate to go through it in fantasy. Could I, would it ever be possible for me to sing in opera? The answer of course was no. An American friend of May Sturges’ who was over in London, and connected with the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, very kindly came to hear me sing one day. I sang various arias for her, and she took me through a series of scales, arpeggios and exercises. Then she said to me: ‘The songs you sang told me nothing, but the exercises do. You will make a good concert singer, and should be able to do well and make your name at that. Your voice is not strong enough for opera, and never will be.’

  So let us take it from there. My cherished secret fantasy to do something in music was ended. I had no ambition to be a concert singer, which was not an easy thing to do anyway. Musical careers for girls did not meet with encouragement. If there had been any chance of singing in opera I would have fought for it, but that was for the privileged few, who had the right vocal cords. I am sure there can be nothing more soul-destroying in life than to persist in trying to do a thing that you want desperately to do well, and to know you are at the b
est second-rate. So I put wishful thinking aside. I pointed out to mother that she could now save the expense of music lessons. I could sing as much as I liked, but there was no point in going on studying singing. I had never really believed that my dream could come true–but it is a good thing to have had a dream and to have enjoyed it, so long as you do not clutch too hard.

  It must have been about this time that I began reading the novels of May Sinclair, by which I was much impressed–and, indeed, when I read them now I am still much impressed. I think she was one of our finest and most original novelists, and I cannot help feeling that there will be a revival of interest in her some day, and that her works will be republished. A Combined Maze, that classic story of a little clerk and his girl, I still think one of the best novels ever written. I also liked The Divine Fire; and Tasker fevons I think a masterpiece. A short story of hers, The Flaw in the Crystal, impressed me so much, probably because I was addicted to writing psychic stories at the time, that it inspired me to write a story of my own somewhat in the same vein. I called it Vision (It was published with some other stories of mine in a volume much later), and I still like it when I come across it again.

  I had formed a habit of writing stories by this time. It took the place, shall we say, of embroidering cushion-covers or pictures taken from Dresden china flower-painting. If anyone thinks this is putting creative writing too low in the scale, I cannot agree. The creative urge can come out in any form: in embroidery, in the cooking of interesting dishes, in painting, drawing and sculpture, in composing music, as well as in writing books and stories. The only difference is that you can be a great deal more grand about some of these things than others. I would agree that the embroidering of Victorian cushion-covers is not equal to participating in the Bayeux tapestry, but the urge is the same in both cases. The ladies of the early Williams’s court were producing a piece of original work requiring thought, inspiration and tireless application; some parts of it no doubt were dull to do, and some parts highly exciting. Though you may say that a square of brocade with two clematis and a butterfly on it is a ridiculous comparison, the artist’s inner satisfaction was probably much the same.

  The waltz I composed was nothing to be proud of; one or two of my embroideries, however, were good of their kind, and I was pleased with them. I don’t think I went as far as being pleased with my stories–but then there always has to be a lapse of time after the accomplishment of a piece of creative work before you can in any way evaluate it.

  You start into it, inflamed by an idea, full of hope, full indeed of confidence (about the only times in my life when I have been full of confidence). If you are properly modest, you will never write at all, so there had to be one delicious moment when you have thought of something, know just how you are going to write it, rush for a pencil, and start in an exercise book buoyed up with exaltation. You then get into difficulties, don’t see your way out, and finally manage to accomplish more or less what you first meant to accomplish, though losing confidence all the time. Having finished it, you know that it is absolutely rotten. A couple of months later you wonder whether it may not be all right after all.

  VI

  About then I had two near escapes from getting married. I call them near escapes because, looking back now, I realise with certainty that either of them would have been a disaster.

  The first one was what you might call ‘a young girl’s high romance’. I was staying with the Ralston Patricks. Constance and I drove to a cold and windy meet, and a man mounted on a nice chestnut rode up to speak to Constance and was introduced to me. Charles was, I suppose, about thirty-five, a major in the 17th Lancers, and he came every year to Warwickshire to hunt. I met him again that evening when there was a fancy dress dance, to which I went dressed as Elaine. A pretty costume: I still have it (and wonder how I could ever have got into it); it is in the chest in the hall which is full of ‘dressing-up things’. It is quite a favourite–white brocade and a pearl cap. I met Charles several times during my visit, and when I went back home we both expressed polite wishes that we should meet again some time. He mentioned that he might be down in Devonshire later.

  Three or four days after getting home I received a parcel. In it was a small silver-gilt box. Inside the lid was written: ‘The Asps’, a date, and ‘To Elaine’ below it. The Asps was where the meet had taken place, and the date was the date I had met him. I also got a letter from him saying that he hoped to come to see us the following week when he would be in Devon.

