Agatha Christie: A Biography

Than where I loathed so much.

A poem Agatha wrote at the age of eleven had been published in the local paper. The new tram service had been extended to Ealing, much to the fury of the residents, and Agatha recollected her first verse as being:

When first the electric trams did run

In all their scarlet glory,

’Twas well, but ere the day was done,

It was another story.

This poem, however, cannot be traced. Between 1901 and 1906 only three poems about trams appeared in issues of The Middlesex County Times and The Hanwell and Ealing Post, none resembling Agatha’s. Later, Eileen Morris, her closest and cleverest friend, suggested she send work to the Poetry Review, whose editor did accept some of Agatha’s poems, for a guinea each. Though her early verse disappeared without trace, we can still read some of the poetry she wrote at the age of seventeen or eighteen, since it was printed in The Road of Dreams, the volume Geoffrey Bles published in 1924, and reprinted in Poems, published by Collins, in 1973. It is, apart from an occasional phrase, sentimental and derivative. One long sentence tells the story of Harlequin and Columbine, Pierrot and Pierrette, whose Dresden china figures decorated both Auntie-Grannie’s house and Ashfield. The theme of magical Harlequin, the lover and protector of lovers, was to resurface twenty years later in Agatha’s book, The Mysterious Mr Quin.

Agatha also set her ‘Harlequin poems’ to music. Her composition was, in her own words, ‘not of a very high order’, but it was competent and expressive. A waltz she wrote was published, despite the fact that, in her own view, it was trite. ‘One Hour With Thee’ (‘a pretty hefty time for a waltz to last,’ she later observed), depicted on its cover a young woman looking much like Agatha herself, with golden hair, sloping shoulders, and a bunch of pansies at her bosom. To Agatha’s great pride, it was occasionally included in the repertoire of the local dance band.

By the time she was seventeen Agatha had set aside her musical ambitions, doing so with remarkable despatch. Her studies with Charles Fürster had led her to hope that with practice and hard work she might become a professional concert pianist but, after one disastrous occasion when she was bidden to play before a visitor and, on sitting down to the piano, found herself ‘overwhelmed by inefficiency’, she asked Fürster to be honest with her. ‘He told me no lies,’ she wrote. ‘He said that quite frankly he thought I had not the temperament to play in public, and I knew he was right.’ It is interesting that, although she was miserable for a while, she immediately accepted this verdict: ‘If the thing you want beyond anything cannot be, it is much better to recognise it and go forward instead of dwelling on one’s regrets and hopes.’ Although Agatha did not know herself well, even then she recognised that public performance unnerved her. Rather than battling against her temperament, she complied with it.

Singing was, as we have seen, the one thing she could undertake confidently in public but here too her early hopes were disappointed. In Paris she had one of the most respected singing teachers of the time, Monsieur Boué, who trained her to make the best use of her soprano voice, taking her through Cherubini, Schubert and, eventually, arias from Puccini. At home, she studied with a Hungarian composer and an English ballad teacher. Agatha sang at local concerts and to fellow guests after dinner but her ambition to become an opera singer flowered in 1909, when Madge, who had become interested in Wagner, took her to hear Die Walküre at Covent Garden. Richter conducted and Brünnhilde was sung by an American soprano, Minni Saltzman-Stephens, whose performance enraptured Agatha, already overwhelmed by the power and beauty of the music. ‘Although I did not deceive myself,’ she wrote in the unpublished draft of her autobiography, ‘I used to go over and over in my mind the faint possibility that one day I might sing Isolde. It did no harm, I told myself, at any rate to go through it in fantasy.’ An American friend of the Millers, who was connected with the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, came to hear Agatha sing, taking her through arias and exercises: ‘And 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 an name at that. Your voice is not strong enough for opera, and never will be.”’ Again, Agatha’s reaction was brave and drastic. ‘I came back to real life and 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 studying singing.’