  That was the beginning of a lightning courtship. Boxes of flowers arrived, occasional books, enormous boxes of exotic chocolates. Nothing was said that could not have been properly said to a young girl, but I was thrilled. He paid us two more visits, and on the third asked me to marry him. He had, he said, fallen in love with me the first moment he saw me. If one was arranging proposals in order of merit, this one would easily go to the top of my list. I was fascinated and partly carried off my feet by his technique. He was a man with a good deal of experience of women, and able to produce most of the reactions he wanted. I was ready for the first time to consider that here was my Fate, my Mr Right. And yet–yes, there it was–and yet…. When Charles was there, telling me how wonderful I was, how he loved me, what a perfect Elaine, what an exquisite creature I was, how he would spend his whole life making me happy, and so on, his hands trembling and his voice shaking–oh yes, I was charmed like a bird off a tree. And yet–yet, when he was gone away, when I thought of him in absence, there was nothing there. I did not yearn to see him again. I just felt he was–very nice. The alteration between the two moods puzzled me. How can you tell if you are in love with a person? If in absence they mean nothing to you, and in presence they sweep you off your feet, what is your real reaction?

  My poor darling mother must have suffered a great deal at that time. She had, she told me later, prayed a great deal that shortly a husband would be provided for me; good, kind, and well-provided with this world’s goods. Charles had appeared much like an answer to prayer, but somehow she wasn’t satisfied. She always knew what people were thinking and feeling, and she must have known quite well that I didn’t know myself what I did feel. While she held her usual maternal view that no man in this world could be good enough for her Agatha, she had a feeling that, even allowing for that, this was not the right man. She wrote to the Ralston Patricks to find out as much as she could about him. She was handicapped by my father not being alive, and by my having no brother who could make what were in those days the usual inquiries as to a man’s record with women, his exact financial position, his family, and so on and so on–very old-fashioned it seems nowadays, but I daresay it averted a good deal of misery.

  Charles came up to standard. He had had a good many affairs with women, but that my mother did not really mind: it was an accepted principle that men sowed their wild oats before marriage. He was about fifteen years older than I was, but her own husband had been ten years older than she was, and she believed in that kind of gap in years. She told Charles that Agatha was still very young and that she must not come to any rash decisions. She suggested that we should see each other occasionally during the next month or two, without my being pressed for a decision.

  This did not work well because Charles and I had absolutely nothing to talk about except the fact that he was in love with me. Since he was holding himself back on that subject, there was a great deal of embarrassed silence between us. Then he would go away, and I would sit and wonder. What did I want to do? Did I want to marry him? Then I would get a letter from him. He wrote, there was no doubt about it, the most glorious love letters, the kind of love letters that any woman would long to get. I pored over them, re-read them, kept them, decided that this was love at last. Then Charles would come back, and I would be excited, carried off my feet–and yet at the same time had a cold feeling at the back of my mind that it was all wrong. In the end my mother suggested that we should not see each other for six months, and that then I should decide defi
nitely. That was adhered to, and during that period there were no letters–which was probably just as well, because I should have fallen for those letters in the end.

  When the six months were up I received a telegram. ‘Cannot stand this indecision any longer. Will you marry me, yes or no.’ I was in bed with a slight feverish attack at the time. My mother brought me the telegram. I looked at it and at the reply-paid form. I took a pencil and wrote the word No. Immediately I felt an enormous relief: I had decided something. I should not have to go through any more of this uncomfortable up-and-down feeling.

  ‘Are you sure?’ asked mother.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I turned over on my pillow and went immediately to sleep. So that was the end of that.

  Life was rather gloomy during the next four or five months. For the first time everything I did bored me, and I began to feel that I had made a great mistake. Then Wilfred Pirie came back into my life.

  I have mentioned Martin and Lilian Pirie, my father’s great friends, whom we met again abroad, in Dinard. We had continued to meet, though I had not again seen the boys. Harold had been at Eton and Wilfred had been a midshipman in the Navy. Now Wilfred was a fully-fledged sub-lieutenant R.N. He was in a submarine, I think, at that time, and often came in with that portion of the Fleet which visited Torquay. He became an immense friend at once, one of the people in my life I have been fondest of. Within a couple of months we were unofficially engaged.

  Wilfred was such a relief after Charles. With him there was no excitement, no doubt, no misery. Here was just a dear friend, somebody I knew well. We read books, discussed them, we had always something to talk about. I was completely at home with him. The fact that I was treating him and considering him exactly like a brother, did not occur to me. My mother was delighted, and Mrs Pirie too. Martin Pirie had died some years ago. It seemed a perfect marriage from everyone’s point of view. Wilfred had a good career ahead of him in the Navy; our fathers had been the closest friends, and our mothers liked each other; mother liked Wilfred, Mrs Pirie liked me. I still feel I was a monster of ingratitude not to have married him.