Here her disappointment went deeper. The ‘cherished secret fantasy’ was one she had taken seriously, although she tried to persuade herself that it had been no more than that; ‘faint possibility’ in the first draft of her Autobiography becomes ‘illusion’ in the second and ‘dream’ in the last. ‘I did not want to be a concert singer,’ she wrote. ‘It would not have been an easy thing to do anyway. Musical careers for girls did not meet with encouragement.’ ‘Yet’, she declared, ‘if there had been any chance of my 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 anything that you will do badly and in a second-rate manner.’ These urgent arguments show that she did mind; becoming an opera singer she saw as the pinnacle of attainment. Moreover, she continued to do so; towards the end of Agatha’s life she startled a young friend by saying wistfully, ‘If I’d been an opera singer, I might have been rich.’

‘So,’ as Agatha put it, ‘let us take it from there.’ Here was a creative and thoughtful eighteen-year-old girl, well-read, her days full of leisure, needing something to which to apply a good mind. One day as she sat in bed, recovering from influenza, bored with reading and playing Patience, she found herself reduced to idling with a silly game she had learnt in Pau and with which she always amused herself when she was ill. It consisted of dampening little pieces of bread and moulding them into tops which could be baked in the sun or a slow oven and then painted, so that they spun prettily as well as merrily. (In the second draft of her Autobiography this long explanation is dispensed with; Agatha succinctly deals herself bridge hands instead.) Clara, thinking this a pathetic expedient for dealing with boredom, suggested that the invalid try to write a story, something which Madge had done successfully before her marriage, when a series of her tales had been published in Vanity Fair. After several false starts Agatha found herself ‘thoroughly interested and going along at a great rate’, and a couple of days later the story was finished. ‘The House of Beauty’, as she called it, was some 6,000 words long – about thirty pages. She typed a fair copy in purple ink on Madge’s old Empire typewriter and signed it with the pseudonym ‘Mac Miller Esq’. It is a powerfully imaginative story, about madness and dreams, echoing the writings about the occult that Agatha and her friends were reading at the end of 1908, by Edgar Allan Poe and May Sinclair – ‘psychic stories’, Agatha called them. There was at this time a great interest in mysticism and spiritualism; one of Agatha’s friends constantly sought to persuade her to read theoretical books on the subject but she found the writing tedious and their assertions improbable. Nevertheless, she was interested in dreams and in the thin boundary between the real and the imaginary, and she was both fascinated and repelled by ‘madness’, a word which the Victorians had used to describe all sorts of instability and which was often believed to be hereditary.

These disturbing themes are all present in ‘The House of Beauty’, together with a happier but no less interesting thread, the search for a well-known but elusive place, in this case ‘a strangely beautiful house’. Despite its infelicities of style (the word ‘exquisite’ is particularly hard-worked) and extravagance of treatment (everything is there: death, delirium, the jungle, madness, music, even a black-robed nun), ‘The House of Beauty’ is a compelling story, well-constructed and conveying with complete conviction how fragile and tenacious a dream can be. From the beginning Agatha demonstrated the two skills that characterise all her writing: she was an excellent storyteller and she could tap her readers’ deeply held fantasies. There are glimpses, too, of another characteristic that was not yet fully developed: she could be very funny. The snatches she gives of a dinner-table conversation (each person in turn opening his remarks with the proposition that it has been an unusually wet summer) have a nice comic touch, and her picture of one of the guests, a professor with an ‘unpleasantly cadaverous countenance’ and ‘a big white beard that wagged with peculiar vindictiveness when he talked’, is effective if not vastly original. ‘The House of Beauty’, drastically revised, was to be published as ‘The House of Dreams’ in Sovereign Magazine in January 1926.

Agatha’s next effort was ‘The Call of Wings’, later published in The Hound of Death in 1933 (and again in The Golden Ball in 1971). It describes how easily those who are disposed to believe in psychic phenomena can be manipulated, especially when new mechanical inventions – in this case, the wireless – are brought into service. Agatha then tried ‘a grisly story about a séance’, which, rewritten many years later, appeared as The Sittaford Mystery. Fourth came ‘a dialogue between a deaf lady and a nervous man at a party’, which has not survived. Agatha’s papers do include a copy of her fifth try, ‘The Little Lonely God’, a story of the encounter in the British Museum between an explorer aimlessly passing the time in London, to which he has returned after eighteen years trekking about the globe, and an equally solitary young woman, in pathetically shabby clothes, whom he assumes to be a governess, alone in the world. It is sentimental, with a little twist at the end, and lacks the force of ‘The House of Beauty’; there are no dreams and no deaths; and, unlike the description in her first story of the heroine’s breakdown at the piano, nothing that appears to be based on Agatha’s direct experience.

As ‘Mac Miller’, ‘Nathaniel Miller’ and ‘Sydney West’ Agatha followed Madge’s example and sent her stories to various magazines, from which they were all promptly returned. Other early efforts have remained among her papers. They are all in purple ink and on the two submitted under the pseudonym of ‘Sydney West’, she wrote ‘Both these written when I was about 17.’ One, called ‘In the Marketplace’, reads like a parable. A man comes to the Salesman in the Great Marketplace of the World and, when asked what he desires, replies ‘Everything.’ He goes away, laden with rich gifts but unsatisfied, and twice returns for more. Only when, ‘after long years’, he passes through the Marketplace untempted and answers the Salesman’s question, ‘What do you desire?’ with the one word ‘Nothing’, are all the Market’s stores and treasures brought out and laid at his feet. This moral tale has a biblical ring, but what the moral is remains obscure.

It is interesting to compare ‘Sydney West’s’ other offering, ‘The Choice’, with ‘Callis Miller’s’ ‘Mrs Jordan’s Ghost’, the tale Clara had written years before. Superficially the two stories are much alike. Both have at their centre the figure of a woman, most likely a projection of the author herself, who has ‘sinned and suffered’ but is ennobled by pity and repentance. Both are written in a deliberately naïve and declamatory style, with consciously rhetorical sentences (‘it is in truth a smooth way …’) and phrases repeated like an incantation (‘The second shadow is like the shadow of a child, though not like that of any earthly child that I have ever seen’). Agatha’s and Clara’s stories also have deeper similarities. Both sound, or are written so that they sound, as if they originated in dreams. They are pure metaphor, their meaning wrapped in the fogs of sleep and the subconscious; the stories themselves attempt to expose the authors’ hopes and anxieties. But there is a difference. Agatha’s tale is more artful than her mother’s. She cannot resist giving it a tweak: in ‘The Choice’, for instance, her narrator consciously makes the ‘wrong’ decision and, because that choice brings complacency, knows it to be the ‘right’ decision. In an otherwise prissy parable, Agatha has a joke at the narrator’s expense.

Agatha next tried her hand at a worldly novel. Set in Cairo, it recalled three people she used to see in the dining-room of the Gezirah Hotel – an attractive-looking woman and the two men with whom she had supper after the dance. ‘One was a short broad man, with dark hair – a Captain in the Sixtieth Rifles – the other was a tall fair young man in the Coldstream Guards, possibly a year or two younger than she was. They sat, one on either side of her; she kept them in play.’ This, and the overheard remark, ‘she will have to make up her mind between them some time,’ was enough to give Agatha a start but, after going a certain distance, she became dissatisfied and turned to a second plot. Again, it was set in Cairo but this time the heroine was deaf, a grave mistake, as Agatha soon realised, because ‘once you have done with what she is thinking and whatever people are thinking and saying of her, she is left with no possibility of conversation with anyone.’ Undaunted by her difficulties in bringing either novel to a close, Agatha ingeniously merged the two, called the resulting mixture Snow Upon the Desert, and despatched it to several publishers, using this time the pseudonym ‘Monosyllaba’. Not unexpectedly, they sent it back. Clara now hesitantly suggested that Agatha might ask the advice of their neighbour Eden Philpotts, a well-known writer himself, then at the height of his reputation, and a friend of the family. Adelaide, Eden’s daughter, had attended the same dancing class as Agatha, who had once made her a pink frock. Eden Philpotts was gouty and kept to himself, so the Millers did not bother him with invitations, though they visited him occasionally to admire his garden. Shy though Agatha was about her writing, she asked him what he thought.

His reaction was splendid. He took her request seriously, reading her work and writing a careful, encouraging letter, which started with a word of praise and ended by giving her something to do:

Some of these things that you have written 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.… 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 uses some very interesting words. Read The Story of My Life, by Jefferies, for descriptions and a feeling for nature.

Warning her that it was difficult to get a first novel accepted, he nonetheless sent her an introduction to his own literary agent, Hughes Massie. Agatha was sufficiently encouraged to go to see him; she found this ‘large dark swarthy man’ terrifying. Her recollection indicates how appalling that interview must have been for a nervous eighteen-year-old: ‘“Ah,” he said, looking at the cover of the manuscript, “Snow Upon the Desert. Mmm, a very suggestive title, suggestive of banked fires.”’ Hughes Massie returned her manuscript some months later, saying that the best thing for her to do would be to put it out of her mind and start again.

Magazine editors might reject Agatha’s early stories and Hughes Massie be dauntingly dismissive, but she pressed on. Amongst her next efforts was ‘Vision’, a story inspired not only by May Sinclair’s A Flaw in the Crystal but also by a detective story only recently published in English, Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room. Although Agatha put ‘Vision’ on one side after it was done, she was to make important use of it later on. Another offering was sent to Eden Philpotts for scrutiny, a story called ‘Being So Very Wilful’. It has vanished, but his report, written on February 6th, 1909, survives. Again, his letter was shrewd and constructive.

Dear Agatha,

I need not go into technical detail with your story ‘Being So Very Wilful’, but I am glad to say that in its own plane it shows steady advance. You have worked hard & you have a natural sense for construction and balance. In fact all is going exceedingly well with your work & should life so fall out for you that it has room for art & you can face the up-hill fight to take your place & win it, you have the gifts sufficient. I never prophesy; but I should judge that if you can write like this now you might go far. However life knocks the art out of a good many people & your environment in the time to come may substitute for the hard road of art a different one.… However these considerations are beside the question of the moment.

For the present you must go on writing about these people and no doubt the more you learn of them the more interesting you will make them. But always remember the worth of people is to be judged by their aims, and this class will never lift you to anything really fine.

They will do to practise on, but presently you will probe deeper into human nature & seek beautiful character & find it.

Your own bent is to the fine & distinguished, & ‘Society’ of the sort you have so far written about is neither the one nor the other. The average crowd of English abroad is just as you paint it. In fact you are lenient.

But if you go on you’ll soon sicken of them & seek other themes & finer issues.

Never be flippant in the first person. Let your flippant characters be; but don’t be yourself. And avoid all first-hand moralising. It is bad art. Of course great artists have done any amount of it; but not the greatest. If you are to take my advice you must go to the school of Flaubert for your models. The artist is only the glass through which we see nature, & the clearer & more absolutely pure that glass, so much the more perfect picture we can see through it. Never intrude yourself.

Presently re-write this story but not just yet. Don’t put poetical quotations at the top of the chapters.

Make the heroine a little younger. Thirty-one is rather too old – don’t you think?…

The construction of the story is admirable, & shows a feeling for form which is very hopeful; but this is a difficult length for publication; too short for a novel & too long for a short story.

Some day perhaps you will publish it in a volume; but you’ll want to re-write it first. I take it you may read what you please now & should advise that you read a few of the French men. If you can read equally easily in French as in English, then read them in French; Anatole France – the stories – & Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. But this last is very strong meat & perhaps you had better wait till you have taken some lighter dose first of the more modern men. When you come to it, remember that it – Madame Bovary – is one of the greatest novels in the world.

Come & see me if you like & when you want to know anything, or have time for more books.

Try another short story – quite a new one of three thousand words – & we’ll see if we can publish it. A little print is very encouraging I know; but I don’t want you to be in too much of a hurry.

Your friend,

Eden Philpotts.

There was one more exchange. Agatha wrote to Philpotts to ask what she should be doing with her life and, firmly and sensibly, he put her problems into proportion.

Art is second to life & if you are living just now (we only live by fits & starts) then put art out of your mind absolutely.… Tell me when I can be useful to you again.

Clara could not have directed Agatha to a wiser mentor.

5 ‘… he will change your entire life’ (#ulink_b26f8835-3399-5318-959f-2ec1699ef55d)

Agatha’s confusion arose largely from the romantic complications of her life. While staying with the Ralston-Patricks in Warwickshire, she had been taken to ‘a cold and windy meet’, where she had encountered a Colonel in the 17th Lancers, Bolton Fletcher. That evening they met again, at a fancy-dress ball at another house, The Asps, and on several other occasions. Agatha had dressed for the ball as Elaine, in white brocade with a pearl-covered cap, and three or four days after her return to Torquay she received a parcel containing a small silver-gilt box, engraved inside the lid with the words ‘The Asps, To Elaine’ and the date of the meet. Bolton Fletcher was, like Agatha’s later portrayal of him as Major Johnnie de Burgh in Unfinished Portrait, a master of the love letter, and ardent notes, flowers, books, chocolates and other tributes followed swiftly. On his third call at Ashfield, he proposed. Agatha was dazed and almost, but not quite, ready to be swept away: ‘I was charmed like the bird off a tree, and yet, when he was gone away, when I thought of him in absence, there was – nothing there.’ Clara was troubled. As she told Agatha, she had prayed for a good, kindly husband to appear for her daughter, one ‘well-endowed with this world’s goods’, for her income was now stretched very thin.

Somehow this suitor did not seem quite right. Handicapped by the lack of husband or sons who might make inquiries, Clara wrote to the Ralston-Patricks, who assured her that, apart from a profuse scattering of wild oats, Bolton Fletcher was in every way satisfactory. Clara did not mind the wild oats, nor the fact that the candidate was fifteen years older than Agatha (after all, there had been eight years between Frederick and herself), but she advised him that her daugher was too young to be pressed for an immediate decision and proposed that there be no letters or visits for six months, ‘which was probably just as well,’ Agatha remarked later, ‘because I should have fallen for those letters in the end.’ When the moratorium was over, a prepaid telegram arrived: ‘Cannot stand this indecision any longer. Will you marry me yes or no?’ ‘No,’ she wrote and straightaway felt enormous relief. ‘I turned over on my pillow and went immediately to sleep. So that was the end of that.’

Though Agatha’s life temporarily lost some of its savour, she regained her high spirits a few months later, with the arrival of Wilfred Pirie, whom she had last seen in Dinard when she was seven years old and he, older and rather superior, had been a Midshipman in the Navy. Now a Sub-lieutenant, he served in a submarine that came often to Torquay. Relieved to settle into a tranquil relationship, fortified by the friendship their fathers had enjoyed and their mothers now shared, and, no doubt, attracted as much by the lovely and intelligent Mrs Pirie as by her son, Agatha agreed that she and Wilfred should have ‘an understanding’. The friendship prospered; the romance did not. Agatha’s description of the fading of her illusion that she shared Wilfred’s tastes and enthusiasms (a phenomenon immediately recognisable to anyone who has ever sought to persuade themselves that they have met their perfect match) shows she was bored, especially when Wilfred talked about theosophy and spiritualism. It was not Wilfred’s embrace Agatha coveted but his family’s. His father was dead but in some respects Wilfred provided the masculine protection and challenge of which Agatha was deprived by her own father’s death and Monty’s elusiveness. It did not occur to her that she treated Wilfred exactly like a brother. Then there was Wilfred’s mother, whose character was as tantalising to Agatha as her schemes of interior decoration. Lilian Pirie represented the sort of woman Agatha admired; well-read, well-informed, lively and assured, she was a more emphatic version of Clara. As Agatha was to write in Unfinished Portrait, where much of Wilfred is to be found in Jim Grant (‘interested in theosophy, bimetallism, economics and Christian Science’), ‘the thing Celia enjoyed most about her engagement was her prospective mother-in-law.’ In marrying Wilfred, moreover, Agatha could believe that she would not really be leaving Clara: ‘I liked the idea of marrying a sailor very much. I should live in lodgings at Southsea, Plymouth, or somewhere like that, and when Wilfred was away on foreign stations I could come home to Ashfield and spend my time with Mother.’

The tedium of the understanding dawned on Agatha when Wilfred telephoned to ask whether she would mind if he spent his leave treasure-hunting with an expedition in South America. Naturally she agreed and on the day after he sailed she realised – for the second time – ‘that an enormous load had slipped off my mind.… I loved Wilfred like a brother and I wanted him to do what he wanted to do. I thought the treasure-hunting idea was … almost certain to be bogus. That again was because I was not in love with Wilfred. If I had been, I would have seen it with his eyes.’ Clara and Wilfred were disappointed but not devastated. A few months later Wilfred married someone else.

For this was the time when Agatha’s friends and contemporaries were determinedly marrying. Twice a bridesmaid, she speculated about her own prospects. She and Madge would look about the room for the most unappealing-looking candidates for ‘Agatha’s Husbands’, forcing her to choose between them. That was in play, but in reality, too, Agatha appraised the eligible men around her. She said something about this in her Autobiography, in a passage discussing friendship between men and women:

I don’t know exactly what brings about a friendship between man and woman – men do not by nature ever want a woman as a friend. It comes about by accident – often because the man is already sensually attracted by some other woman and quite wants to talk about her. Women do often crave after friendship with men – and are willing to come to it by taking an interest in someone else’s love affair. Then there comes about a very stable and enduring relationship – you become interested in each other as people. There is a flavour of sex, of course, the touch of salt as a condiment.

According to an elderly doctor friend of mine, a man looks at every woman he meets and wonders what she would be like to sleep with – possibly proceeding to whether she would be likely to sleep with him if he wanted it. ‘Direct and coarse – that’s a man,’ he put it. They don’t consider a woman as a possible wife.

Women, I think, quite simply try on, as it were, every man they meet as a possible husband. I don’t believe any woman has ever looked across a room and fallen in love at first sight with a man; lots of men have with a woman.

At first glance, these observations seem naïve. While acknowledging that sexual chemistry plays a part in all relationships, it is unwise to generalise, given the differences in people’s sexual proclivities, or their lack of them. It is also harder, in some societies at least, to understand Agatha’s remark that ‘Men do not by nature ever want a woman as a friend.’ From the context (she is talking about Eileen Morris), it is clear that by ‘friend’ she means a mixture of companion and confidant. In Agatha’s youth the spheres in which men and women worked and lived were distinctly separate; fewer experiences were shared from an early age. There was less for men and women to talk about together and they were in some ways more baffling to each other. At the age of twenty, moreover, Agatha’s perspective was particularly narrow. She fully expected to meet ‘her Fate’ at any moment, and, indeed, she was looking out for him. So far, her own exquisite infatuations had been short-lived and she had sensibly backed off from the ardent Bolton Fletcher and well-meaning Wilfred. There was to be one more false start.

This was Reggie Lucy, the elder brother of Blanche, Marguerite and Muriel, with whom Agatha played tennis, croquet and Diabolo, picnicked on Dartmoor and roller-skated on the pier. A casual, comfortable family, they had first taken Agatha under their wing when Clara and Madge had gone to France shortly after Frederick’s death and she had stayed behind at Ashfield. The Lucys were a happy-go-lucky, devil-may-care collection, racy and informal – the two younger girls were known as Margie and Noonie and, apart from Jack Watts, they seem to have been the only people ever to escape with calling Agatha ‘Aggie’. Reggie, a Major in the Gunners, now came home after his foreign service; he took Agatha’s erratic golf in hand and, as time passed, proposed to her in an unemphatic and companionable way. As always with the Lucys, who were constantly missing trams, trains and meals, there was no urgency: ‘Just bear me in mind, and, if nobody else turns up, there I am, you know.’ Agatha immediately agreed. Reggie, however, insisted equably that they should wait a couple of years so that Agatha could survey the field before settling down with him. He returned to his Regiment and their courtship continued by post. Reggie, who is the model for Peter Maitland in Unfinished Portrait, assured Agatha that, despite their understanding, she should consider herself absolutely free. Agatha, like Celia, in that book, did not wish to be. ‘Don’t be too humble,’ says Celia’s mother to Peter. ‘Women don’t appreciate it.’ Sadly, she was right. Agatha was carried away by someone more determined and impetuous.